Cabinet of Wonders

Those Who Come While We Sleep

2012-02-10T09:43:00.000-08:00

I used to have these naps. They were strange naps; I would lie in the sun in my apartment some afternoon when I'd been working really hard, and I would fall into a sleep so profound it was almost painful. And then, when the first depth of it had passed, I would find myself lying there, unable to move, trapped in my nap. It was like I was pinned to the couch or the floor -- wherever I'd been lying -- and the nap went on, and I couldn't move, the sleep was so intense; and yet I wasn't fully asleep. It would go on for some indeterminate amount of time, and then I would be released.

Being the kind of person I was, I didn't worry about these naps. Sometimes I thought they were brought on by sugar, sometimes I thought they were a gift, a kind of ubernap that refreshed me more than usual. Once or twice, though, I thought I saw something that really shouldn't have been there: a small man sitting on the foot of my bed, a strange glittering shape in the corner of the room. And I remember all the way back to being a baby, lying in my crib, terrified, unable to move while these shapes streamed at me from the ceiling.

These unmoving waking-dreams have a name, as it turns out; it's called Sleep Paralysis. Apparently, when the body is moving between sleep and wakefulness -- at either end of the sleep cycle -- the body can be in REM sleep while the mind is awake. It's related to lucid dreaming, where the dreamer is aware that he or she is dreaming and is able to gain some control of the dreaming experience, and to out-of-the-body experiences; in sleep paralysis, the sleeper tends to fixate on re-establishing control over their body, but in an out-of-body experience, the sleeper perceives themselves as being separate from their body.

The body naturally falls into a sort of paralysis when it is in REM sleep, called REM atonia, where muscles are kept from reacting to the dreams the sleeper is experiencing. Think of cats or dogs twitching while they dream of hunting: most of the muscles are disabled, but the echo is there, the ghost of the movement.

Then of course there is the sexual dimension:

"The release of certain neurotransmitters... is completely shut down during REM. This causes REM atonia, a state in which the motor neurons are not stimulated and thus the body's muscles do not move. Lack of such REM atonia causes REM behavior disorder; sufferers act out the movements occurring in their dreams... Erections of the penis (nocturnal penile tumescence or NPT) normally accompany REM sleep... In females, erection of the clitoris causes enlargement, with accompanying vaginal blood flow and transudation (i.e. lubrication). During a normal night of sleep the penis and clitoris may be erect for a total time of from one hour to as long as three and a half hours during REM." [wiki]

Which brings me to another point: sleep paralysis is often accompanied by vivid hallucinations, perceived loud noise, and sometimes an acute sense of danger. So how does this work, if you feel that you are pinned to your bed, unable to move, feeling anxious, but at the same time you have a big stiffy under the covers? What would your hallucination be? Would it, perhaps, be that of a demonic lover, keeping you still by evil magic while taking advantage of your manly charms? Conversely, imagine how confusing it would be if you were a staid Victorian lady who was pinned frighteningly to her bed while experiencing distinct stirrings in the night?

Enter the incubus, one of the oldest forms of supernatural creature, a male demon who lies with women at night -- and its counterpart, the succubus. Tales of these visitors can be found from South America to Africa to Eastern and Northern Europe. One of the earliest mentions of an incubus "comes from Mesopotamia on the Sumerian King List, ca. 2400 BC, where the hero Gilgamesh's father is listed as Lilu. It is said that Lilu disturbs and seduces women in their sleep, while Lilitu, a female demon, appears to men in their erotic dreams." [wiki]

There was a great deal of debate as to these creatures' purpose in early Christianity, but the common debate was whether the demons had any reproductive capability, and were they using humans in order to reproduce (a la Rosemary's Baby). It became commonly accepted that incubi and succubi were the same demon, changing shape: by taking female form, they were able to collect male sperm and then turn around and impregnate a human woman using their male form -- and the collected sperm. The Malleus Maleficarum states:

"...to beget a child is the act of a living body, but devils cannot bestow life upon the bodies they assume; because life formally proceeds only from the soul, and the act of generation is the act of the physical organs which have bodily life... Yet it may be said that these devils assume a body not in order that they may bestow life upon it, but that they may by the means of this body preserve human semen, and pass the semen on to another body."

Why the baby conceived in this way is not simply a normal baby, no one seems to know; but in the Christian tradition, a baby conceived this way (a cambion) is usually wickedly smart and able to get people to do their bidding. Some texts hold that a cambion does not exhibit breathing or pulse, but appears to be alive -- until they are seven years old, at which time they begin to appear more like normal people. Caliban, from the Tempest, was supposedly a cambion, as was (according to some stories) Merlin.

When the experience is not sexual it has still been attributed to demons or other supernatural presences. The word nightmare, for example: mare in nightmare does not stand for female horse, but for mara,an Anglo-Saxon and Old Norse term for a demon that sat on sleepers'chests, causing them to have bad dreams. In Newfoundland, the sleep paralysis experience is referred to as the "Old Hag," similar to the Night Mare: a creature who sits on the sleeper's chest while they sleep, making them helpless. Similar stories can be found in Sweden, Fiji, Turkey, Chile, and many other places; one of the interesting things about sleep paralysis is that it is completely cross-cultural -- a product, simply, of being human. Studies done in Canada, China, England, Japan and Nigeria found that 20% to 60% of individuals, across the board, reported having experienced sleep paralysis at least once in their lives.

Often, sleep paralysis is associated with narcolepsy, a disorder where emotional excitement makes the sufferer fall asleep. More rare, but also associated with both sleep paralysis and narcolepsy, is cataplexy, a disorder that makes one lose control of muscles, either totally or partially, in muscle groups. Thus, for example, one woman I know falls to the floor when she gets overstimulated -- but is famous for being able to set her glass on the nearest surface on the way down. Common cataplexy responses are buckling at the knees, weakness in the arms, and lolling of the jaw; but the effect is brought about the same way that REM sleep temporarily paralyzes the muscles.

This makes me wonder about myths such as Rip Van Winkle. Was he, actually, asleep the whole time? Or did he have some kind of waking dream -- was anyone sitting on his chest, causing him to neglect his life and let his house and crops fall to overgrown ruin while he lay, unable to move? (What about the guy in the song "Four Minutes of Two," who fell asleep waiting for his girlfriend and woke up to gigantic metal bugs?)

And lastly, in the spirit of things falling to overgrown ruin, here is a quote about Lillith, the demon/goddess/early feminist (depending on your source) -- whose origin can be found in Lilitu, the Babylonian demon described above. The quote comes from the Bible's Book of Isaiah 34:13–15, describing the desolation of Edom:

"Her [Edom's] nobles shall be no more, nor shall kings be proclaimed there; all her princes are gone. Her castles shall be overgrown with thorns, her fortresses with thistles and briers. She shall become an abode for jackals and a haunt for ostriches. Wildcats shall meet with desert beasts, satyrs shall call to one another; There shall the lilith repose, and find for herself a place to rest. There the hoot owl shall nest and lay eggs, hatch them out and gather them in her shadow; There shall the kites assemble, none shall be missing its mate. Look in the book of the Lord and read: No one of these shall be lacking, For the mouth of the Lord has ordered it, and his spirit shall gather them there. It is he who casts the lot for them, and with his hands he marks off their shares of her; They shall possess her forever, and dwell there from generation to generation."

This is supposed to be about an accursed place, and the passage, in Old Testament tradition, shows that accursedness by listing eight different "unclean" -- possibly demonic -- animals (including the Lillith, apparently). However, from my contemporary perspective the beauty of the description gives me chills; it looks to me more like a blessing. In fact, there are places I would like to invoke this curse in the here and now. Wouldn't it be amazing?

Other links:
- Narcoleptic dog on YouTube

- Windsor McCay's Dreams of the Rarebit Fiend, my favorite book on dreaming: hilarious and true to life, and drawn in the early 20th century. Pay no mind to the poor design of the modern cover (unlike the cover of my edition, below); the inside is what matters.

What Ever Happened to Dog Carts?

2012-02-05T09:28:00.000-08:00

I happened across this some time ago, at Terrierman's Daily Dose. He has a large number of old photos of dogcarts all around the world; mostly they are carts for milk delivery or other kinds of small delivery, pulled by one or more dogs.

An example of a milk cart, full of canisters. The unhitched terrier is probably a guard dog.

Dog cart mobile tea delivery, Brussels, with three dog team.

Dog cart postcard, Quebec.

There are lots more pictures on his blog; check it out. He is a great believer in working dogs; in fact, the blog is connected with his website about working terriers: his hobby or possibly profession is hunting groundhogs, foxes, etc in their holes using terriers (often the prey are caught around farms and relocated to wilder areas).

The Secret of Kells

2012-01-13T10:00:00.000-08:00

I just watched The Secret of Kells tonight. I've had it on my list for a long time, and thing after thing has thrown itself in the way of my watching, but tonight I had a time limit. And that was when I said, "Hey, I've been meaning to watch this for a long time. C'mon, I've heard it's good."

I managed to overcome much grumbling from the other members of my household and force them to watch this instead of an already-seen Dr Who episode. We sat back and prepared to be entertained. And that's when the color and complexity of Kells burst over our eyeballs and we sat, entranced, none of the usual trips to the bathroom or other interruptions for the full hour and a quarter of the movie.

The story is about a child named Brendan who is growing up in the Kells monastery in Ireland, run by his uncle, who is building a huge wall to keep the Northmen out. They take in a refugee from Iona, a tiny island off the coast of Mull, in western Scotland, where the Northmen have attacked and left no one alive. In his keeping is a book, the Book of Iona, whose pages are filled with the majesty of generations of work; but the book is unfinished.

The refugee, a monk with the gift of fine illumination, asks the boy to go into the forest to find some oak-berries (probably mistletoe) to make green ink with, so for the first time, Brendan leaves the safety of the monastery and goes among the trees. There, he is saved from the wolves by a girl who tells him to get our of her forest. He accuses her of being a fairy, and she does seem to have a magical quality, flitting through the trees and making flowers grow; she gives her name as Aisling, and she consents to help him find the berries if he will then leave the forest and not come back.

Of course, they end up becoming friends, and Brendan goes back to learn illumination, against his uncle's will. His uncle is obsessed with building a wall strong enough to keep the Northmen out, and does not see as his nephew begins to learn to create incredible illuminations, with the help of a magical glass which he wins from Crom Cruach, a pagan god whom St. Patrick is said to have overcome.

The extraordinary thing about the animation is the way in which you emerge at the end, feeling that you've just swum through the most marvelous illuminated manuscript. The attention to detail, and the careful attention paid to Irish art in its execution, is overwhelming. Apparently, the animators took a leaf from Mulan (which uses Chinese art as an inspiration) in its conception, and it works; the film is lovely, and very Celtic.

Throughout the film, too, are side-references and little references which, like the endlessly complex illuminary graphics of the film, thicken it into layers of meaning. For example, the cat, Pangur Bán (whose name means White Fuller in Gaelic) comes from an Old Irish poem, written in the 9th century by an Irish monk at Reichenau Abbey, in southern Germany:

I and Pangur Bán, my cat
'Tis a like task we are at;
Hunting mice is his delight
Hunting words I sit all night.

Better far than praise of men
'Tis to sit with book and pen;
Pangur bears me no ill will,
He too plies his simple skill.

'Tis a merry thing to see
At our tasks how glad are we,
When at home we sit and find
Entertainment to our mind.

Oftentimes a mouse will stray
In the hero Pangur's way:
Oftentimes my keen thought set
Takes a meaning in its net.

'Gainst the wall he sets his eye
Full and fierce and sharp and sly;
'Gainst the wall of knowledge I
All my little wisdom try.

When a mouse darts from its den,
O how glad is Pangur then!
O what gladness do I prove
When I solve the doubts I love!

So in peace our tasks we ply,
Pangur Bán, my cat, and I;
In our arts we find our bliss,
I have mine and he has his.

Practice every day has made
Pangur perfect in his trade;
I get wisdom day and night
Turning darkness into light.

(Translated by Robin Flower)

Which is excellent, because the movie begins: "I have seen the book which turns darkness into light." And, of course, a large part of the movie takes place in the Scriptorium, where the illuminations are created, and where, I suspect, our nameless Irish monk was when he wrote the poem. It's also possible that the author was from Iona, which was repeatedly sacked: a lot of the people fled, many to Ireland, but many of them went to the Continent to set up Columban monasteries. So you see the references are circular, like an Irish knot, or a snake swallowing its tail, or a fine illumination.

Interestingly, there was a Saint Brendan, but he lived many years before Iona was even founded, so not all trails lead back round to the beginning. But then, though art is about truth, it's not always about having the facts straight.

And just to give you an idea what they're talking about when they go on about the wonder of their book, here are some images from the real Book of Kells (its final name), which lives ~~in the British Museum~~ at Trinity College in Dublin:

Here is the page called the Chi Rho page, meaning the first two letters of the word "Christ" in Greek.

A detail from that same page, near the top.

And just to drive you crazy, here are two cats and their kittens worked into the bottom, in the reddish bit by the lowest part of the P shape. Look carefully (try clicking on the image to see it in more detail). See all that insane detail inside all the other bits? The interwoven curlicues under the cats' feet? That is all miniscule work, which could not have been done without at magnifying glass (the crystal? From the eye of Crom Cruach?); the Chi-Rho page in total is about the size of an 8 1/2 by 11 inch piece of paper. Imagine trying to do that with 8th or 9th century technology, quill pens and such.

This page, by the way, shows up in the movie, so watch out for it. And watch out for all the pieces and parts of the page to appear all through the movie as part of the storyline. It's quite a work of art -- the movie as well as the book.

Good luck -- you're in for a treat.

Misfit Zeitgeist

2012-01-06T11:00:00.000-08:00

This fall, my older daughter entered middle school, and I was scared stiff. This is a child who runs around in the woods with a cloak on, who has always had her own (sometimes very odd) sense of style, a person who has done conceptual art -- without any prompting -- from the time she was perhaps three years old. She is intelligent, sweet, and totally unlike any of her peers. I knew she was doomed: she'd get eaten alive. I certainly had, at that age -- and she was like me, but more so. (This is the same daughter who took those endlessly popular pictures of tourists at the Tower of Pisa when she was nine).

She was aware of my anxiety, despite my attempts to be calm. "Mama," she announced to me in August, after coming back from the be-who-you-are heaven of Camp Winnarainbow, which she says is like a second home for her, "I've decided on a strategy. I'm going to wear clothes that are totally me, and then see who wants to hang out with me. If they don't like it, we'll both know we shouldn't be friends. If they do like it, then I'll have found people like me to hang out with."

I was secretly skeptical of this idea, because I felt she had really no conception of how cruel people can be in junior high, but I stifled that part of me long enough to praise her for coming up with a plan. And then the rest of the month she hit the thrift stores, and went through her clothes, throwing out anything that didn't fit in with the "real" her, with the exception of some comfy old clothes for around the house.

Then school came, and she wore... well, all of it. Even the cloak. And she got no grief for it. Sure, she got a couple of annoying boys buzzing around, saying, "why are you wearing a cape?" To which she answered, with admirable aplomb, "It's not a cape, it's a cloak. Capes don't have hoods." And they nodded! And went away! And the girls didn't even whisper about her! Except for one couple of (potentially interesting) girls who said to each other "Wow! That girl is wearing a cloak! How cool is that?"

So either she's totally insensitive to the giggles and whispers, or middle school has changed inordinately since I was there. True, that was a long time ago, and true, this is an unusual American town, being an easygoing surf town in California; but I don't think children that age have changed that much. Instead, I honestly think the culture has morphed a little. I think the geeks, by hook or by crook, have begun to inherit the earth.

This is what I arrange as my evidence: Mulan, the girl who was not supposed to dress like a boy and go to war. Harry Potter, who went against all that he was told to do, and endured whispers and self-doubt while hanging out with a girlgeek that we all loved. The Incredibles, where a family of unwanted misfits save the world and learn to let their oddness hang out. Percy Jackson. How to Train Your Dragon. The Sorcerer's Apprentice movie, which took a whole show you can see live at Maker Fair as a centerpiece of geek creativity. Neil Gaiman's Graveyard Book, which turns the whole misfit thing wonderfully on its head.

Lesser known are things like the excellent young adult book Stargirl, and the incredibly inspiring graphic novel Page by Paige, as well as the fine novel A Mango-Shaped Space, and many, many others. All about people who do things differently than the norm, and who are worthy role models.

Face it, this isn't the 80's anymore. This isn't Pretty in Pink, where they changed the ending so Andie gets together with the boring jerk guy, simply because the sample audience didn't like it otherwise. In this incarnation, Ducky not only wins, but the audience applauds because the misfits are happy being themselves.

In the adult world, we have the Maker movement. Burning Man. XKCD. Steve Jobs (okay, that was obvious). In other words, the geeks of the last generation got creative jobs, started companies like Pixar, and began to influence culture. Or they took time off from their dayjobs to go out into the desert and build huge sculptures and hang out with people in an alternate city, where the whole local cultural system is based on the idea of giving, of creativity, of being eccentric.

And what about the Steampunk movement? Before it was boiled down to gears and Victorian garb, it was a bunch of people making things, creating their own alternate aesthetic, revamping computers and rebooting scooters. And all the other things people did before you just bought your stuff on etsy from people who still do make things.

My point is, even in the mainstream, it's all trickling in. Children are being raised on a diet of misfit heroes, because the people writing the stories and making the films and producing the media were often misfits themselves. And who doesn't create stories that are, to some extent, about themselves -- or at least about people they identify with? And, when they get older, if they're lucky, they'll discover that a lot of misfits are now having a lot of fun doing weird, fun things they made up out of thin air -- and everyone's welcome.

