So Steamy !

The City of Eugene has purchased an old steam plant that was built in the 1930's.   Mark and I toured it last Saturday.

They plan to remodel it over the next two years and turn it into a public brew-pub / music venue / shared office space / riverside destination.

The steam plant used to provide steam heating for the City of Eugene and Peacehealth Hospital (when it was near the U of O campus).  It hasn't produced any steam for (I want to say) a decade. 

 We were on a tour with about ten other folks.  I was with a group of photographers who pretty much stopped listening to the tour guide so we could snap photos of all the half-century old tech.  I mean, really; who could resist a dial that reads "Power Factor" ?

 I was so busy photographing Mark that I failed to get a good photo of the valve he was turning, which had a lot of words on it.

It was too bad that safety concerns prevented us from climbing up on the catwalks.








I spent too much time trying to get a good photo of this yellow hook, which was part of a giant crane on a track.  The whole structure was about three stories tall.











The crane was used to hoist massive generators through sliding barn doors on the south-east side of the building and ease them along the length of the building. 

I wish we could have stayed longer -- I could have easily spent three hours in there photographing stuff

 What struck Mark was that the actual boiler was something like five stories tall and had human-sized hatches in it.

 I came away from the tour with an increased appreciation of the building.  From the outside, it looks like a typical brutalist architecture (I think this is partly because of a later addition to the building's south-east side).  But after seeing the inside, you can see that the building was responding to and designed for showcasing the boiler and support structures. 

The whole place was a steampunk stock photo opportunity.  In fact, Mark had to remind the tour guide that the photographers in the group had started to leave the building, but had stalled out surrounded by all the steamy.

Decade in Review: 2011

January 2011:  After some deliberations, I decided to write on a train from Eugene to Portland.  So I dressed up as a Pegasus Ranger!   The train ride was fun.   I discovered the Crumpacker Family Library (The Temple of Books!) and I had a lovely pizza dinner with Jay Lake.  The summary of my Adventures of a Pegasus Ranger follows:

In the manuscript of Pegasus Ranger in Portland, I see someone using artifice as a tool to search for an axis mundi. He dons a costume and begins his search with a train ride; he discovers that the meridians and parallels of the world are blurred. He thinks he's discovered an axis mundi in a temple of art, but his vision of artistic logos overwhelms him and he retreats. A fellow writer, a kind of shadow-shelf of the searcher, turns his attention to Death. Each of the searcher's encounters contrasts and compares chaos and order; control and surrender; expectations, fantasy, and reality. At the end, he tries to connect the dots into a paradigm, but they don't mesh perfectly. The story ends with the searcher almost home, passing a shadowed milestone.  As he recalls life, art and Georges-Pierre Seurat, who painted A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, the Pegasus Ranger concludes that the Geometry of Life is always Deconstructed by Entropy.  But Life -- which includes its terminus, Death -- is not about seeing, it's about how one looks. The act of observation not only changes the observed, it changes the observer. Look well.  Bring outfits.  Look good.

February 2011:  The grey days of Winter were officially getting to me.  To combat them I would  use a halogen torchiere and fill the house with Summer-like light.  The Winter Light never used to bother me (that I'd been aware) and I attributed my sluggishness and despair to (undiagnosed) seasonal depression.   But some days not eve the torchiere would help, and I'd have to take a picture of myself wearing a turban made out of a starry polar fleece blanket.


March 2011:  We went skiing, where I had the pleasure of admiring a stranger's skiing moves, and discovered I was looking at Mark.  Going home, we got trapped on the highway about twenty miles out of Eugene by a a windstorm which blew a tree over a road and knocked electricity out of the McKenzie River corridor.   Mark drove us to Belnap Hotsprings and discovered a lovely outdoor temple folly.  I was glad I was with him, because I would have pulled the car over at the side of the highway and froze.


April 2011:  I officially began fiddling around with zellij tile design and launched a fascination with producing ten five-pointed stars whirling around each other.  I'd already played with Penrose Tiles, so it was an easy jump.  I find that constructing geometric forms calms me down and is rewarding; I'm not sure if it's the process, of using a compass or the pleasure of creating an ordered design, or the challenge of fitting different things together.

On the writing front, I tried to create an e-book and got stalled.


May 2011:  After watching University of Oregon want ads for about a year and applying for a few jobs, a writer friend from the Wordos clued me in to an IT job opening in the UO Psychology Department.   I got hired as a temporary part-time worker.    This was a good thing; and the extra income made a lot of things a whole lot easier.


June 2011:  We visited Mark's family on the east coast.  It's always fun to visit them because they are New York Direct, which is a refreshing change from Corvallis Nice.  We usually do some site-seeing, and I often visit the Metropolitan Museum of Art -- this visit included a reminder to finish projects.  One day, Mark and I made a pilgrimage to Olana -- we dressed up, and got to be fabulous gays touring an architectural palace (with sketching and a picnic afterward).