There are a number of interesting factors here, besides the obvious "geeks growing up and taking over" model. For one thing, the whole Web 2.0 model of users creating content means that people are taking control over their own creative production. Communism, if you will, of the culture, where the most outrageously weird person can get seen for their creative genius. For another, there is the way the Internet has allowed subcultures to flourish: geeks and eccentrics and anyone else can now band together with people of like minds to create a subculture, instead of sitting at home thinking they are the only one in the world who thinks the 17th and 18th centuries were the coolest ever.

And the more this happens, the more the people who learn the technology are the ones who will be producing the creative stuff that influences culture... and on and on.

Interestingly, it has been pointed out that clothes fashions haven't changed much recently. Car styles haven't changed much either, and nor has music. No one is coming up with the new Punk Rock, or the bouffant hairdo. Back in the last century, clothes and cars and other things were always very distinct from each other from decade to decade, but we haven't seen much of a shift in fashion or industrial design, other than fractional differences, for about twenty years. Why is this? Some people say it's because there is too much change: our technology changes so fast and so often that we have had to drop something. But I think you could phrase it another way -- you could say: our attention is elsewhere. Cars, clothes, songs, these things are parts of our lives that we live with but don't look at so much. Many of us are busy with other things, things less everyday.

I am finding, suddenly, that my odd tastes, my weird interests, are becoming the rage. Everywhere you look, now, references to Wunderkammern and Cabinets of Wonder are popping up, used in every possible way. Martin Scorcese's wonderful film, Hugo, based on Brian Selznik's even more wonderful book The Invention of Hugo Cabret, is full of things which I've been talking about for years. It's weird. I'm finding ideas I already wrote into novels suddenly cropping up in novels I'm reading (for example, there is the fabulous Mechanique: A Tale of the Circus Tresaulti, which I have just reviewed in the new book review blog Spec Fic Chicks -- where people are remade with machine-parts as part of their anatomies, and ultimately, part of their souls -- is disturbingly close to something I'm trying to sell in a children's book right now).

So this is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, something I hold very dear is suddenly seeing a surge in interest -- yay! But on the other, it means that the cool things I am interested in are suddenly under public scrutiny, are being watered down as they enter the media and become part of the ad-cycle; and soon, Cabinets of Wonder will be passe, will -- oh horrors! -- show up at Costco. Except... so little of the history will have been truly described, and thus will remain, mysterious and horrific and beautiful, and essentially untouched, the Platonic ideal of exploration and weird magical science. I hope.

Despite the fact that I could be out of fashion next week, I find this spirit of the times to be incredibly exciting. Watching my daughter go off to school in a tight leather vest over a cotton shirt, a Steamboy-style cap, and rainbow rubber boots, and knowing that she is doing it safe from severe criticism is honestly thrilling. Knowing that my people, my kind, are out there remaking the culture from the ground up, even if I don't always like or believe in the things that they produce... just knowing that they're there, making stuff, questioning stuff, trying new cultural systems, makes my adrenaline pump as I think about all the doors that are opening. Thinking about it, I get shifty in my seat. I get excited, because you know what?

We're winning.

Lena Herzog's Lost Souls

2012-01-05T15:31:00.000-08:00

I came across this by chance: another photographer, photographing Frederik Ruysch's amazing birth defect displays from the Kunstkammern of Peter the Great, as well as Vienna's Federal Museum of Pathology at the Narrenturm. I have always admired Rosamond Purcell's photographs, but now there is Lena Herzog.

On Science and the Arts, she does a good job of talking about the true nature of the collectors of the old days, the ideals of morality and aesthetic considerations, the way that art and science were not so separate as they are now. Check out her narrated slideshow here.

In the meantime, I recommend her book, Lost Souls, which sounds like an amazing meditation on the the abstract beauty of these items of study:

"The arrangements of the fetuses, the specimens, the anatomical skeletons, was highly artistic. Ruysch was a true artist. The images I have created, I took special care not to take advantage, not to speculate, on the macabre -- on the horrifying. I wasn't interested in shocking anyone. They are shocking by definition because it's such complicated territory. They're dead, they're children, they were meant to live, they never lived -- so I truly wanted to follow in the footsteps of Frederick Ruysch, who took special care. For example, he would hide the especially frightening parts with lace, revealing it only to his students of anatomy and to himself to study, in order to help humankind. The morality of the cabinet makers was never in question. They were highly conscious of the moral and human implications."

The preserved fetuses are glimpses into the perils of health and science back when medicine was in its infancy, but she manages to capture some of their ephemeral beauty, and some of the qualities which Ruysch so carefully preserved: that of error and loss, of humanity and the need to understand.

Links:

More on Ms. Herzog and the book in the Paris Review,
and
A rather technique-heavy conversation with Ms. Herzog at the American Society of Cinematographers.

Tyger, Tyger in a Folded World

2011-12-06T08:46:00.001-08:00

I just came across this, pretty much by accident. It's amazing, a small film by Guilherme Marcondes, a Brazilian filmmaker, based on the William Blake poem. He uses puppetry, illustration, photography and CGI to make a fantastically rich little gem:

Mr. Marcondes is influenced by the pastiche of Brazilian culture and the DIY quality of the Brazilian film schools of which he came. Clearly, he uses anything he can get his hands on, including things like origami and the ancient Japanese puppet-art of bunraku. It's all very stylized and fabulous, and makes me want to know more about his earlier life -- did he study all these kinds of art? He must have.

I went to his website, where he has samples of his work, and I found this, from a movie called Bunraku, the opening sequence of which he was given carte blanche to do:

I never heard of this movie, Bunraku. It looks like it was released in France and Canada, but not here...? It looks like a very violent movie, definitely not my type of thing, but the art direction looks really interesting: the pans through cities seem to unfold like a pop-up book, and the scenery is an odd conglomeration of bits. Which leads me to the fact that Mr. Marcondes originally studied architecture:

"I like experiencing architecture, not practicing it. Just as I go to the movies or listen to music, I like to wander around a city, paying attention to how the space is organized, how the transportation works, etc. I’m interested in how the environment we live in changes and conditions our personalities. That’s clearer in Tyger than in any other film I’ve made. That also explains why I like J.G. Ballard so much!" [link]

And on that note, I will leave you to ponder a world where cities are made to pop up as you move through them, and when the apocalypse comes, flowers of light grow through the cracks of the world.

Prognostications, Ahoy!

2011-11-29T23:30:00.000-08:00

Whitby. We've heard of the place, on the coast of Yorkshire, home of the madhouse in Dracula, the place with the lightning, the cemetery; the scene of that great Gothic battle against evil. One imagines it a dreary place, lashed with wind and weather, with dark clouds clinging to the rocky shores.

But Whitby is actually somewhat of a tourist place, and always has been; a place for the people of northern Yorkshire to go to the seaside, an old fishing port (where Captain Cook learned his trade), connected to the North York Moors, where from Georgian times until the present, people go to walk and look. And Whitby jet, mined there since Roman times, was very popular among the Victorians.

George Merryweather was a doctor living in Whitby, an honorary curator of the Whitby Philosophical Society in the mid-19th century. His habit of inventing things, so common among the people of the day, led to his invention of the Platina Lamp, a long-burning light source:

"In a communication from George Merryweather, Esq. to Professor Jameson, dated Edinburgh March 5th, 1831, it is proposed to extend the aphlogistic platina lamp, by constructing the body of the lamp, of tin large enough to contain a quart or more of alcohol. This will be sufficient to keep the platina in a state of constant ignition for thirteen or fourteen days and nights. Such a lamp, while entirely devoid of glare, affords sufficient light to shew the face of a watch in the dark of night. ... if it be connected with an unfailing reservoir of alcohol, the lamp may be ignited for years. The spongy platina does not appear to be, in the least, deteriorated by being kept in a state of constant ignition."

-- The American Journal of Science and Arts, Volume 20, under "Miscellanies"

However, the thing which Mr. Merryweather became truly famous for was his "Atmospheric, Electromagnetic Telegraph, conducted by Animal Instinct," or, more shortly, his Tempest Prognosticator," which he built for the Great Exhibition of 1851. It is a beautiful structure, with a bell at the top designed to look like the dome at St. Pauls. Around the bottom are placed a dozen glass bottles; threading from tiny hammers around the edge of the bell are threads, which connect to a piece of whalebone just inside the neck of each bottle. Inside each bottle is poured an inch of rainwater and then -- oh happy home! -- each bottle is occupied by a leech. A common, ordinary surgical leech.

Being a doctor, Merryweather had observed that medical leeches responded to barometric pressure or electrical charge in the air, or whatever it is that allows smaller animals to know when bad weather is afoot. The leeches' response was to climb -- probably a good response for water-dwelling creatures just before a rain, so that they don't get washed away. So when Merryweather's leeches climbed to the top of the bottle, they nudged the piece of whalebone, which caused the string to move and ring the bell. It's not clear, but it appears that the more the bell rang before a storm, the worse the weather to come.

Interestingly, Merryweather knew that his observations would come under question. He set up a system, using the incredibly efficient postal system of the day, wherein he would post a letter to Henry Belcher, President of the Whitby Literary and Philosophical Society whenever his Prognosticator gave him warning of an impending storm. Because the postal system delivered mail several times a day, the letters were postmarked with both date and time, proving that he had predicted the storm before it happened. He did this for all of 1850, and his Prognosticator was surprisingly effective.

The thing that is interesting to me about this invention, which few people actually talk about, is the way in which Mr. Merryweather was working to span that growing gap between the natural world and the newly-ascendant scientific world, using "instinct" as an accurate gauge for something as practical as weather-prediction. Interestingly, however, meteorology was a very appropriate battleground for this clash, as the scientific method did not always work so well with the chaotic ways that weather systems worked:

"…Faced with problems in constructing meteorological knowledge from the weight of precision observation, meteorologists turned their attention towards kinds of knowledge that stood outside conventional methods and instruments, however extensively situated, however precise and continuous. The reputation of popular weather wisdom explained how meteorology persistently remained a key site for attacks on the dogmatism of scientific culture, and it forced meteorologists to consider the problem of evidence that seemed to escape the forms of number, weight, and measure."
-- Predicting the Weather: Victorians and the Science of Meteorology, by Katharine Anderson

In other words, meterologists couldn't simply get by predicting whether people would die at sea based on simple measurements; they had to rely, in some part, on other things they found to be true:

"Eccentric as it may appear, the Tempest Prognosticator embodied widely shared assumptions about forms of knowledge, instruments, and meteorological science. Its plausibility was based on two key perceptions: first, the precision and infallibility of sensations; and second, the importance of instruments to modern knowledge. Both are crucial for understanding the relationship of weather wisdom and scientific meteorology. The complex instinctive behavior of some "lower" forms of life modeled a natural form of automatic precision."
-- Katharine Anderson, above

I had never really thought before how much the battleground between accepted wisdom/magic and science was fought to a much later date in meteorology, but it makes sense: for, if there's one thing Chaos Theory and satellite technology have taught us, it's that weather is a fickle, far-ranging thing, and telling sailors whether to go risk their lives merely on a barometer is something no one is completely comfortable doing. Anyone attempting to predict the weather, even today, is likely to come under criticism and even scorn when their predictions appear to be caged in ambivalence; so Merryweather must have thought he was onto something wonderful. He even tried to convince meterologists that his leeches could be hooked up to a telegraph system, with a minimum of difference in design; but not surprisingly, they did not take the bait. They already had their feet set on a road in which animal instinct was discounted, and would continue to be discounted, until the late 20th century.

(The Tempest Prognosticator is now kept at the Whitby Museum)

Read more about the Prognosticator

Dragon Hunters

2011-11-19T20:44:00.000-08:00

By pure accident tonight, I watched Dragon Hunters, an animated French movie for kids which was released in America in 2008 with English voices, most notably that of Forest Whitaker as the hugely muscled, sweetly earnest Lian-Chu.

Based on a French TV series which I'd never heard of, the movie is a 3-dimensionalized story about two men, friends from their days in an orphanage, who work as dragon hunters, along with Hector, their blue... dog? dragon? rabbit?. Gwizdo, the unscrupulous brains of the outfit, is a fine foil for Lian-Chu's stolidly heroic personality, and though they never seem to get the money they need, they have each other. Their quest in life is to make enough money to retire to a little farm, where they will grow -- "sheep," puts in Lian-Chu, whenever it comes up: Lian-Chu is an avid knitter.

The two are discovered by Zoë, a young girl who lives in a vast castle with her blind dragon-hunter knight uncle, who doesn't appreciate her. She dreams of becoming a knight and dragon-hunter, and has left home to find knights who can help her uncle kill the "world gobbler" dragon who is coming, as it comes every twenty years, to wreak distruction and disaster.

This sounds like a normal fantasy, similar to many animated features churned out by Hollywood. Believe me, it's not. The art direction, the scenery, and even the premise is actually totally unique. The landscapes are an amazing fiddle of physics, requiring conceptual leaps which are both disorienting and wonderful, because they live in a floating world, made up of fragments of land which float and move, but nevertheless have their own gravity. Moving through this space consists, often, of stepping from chunk to chunk of ground which either floats near you by accident or is held in place by roots or other debris. The opening scene, where Lian Chu is trying to kill a slug-like dragon which drags him around and around a variety of little ball-like floating planetoids, scraping off the vegetation which takes to the air, floating all around them -- this is like nothing Hollywood would make. The whole thing has a non-American flavor, from the weirdness of the world to the odd details of character and humor.

It's these details that are wonderful, funny and awe-inspiring and vivid, like when Hector, in the middle of an action sequence, pulls a booger out of his nose, and in the next shot wipes it, unnoticed, on Gwizdo's sleeve. Or the passing moment when Zoe comes out from behind a pillar, pulling up her pants. Or when, as they come closer to the end of the world, they encounter the wreckage of some past civilization, looking like Prambanan and Palmyra, all taken apart and floating everywhere, filling space with lost chunks. Or the calendar Zoë's uncle makes to predict when the World Gobbler will return, which gives the inspiration for some of the best credits I've ever seen, full of awesome little clockwork devices that appeal to the deepest part of my clockpunk soul. The details fill out the movie, taking it out of the realm of mere kid's adventure and putting it up with Carl Barks' duck comics or the best of the Asterix books, an endlessly repeatable classic.

Oh, and did I mention the music? I noticed gamelon-ish music going by, as well as some sort of arabesque mix, and I believe there was a Cure song in there somewhere; quite a collection, and very un-Disney.

It was so engaging, so awesomely mind-bending and beautiful in its production, that I found myself looking around for more by the same people. But it seems to be a combined effort of several French cartoon directors and writers, and what they've done before is mostly for TV. However, make note of Guillaume Ivernel, who did the really beautiful backgrounds for the Dragon Hunters TV show and was the art director as well as co-director for the movie with Arthur Qwak, the creator of the series. So the luminous anti-gravitational universe through which the characters walk -- and which gives the whole thing its surreal style -- is his doing, though the original concept came from Qwak. It's clear that they had a blast doing this movie, and though it may be a one-off, one can't help hoping for more.

More details about the movie here.

Mechanics for Pure Aesthetics

2011-11-17T17:46:00.001-08:00

As it turns out, I just signed the contract for my novel, Songs for a Machine Age, which will come out next November from Hadley Rille Books. This is a good thing, a nice thing, and it makes me happy.

However, in the process of all this, I've been having to think where the premise for this book comes from. Like all things such as this, there are layers of influence; and my love of the 18th century and its pointless, beautiful machines, created solely for the pleasure of their existence, has been around so long that I can't put a finger on it; but I think the place where I can start for the influences of this book came from a robotics class I took for educators.

It began with training us how to use the robotics kit that we were being given, in the hopes (I think) that we would buy it and use it and it would become the Next Big Thing. The people teaching us were deeply involved in First Robotics, a big, expensive robotics competition for high school students. They started the workshop with how to build things, how to use the tools at hand, and how the various available parts worked. We all built the same thing, a little remote-controlled car, and experimented with the various parts.

My experimentation was to put two large wheels and two small wheels on my car, the sizes being diagonal to each other, so the car could not ever have four wheels on the ground at once. This meant that when I changed directions, the car would rock back and forth in a very interesting way. I wanted to build a tower on top with moving parts so that the moving bits would sway or swing as the car rocked.

However, the robotics people thought I was odd. They went on to do a series of task-based design assignments; we were supposed to find creative ways to pick something up and move it to a targeted area, or follow a line, or push a ball somewhere without losing it.

I came away from this event totally fascinated with the difference between their way of thinking and my own. I wanted to do robotics so I could build interesting things that were beautiful and could move; they thought robotics were about, well, industry. Building a car. Moving a thing from here to there.

Tasks.

The more I thought about it, the more it seemed to me that machines, in our modern world, are all about tasks, about work, about doing things for us. They are our slaves, our brawn, extensions of us; but they don't do the fun stuff. They do the work. We give them assigned tasks. They were birthed from the can-do attitude of the 19th century, not the Cartesian ideals of the 18th century. Instead of "how can we reproduce, or enlarge upon, the miracles of nature," it was "how can we increase our productivity so that we might subjugate nature, overcome the laws of physics, and make things easier for ourselves?"

What happened to the idea that machines might be agents of miracle? True, computers and their ilk do many miraculous tasks, and enrich our lives with music, video and the like; but we are still listening to and watching canned people, not enjoying the machines for the sake of themselves. We are not looking at the idealistic side of it; we are simply wanting good bandwidth. One of the only places in common culture where the workings of the machine are considered, are prized, is in the world of robotics. And in robotics, at least in the traditional venues, they care mainly for tasks.

Except.

Except for Burning Man, and Maker Faire, and, in its purest form, Steampunk. Except for some areas of the art world. In other words, people who like to make stuff, and arty people who like to find out how things work. People who like their machinery tactile, silly, creative. Why should we only purchase goods made in factories? Why shouldn't we create our own devices? Why shouldn't we hack the manufactured goods and turn them into something beautiful and divine and oh-so-ours? Bring the beauty back into our lives?

Automaton Caterpillar, probably by Henri Maillardet

Before I wrote Songs for a Machine Age, I hadn't thought clearly about all of this. What I actually said to myself was, I want to write about a place where the only machines in the whole culture (with a very few exceptions, like flour mills) are entirely aesthetic. A place where machines are honored, admired, and used only for the celebration of religious festivals. I began to write Neddeth's Bed, to find out what that place was like, and as it progressed, I began to think more deeply about this place: how did the culture get this way? Did they just naturally not think of the practical applications of machines? Or did something happen in their history?

What if, for example, the Industrial Revolution never happened? Or, even better, what if something went so awry with the Industrial Revolution that a country rose up against it and threw out the whole idea of manufacturing, reshaping their culture to be entirely based around making things with one's own two hands? And what if the need for technology, for cool devices and complex machinery is regulated by a class of people who were educated entirely for the purpose of making beautiful machines, who are experts on the bad old days -- drilled in the horrors of manufacturing -- so that it won't happen again?

I still haven't finished Neddeth's Bed. Songs for a Machine Age came from the questions I had while writing Neddeth, and grew into a fun adventure novel, with all of the above questions as background. But the layers of understanding, like so many things, went on from there, and now I'm working on the next layer down, the reason why their revolution happened. What could possibly change a culture so much? I had to find out, so I am writing it; and it is definitely not a fun adventure novel. So if you need me, I'll be in the basement, peeling the onion of my world -- and rooting around in all the machine-parts.

...and... if you want to see some machines that distinctly remind me of some of the Festival Devices I imagined in Songs, check these out:

Such amazing attention to detail! Seriously, it's extraordinary how every tiny piece of these devices are carefully crafted. Just exactly like I imagine the devices in the book. Now if this artist only made things that were ambulatory...!

More on U-Ram Choe

Odd bonus: Interesting blog post about Descartes and automata.

Visualizing Depression, Happiness as Esprit d'Escalier

2011-11-09T20:56:00.000-08:00

You can always tell what state my mind is in by the state of my house. I am not really bipolar, but I do swing back and forth in energy levels; sometimes it's clean (more rarely than I would like), more often it swings between the clutter of doing lots of things, and the clutter of neglect.

Sometimes, the clutter of neglect happens because I'm not home much, or I have too many commitments. Other times, it acquires a patina of depression. This is when things get bad -- the place doesn't smell right; the dust bunnies are mingling too much with the stuff; there are too many things on the floor; everything is collecting dust. That same pair of little girl leggings has been in that same place for two weeks. None of the chairs are sit-able with all the things piling up, and the plants need water.

Depression, for some people, is a familiar place, a landmark, some scenery you thought you had left, but now find yourself back in almost without knowing it. In my particular scenario, there is a big black hole that I have to stay away from. It has a certain gravitational pull, and if you simply march thoughtlessly ahead, you will fall into it. Once inside, the whole paradigm is geared toward "DOWN" and like the Red Queen, you have to run as fast as you can just to stay at the level you find yourself. My sister-in-law says it's like an ant-lion's hole, with the loose sand, so that no matter how hard you claw your way out, the terrain underfoot just keeps shifting out from under you, sliding you back.

It's easiest simply to steer clear of the hole than to get out once you've moved over that edge. I know where the hole is, and I know the surrounding countryside well enough that I recognize the signposts to stay away from. There are things that push me toward it, but there are also things which carry me away from it: by consciously thinking positive thoughts when it looms, I can change the countryside I walk through -- just a bit, but enough. Like a compass needle pulled toward the North, my thoughts veer toward the hole if I'm close enough, but unlike a compass, I can, with effort, wrench those thoughts off to a different direction -- and by doing so, find myself in a completely different country.

Weirdly, pasting a smile on my face often helps; the smile becomes a real one disturbingly quickly. I'd heard from someone that the act of smiling in itself can help you feel better, and it does. Which says all kinds of things, like those people I can't stand, who smile all the time, may in fact actually feel good about themselves. Or that Americans have crummy lives, because they smile so much to stay sane.

Other ways people think about depression: I have one friend who says her world becomes two-dimensional, like nothing has any substance anymore. It's all just cheap cardboard cutouts of reality, and all the people she knows, all her friends and family, have lost their depth. The world becomes shallow and lusterless.

For me, I become slow. I labor along, and I'm never able to accomplish anything: the day simply goes past before I can get there. I wind down like a film coming to a halt, and lose the ability to get enthusiastic. Food doesn't taste good, so I eat a lot of it to try to make up for the lack of interest by trying again and again. Sleep is unsatisfying, so I do more of it if I can.

Another friend of mine is absolutely the opposite: she says depression winds her up. She gets tense, buzzes around uselessly, doesn't accomplish anything because she's rattling apart. She snaps at everyone, and can't concentrate on anything. And she can't sleep.

Someone else described it this way: it's like a thickening veil between you and everyone/everything else, and you can't reach through it. Sort of like a cataract of the soul, isolating you and making it hard to see where you're going, what you're doing, why you're even doing it.

All of these descriptions have an element of the world moving away, becoming distant, of reaching out and not being able to touch anything or feel it touch you. When things are really bad there is this desire to make it all stop: the reaching, the isolation, the inability to communicate across vast distances. Sometimes there is the sense that it's all your fault, that you have isolated yourself, or that others have turned away because you are a bad person. It's hard to live with, and it's hard to live with yourself. The whole thing becomes exhausting. You find yourself just wishing you could wink out, be gone, stop.

"It was as if what I wanted to kill wasn’t in that skin or the thin blue pulse that jumped under my thumb, but somewhere else, deeper, more secret, and a whole lot harder to get at." –Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

Elizabeth Wurtzel said, "I start to think there really is no cure for depression, that happiness is an ongoing battle, and I wonder if it isn't one I'll have to fight for as long as I live. I wonder if it's worth it." Which is an interesting point. Because what are the gauges by which we measure happiness? How do you know if you've won the battle, if you're getting the happiness you've been fighting for?

The truth is, we don't know until it's past. "A long and happy life" is something people often say in eulogies, in biographies; but did the person with the "happy" life actually know they were having it, while they were having it? Or is that something you can only judge in hindsight? Is the "long" part of that statement mandatory for the "happy" part to be assured?

An interesting study came out recently that compares satisfaction and happiness levels. For example, people with children are generally less happy than people without children; however their satisfaction levels tend to run higher. What is the difference between satisfaction and happiness? Unfortunately, I got this information third hand, so I don't know what the creators of the study call happiness, or what they call satisfaction. But I think it's actually an interesting point to consider.

I suppose I would say happiness consists of moving unobstructedly through the world, of being able to take those moments that are beautiful and really wring some enjoyment out of them -- notice them as they go by. It is a matter of being. You are happy; your happiness is a state of being. In the case of the person who has had a "long and happy" life, that happiness may be an artifact of hindsight, of perspective: only when you get far enough away from it do you realize that all that -- that hurdy gurdy and running around and having meltdowns and tears and holding each other close and kissing your child's head -- that held all the ingredients of happiness. But, for most of us, I think we don't know it's happiness nine-tenths of the time.

Satisfaction, on the other hand, is about doing. You get satisfaction from the things you do. When your life is satisfying, there is the sense of a job well done, a completion, a feeling that you have done well. You look at your child and see someone well-read and capable and vivacious and you feel that you did the best you could. Your garden is full of flowers; you grow tomatoes and you knit sweaters and you work hard at your job. These are all good things, and honestly, satisfaction is an important emotion to have.

The thing, I think, is not to allow yourself happiness as a reward for satisfaction. The doing of things has, I think, ruined many of our lives, because we don't allow any cracks for the happiness to get in. If there are no pauses, the happiness can't slip in on us unawares. Those moments of quiet, that happiness, they need nourishing; and if the doing of things balloons outward to fill all available space, then you will look back on your deathbed and say, "My, I've had a full life," and if you're lucky, you'll confuse fullness with happiness.

Because there are always those moments of joy, some of them tiny -- like watching your daughter lean down over her book in the sunshine, her hair hiding her face, and seeing the beautiful line of her back; or when the first curling leaves of your garden begin to sprout; or even that moment when you take the time to sit outside somewhere beautiful with a glass of wine and watch the sunset with someone you love and like talking to. In those moments, if we take them carefully and in the spirit of trust, we can allow the happiness to take root, like a shy plant, and grow through the hurt, the isolation and the busy-ness. And with it, the world will begin to poke through the caul, begin to thin the membrane, the heaviness between ourselves and the world. The isolation can diminish, the compass needle can be taught to point elsewhere, and at the end of it all, we'll be able to see and touch everything again.

"It's not catastrophes, murders, deaths, diseases, that age and kill us; it's the way people look and laugh, and run up the steps of omnibuses." -- Virginia Woolf

Coming Home from World Fantasy

2011-11-07T09:02:00.000-08:00

It wasn't until I was coming home that I noticed it: a sinking feeling, a sort of settling back into the greyness of my body. I had been burning, bright and smart and heard; I had been ageless, interesting, interested. I had been in the company of people who also burned with the clarity of their intelligence.

Now, on the plane, I was falling back into the usual me, flying as it were into a sort of miasma of banality, back into my age, my weight, the sense of disengagement. In other words, back to paying too much attention to other people's world-views and priorities, because they outweigh mine. It was as if I was some kind of outcast who, for a moment, had lived with her tribe, and was now going back to the other tribe, the one to whom she didn't quite belong, and whose opinions and judgements seem, in the immediate day-to-day sense, to shape the world. In fact, to shape me.

It sounds terrible, doesn't it? Sometimes a little perspective can feel like that. I found myself thinking of a story where the person has a talent -- say, the ability to save lives, or the ability to make beautiful things -- and they are brought into the place where the rich people live because of their talents; for a moment, they see how much they really shine. Then they have to go back to where they live, a place where, perhaps, the powers-that-be put something in the water, or the air, and everyone there never looks up, never shines, never thinks about anything outside their little sphere.

My father grew up in Detroit in the 1930s. I may have mentioned this before, but his family had a cottage on Lake Erie in Canada, near where my grandmother grew up. Every vacation, and even some of the school year, my father would go and stay at the cabin, where they would swim, or go ice-fishing, make things out of the clay they found along the bank. Then, inevitably, they'd come back to Detroit, over the bridge. Detroit, being a coal-fired town in those days, could not be seen from the bridge. My father says that as they came closer, you could see the steeples and the taller buildings poking up out of the dark haze that obscured the rest of the city; and as the bridge went down, they would descend into that haze, go back to Detroit life. For him, it was merely a symbol of going home.

Imagine, then, if this talented person in the story were to descend back into the place they came from, exactly like descending into the haze; but instead, it's a haze of lost ambition, disinterest in learning, provincial thinking. A sort of purgatory imposed from above, in which even the most brilliant and talented people only stand out a little through the miasma, the creative and intellectual smog. What kind of story would that make? Having been outside the smog, would the person understand, and rebel? Or would they live tragically, knowing that if they could only live in the untainted area permanently, they could be brilliant and useful and shining? Or would they understand that they might be alleviating some of the smog, challenging people's paradigms, by their very existence? I dare you to write it, and I'll write it too. Maybe we can compare notes.

In the meantime, all I can say is, hooray for the internet! May the tribes all keep in touch with each other, keep their tribeness in the best way they can.

Whose Ideal Was This, Anyway?

2011-07-08T23:11:00.000-07:00

As part of my day job I teach media literacy to children in 5th and 6th grade -- just before they go off to junior high school, and hopefully just before they are inundated with the maximum number of messages about who they should be.

One of the things I did recently was to make two slide shows about the evolution of what is considered ideal in both male and female bodies. For the female progresssion, we start with the S-curve styles of the 1900's, with the impossibly thin waist and the "monobosom" pouter-pigeon chest.

The thing I always debate with myself about this kind of image is this: is it better to rely on a piece of corsetry, torturing one's body into shape through lacings and bonings which everyone uses? At least then, no one expects you look that way naturally. Or is it better to be natural, wearing flimsy knitted clothes that give away every lump and bump, and be expected to be perfect with no structural support at all? The former is painful, but the latter can be even more painful, because the only way to gain the correct shape is to starve yourself, exercise to death, and have plastic surgery -- all invasive techniques that actually change your body and affect your overall lifetime health. And even then, after all that, they don't often work.

Within about twenty years after this, however, the fashion changed so much that anyone with those kinds of curves is in big trouble -- which means that all the curvy women who were considered beautiful before probably had daughters who inherited their shape and were now struggling with trying to flatten and narrow themselves so as to fit the new shape.

Within another twelve years, you have Mae West making that flat ideal look entirely silly.

And then come the forties, time of slim hips and shoulder pads, a more masculine look to go with wartime and the Rosie the Riveter ideal of womanhood.

But of course, men who are at war and dreaming of home think about girls like Betty Grable with longing: not so masculine looking here. Note, however, that there is no gap between her thighs. If she were a modern pinup, she would have much thinner legs, often so much so that there would be a space between the thighs.

By the fifties, things had changed back again from the shoulder pads and the narrow hips.

Then, in the sixties, a new phenomenon came to our attention: the new, "modern girl" look of Twiggy. Suddenly all those girls who looked like Marilyn Monroe were doomed. Thin was in (remind you of the twenties at all? Modernness and shapelessness?).

This is, I think, the beginning of our modern supermodel/Photoshop hell.

Curiously, though, this is where I started to notice a thing. It was a kind of big thing, and I'm not certain how I missed it before, except that with the proliferation of media, there are more examples for me to look at. What I noticed was a rift between the ideal woman for men and the ideal woman for women.

The thing is that while Twiggy was strutting her stuff to the women, we had Jane Fonda taking the male world by storm in her role as Barbarella.

So what is that about? When women try to emulate someone such as Twiggy, against the general desire to attract men, what are they doing? My guess is that it's about women trying to impress other women. Which is an interesting phenomenon (Note: I am going to set aside gay, lesbian, bisexual and other preferences here because that is a huge discourse in itself; I'm making a choice to talk about the majority, in the services of a discussion of "popular culture," which is, after all, what the media is serving up. I do think it could probably be said that few lesbians are particularly interested in the Twiggy look, either, but perhaps I'm going out on a limb, making sweeping statements like that).

Another thing I am fascinated by is the incredible strides we've made in the technology of beauty. These earlier examples didn't have the benefits of plastic surgery, personal trainers, and Photoshop. True, the early catalogs are all drawings, so could be as fantastic as you want; and true, they had the soft-focus lens and some retouching in still photographs. But when Ursula Andress walked out of the waves on film, she had to hold it in, to carry herself well in order to look as fabulous as she did. When I compare the photos of her to the apparently effortless beauty of the photos of her modern counterpart, Halle Barry, two things come to mind: "Poor Ursula! She looks so self-conscious by comparison!" --and-- "My word, but Halle looks disturbingly, almost supernaturally, flawless!" And, to be honest, it is supernatural: she has the benefits of all the modern technologies. Whereas Ursula was actually standing there, in the raw, being natural -- no "super" about it.

The thing that disturbs me most about these two images is how our daughters must feel about themselves when they see them. The girls in 1962, seeing Ursula rising from the waves in Dr. No, knew that what they were seeing was a real woman, something they could aspire to (if that was what they wanted). Seeing Halle Barry, above, holds no such comforts, particularly when digital film has so much option for smoothing out those flaws. Such perfection is absolutely outside the realm of anyone who is honest with themselves. They might as well throw themselves against a brick wall, because you can't live, and breathe, and be that perfect. It's impossible, and our daughters know it.

And I won't need to say much about the present Photoshop climate, and the overzealousness of Photoshop users that, while making fun of themselves to some extent, are also continuing to propagate the impossible image, one that makes it hard to judge what the real person looked like and so impossible to know what to compare oneself to.

Now, on the male front, there's not a lot of change from 1910 to the 1970s. Maybe a little more muscle, but nothing strange. Male self-image, like male fashion, is one of conservatism and extremely subtle variation, particularly during the 20th century. Sure, there were the Ziggy Stardust exceptions, but very few men actually aspired to that kind of skinny and androgenous look -- or to wearing shiny, colorful stretch body suits and platform heels on the street.

However, in the 1970s, not too long after Ziggy was blowing peoples' minds, a man who everyone had thought rather extreme, crossed over from the bodybuilding subculture into the mainstream media, bringing with him a sea-change as he came.

It's true that his first big role in film was one of extreme caracature, and many people laughed at its comic book qualities.

But the film, and his role in it, captured imaginations too. Arnold made his next appearance in another, more serious role, one in which his physical attributes are used in a much more believable way.

To overcome a comic-book image by portraying a truly frightening cyborg is an interesting entry into "normal" roles; but Terminator had a rippling effect of acceptance for his weird physique: how he looked went from being weird and scary:

...to being impossibly badass, and that, right there, is an entry into the imagination of the male populace. From there it was on to action movies, and before you know it, others were emulating the look. It became de rigeur for action movie heroes to have that pumped-up look; and a whole generation of boys grew up with the idea that it was the ultimate in masculinity.

Just look at GI Joe. In the 1960s he was a regular guy, modeled to look like a grownup version of the boys who played with him.

But by the 1990s, with G.I. Joe Extreme, whose biceps are nearly as big as his waist, it began to get out of control. Boys were being encouraged to play with role models that not only went beyond anything they could achieve with steroids, but would require actual muscle implants to achieve the proportions.

Curiously, women didn't go along with this, just as the Twiggy thing never caught on with men. The Brad Pitt of Thelma and Louise, which appealed to so many women, is not the same one as the Brad Pitt of ~~Fight Club~~Troy, an action movie.

And yet, just look at Robert Pattinson, the male star from the recent Twilight movies, who is the romantic fantasy outlet of hundreds of thousands of girls across the world. A farther cry from the Arnie physique I can really not imagine.