September 2011:  My micro fiction, "The Book Deal" was purchased for "Twisted Tales," a micro fiction anthology by Delving Press.  "The Book Deal" was a fun, 66 word horror story.  Alethea Kontis and Damon Kaswell were also in it.


Through the late summer and throughout autumn, I worked on writer craft.  I read Dracula, and I couldn't understand what was so horrible about the vampire until someone explained to me at OryCon that the count was operating outside the circle of Christian Grace.  I read some dreadful steampunk genre stories (one kept flipping back and forth between a romance and something else), and apparently zombies (er, revenants) must be included.  I wrote my first steampunk story, and then another, to mixed reactions at the Wordos table.

And I thought about masculinity, and gay male desire, and story, and what is it that I want to explore as a man who is gay and who is a writer.

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If there was a theme for 2011, it was the geometry of life cycles.  I wanted things to be pretty and ordered, but it seems that having a pretty and ordered life takes a lot of practice -- and in the end, the geometry is left open by Death.

Trials of Steampunk

I got to the end of a Published Steampunk Novel.  Although I liked the characterizations and the dialog and some of the visuals, some of the wiggling with history and the fudging with how dirigibles work bothered me.  OK, and there were a couple of times near the end when the characters grabbed the idiot ball in service to the plot.

The development of dirigibles was about 50 years ahead of its time (the story was about 1860) and they felt more like Flash Gordon airships (e.g. using steam thrusters and "airbrakes" to slow the fall of a crashing dirigible) than a (1905) helium hydrogen filled craft.  Oh, and (sigh) zombies.  

Zombies almost always make me wonder what about shambling cannibals is attractive to the zeitgeist.  Then they make me think about Sherry Turkle's "The Second Self" wherein a child classifies spiders as being not alive "because you can kill them."  I guess they fulfill the need for a "kill-able other" in battle narratives.

At the end of the novel, the author said, "Hey, so I tweaked the historical bits; don't send me e-mail telling me how I goofed up my history--it's Steampunk, I can make up whatever I want."  I didn't buy it, mostly because although I could accept the historical tweaks, the dirigible changes felt more like sloppy research.  

And then I felt like some nerdy physics curmudgeon.  I mean, yeah, Steampunk isn't rocket science; but if you want to write Steampunk, shouldn't one pay lip service to Jules Verne and at least try to get the science right?

Afterward, I thought about how I cut way more slack for "Girl Genius."  I think the comic-book format of "Girl Genius" defuses any objections that reality is being violated.  The Foglios also call "Girl Genius" a Gaslamp Fantasy rather than Steampunk--which goes to show you the power of genre.  In other words, the Steampunk Novel fell into a history and physics uncanny valley.  

Oh well, at least the latest Steampunk Novel didn't have its strong female dirigible pilot turn into a ditzy romance heroine half-way into the book.  

Masculinity & Steampunk

Santos Dumont
Wikimedia Commons

 Lately, I've been writing a story set in a world with an alternate history where magic works, it's the beginning of the 20th century, and dirigibles are in the air.  The process has been an integrative one for me, because little bits of history that I've usually not connected in my head have come together.

My story involves a small airship, slightly larger than the one Santos Dumont flew around the Eiffel Tower circa 1900.  (The really big airships, like the zeppelins of Germany, didn't appear in historical skies until about 1910.  Transatlantic and trans-US crossings didn't happen until the 1930's.)  

Lewis Hine, 1920.
Power house mechanic
working on steam pump.
Wikimedia Commons

Since my characters are American citizens raised in England, they "Remember the Maine!"  It also means they're Victorians.  My challenge writing alternate-history American-Victorians is preserving the feel of culture while writing a gay male character who isn't committing "a sin unspeakable in Christian circles," and a female character more active than Willamina Harker.  (Yes, the Harkers and Count Dracula are from this time period, too.)  I think I can justify some of the characters' cultural expectation by using an alternate history religion that I've played with before -- it helps that instead of a same-sex trinity, the godhead is a gender-balanced quartet. 

So I have to examine how to write masculinity.  On one hand is the "muscular Christianity" that E.M. Forester commented on, with its homo-social prep-schools filled with fine young men learning Greek and honing their bodies with athletic games.  With the alternate-religion of the world, I think I can focus on the strong body, strong mind ethic to help preserve that old English Empire feel.  And since The Father and The Mother of the Quartet are equals, there's less pressure to have a "The spiritually manly man is the head of his household" morality.

Oscar Wilde
Wikimedia Commons

But at the opposite end of the historical definition of early twentieth century manliness is Oscar Wilde, The Aesthete.  In this time period, if one was a refined, nonathletic, aesthete, one was not a manly-man.  And Steampunk, the romanticized version of the industrial revolution, is firmly rooted on the Manly Man in the Steamworks; the Self-sufficient, Burly Explorer; the Civilized Marshall of the Inner-Brute.  The aesthete hadn't marshaled his inner-brute so much as banished it (if he ever had one to begin with).

Anyway... that's been what's peculating in the back of my head.  Now... onto writing the story.   And I think I'm going to try my hand at more Steampunk, if only to try different ways of queering it.