I can't save the children I teach from the poor information and misleading imagery they are fed every day, but I can try to make them aware of the visual diet they are ingesting. We work in Photoshop, and they learn to do retouching themselves, which gives them not only a technical tool but a deeper understanding of how these images are remade, so that when they see an image, they can look for the telltale clues.

Hopefully, they learn that there is really no way to make ourselves as perfect as the images we see -- and, in fact, they may even question who we are trying to make ourselves perfect for? As Jean Kilbourne says in Killing Us Softly 3, "We learn from a very early age [from advertisers] that we must spend enormous amounts of time, energy, and above all, money striving to achieve this ideal, and feeling ashamed and guilty when we fail. And failure is inevitable."

Links:

Watch Killing Us Softly 3 (from 1999); very interesting stuff

And here's a nice article on the changing standards of body image for men.

Where Have I Been?

2011-07-08T15:20:00.000-07:00

Sometimes life is like a tidal wave. You know all those videos of Japan, where houses, and dogs, and trees, and cars were all just lifting up and pouring away to who knows where? That has been a sort of metaphor for my life for more than six months, now. Nothing too bad, just... transitional: life swelling to get so large that it sweeps everything away. Poor health and children's transitions and aging parents and lots of overwhelming commitments (such as the acceptance and subsequent edits of a novel), all at once. All flowing crazily away from my control in the huge tsunami of life, while I watch from the rooftop, helpless.

I do apologize for my silence. And I do want to write more here, really.

However, I am rethinking the format of this blog, because as a compendium of interesting stuff it is a wonderful thing, and I want people to go on enjoying it, even if I can't keep up with it the way I used to. So I'm going to keep posting, but it will be a slower, more steady trickle, instead of the bursts of activity I have attempted heretofore, which I can't sustain.

Also, I am in the middle of looking for a blog partner, so that the blog can continue its extraordinary journeys with more input from more voices than my lone one. I'm planning to be very picky about who this person is, and I hope it will rejuvenate the regularity with which you all have something here to read. Cross your fingers!

In the meantime, because it is (finally) summer, and I have a month and a half off, please honor me by checking out the new posts which I will be putting up on a (semi) regular basis, much more than what you've been seeing of me recently!

Cheers!

Why Cheap Art

2011-01-27T21:41:00.000-08:00

If you have not seen this, you should. I have a poster of it up in my house, and have read and re-read it for years. I like it, and I'm still not tired of it. I bought it at the Cheap Art Store on Divisidero in 1989, a place that sold truly cheap art (that really was art) but didn't last that long.

'Nuff said.

Oddities on TV

2010-12-31T08:30:00.001-08:00

I got an email at the beginning of November from Sean Francis at Leftfield Pictures about their new television show on the Discovery channel called Oddities. It's about a shop in Manhattan which sells, well, Wunderkammer things. Obscura Antiques and Oddities sells such things as bezoars, straitjackets, and wax medical models, and apparently this stuff is becoming increasingly hard to find. The owners spend a lot of time and energy traveling to look at things which often turn out to be nothing worth looking at.

I am assuming the show will track these journeys to find interesting stuff, and perhaps some of the odd customers the shop encounters. If you have television, it may well be worth a look.

You can read more about the new show at the Discovery page: you can see videos, tour the shop or even get on the show if you have something you want to sell them. It looks very cool.

Thanks, Sean! And sorry it took so long!

A Plethora of Automata, but Lasting Forever

2010-12-16T09:03:00.000-08:00

Nick Rayburn sent me a link to this video of a nicely done tapping hand:

It has beautifully-captured motion and a nice sense of sculpture to it. I watched it three times, and then, as always happens to me, I got distracted by all the other automata videos down the side of the page.

There are so many people doing automata now that every time I go to Youtube I find more. It didn't used to be this way; when I first started this blog I'd swear the video channels all seemed to show the same few. However, nowadays, more and more wonderful creations are blooming all the time. I'll try and feature a few now and then, although if you're like me you'll probably find them yourself by sheer compulsive watching.

Here's an example of a very complex one made by Thomas Kuntz:

Most of them are a little simpler than this one, which is remarkably theatrical (columns of fire!). Arthur Ganson, for example, makes his own gears and other mechanisms out of wire, and then puts together these complex creations that generate what seem like astonishingly simple motions in everyday objects, motions which aren't mechanical-looking at all -- which is why they're actually not simple. I've mentioned him before, but he's made many more beautiful things since then. You can find at least 25 different pieces of his on Youtube.

His pieces are remarkably lyrical, and although Mr. Ganson has a thoroughly Fine Art resume, his work avoids some of the pitfalls that contemporary art often falls into: the banality, the emphasis on a common understanding of mass culture, which taken as a whole -- suburbia, television, consumerism -- doesn't have much resonance for me.

He says, about the uber-creepy Machine With Abandoned Doll, above: "Stopping to view the ocean from Highway #1 on the coast of California just south of San Francisco, I found this doll lying in a trash pile by the side of the road. I picked it up and immediately visualized this machine. 'As above, so below.'- this recognition of the parallel nature of our spirit and body helps define the formal structure of the machine."

As you can see, he knows his artspeak, and can write what he needs to get recognized by the High Art community; but at the bottom of it all, anyone can understand his work, because he sticks to simple things that resonate with us at a deeper level than those banal parts of our culture -- even if his machines are anything but simple.

It makes me happy to see people thinking once again about the mechanical world. It seems to me there is a correlation between looking back at clockwork and other more fundamental mechanisms (as opposed to electronics-based mechanisms) and a more sustainable approach to the world, because it's a clear rejection of mass-produced planned obsolescence. If you've ever seen The Story of Stuff (below), you'll know that something like 80% of all the consumer goods we buy are in the landfill within 6 months, because they're simply designed to break. In a society like this, clockwork and steam -- and even the concepts of clockwork and steam -- have a certain satisfying durability which is often lacking in our day-to-day lives and stuff. Think of those many wonderful surviving automata from the 18th century, which still work: dancing, playing music, moving like they should all these hundreds of years later. Sure, they've needed tune-ups and the occasional rejuvenatory makeover, but they were really made to last, and they show it. That, in itself, has a resonance for those of us living with an endless supply of disposable stuff.

(beware, this is 20 minutes long, though very fascinating)

One of the things I thought a lot about on my hiatus was what is important to me. Much of what I find important is probably the same as most people: love, a good home, happy children, creativity, a job which makes me feel I'm doing something useful. But there are also things like conversation, wonder, discovery, intimacy, learning, community, nature, and aesthetic observation which, though they sound rather abstract, are things I need for true satisfaction in my life. A lot of people don't seem to need those things, or if they do, they don't realize it. For me, communicating some of these needs is part of what makes me write a blog; but I think there is an idea out there now, that the act of making art is a cerebral exercise, as divorced from the ideas above as we are from the realities of production. With Postmodernism, many people in the art world scoff at the naivete of belief in universal truths, which for me are no longer like those old ones in the Victorian novels -- Truth, Beauty, Virtue, and Hope -- but are embodied in things like the movements of birds, the feeling of holding a baby, the quality of water against your skin. Instead, with Postmodernism we have playfulness, multiculturalism (both good things), and fragmentation, which leaves us with a curious lack of certainty.

And that's an interesting thing, because when you try to paint certainty onto the contemporary world, you hit a mammoth fail. To be honest, I think it's part of what I don't like about some of the art I see now, is that feeling of amorphousness that comes with not being sure of your voice, not being certain what it is you're doing.

It's in the peripheral cultures that certainty seems to come a little more into focus, those ragtag groups like the Steampunk and Maker communities, where people know what they like and pursue it with happy abandon. The multitude of voices which make up this Postmodern society are finally finding their stride in the minglings of these subcultures, places where beauty and skill and the desire for something a little more permanent are considered good ideals.

And that's why I like seeing all this automata, from people who have contrived to straddle the space between the over-mixed blandness of the art world and the lively, vibrant certainty of subcultures. The interest in materials, the love of small pleasures, the geeky fascination with how things work: they work against the tendency of made things to end up in dumpsters, and especially they avoid that tendency for art to become saleable, showable detritus made by people who have been stuffed with unreadable theory, who don't, apparently, feel that vibrancy.

I have to say, it gives me hope.

3 Small Web Animation Experiences

2010-12-13T19:44:00.000-08:00

My friend Gwyan sent me these today, and I wanted to share them. Silly, meaningful, and just plain interesting...

My favorite is this one, by Evelien Lohbeck:

Then there is this, uh... music video?? by a band called Sour.

Lastly, you could spend quite a few minutes exploring these super-simple but curiously arresting short... uh, thingies by Aron Sommer. Art pieces? Yes, I think.

Enjoy.

If Only I Had A Fourth-Dimensional Mirror

2010-12-09T10:38:00.000-08:00

Since I've moved house, I've been looking through all my old clothes that have been stashed away for years. I'm one of those people who find really cool clothing and then when they look ridiculous I stash them away until they are reasonable to wear again. It's surprising how many clothes actually do work fifteen years later (as long as they're not bubble gum fashion statements).

One thing that has been striking me over and over recently is the shadow-me that I seem to live with. By this I mean, my younger self, which hangs around in these clothes and in photographs. A tall, slender girl with blonde hair who lacked the confidence to express her opinions. I pull out dresses with the 26 inch waist and think, who was that person? Why didn't she speak up? And I still feel her inside me somewhere, still anxious about things, still idealistic, and she's wondering "what the heck happened to me! I want my body back!" It's like being schizophrenic.

I think I blogged somewhere in Croatia about palimpsests, those places where the information from older times gets layered over newer information. Lately, I'm thinking that people, as creatures who live and grow through time, are really just living palimpsests. Our older selves are simply layered versions of our younger selves. Take a look, sometime, at an older person's face: you'll see every experience they ever had, etched into the lines there. If the person has had a bitter life, their face will show it; and people who live their lives well have a certain beauty, laid into their faces like a mosaic or like those poles with the layers and layers of posters stuck to them.

Have you ever seen or read Flatland (my favorite is the wonderful 1965 animated version, with members of Beyond the Fringe doing voices)? It's about some 2-dimensional people (squares, triangles, etc.) who meet a sphere as it passes through their space. The sphere, as it passes through, appears to grow and shrink as different parts of it are bisected by the 2-dimensional plane, and the denizens of that world think that it's only a circle which appears and disappears and fluxuates in size.

As you can see in the video above (which I found after writing most of this post), we are all multi-dimensional creatures, made huge with the vastness of time's dimension, yet seeing only the three-dimensional slice of ourselves in each moment. The younger me, the older me, the me-that-is-to-be, they are all only aspects of the wholeness of myself. So I really am only looking at a part of the whole when I wonder who that person is/was/will be.

What is the shape of that whole, really? I don't mean just in terms of our bodies moving through space; I mean, who are we? What drives us? How does that inform the multidimensional self?

Up to about twenty, we are growing so much that we can't keep up with our own changes, and as a result every time we meet ourselves we are totally different. We get used to this flux: it's all we've ever known, and we don't generally have the agency to influence the world, so we take it in stride.

However, by the twenties, then, are about being Finished -- about Being A Grownup. People in their late teens and twenties are busy reveling in doing all those things they've looked forward to doing when they became A Grownup: going out to clubs, eating whatever, drinking, staying up late, taking terrible care of their bodies: in other words, going where they want to when they want to -- and reading all those banned books. They smoke, they swear, they talk about exciting new things. They try stuff. They are busy devouring the world and showing everyone how they are Not A Kid.

In their thirties, people tend not to need to prove this point so much, and often settle down a bit, getting involved in their job or family life and generally feeling youthful but settled. Their bodies are still good, their friends are smarter, they are deepening intellectually. Life is good.

Then a weird thing happens in the forties and/or fifties. Suddenly their bodies are betraying them; weird physical anomalies appear as if overnight, literally -- one day they're not there, and the next day they are: weight gain, strange fallen bits, wrinkles and bags and puffy bits you never imagined on yourself, all materialize, one by one, in an avalanche of hellish change. By the time you're sixty or seventy, perhaps you're used to it. I don't know; I'm not there yet. However, it's clear that some people go down fighting all the way.

I used to look forward to getting crow's feet. I thought getting old wasn't such a bad thing, and looked forward to someday being one of those leathery old ladies full of cool stories (as opposed to the unmarked, unremarked face which was my youthful lot). Then one day, for reasons which aren't important but were temporary, I woke up and the space above my eyelids had fallen down over my eyes: I could feel my eyelashes holding them up, and when I looked in the mirror I almost screamed. My eyes had gone from the familiar crooked, normal-sized, expressive and not-ugly eyes to some horrid small and mean-looking ones, the eyes of a stranger. I'd swear it wasn't even me looking out of them.

In that moment, it suddenly occurred to me that this might be what my eyes might look like in old age. Suddenly I was a lot less keen. Where were my same eyes with the crow's feet? Would my eye-skin do this, simply sag over my eyes until I was drowned, lost, subsumed in someone else's face, getting up every morning and looking in the mirror and wondering where the me that I had looked at for years had gone? Was I doomed to look mean forever?

Luckily, the awful swelling passed, but it definitely shook me up.

I remember my 90-something-year-old great aunt -- the one who was married to the painter, who made amazing clothes out of curtains and wrote poetry and called you "Darling" in a wonderful deep voice -- I remember her telling my mom, "You're always sixteen inside, darling." She would flirt with young men and get away with it, because she was so dynamic. The young men always responded -- they were fascinated by her. She was as wrinkly and lacking in hair as the next old lady: but she carried herself with drama, wore interesting clothes, and was a marvelous conversationalist.

The thing is, I always aspired to be her. I thought I wanted to be that cool old lady when I was older. But I didn't realize how hard the journey might be -- to go on keeping hold of who you are when the outside of you changes so much. I'm already one of those people whose outsides and insides have never matched: I used to look in shop windows when I walked by, not because I was vain, but because I could never get used to the idea that that person was me. Initially, it was because I couldn't believe that I was fully-grown and had all the grownup bits; but later, it was more to do with not believing that the person with the blonde mane and the unfinished-looking face was really me. It simply didn't seem like an outward expression of who I was. And yet, as the years go by, you get used to that outer self and you come to see it as a favorite sweater, something comfortable that you wear every day and even dress up with accessories -- like clothes, for example (In my case, later, when I had a few more lines in my face, I dyed my hair red and became much more satisfied with the match between inner and outer selves).

Eventually, however, the sweater gets baggy -- and that's when you suddenly realize you're stuck wearing it even if you find you don't love it so much anymore.

I'm thinking more and more that what you have to do is stop thinking of it as if you are an unhappy consumer who can't buy a new sweater (although many people actually try to get the old one retailored); what you have to do is think of it -- all of it -- as a whole. It's not so much that the outer you has worn out, while the inner you is inside screaming to get out; rather, all of those incarnations of you -- the child, the nubile young thing, the virile strong young man, the parent, the middle aged person, whatever guises you have inhabited along the way -- all of those are actually still there. Literally. You just can't see them anymore.

Wikipedia informs me that although I was taught that "Time Is The Fourth Dimension," in most mathematical models there are many different spatial dimensions, and time is not a part of these dimensional spaces. However, there is a type of space (or spacetime) called Minkowski space: "In physics and mathematics, Minkowski space or Minkowski spacetime (named after the mathematician Hermann Minkowski) is the mathematical setting in which Einstein's theory of special relativity is most conveniently formulated. In this setting the three ordinary dimensions of space are combined with a single dimension of time to form a four-dimensional manifold for representing a spacetime.

"In theoretical physics, Minkowski space is often contrasted with Euclidean space. While a Euclidean space has only spacelike dimensions, a Minkowski space also has one timelike dimension." Et voila! I can still talk about time like it's a fourth dimension. Mathematicians may scoff, but it's just damned easier this way, so I'll willfully stick to it for this post.

Source: Hubblesite.org
In some version of Minkowski spacetime, then, your tired old body might look like a Nebula photo from the Hubble telescope, or like the best palimpsest you could never imagine. You might find that all the joyous moments shine among the multitudinous wholeness like stars, or that each care that etched its line on your face was represented by a thousand tiny vacillations, like the delicate frills on a jellyfish. You might find that all your many travels make you into a great creature so tangled and enfolded in the Earth that the two have become inextricable. Which gives a new meaning to the "personal responsibility" part of ecological stewardship.

Looking at the women I know who have reached the crone age successfully, I think to myself "it is possible." It's possible to move through the baggy patches with grace, building a beautiful whole. The secret is to live with joy, and the wrinkles in your 3-D self will hopefully layer themselves over the droopy eyes until the palimpsest of happiness embeds itself in your polished old skin so your eyes can't look mean, especially when you look at them in all four dimensions and see who you were, where you went, who you became, and all the many layers and scars and travels and experiences in between, becoming something so vast, so world-encompassing and beautiful that you can't help but be proud.

This Is a Blog Post About News Websites

2010-12-01T21:30:00.000-08:00

I don't usually do this simple passing-on-of-the-link, but I had to share.

Someone just sent me this link to a non-article about science writing, and it makes me laugh. It's hard to explain why it's so funny, but if you read as many website science articles that sum up what someone else said about the science, you'll probably think it's funny too. Especially as the Guardian themselves are known to write articles almost exactly like this...

Of Whales and Tourism and Ill Luck

2010-11-25T08:58:00.000-08:00

Disclaimer: Not my whale, just an amazing photo

A few days ago a blue whale washed up on a beach near where I live. We went to see her, all 86 feet of her; she lay in the sand of a little cove, upside down, with the great pleats underneath exposed to the world. Nearby lay the unfinished foetus which had been killed when its mother hemorrhaged after being hit by a freighter. Scientists from the marine lab had taken her pelvis, and removed the foetus (I assume) as part of their measuring.

It was quite a stunning thing to behold. It looked almost unreal, like something made from plastic for a Hollywood movie. It was really hard to believe it was something which had been truly real and alive, swimming in the sea a few days or weeks before. The sand was soaked with whale-oil, and everyone who walked in it had to throw away their shoes afterwards, because the smell was literally impossible to remove. A local woman told me a blue whale had washed up fifty years ago and they had tried to move it with a giant lumber forklift; she said even twenty, twenty-five years ago the thing had still smelled. They'd been unable to ever completely remove it from the machinery.

Which makes sense; whale oil was one of the key original ingredients of Rust-Oleum protective anti-rust paint. If it takes 30 years to get the whale oil off a forklift, it must have been a mighty good anti-rust material. It is apparently a kind of liquid wax, and not a true oil at all (although the line between oil and wax is a very subtle one).

Whale oil is, of course, why most whales were killed in the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries. Not only any old whale oil was useful but in particular sperm oil, from the head of the sperm whale, which contains spermaceti, "brilliant white crystals that are hard but oily to the touch, and are devoid of taste or smell, making it very useful as an ingredient in cosmetics, leatherworking, and lubricants." [wiki] Sperm whales also produce ambergris, a very special and mysterious substance which the whales secret in their stomachs to ease the passage of hard objects (like giant squid beaks):

"Ambergris has been mostly known for its use in creating perfume and fragrance much like musk. While perfumes can still be found with ambergris around the world, ...It was banned from use in many countries in the 1970s, including the United States, because its precursor originates from the sperm whale, which is an endangered species. However it has been legal since 2005 due to strict monitoring of distributors who ensure that only ambergris that has been naturally washed to shore is sold. Ancient Egyptians burned ambergris as incense ...The ancient Chinese called the substance 'dragon's spittle fragrance.' During the Black Death in Europe, people believed that carrying a ball of ambergris could help prevent them from getting the plague. This was because the fragrance covered the smell of the air which was believed to be the cause of plague ... some people consider it an aphrodisiac. During the Middle Ages, Europeans used ambergris as a medication for headaches, colds, epilepsy, and other ailments." [wiki]

The thing that struck me most was the feeling, looking at all the people who came out to see the whale, that nothing had changed: take away the jeans and sneakers, and you had an image straight out of an old engraving of the tourists going to see the giant beached sea beast. Compare these two images, if you will:

The lower one, of course, being my whale (thanks to Biblioddysey for the upper one).

There were some chunks of baleen (filtering teeth which the whale uses to catch krill) nearby, removed or broken out for I'm not sure what purpose. I took some pictures of them, once again impressed by how much of what had grown naturally seemed like something built, something incredibly engineered. The texture of the baleen was hard and resin-like, but ultimately fibrous, and the inner texture was sort of shredded into a hairy finish. The efficiency of this structure is extraordinary: the hard, slotted part lets the water out very quickly and the hairy inner part keeps in all the little food animals.

Whales are extraordinary creatures. Their sheer size is extraordinary, of course, but the way they have adapted, the incredible complexity of their biology -- the substances they produce, the structures of their bodies, even the way they interact, are all unique and difficult for us to really grasp, since they live in such a different environment from us. The mystique of whales is long-established, even when the tradition was to kill them if you could -- as you can see by any light reading of Moby Dick. Did you know, for example, that one newborn blue whale drinks one hundred gallons of milk a day, and by the time they are weaned weigh around twenty-three tons? Or that one blue whale can hear another's song across thousands of miles of ocean?

Sometimes, for whatever reason, they come up out of the sea to die, and we don't know why. People make extraordinary efforts to help whales who have beached themselves, sometimes in large groups. There are a number of engravings depicting the fascination people have with whales which have come up on the beach...

(Particularly, if you look closely, these people seem fascinated with the size of their penises).

Unfortunately, while there is a ban on whaling nowadays, many peoples don't go along with it. The biggest offenders (though there are several) in this controversy are the Japanese, who continue to whale for "science" in rather stunning numbers and whose whale meat seems to find its way into all kinds of lucrative places, under the noses of the regulatory bodies who try to keep track of these things.

When I was a little kid, I remember people making fun, not of tree-huggers, but of people who supposedly went around with signs saying "Save the Whales." At the time, it seemed that the ocean's vastness was inexhaustable, and most people rolled their eyes at the way those animal-loving people talked about whale songs and the beauty of the pods moving through the water. But now, in the present climate of loss and depletion, these stories become more meaningful. Anyone who has been out in a boat and seen whales up close will attest: they are beautiful. The fact that such isolated creatures continue to talk to one another over great distances is amazing. Within their very bodies, they produce magical substances -- and structures -- which vie with some of our highest technology.

And their sheer size and power is, of course, staggering.

Ursula LeGuin: The Conflict and The Plot

2010-11-22T10:22:00.000-08:00

I've been finishing one novel and starting another, so I'm in the mode of thinking about fiction lately. I seem to be able to either write fiction or non-fiction, but not both at once. Not easily, anyway.

Below are some words of wisdom from Ursula K. LeGuin, words that make me feel much, much better, because although I write stories, I don't always write about conflict per se. Sometimes, to me, there are better things to think about, and when people tell me that to make a successful piece of fiction I need to have plot! I need to crank up the conflict! then some part of me deep inside says, "Oh, yeah?"-- and I just can't shut it up. Like the title of the book this quote comes from (Steering the Craft), I have an internal guidance system which takes me where I must go. Perhaps as a result, I do have trouble selling stories: the nice comments from genre editors I've gotten is that the story is too slow, or that not enough happens. From the occasional literary editors, what I've heard is that because the story contains speculative elements, they can't use it (though I'm much more likely to get form rejections from literary editors).

I don't mind rejections, and I'm actually pleased that I'm getting comments and personalized rejections nowadays. Believe me, it is so wonderful to be getting these nice letters now, after all the years of form rejections; however, reading these words below, especially from one of the writers I most admire, makes me want to go on trying anyway. And the words make me want to turn back against the tide of pressure I've been floating in, the one that urges plot! plot! plot! perhaps at the expense of other things: they make me want to think again about the actual words I'm using, the phrases, the intricate, tiny narratives in tiny situations that fascinate me.

I love wisdom; I love people who have gotten old enough to have this kind of perspective. I love people who are well-read and incredibly eloquent, talking about things that matter deeply to me. Steering the Craft has been a marvelous read, and these words ring, not only true, but resoundingly.
__________________________

"I define story as a narrative of events (external or psychological) which moves through time or implies the passage of time, and which involves change.

"I define plot as a form of story which uses action as its mode usually in the form of conflict, and which closely and intricately connects one act to another, usually through a causal chain, ending in a climax.

"Climax is one kind of pleasure; plot is one kind of story. A strong, shapely plot is a pleasure in itself. It can be reused generation after generation. It provides an armature for narrative that beginning writers may find invaluable.

"But most serious modern fictions can’t be reduced to a plot, or retold without fatal loss except in their own words. The story is not in the plot but in the telling. It is the telling that moves.

"Modernist manuals of writing often conflate story with conflict. This reductionism reflects a culture that inflates aggression and competition while cultivating ignorance of other behavioral options. No narrative of any complexity can be built on or reduced to a single element. Conflict is one kind of behavior. There are others, equally important in any human life, such as relating, finding, losing, bearing, discovering, parting, changing.

"Change is the universal aspect of all these sources of story. Story is something moving, something happening, something or somebody changing.

"We don’t have to have the rigid structure of a plot to tell a story, but we do need a focus. What is it about? Who is it about? This focus, explicit or implicit, is the center to which all the events, characters, sayings, doings of the story originally or finally refer. It may be or may not be a simple or a single thing or person or idea. We may not be able to define it. If it’s a complex subject it probably can’t be expressed in any words at all except all the words of the story. But it is there.

"And a story equally needs what Jill Paton Walsh calls a trajectory — not necessarily an outline or synopsis to follow, but a movement to follow: the shape of a movement, whether it be straight ahead or roundabout or recurrent or eccentric, a movement which never ceases, from which no passage departs entirely or for long, and to which all passages contribute in some way. This trajectory is the shape of the story as a whole. It moves always to its end, and its end is implied in its beginning.

"Crowding and leaping have to do with the focus and the trajectory. Everything that is crowded in to enrich the story sensually, intellectually, emotionally, should be in focus — part of the central focus of the story. And every leap should be along the trajectory, following the shape and movement of the whole."

I'll leave you with that taste in your mouth, rather than even trying to reach that level of eloquence. Phew.

Atlas Obscura

2010-10-21T22:56:00.000-07:00

I just wanted to take a brief moment to mention this fun new venture that one of the folks from Curious Expeditions has been working on. It's a map of many of the odd and curious things from across the world, created by the editors – and also, by people like you. It's really, really neat, full of amazing places already (and they've invited me to be a guest editor, hooray!). I think it's going to be a big hit, so please go on over there and add something if you know of a weird place you think no one else has been to (or at least, something that's not on the Atlas yet). They would love to hear about it!

More from me soon; I'm a little overwhelmed at the moment, but next month should be better (and on from there). I've got about six posts sitting waiting for editing, and simply haven't had time!

Win a Kindle and Buy My Story Too

2010-10-06T11:41:00.000-07:00

Okay, shameless hustle. I promise to keep it short.

Eric Reynolds over at Hadley Rille Books says,

"I've just started a big marketing campaign to sell 5000 books between now and December 31st for Hadley Rille's 5th birthday (Nov 29) and am asking people if they'll help me spread the word on-line. I'm going to give away a Kindle 3G, which people can register for at www.hadleyrillebooks.com, and if they buy or pre-order a book (like Aether Age) then they get additional entry(ies)."

November 29th is also the release date of Aether Age: Helios, the anthology I'm in. Hadley Rille is offering a pre-order special for the anthology right now (with a discounted cover price for both the soft- and hardcover editions, and free shipping).

Anyway, FYI!

Back soon with a few notes on hoarding...

Update: Eric also tells me that "I also have a couple of logos for it that people can use and if they post those as their profile pic or use it on a blog, etc., then I'll enter them again [for the Kindle]."

Here they are:

It's A Yawn, It's A Sneer

2010-09-16T22:34:00.000-07:00

No, it's the Flehmen Response.

Have you ever wondered why your horse or your cat gives that "gurning" face after smelling something intensely? I did; I thought it was something in the smell that made my cat react that way, as if she didn't like it -- except she kept going back to it again. It seemed like she was a glutton for punishment.

Now I find it wasn't that at all: she was exhibiting the Flehmen Response, a way of smelling that does not involve the nose.

What it does involve is an organ inside the roof of the mouth called the vomeronasal organ, otherwise known as the Jacobson's organ. The "gurning" face (or, in the case of goats and horses, the weird lip-lifting) is actually a way of getting air to circulate inside the mouth so that the vomeronasal organ can pick up molecules of the scent in question. It helps the animal see what kind of scent it is, really, and gives them more information about the source of the scent.

Generally, the scents that cause this kind of interest are things that contain pheremones or other compounds that tell the animal about other animals, either of their own species or, in the case of cats, those of prey. Curiously, it is believed to be the basis of the Cheshire Cat from Alice in Wonderland.

"Flehming allows the animals to determine several factors, including the presence or absence of estrus, the physiological state of the animal, and how long ago the animal passed by. This particular response is recognizable, for example, in stallions when smelling the urine of a mare in heat." [wiki]

This is a small fact, something you can bring out in odd moments to impress your friends; but as an activity it rarely fails in comic charm. Here is a video of a pony with the Flehmen Response in action:

Lastly, I'm not certain the video below is a flehmen response (if so it's a very lively one), but it is pretty funny.

You can also type "Flehmen Response" into Google Images and see what you get: a veritable rogue's gallery of weird facial tics.

If We Only Had Twelve Fingers

2010-09-07T20:02:00.000-07:00

Standard Kilogram Mass, one of 40 made in 1884 which were exact copies of the international prototype kilogram kept at the Bureau International des Poids et Mesures in Sèvres, France

Sitting around tonight arguing with my friend Gwyan about the Metric System, I found myself embroiled in a very interesting discussion about the nature of measurement and the extent to which people will follow rationalism.

The thing is, despite the fact that it's based on our own ten fingers, I don't like the metric system. I don't like a system that requires decimal calculations and which won't easily divide by anything other than 5 or 2. It is not ultimately logical for people who make clothes out of four basic panels (and have to size those panels up and down), and in my opinion anything that requires an infinitely repeating decimal to represent a third of the measuring unit is crazy. It just doesn't make my life better. The system was made up by a bunch of rationalists who got carried away with creating a completely new system that people in different countries would accept -- for the sole reason that they wanted something new. It figures that it caught on -- only something this untidy and bizarre would.

Well, mostly. The British didn't accept the metric system for many, many years, despite the Victorian institution of universal education -- probably because the system had originated in France. But that's a whole 'nother story. Curiously, though, the idea originated with an Englishman, John Wilkins, first secretary of the Royal Society of London, in 1668. The idea didn't catch on, and the English went right on with their intricate monetary system and their 20-ounce pints.

But then "in 1670, Gabriel Mouton, a French abbot and scientist, proposed a decimal system of measurement based on the circumference of the Earth... His ideas attracted interest at the time, and were supported by both Jean Picard and Christiaan Huygens in 1673." [wiki]

Well, that explains a lot. In the days of Reason and Enlightenment, systems which tidied up numbers and arranged them in clean lines and shapes were all the rage. Metrics are a perfect example:

"1000 litres = 1 cubic metre ≈ 1 tonne of water; 1 litre = 1 cubic decimetre ≈ 1 kilogram of water; 1 millilitre = 1 cubic centimetre ≈ 1 gram of water; and 1 microlitre = 1 cubic millimetre ≈ 1 milligram of water."

This would appeal enormously to a culture of gleeful intellectualism, the same one that came up with Napier's Bones and calculus.

It was dear, rational, idealistic France who went for the wholehearted changeover, of course:

"The inconsistency problem was not one of different units but one of differing sized units. Instead of simply standardising the size of the existing units, the leaders of the French revolutionary Assemblée Constituante decided that a completely new system should be adopted. It was felt that no country would accept standardising on the units of another country, but that there would be less resistance if a completely new system made change compulsory for all countries." [wiki]

In other words, they threw out measurements that had been working for individual people for hundreds of years or more, because of an ideal. Not a bad thing, maybe, and in talking with Gwyan, I was hard-pressed to describe my aversion to base-10 systems of measurement. I don't have a problem with base-10 monetary systems; money is, after all, pretty much about numbers, and our numeric system is base-10, so it follows. It's pretty straightforward that any being with ten digits is going to have a base-10 number system. And the beauty of the metric system is that if the units you're working with start to need dividing, you can simply slide down into the next unit level and viola! You're working with whole numbers again. It's a different way of thinking: you're not working so much with pieces and parts, but rather with a sort of layered mesh of wholes, through which you can move as needed. Which is fine for distance or weight, but not so good for discreet objects like eggs or minutes.

And that 1/3 measure, that sticks in my throat. You can go on sliding downward in unit size forever and never get to the bottom of the number; it will always be an estimate, a rounding-up or -down. And it bothers me, as someone who used to work in the garment industry, that dividing things in fourths involves such an awkward number as 2.5, or even 25. Those are not friendly numbers (*see below); they don't show up in the kind of kitchen that has a cast-iron pot at the fire and herbs hanging from the ceiling. These numbers don't believe in us and our four-cornered world; so I don't believe in them, either (so there).

The madness of post-Revolutionary France bears me out on this. They redesigned everything to be about tens: the 10-hour clock (as opposed to 12-hour); their new calendar had 12 months but with 10-day weeks; and of course, money, length, weight, volume and so on. The breadth of it was staggering: they were redesigning the universe to fit itself to our hands -- our five-fingered, flower-like hands.

(Image by Sue Ford)

True, there is something beautiful and otherworldly about the number 5. It exists in nature, but it doesn't fit into everyday symmetry the way the simple triangle can. Drawing a pentagram accurately is a tricky proposition. We don't think in fives: when we count pennies, most people make groups of twos and threes. It is beyond and above the natural grooves of our minds, and this may be why the pentagram (and pentagon) has always had such magical significance**.

But really -- should we be redesigning our whole cultural definition of space and mass into fives? They may be beautiful, but they are absolutely not practical, at least not in any world that I inhabit.

(Image thanks to The Steampunk Home)

Interestingly, Gwyan pointed out that the metric system is more useful in bureaucracies, mass-production, and science, where the numbers need to be able to go very large or very small. This is a wonderful point, because I think what I object to about the conversion is that it is designed to benefit those industries -- not individual people, moving through their individual lives. This is precisely why the calendar is still divided into twelves, and why the 10-hour clock simply failed; why dozens and grosses are still used in bakeries and eggs in many places. People like to be able to divide time and goods many different ways, not simply into two possible factors, and fractions thereof. The Romans had a unit called an uncia, which is the basis of our words for "inch" and "ounce"; it was part of a fractional system based on twelfths.

Interestingly, there are several languages who use duodecimal number systems (otherwise known as base-12). I'm not referring to Elvish here (apparently it's one example); in Nigeria, there are several, as well as a few obscure Nepalese and Indian languages.

Another place, at least in the US, that is unlikely to change very soon is in the kitchen. Cups, ounces, and teaspoons were arrived at through usage, through what worked easily with the tools at hand.

I have to say, it's not that I dont like tens; they work just fine in a mathematical context -- for counting things, it's certainly a good idea to have your counting system match your number of fingers. It's more that for everyday use you sometimes simply can't beat the number twelve. Even those of you who write in saying you're fine with the metric system still use a 12-hour clock and a 12-month year; would you prefer it differently? And for those of you, who like me, simply like the number 12, there are "dozenal" societies in the US and the UK (they forsake the word duodecimal because it means ten plus two, which they feel is beside the point). Perhaps I'll join. After all, what a fabulous number: dividable by 2, 3, 4, and 6. Definitely a keeper.

*Note: when I say friendly numbers here, I am referring to a different property than that of the friendly numbers of number theory; nor are they amicable numbers or sociable numbers, some of which have been around since Pythagorean times.

**Pentacles, on the other hand, do not originally have an association with the number five. I didn't know that until the moment of this writing.

The Doctor, Dissected

2010-08-26T00:03:00.000-07:00

Lately I've been watching the new Doctor Who series one after the other on Netflix, in odd moments when nothing else will do. A long time ago, my friend in Scotland sent me some action figures from the second season, and I didn't know the first thing about them. My friend Gwyan, having grown up in the UK, is a big (old) Doctor Who fan, but I could never see the appeal, so I hadn't yet approached the new one. But I kept hearing about it, and I have to say when I was at Writers of the Future and got to know Sean Williams, an extraordinarily intelligent man and an avid Doctor fan (and a very nice person to boot), I began to reassess the preconceptions with which I had come to it when I was young.

My first attempt at the Doctor was as a twenty-something person, and there are a number of reasons why I never took to it.

First of all, and this is entirely childish and silly, the cheapness made me sort of slide off it without getting a grip, if that makes sense. I didn't know which episodes were good ones; the ones I watched seemed to be attached to ones I hadn't watched, and I couldn't get past the low-budget effects and the ridiculous voices and things that were supposed to be scary (or at least to be taken seriously). Perhaps I was someone who couldn't laugh at things enough; perhaps I didn't give it enough of my attention. Perhaps I was too young and conscientious when I tried it. In a weird way, this is probably also why I never became a smoker: the smell put me off and I just didn't have the stick-to-it-iveness to become addicted.

Secondly, when I did actually get a "good" episode, the girl companions in the show put me off. They were great girls, don't get me wrong: but they didn't do a lot, other than make mistakes or get rescued. I say this as someone who hasn't watched a lot of Doctor Who, but I have to say the same thing was true for me of the old Star Trek (which I have watched a lot of). I really wanted to like them - all my friends (mostly male) had this sort of connective tissue of geekiness about those two shows, but I just couldn't identify with any of the female roles, and it got in the way of my enjoyment.

(On a side note, I discovered Galaxy Quest a few years ago and really loved the way they played with this issue with Sigourney Weaver, the ultimate smart female role model, someone whose role in the tv-show-within-the-film is to repeat what the ship's computer says. It seemed to personify all that I disliked about the old Star Trek, and made me love the movie's writers).

However, I'm finding that I like the new Doctor. He seems willing to feel things, and his companions actually save his life and participate in the solutions, not just the problems; the effects manage to emulate the old show without being obviously cheap. They even emulate some of the way the old shows used sets and costumes that were laying around the lots -- I'm always a sucker for a mixture of science fiction and costume drama.

But along with this new interest is a discovery that I can't find any interesting overall analysis of the Doctor Who construct. I've found many analyses of individual episodes or specific incarnations of the Doctor, but people looking at the underlying cultural elements of the show as a whole seem a bit thin on the ground. Please - correct me if I'm wrong. And please take this next bit with a grain of salt.

It seems to me that some really brilliant person came up with a concept that would appeal to those intelligent, un-macho young men in that particular geeky stage between twelve and fifteen who hope to become someone dashing and useful someday. Think about it: an eccentric man who is a Time Lord (the name itself is terribly indicative of someone with power over interesting and important things like time and space), roaming the universe alone (appeals to loners) having adventures. He is always accompanied by an attractive young woman, who has been impressed by his acumen and persuaded to accompany him around the universe (she is also changed out before she can start to age). Many of the Doctors were thin (not heavily-built) men with unprepossessing features, and yet they were terribly competent and had excellent abilities; and usually they were able to defeat their enemy simply with their wits (and sometimes with little else). Does this not sound like the esprit d'escalier embodied in a character? How many of us geeks (and yes, I include myself here) wished when we were young that we could come up with that exact right thing to do or say at the moment when it was required - the vanquishing, or at least reducing, of the bully with our wit and debonair cunning, the chance to save the day in a way that made that attractive ~~girl~~ person notice us?

Most of the people I know who were really huge fans of the earlier incarnations of the Doctors from the 1960's and 70's are intellectual-leaning males. If my experience is anything to go by, it would explain a great deal of the show's appeal to these folks as young men. It was smartly written, and values words; it was intellectual rather than visceral (the early Doctors seem to approach events using their reason, not their feelings); it treated women as smart and even intensely interesting people but preferred them to be pretty and to need help; it was mainly concerned with gadgets and robots and creatures who wanted to either mindlessly kill or take over the world. There is something in geek nature, I think, which likes to imagine that the world is controllable, and the Doctor Who series embodied this preference for reason and logic overcoming chaos (interestingly, Star Trek had a completely different message, and that beloved creature of logic-loving geeks - Spock himself - was not infallible: he was subject to periodic bouts of chaotic thinking, because the show required emotion to be the winning quality. Kirk's character, of course, made sure non-geeks could like the show too, being all about manly emotion and impulsiveness).

With all this in mind, I have to say I very much appreciate the kind of writing that allows the new Doctors to be men who have the same sharp intellect as the old ones, the same quirky weirdness which appeals to intellectuals and geeks and young boys, and yet manages to have an extra layer of emotion written in underneath, that extra something which makes people like me who are sticklers for emotional motivation willing to watch, and go on watching. I find that although I still find the Dalek irritating (sorry, fans, I came to it too late), and don't particularly like the cybermen, the fact that the main characters are so believable and, as believable people, are responding with distress to the monsters, makes me willing to go along - and as a result, interestingly, I am more willing to go back and watch the old shows. And I do it with a more open mind, coming to it as historical documentation of the world-building, rather than wanting to laugh outright at creatures made of plastic bags and tin foil.

It means a lot to me to see that the world is changing in this way, allowing us grown-up girls to reclaim bits of what we never could access before. When smart and even-handed people are on the teams that write the new stories, the world changes. Like Title IX, which has changed innumerable girls' lives, the acceptance of girls (and non-heterosexuals too) into the Land of Geek - and the accommodation of their sensibilities - is a wonderful thing, something relatively new. I think this same approach could benefit a lot more of our popular pastimes (I'm not naming gaming, oh, no, not me). The fact that the girls in the new episodes are kickass, and that the Doctor is able to care about things in his heart and soul, and the attention to detail which comes with a larger budget, means that a door has been opened, and people like the younger me, girls or others with geeky romantic adventure leanings, can also get into the Tardis and fly away with the Doctor, and for that I am grateful. It's a new world, and I like it.

Summer In Winter

2010-08-09T18:44:00.000-07:00

It's blackberry season.

Also peach season, and apricot season, and many other kinds of fruit I love beyond reason.

In the winter, we collect, freeze and dry mushrooms to eat when the mushroom season has passed, so we can enjoy those flavors even when they are barely available in the fancy supermarkets for $40 a pound. We got 20 pounds of morels this year, and innumerable black trumpets. But in the summer, it's fruit. Boxes of it, bags of it: we gorge, and are content.

However, like the mushrooms I'm always trying to save that fruit for the winter months, when the flavor of blackberries or peaches can give you a moment of summer in the midst of the cold. Most years I make preserves of one sort or another. I've made strawberry jam and olallieberry jam, apple and pear butter, canned olallieberries and canned pears... yum.

The problem is, I'm almost the only one who eats it, so it sits there, fruit from summer waiting to be eaten when the fresh fruit is gone - waiting and waiting. It makes me sad. We do eat the canned olallieberries over ice cream (extra yum!)... but this year I decided to forget jam and go alcoholic.

Too much jam.

I remember when I was a kid, my parents went through a phase of making what they called "civil war nectar:" fruit in a big glass jar with sugar and something else, which fermented and produced a small amount of alcohol, which they ate over ice cream or cake. I've tried many times to get a recipe for that, but only yesterday found one:

1 part brandy
1 part fruit
1 part sugar
Leave it in a covered jar for a week before using.
Every time you use it, replace what you've taken with equal parts sugar and whatever fruit is in season.
Refrigerate in between uses if you are not using for more than a few days.
The place I found the recipe says: "Great on ice cream, pound cake, and such, but it does get very sneaky strong."

In my journeys through the internet looking for this recipe, I came instead across what seems to be a different approach to the same thing. Rumtopf ("rum pot"), also known as "tutti frutti" (all fruits, and yes, apparently that's where the name comes from) is a very old way of preserving summer flavors into the winter, from a time when alcohol was one of the only ways of preserving fruit:

"A tutti-frutti is started at the beginning of the summer, with fruits added to the mixture as they come into season. The last addition is usually made in September at the end of peach season. The trick to a successful tutti-frutti with brandy or a rumtopf with rum is to use an eclectic mixture of summer fruits, creating a blend of flavors. After the last addition, the entire mixture is set aside to mellow and age for several months. Of course, you can begin sampling the tutti-frutti/rumtopf whenever you like, but in Germany, it is not sampled until December on the first evening of advent. After that, it is fully consumed throughout the Christmas holidays. The spirited fruit is served over ice cream, pound cake, bread pudding and many other desserts. The sweet, fruity liquid can be enjoyed as an after dinner liqueur or mixed into cocktails."
(Thanks to Theresa Loe)

You find a ceramic or glass jar, about a gallon in size, with a tight-fitting lid. If you don't have a lid, or if the lid doesn't fit tightly, you can supplement with plastic wrap and a rubber band. You can also put a dish inside to hold the fruit down under the alcohol.

"Strawberries, cherries, raspberries, peaches, apricots, pineapple, nectarines, red currents and plums all work well. Do not use watermelon or cantaloupe (too watery), blackberries (too seedy), bananas (too soft) or citrus (too acidic). Some people avoid dark fruits like blueberries because they will discolor the lighter fruits in the mixture..."

I actually did use blackberries, because I like their flavor, and some people do the same with blueberries. I have also heard you should not use apples or pears, because they don't have sufficient body and get all mushy. The other thing I found is that having a cylindrical jar works better with the holding-down dish, which unfortunately allows fruit to escape around the edges if you use a round jar like I have.

What thrills me about this dish is the wonderful fragrance, a summery smell that comes wafting out whenever I open the lid. I smell it, and I think about the layers of fruit inside, and how when Christmastime comes we'll appreciate that injection of lost sunshine into our lives. It's like a little pot of treasure in my pantry, waiting for me to add more anytime I get some good fruit. At some point, I will try the Civil War Nectar, but for the moment I'm looking forward to that first taste of the Rumtopf in December.

Now, the other thing I made this year, which turned out extraordinary, was Creme de Mûre, a key ingredient in one version of the French cocktail known as Kir. We learned to love this drink during the ten years our family owned an old mill in France, where we would go and stay on the river and eat French food and generally enjoy the beauty of Bourgogne (Burgundy), where the house was situated. Traditionally, kir is made with Creme de Cassis (blackcurrant), topped up with white wine from Bourgogne. It's drunk as an aperitif, before food or a snack.

"Originally called blanc-cassis, the drink is now named after Félix Kir (1876 - 1968), mayor of Dijon in Burgundy, who as a pioneer of the twinning movement in the aftermath of the Second World War popularized the drink by offering it at receptions to visiting delegations. Besides treating his international guests well, he was also promoting two vital economic products of the region." [wiki]

If the rumtopf has a wonderful scent, this one is simply godlike. I find the flavor is rich and redolent of that peculiarly spicy blackberry scent, the smell of English summers and of scratched hands, sunshine and delicious forage, stained lips and that cautious, arched straining one does to get hold of a good cluster that's just out of reach. There is nothing like the smell of good blackberries, and now by making it I've actually managed to capture that smell in a bottle. It, too, has to age for three months, so I'm really looking forward to this winter, more than any winter full of jam.

Recipe for Creme de Mûre:

500 grams of blackberries
500 ml eau de vie (I used vodka - 80 proof)
250 ml water
350 grams sugar

Crush the berries and put them in the alcohol for 24 hours (cover it well).
Then strain out the fruit and put the fruit in the water for 24 hours.
Strain again, putting the fruit in the compost or feeding to your chickens.
Add the sugar to the blackberry-water, and heat until just warm enough to dissolve the sugar.
Now mix the sugar/blackberry mixture with the alcohol. Filter it through three or four layers of cheesecloth (or a thin, open weave dishtowel -- too tightly woven and it will clog), and put in bottles.
You can drink it at this point (yum), but it's apparently better if you let it age.

When my children were little, we used to read a book called Frederick, by Leo Lionni, about a mouse-poet who didn't help collect seeds and things during the summer. When the other mice complained, he said he was collecting smells and colors. Then when winter came, he was able to warm them with his words, which brought back the sights and feelings of summer in the middle of winter. I always liked this book, because it's about the things a writer wants to capture, and about bringing bits of the soft season into times that are hard and cold.

These dishes remind me of Frederick, holding tight to that fragrance and color from the season when fruit was really and truly ripe and giving it back to us again when we need it most.

So enjoy! And may your winter be full of the poetry of fruit...

Very Small Post About Tomato Blossoms

2010-08-04T13:35:00.000-07:00

So I'm just not getting many tomatoes this year.

The bees come and hang out with the squash blossoms and the sunflowers, and pretty much ignore the tomatoes. The bumblebees like them, though the two poor bumblebees I see in there are working hard trying to cover all those blossoms.

So I went to look up tomato pollination, and I find there is a whole mythos about tomatoes being self-pollinating. Apparently, according to this site, "The wild progenitor of our domestic tomato, in its native Peru, was pollinated by a solitary bee that was specifically adapted to it. As tomatoes were carried to other areas, its pollinator did not go with it, and pollination was often lacking."

Looking around, I came across a wonderful Instructables which explained things further:

"Tomatoes, as well as other members of the Solanaceae require a special kind of pollination to achieve proper fruit set. This form of pollination is known as "buzz pollination". Buzz pollination is accomplished by Bumblebees (Bombus), by gripping the flower with their legs and vibrating their flight muscles; honeybees (Apis) are incapable of doing this. In small gardens, bumblebee populations can be insufficient to properly pollinate tomatoes and related plants. Here's how to buzz pollinate your plants to produce larger fruits."

The 10-second video and the one-step Instructable then goes on to demonstrate a perfect (and hilarious) way to pollinate your tomatoes, which I will allow you the pleasure of discovering. It made me laugh.

Back at the first site, they tell us "Greenhouse growers for many years employed humans with electric vibrators (one brand name: Electric Bee!) to accomplish pollination. Today these have been mostly replaced with cultured bumblebees who do it more efficiently and cheaply."

All of which explains why I saw the single bumblebee in my garden, going from flower to flower and making a strange "bzazz" noise as it climbed onto each one. Yay, bumblebees! Still, I think I'll follow the Instructables and see if it helps.

More in the Way of Hands, Mechanical

2010-07-31T23:35:00.000-07:00

Since I've been on the subject of waldos, and making things by hand, I might as well show a few of the myriad interesting images I've come across. The hand can be interpreted in so many ways.

First, an amazing clockwork hand manipulator, which I would love to have, even if it's really simply art for art's sake. However, imagine if this could read Jacquard cards (or complex cams) and thus make your hand move in specific ways. Gives a new meaning to the term "player piano" - or perhaps, "piano player." Which would it be?

And a YouTube video of how it works:

Shane Willis' cool Escher-inspired hands repairing each other.

Part of a school project where students had to build working hands out of popsicle sticks and strings as a study of engineering and physiognomy.

A Becker Lock Grip hand, modded by the writer of a blog on "Technical Below Elbow Amputee Issues." In fact, modded twice. Really a very nice hand to have if you need a prosthetic arm, because it is so moddable (and cool looking). An interesting discussion, too, of people's reactions to different prosthetics he's tried... And a neat video of him using it to chop tomatoes.

(Editor's note: Wolf Schweitzer, author of the Technical Below Elbow Amputee Issues blog, above, has written to tell me that I must include the beautiful Monestier-Lescoeur hand, made by a sculptor and automata maker who does very interesting work. He's right - check it out: you can see the video here)

Another school project, with instructions

Kroenen's Mechanical hand, a reproduction of the one in the movie Hellboy.

A cheap mechanical hand ($17) which I came across on BoingBoing

I wasn't able to get a copy of this amazing tattoo of a hand emerging from this person's flesh, but I encourage you to go look at it.

In the Waldo tradition, this person made an oversized wooden hand to fit on their arm

Lastly, Ambroise Pare's excellent rendering of a mechanical hand, made from the original but with metal parts inside. From a nice Timeline of Robotics website.

The picture at the top was in Google Images, but led to a site which proposed to scan my computer for viruses, and nothing more. So I snagged the image and got out of there...

A Magical History Indeed

2010-07-30T10:24:00.000-07:00

(Editor's note: it has been pointed out to me that the book I reference below has already been mentioned on this blog, years ago, under a different name (Edison's Eve). It seemed familiar, but all the searches I did came up without a cross-reference, so I let it go. However, the articles I list below are so interesting that I've decided to let the post stand.)

On pursuing some other research, I came across a reference to what looks like a wonderful and extraordinary book. Living Dolls: A Magical History of the Quest for Mechanical Life, by Gaby Wood, looks to be a treat. Although the book came out in 2002, the author's fascination with humans looking to make machines like themselves (and ultimately, to lose that line between themselves and their machines) makes for a truly interesting read. The Observer, in an insightful review, describes some of this fascination:

"Never far away from the mechanical joke is the threat of death and horror and Wood does not miss this lesson. Her stories always end in the dark. So she describes an automatic chess player first made in Hungary in 1769, in which a moving statue of a Turk seated behind a board atop an elegant cabinet would play, and almost always beat, the best human masters. The Turk got star billing until well into the nineteenth century, was memorably if unreliably described by Edgar Allen Poe, and ended its life in a fire at Philadelphia's so-called Chinese Museum in 1854.

"Long before then, everyone knew there was a human director concealed within the Turk's cabinet, hidden by a useless but convincing set of gears. Wood carefully documents the Turk's life, but she's much more interested in that of its directors, some more than 6ft tall, trapped for hours within a tiny box. The best of them collapsed into alcoholism. 'Death came to put an end to his painful position', joked a Paris journalist.

"The point of such tales, so Wood convincingly insists, is not so much to illuminate the capacity of machines to behave like humans, but to reflect on how people turn themselves into machines. She recalls that while Edison devoted huge efforts to building speaking dolls, it was the phonograph which he baptised his 'baby'. She describes a film made in 1902 by the French genius Georges Méliès, in which the cinematographer plays his own decapitated head powered by a vast set of bellows."

The Guardian, in their review, actually went so far as to quote an extensive section from the book, about Jacques de Vaucanson, an early automata maker and brilliant man, known for his duck which ate and "digested" its food. The story is long and wonderfully written, and I highly recommend you go read it for yourself, but here is a sample:

"Vaucanson's earliest mechanical influences came from the church. He was the youngest of 10 children (born in Grenoble in 1709), and his Catholic mother would take him with her every time she went to confession. While his mother was with the priest, Jacques stared at the clock in the adjoining room. Soon he had carefully calculated and memorised its mechanism, and was able to build a perfect copy of it at home.

"His father, a master glovemaker, died when Jacques was seven, and the boy was sent away to be schooled at a monastery, where he arrived clutching a metal box. He didn't get on with the other boys, and couldn't concentrate on his lessons. Eventually, the father superior was forced to open the box. He found wheels and cogs and tools, next to the unfinished hull of a model boat. When confronted, Vaucanson refused to do any studying until he could make his boat cross the school pond. He was locked in a room for two days as punishment, but he spent the time making drawings so exceptional that the maths teacher, who was later to be lauded by the Royal Academy of Sciences, decided to help him.

"Of course, a story exists about the youthful genius of all famous men. What is curious here is that all of Vaucanson's early efforts as a mechanician were connected in some way to religion. The clock was seen at confession; the maths teacher was a monk. He went on to be taught by Jesuits, and, on leaving school, became a novice in the religious order of the Minimes in Lyon. This was the only way, he thought, that he would be able to pursue his scientific study, given the limited finances of his widowed mother. Indeed, Vaucanson was given his own workshop in Lyon, and a grant from a nobleman to construct a set of machines; but his talents were only encouraged up to a certain point. In 1727, to celebrate the visit of one of the heads of the Minimes, he decided to make some androids, which would serve dinner and clear the tables. The visitor appeared to be pleased with the automata, but declared afterwards that he thought Vaucanson's tendencies "profane", and ordered that his workshop be destroyed."

The article goes on to describe how Vaucanson escaped the monastic life and went to Paris to seek his fortune, find a patron, and do the work that he cared about most, including the incredible flute-player Vaucanson thought up literally in his sleep, a nearly impossible proposition for the day, but he pulled it off in the most extraordinary way. Aside from the man's brilliance just watching the things he made travel through history is an amazing story, and like most stories of lost things, fairly sad, with a few interesting notes about the beginnings of the French Revolution.

Within the quoted section in the Guardian we watch Vaucanson's inventions move through history, lost and found several times, becoming increasingly defunct, while later tinkerers are unable to get them to work properly. Interestingly, the author of the Observer article mentions meeting a contemporary who was working to recreate the digesting duck --

"A couple of years ago I met a brilliant English artisan who'd been hired to make a modern replica of Vaucanson's duck - most of our chat focused on just how this trick defecation worked. But spread out on his table were lumps of dead duck, bits of wing, tendons and feet."

-- And now you can see a reproducktion (sic, sorry) on YouTube doing its thing. It used to have its own video, but it's been taken down - all I can find now is this very nice man apparently telling French schoolchildren about Vaucanson's brilliance.

Lastly, in a wonderfully reflexive postmodern touch, someone has created an automaton of Vaucanson himself, making his duck.

Well, as they say, the more things change, the more they stay the same. The obsession with mechanical life goes on.

Get the book from Amazon

New Story Coming Out

2010-07-23T18:48:00.001-07:00

Just a quick note to say I have a story coming out this fall in the new Hadley Rille anthology, The Aether Age (Helios). The book is a collaborative between the editors and the authors, set in a world where steampunk technology is developed by the ancient Egyptians, Greeks, and so on. It was really interesting and absorbing for me to write, and I'd love to do more - apparently this is only the first of several books set in the Aether Age world.

Hadley Rille Books published a story of mine in their Footprints anthology, if you recall, and I got some positive mentions for it - by people like Gardner Dozois in Locus' Year in Review, to name one. Let's hope this will do as well... though I have to say, it looks like a very cool anthology!

You can find out more about the Aether Age at the blog. I'll announce the publication date as soon as I find out about it! In the meantime, I'm very pleased about the cover art.

Adele Blanc-Sec Comes to the Screen!

2010-07-14T10:17:00.000-07:00

Okay, you-all probably already heard about this, given that the movie has already been released all over Europe, but I only found out about it this morning. After all, I've been busy building a house. Nevertheless... peel me off the ceiling!

I am absolutely over the moon. Thank you, Luc Besson!!! I have been a fan of Adele Blanc-Sec for nearly 30 years, if you can believe it: I found one of the comics in a store the very first time I went to France. It was a comic book - but it had naked breasts! And a strong woman protagonist who smoked and pulled guns on people! And it took place in the early 1900's, with all the wonderful fin de siecle architecture and early-century atmosphere! I'd never seen anything like it - the whole thing just blew my young mind. And I learned a lot of French trying to figure out what was going on.

This series of books, originally written by Jacques Tardi in 1972, is a hu-u-uge reason why I love Steampunk today. It made the most incredible impression on my young mind, and I spent many years hunting down first French, then English versions of the books. They have been hard to find, and I loved them a lot - and by extension, I learned to love Tardi. And now, thanks to the movie, Fantagraphics says they will be bringing out new English translations this fall. This sounds exciting, but it's only Volume 1 - the others will follow later (I hope).

This is a very long time coming, but I am redeemed! Bwahahaha!

Check it out:

Unfortunately, according to IMDb, the film seems to have no release dates in any English-speaking countries. It's not clear why this is, but I encourage all to write to the distribution company and demand to know when they will bring this awesome-looking film to the English-speaking world. In the UK, that would be Optimum Releasing, but I haven't found anything for North America yet. It seems like the delay in announcing it is pretty long. I just hope they're not bickering about the bath scene or something (argh).

Thanks to the Steampunk Home for finding this!

Slashfilm has some photos here...

And here are also Two reviews one of which doesn't like it so much and the other which does. I don't care - I see scenes, even in the trailer, that I remember from the book, and it makes me childishly happy, regardless!

Where's the Waldo?

2010-07-11T14:51:00.000-07:00

Last night I had a dream where hands had become obsolete. For everything one wanted to do, one selected a tool that attached to one's arm, and then used the tool to do the activity. Golf clubs, oars, hammers, even cutlery -- they all had little slots in various walls; and when you wanted to do that activity, you simply stuck your (obsolete, apparently) hand into the ends that stuck out, and they would click onto you, becoming part of your body.

This is, of course, ridiculous, because hands and arms are one of the most amazing examples of evolutionary engineering that one can find in nature. Ultimately, a huge number nonrotational mechanical devices -- pliers, pistons, and even backhoes, to name a few -- are directly related to the structures of our hands. Why (as in my dream) would anyone make tools that bypass that extraordinary usefulness?

But it was just a dream.

In 1942, Robert A. Heinlein published a story called Waldo, about a man who is weakened by disease who invents a device (nicknamed a "Waldo") which allows him to magnify his own manual strength: the movement of his own hand would direct the device, which was also hand-like.

The Giant Hand, which is waldo-driven and was also at Maker Faire - and anyone could sit in the driver's seat

Since then, of course, remote manipulators (actually called waldos) have become common, especially for magnifying size and strength or reducing movements to microscopic size. For the most part, they have been used to reproduce hand movements; but this has progressed to things like powered exoskeletons, a la Ironman or Aliens (curiously, some of the real life ones were actually inspired by Heinlein, again - this time the book Starship Troopers). True, the contemporary exoskeletons can only walk a mile in half an hour, and their power packs don't last long; but someday, of course, we'll all be fighting wars with faceless super-soldiers.

Cyrano de Bergerac must have had a good sense of smell

Much of the funding for exoskeletons has come from places like MIT and the Pentagon, homes of ubergeeks and soldiers -- thus the dream of making oneself superstrong and impervious. True, the appeal of Ripley in the cargo loader in Aliens saying "Get away from her, you bitch" is enormous. But why can't we create waldos for other uses, perhaps to enhance more peaceful parts of us? I'd like to see sensory enhancement, not just moving and lifting. Waldo noses, for example, that allow you to smell better or in weird and interesting ways -- imagine smelling the difference between oxygen and helium, or being able to have a nose like a hound dog! I'd love to be able to become a SuperTaster , like in the They Might Be Giants song. Or perhaps someone could make Steampunk-like eye enhancers, like in City of Lost Children, that let you see infrared, ultraviolet - or even (gasp) real X-Ray specs?

There are actually waldo noses, although sadly they do not connect to anyone's sense of smell. And of course, visual enhancers have been around for a long, long time (say, three thousand years or so?). At Maker Faire two years ago, too, I saw Elly Jessop's wonderful Opera Glove, which she developed in MIT's Media Lab. This shoulder-length Glove was a sort of Voice Waldo, allowing her to catch her voice and manipulated it with an interactive glove. Very cool! In fact, a nice note (sic) to end on:

Links:

How to see if you're a Supertaster

On Utopias and the Hand

2010-07-10T22:26:00.000-07:00

This year, in an effort to get the count in so our school could get more accurate funding, I became a census enumerator for the Non Response Follow Up (NRFU) part of the census operation.

It was interesting because, being someone who moved back to the area in which I grew up, I finally got to go down all the roads I'd wondered about as a kid -- and explored the outer reaches of Last Chance Road, which winds and bumps for eight miles or more into the back country, unpaved all the way. Some of it requires four wheel drive just to be able to get over the lumpy terrain or up the super steep hills. People there live in all kinds of interesting situations.

When I told other census workers I was going up Last Chance, they looked at me in awe. "Aren't you afraid to go up there?" one person asked me. "I had to go there to find houses. Brrr," and she shuddered. Other people had similar reactions. "Be careful," one person told me, as if I might not come back.

However, I knew a great many of the people who live back there. Some of them are teachers at the local school, and a great many have kids who go to school with my children. The larger majority of them are people who wanted to own their own land and their own homes, who wanted to grow gardens and live in nature, but could not afford to do it in fancier "rural" neighborhoods like Bonny Doon -- which has city garbage service, post boxes, and a bus line. Instead, they opt to drive in and out the five or six miles of rutted dirt road to their houses in the knowledge they can live their lives undisturbed, without a mortgage or a crazy lifestyle to support it.

Some of them have been there from the beginning. One of the teachers, for example, has a half-adobe house with hand-hewn beams and lives in a valley rich in creek-bottom soil. The garden, and the plants and flowers all around their house are like a fairy tale -- the result of more than 35 years of hard work. They built their house themselves, with no hired help, and it's a lovely work of art, like a house out of the Brothers Grimm.

A Low Impact Woodland Home – but not from here. This one's in Wales...

Another family homesteaded a piece of property where the soil wasn't quite so rich, but 36 years on the garden is extraordinary: fruit trees and bowers of roses, vegetables and one of the most beautiful hand-built log houses I've ever seen. It took three and a half years to build, hauling the trees in from the forest, peeling them and setting them; cutting the floorboards and making kitchen cabinets from hand-cut boards without the benefit of power tools.

Other houses perch on hillsides with extraordinary views, tucked among the manzanita; and there was one amazing treehouse I came across that towered over a hundred feet up in a huge tree, a three-tiered platform with arguably the most breathtaking vistas anywhere.

Some of the houses there are newer, and built with less creative endeavors in mind, of modern trucked-in materials; there are even all-mod-con trailers parked here and there in the woods. But they have the same idea in mind: a beautiful place, undisturbed by your neighbors. Even people who live only a few yards away from each other don't bother each other, except to say "hi" when you are getting in and out of your car. The unwritten rule is that they are all out here for one basic reason: to be left alone to live their lives. How that makes these people scary, I can't imagine. I suppose the outside reaction to their life-choices says more about the people who are scared than it does about the people they are scared of.

I wasn't part of the 1960's and early 1970's ideology which some of the old-timers up Last Chance have managed to successfully embody. However, my parents were. They were a bit old to be hippies, but they had a creative (some would say bohemian) outlook which fit well with the can-do attitude of the times. In 1967 they built one of the first summer craft schools in the United States and called it Big Creek Pottery. It was more than a place to go to learn to throw pots; it was a place where people discovered themselves, dropped some of the pre-existing ideas of who they were. That sounds cheesy, but think about it: they learned how to build a kiln; they learned the chemistry of glaze formulas; they had lectures and slide shows and demonstrations by some of the leading craftspeople of the time. And they stepped out of their lives for a moment, into a place in the country, where there was hand-cooked food, two acres of vegetable garden, goats, chickens (fresh eggs!), and all the stars in the world to look at when they stayed up at night. It was idyllic, and it was hard not to go home changed.

Most of my early adulthood was spent coming to terms with the fact that adult live would never be like that. The eighties and nineties were enough to teach me that those days might never return. However, now I've come back to the place I grew up I'm finding new generations of believers in the idyll: this area is rife with organic farms, and new crops of idealists keep Last Chance alive and kicking. The can-do attitude has not died.

Wavy Gravy

This summer my children went to Camp Winnarainbow, a circus camp which was started by 1960's icon Wavy Gravy. I sent them there because it sounded fun, learning stiltwalking, trapeze, tightrope, juggling, you name it. When they came back changed, I couldn't help thinking of Big Creek Pottery and wondering what experiences they'd had in their time away. My younger daughter, given to fits of evil genius which tended to ruin her sister's life, suddenly was making an effort to be sympathetic and good-hearted. The older daughter seemed calmer, and talked about wanting to do acting. She'd never wanted to be onstage in front of lots of people before.

Winnarainbow's slogan is "Toward the Fun," a humorous take on the Sufi expression "Toward the One." And as it happens, there is another agenda here: one of giving children a safe place to go and explore parts of themselves they don't get to be with every day -- without fear of being made fun of or the sense that they are weird. There is a whole tent devoted to costumes (one drawer is labeled "gorilla parts"): spangly things, wigs, silly hats, ball gowns, makeup. Children can access this treasure house at will, and often wander around with costume parts on as part of the everyday routine. The Tornado of Talent goes on almost nightly, and everyone gets to show what they can do. My younger daughter, who had been bullied at school this last year, discovered an insane talent for improv -- when I got there, strangers would come up to me and tell me she had the best sense of humor in the camp -- and is now putting that talent to use practicing comebacks for the bullying remarks she might encounter next year.

The camp is associated with Patch Adams, and some of the counselors have been Clown Ambassadors to other countries. Their stated philosophy is to teach responsibility for one's own behavior, and develop confidence, inner security, and appropriate self expression; to value the uniqueness of each individual within a diversity of backgrounds; and "to provide a training ground to nurture leaders for a peaceful, harmonious and sustainable culture."

I'm not an advocate of backwards-looking thinking. I don't believe we should always be remembering the "Good Old Days" and wishing we could go back. But I do believe in learning from our past. There are a lot of failure stories from the 1960s: hungry people abandoning their attempts at self-sufficiency; communes where people had impossible falling-outs; the sexual revolution backfiring as women who didn't want to sleep with every living being were told they were "uptight."

At the same time it can be awfully tempting to look back and see a time with fewer electronic devices, when we weren't all expecting Internet access and people had so very much time to actually build things and make things - and talk to each other face to face. The loss of hand-work as a regular part of life is a definite problem with the way we do things now, which is why I'm always so pleased to see people making things with their hands. Here in California, I see music programs, art programs and all the shop and woodworking programs being cut out of existence -- not only that but the equipment is being sold off and the buildings closed or even pulled down. The outlay involved to rebuild these programs, buying the equipment and so on, will be impossible for many, many years; and in the meantime, generations of children are being raised who aren't being taught to do anything with their hands other than type and write (and use a Wii). And sports, of course, but not all of us are cut out for that.

So it's easy to look at a time when most people did have those skills - the skills to build their own houses and to fix their own cars and make gardens out of poor soil, and did have time, and worked together to build a shared vision of the future - and see a time that's slipping away. And yet, here I am, talking to a much vaster audience, all about making things and being idealistic. And there's Make, and Instructables, and learning things via YouTube, all the products of visionaries. My daughter learned how to do Jacob's ladder from an unknown 11-year-old boy on YouTube; how cool is that? You can convert your diesel car to cooking oil, and power your generator on walnut shells, if you learn how at places like Maker Faire which is the coolest thing ever, and a place where like-minded visionary people can come together. It really isn't a lost culture, after all, we're just doing it a little differently. So I'll finish with one last exhortation: Make stuff. Do it a lot. Use your hands. And don't be afraid to change your environment. Or the world.

LInks:

A Wonderful book by Juhani Pallasmaa called The Thinking Hand:
"In The Thinking Hand, Juhani Pallasmaa reveals the miraculous potential of the human hand. He shows how the pencil in the hand of the artist or architect becomes the bridge between the imagining mind and the emerging image. The book surveys the multiple essences of the hand, its biological evolution and its role in the shaping of culture, highlighting how the hand–tool union and eye–hand–mind fusion are essential for dexterity and how ultimately the body and the senses play a crucial role in memory and creative work."

I'm Not Dead

2010-07-08T16:03:00.000-07:00

Okay! A long period of illness mingled with huge life changes have kept me from the blog, but things are settling down now. My apologies for my silence: I was building a house, moving into said unfinished house, and coping with not being well all at the same time. Building a house is a colossal undertaking, and moving can be truly awful, even without the poor health. But now we have electricity, toilets, and even a shower, and today we put two of the doorknobs on. And I'm healthy again. Which just goes to prove that personal things really can interfere with your goals in life.

So with that said, I am back. I am finishing the Machines novel, starting a garden, and revisiting lost haunts. Summer is here, peaches are ripe, and I have the summer to pull myself together. I may be a little slow for awhile but I am planning to post one post a week until I have some fewer boxes in my living room...

Next up: Utopias and Good Intentions

Virus is a Knowledge

2010-03-30T19:33:00.000-07:00

Much apologies, although I've theoretically been back from hiatus for awhile, I've also spent some weeks sick as a dawg with a horrible lung infection. I am getting better, and as soon as I can get things back in order a bit, I'll be writing more! Promise.

Diorama Extravaganza

2010-03-20T16:53:00.000-07:00

Long, long ago, Nicholas Clayton wrote in to tell me this:

"Going off-post to point you to something that should intrigue any enquiring mind that is prepared, as yours evidently is, to be delighted. I can't find any note of it in your blog: the London Diorama.
Sitting in a taxi I saw the name blazoned on the pediment of the Nash terrace at Park Square East. This led to a fascinating article (The Diorama in Great Britain in the 1820s).

And the Diorama structure of building is still there behind the facade as can be seen on the Google satellite view [see picture]. I have yet to visit to find out how accessible it is to the public."

The diorama was a sensation in the early 1800s, the brainchild of Louis Daguerre, as in (you guessed it) the daguerrotype. Having apprenticed in architecture, theater design, and panoramic painting, M. Daguerre was a natural talent with a true skill for theatrical illusion. He became famous for his electrifying theater design, and at the age of 35 opened his first Diorama in Paris in July 1822.

"...the Diorama was a theatrical experience viewed by an audience in a highly specialized theatre. As many as 350 patrons would file in to view a landscape painting that would change its appearance both subtly and dramatically. Most would stand, though limited seating was provided. The show lasted 10 to 15 minutes, after which time the entire audience (on a massive turntable) would rotate to view a second painting. Later models of the Diorama theater even held a third painting.

The size of the proscenium was 24 feet (7.3 m) wide by 21 feet (6.4 m) high (7.3 meters x 6.4 meters). Each scene was hand-painted on linen, which was made transparent in selected areas. A series of these multi-layered, linen panels were arranged in a deep, truncated tunnel, then illuminated by sunlight re-directed via skylights, screens, shutters, and colored blinds. Depending on the direction and intensity of the skillfully manipulated light, the scene would appear to change. The effect was so subtle and finely rendered that both critics and the public were astounded, believing they were looking at a natural scene." [wiki]

Here is part of a review of one of the dioramas shown in London, from The Times, 4 October 1823:

“The warm reflection of the sunny sky recedes by degrees; and the advancing dark shadow runs across the water – chasing, as it were, the former bright effect before it. At the same time, the small rivulets show with a glassy black effect among the underwood; new pools appear which, in the sun-shine, were not visible; and the snow-mountains in the distance are seen more distinctly in the gloom. The whole thing is nature itself; – and there is another very curious sensation which this landscape-scene produces on the mind. The decided effect of the thing is, that you look over an area of twenty miles; the distant objects not included. The whole field is peopled: a house, at which you really expect to see persons look out of a window every moment – a rill, actually moving – trees that sem to wave.

You have, as far as the senses can be acted upon, all these things (realities) before you; and yet, in the midst of all this crowd of animation, there is a stillness, which is the stillness of the grave. The idea produced is that of a region – of a world – deserted; of living nature at an end; – of the last day past and over. Silence, in spite of Ariosto, seems to have found a resting-place – nay, at last, an empire – upon earth.”

The diorama in London was built the year after the first one in Paris, in 1923.

I did a bit of web-burrowing and came up with this information:

Arthur Gill (who throughout the 1960s and 1970s wrote a regular column in The Photographic Journal of the Royal Photographic Society) recorded an account of a visit he made to the Park Square East/ Peto Place building at a time when it was empty in the mid–1970s. He found what seemed to be the remnant of a filled-in well of about twelve feet (3.7 metres) diameter which he thought was originally used to contain the turning shaft on which the Diorama saloon had turned. A few years before, when the building housed a department of the Middlesex Hospital, the well had been filled with warm water and used for hydrotherapy of disabled patients. Mr Gill explored fully the empty building and “tried to imagine what the aspect would be like if the circumferential rooms and offices were absent... However, try as I would, my imagination was unable to sweep away the modern amendments and adaptions, and recapture the Diorama. Except for that concrete–filled well ... everything has gone beyond recall”. (Arthur Gill, ‘The London Diorama’, History of Photography, January 1977, Vol. 1, No. 1, pp.31-36)

In the early 1990s it was being used to house the Diorama Arts centre, but later it became part of the national headquarters of The Prince's Trust charity. Lord knows what's inside the structure now.

Daguerre went on to build other dioramas, the last one being a diorama in a church in Bry-sur-Marne, just outside Paris, where he lived. Last time I was in France I tried to get there because they still have one hanging in the church; but apparently it was poorly restored over the years, and now they are trying to restore it from the restoration, so to speak, having lost a good deal of the transparency and effect in the previous restoration.

Daguerre, of course, was fascinated by visual representation in all forms, and ways of reproducing the reality of the world in a more permanent, frozen form. It was not surprising, then, that he became involved in the first photographic process:

In 1822 Joseph Nicéphore Niépce produced the world's first permanent photograph (known as a Heliograph). Daguerre partnered with Niépce three years later, beginning a four-year cooperation. Niépce died suddenly in 1833. The main reason for the "partnership", as far as Daguerre was concerned, was connected to his already famous dioramas. Niepce was a printer and his process was based on a faster way to produce printing plates. Daguerre thought that the process developed by Niepce could help speed up his diorama creation.

Daguerre announced the latest perfection of the Daguerreotype, after years of experimentation, in 1839, with the French Academy of Sciences announcing the process on January 7 of that year. Daguerre's patent was acquired by the French Government, and, on August 19, 1839, the French Government announced the invention was a gift "Free to the World."
Daguerre and Niépce's son obtained a pension from the Government in exchange for freely sharing the details of the process.

The Wikipedia article on dioramas says that Daguerre was a manufacturer of mirrors, which is interesting for several reasons. One is that the plates on which the daguerrotypes were developed used a silvered surface; another is that his cameras depended on taking the light that came through the camera's lens and reflecting it with a mirror onto the plate, very much like a camera obscura. He never developed this camera much, and depended on this same essential concept for his patent. All part of the smoke and mirrors of good theatre, I suppose.

Many thanks to R.D. Wood's extensive work on the history of the diorama.

Rural Old New York

2010-02-26T11:20:00.000-08:00

Janice McIntire just sent me a link to a New York Times article about a man who has spent 30 years turning his 1-bedroom Manhattan apartment into a rustic cabin á la Abe Lincoln. Check out the amazing interactive tour, which allows you to see a panorama of both his living room and his kitchen. I took a couple of screen shots just to give you a taste (check out the computer in the kitchen, and don't forget you can look at the ceiling and floor).

The things one can do if one has enough time! Who says Steampunk is a recent development? It's been in the works a long time.

Thanks, Janice! (via Bettershelter)

Brief News

2010-02-23T23:01:00.000-08:00

Okay, I'm still on hiatus for the moment, but I just wanted to say I'll be on two panels at the Nova Albion Steampunk Exhibition in Emeryville on Saturday, March 13th. Here's the info:

Saturday 1:00-2:45
STEAMPUNK GARB FOR LIFE ON A BUDGET
Jade Falcon, Ryan Galiotto, Jean Martin, Gail Carriger (M), Heather McDougal
Modifying and adapting everyday wear. Making steampunk gear out of found objects and clothing.

Saturday 4:30-5:45
STEAMPUNK TECHNOLOGY
Jon Sarriugarte, Patrick McKercher, Alexander Logan, Mark Anderson (M), Heather McDougal
Making and creating past inventions for the future. Discussing the maker mentality, why the rise of steampunk, why now?

Yeesh! I'm terrified. But it might be fun, if I keep the Mouth Editor on full speed ahead. It's not that I'm not smart, it's that I very often don't look it, so I have to watch my step. Expect a blog post on this kind of disconnect in March.

This Hiatus was a Good Thing, and I've been collecting ideas for posts. So see you soon - I'm looking forward to it!

Hiatus: Until March 20th 2010

2009-09-12T14:49:00.000-07:00

Things have been a little chaotic here recently. In fact, the whole summer has been nuts. I am trying to build a house (and so far failing), finishing two novels, and sorting things in order to someday move into a smaller place; we were evacuated for the Lockheed fire in August and are just getting things back in order; and suddenly, I am realizing I need to really get some writing out there now that I've been published a little bit.

So I am taking a 6-month hiatus from the blog. I don't know what that will do to my readership, but it seems more fair to simply state when I'll be back, writing about things that are cool and interesting, than to simply fall away like I've been doing recently.

I'll hopefully collect weird bits during the coming six months and come back fresh and full of new things to talk about.

In the meantime, take care and feel free to use these pages as a source of inspiration for writing or art, a place to come to be reminded that the world is not a dull place, or just resource for finding out about something obscure which just might be here.

Please, feel free to email me at mcdougal dot heather at gmail dot com and let me know if there's anything you think I should be blogging about. And thanks to those who already have. I'm thinking about it, I promise.

I'll be back on March 20th, 2010.

Cheers,
Heather

Hubble: Deep Field

2009-08-23T23:11:00.000-07:00

My friend Gwyan just sent me this and I actually can't find many words to describe the effect it had on me. There was a moment, and I will let you find that moment, when I caught my breath and actually became too emotional to speak. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did. It is, quite literally, awesome.

MetaHaiku

2009-08-08T07:52:00.001-07:00

"Cent mille milliards de poemes" (A hundred thousand billion poems), by Raymond Queneau

For a number of years I've been really interested in the possibilities of hypertext as a vehicle for really interesting and complex narrative. I diddled around with writing stories in hypertext, but was never satisfied with the result; they seemed to me either confusing or aimless or simply mechanistic, and at best I came up with something so voluminous that I couldn't possibly complete it in one lifetime.

I decided to try poetry instead.

Poetry has the virtue of being all about simplicity, about using as few words as you can to create complex images and ideas. It's about making little windows into reality, places where the world stops for a moment and you see, really see, something unexpected.

It's really a perfect place for hypertext, being spare and clear and often having a specific structure. And there is a long history of what is called combinatorial poetry, or combinatorial text - the creation of poems that can be changed around by the reader, usually based on some mechanism in the book form. I decided that I would try haiku, since the form is so fixed. This would a) allow me to work within a specified framework, so I didn't have to also create (and get tangled up in) my own system; and b) would keep the poems from wandering off on a tangent, keeping them simple and clear. I also decided I would specify the number of links so as to keep it as structured as a traditional haiku.

What I came up with, using the simplest tools I could, was an HTML frameset system in a set window size. The top frame held the top line, the middle frame held the middle line, and the bottom frame held - well, you get the picture. Then in each line I chose one word which would be emphasized, making that the link word. When the reader clicks on that link, the line changes, creating a new haiku. (more about my process here)

It's difficult to describe it, and I can't actually insert one here in the blog, so I suggest you try one. Here's my little MetaHaiku site, where you can see a few that I've written.

The thing I like about these is that it enlarges the tiny window of a haiku without compromising its essential qualities. By nature, haiku are traditionally supposed to describe a moment, and they are supposed to contain some clue about season, and they are supposed to speak only of small things - which of course capture something much larger. So when you make a haiku with hypertext, you are creating a series of moments, a progression of snapshots which move slightly through time, describing a longer moment than a regular two-dimensional haiku. It's not so much that they describe more as that they describe longer, and the reader can unveil the moment in a way that is pleasingly exploratory.

The haiku have five links on the top line, seven on the middle, and five on the bottom, echoing the syllabic line-structure. The experience is a lot like our experience of real moments - in other words, you can't go back. There is a starting haiku and and ending haiku, and any number of ways to get there. In the present structure, you have more than 175 ways to get from the beginning to the end, so the process is surprisingly repeatable.

What I've decided is that I'd really like to share these, and see if others are interested in writing some. What I'd really like to do is to find a simple way to do it, given that mine are done in a clunky and complicated way, and then broadcast the template for everyone to use. I'm working on having a friend make a Flash interface to simplify things, but in the meantime if anyone wants to know the more lame way I did it you can email me (look in the sidebar for the address) and I'll do my best to define it for you.

Vive la Interactif!

The Many Personalities We Live With

2009-08-03T14:44:00.000-07:00

This is Garky. Garky spent almost a whole day sitting in chairs with Younger Daughter, shooting down the vampires in the trees, and generally sharing many other adventures before geting injured and requiring bandages. Now she lives in this vase.

You might mistake her for some kind of Sogetsu Ikebana*, but you would be mistaken. Despite my daughter's belief that she can hold vampires at bay, she is really an onion flower (don't tell Younger Daughter).

This is the same daughter who personifies such characters as Snitch, Miru, Grumpo, Cute-o, Wadro, Sicko, and Happo.

They all talk in a strange way, saying "You too nice to me" instead of "You're too nice to me".

Snitch likes to eat hair and fingers, because it thinks they are worms. You must keep these things away from it, or it will grab and eat them.

Miru likes to eat fresh skulls with brain juice, as well as having a fondness for the flavor of cactus, and always hugs its pillow. If it loses its pillow it gets really sad and goes and looks for it. If anyone steals its pillow, it bites them.

Grumpo complains all the time, about everything, including nice things. If you're nice to it, for example, it says you're nice to it too much.

Cuto is incredibly cute, but loves to bite off your limbs, and can go for ages and ages without food or water.

Wadro loves its hole. Its hole is any area of water (other than the ocean). If you go in its hole it drags you under and drowns you. When there is no water, Wadro cries, "Hole! Where hole!" in a piteous voice.

Sicko barfs on you.

Happo is always happy and okay with everything. Even if you beat on it or say mean things. Happo is the teflon of characters, to the detriment of itself and everyone else's sanity.

Characters appear when Elder Sister bings them into existence with her invisible magic wand.

The term "characters" is not to be confused with Annoying Little Character, a hand-creature who is incredibly annoying and cheerful, singing its Annoying Little Character song and dancing until someone slaps it, whereupon it lies down and gets sick for awhile. Only time passing can improve its health.

These are not the only characters who appear. When Elder Daughter was three she became intensely enamored of a butternut squash that my father had drawn a cartoon face on with a Sharpie. She called it her "heavy baby" and carried it everywhere, in the car and into bed. We had difficulty with the gales of mirth trying to get out, but we bore with it until it got so shrunken that it had to be disappeared, whereupon she spent several weeks looking for it.

I remember reading an interview with Frank Zappa many years ago in which he talked about following his son Ahmet (aged perhaps three at the time) around trying to catch the lyrics to a song he sang called Frogs With Dirty Little Lips. It fascinated him, he said, because it was such a great concept, and because the words changed all the time, and it drove him crazy. Now I find, looking it up, that he actually did put the song (or some momentary version of it) on his album Them or Us. I need not mention how much I love how Frank Zappa's mind worked. It is a secret, or used to be.

So I suppose, despite our poor housekeeping skills, my household has its interesting moments. At least the Characters don't argue with me much.

An example of Sogetsu

*More on Ikebana and Sogetsu: "the great difference between the Sogetsu School and [traditional] Ikebana lies in the belief that once all the rules are learned and the techniques mastered, there is an unbounded field for freer personal expression using varied materials, not just flowers." [wiki] Curiously, I think the same kind of thing could be said about play. And about storytelling. Or even, perhaps, things like manners and who you feel like being, at the moment.

Here also, some Sogetsu masters' work. And a little about the man who started it. I think I might do a photo post about it, sometime...

Summer Cleaning

2009-07-21T20:00:00.001-07:00

Cleaning out the basement is meant to be a boring, thankless task. Fortunately for me, I seem to have been doing it for years, so now that I absolutely have to get rid of some stuff, I'm finding only the less junky stuff is really left to deal with. And so I find myself going through years of lovely stuff, things I had forgotten I own. Nice things. Things from my travels and other odd life-experiences...

George Carlin had a thing he used to do about "My stuff and your shit," but it seems to me this stuff is pretty interesting shit..

So I took some pictures.

But then, my thinking it's interesting is exactly the reason why it's in my basement.

This is one of those nesting Russian dolls, called a Matryoshka doll, but instead of those pretty girlie figures we get all the main Russian leaders, from Boris Yeltsin right back to a teeny-tiny little Ivan the Terrible.

They seem to be trying to educate us about some of the leaders, here...

Can't remember where I got these. Somewhere in Asia, during my rambles; they are opium tools, probably made for tourists, but then again, I'd bet they aren't too far off from the originals.

Glass soda bottles from a street vendor in Japan. You pay your money and the vendor bashes in the top, which is a little glass ball held in place purely by the pressure of the carbonation (see the picture below). Then you stand there and drink it, give the bottle back to the vendor, and go on your way. Needless to say, I wasn't a very good citizen, or I wouldn't have these.

The glass shell of a streetlight. Notice the interesting combination of Fresnel lens on the inner surface and wavy texture on the outside. The Fresnel lens focuses the light, and the wavy lines make it feel less like a spotlight. It's imprinted with the GE logo (see below).

A solid glass ball, about the size of a small grapefruit.

One of the few items left from my days blowing glass, probably my favorite.

Edward VIII coronation cup, horribly mended.

Everyone needs some good English stripey ceramicware!

A few of the many, many cups my father made for my wedding celebration...

...And my baby cup, also made by him.

Outside and...

...inside of a millivoltmeter, which seems to record its measurements on a soot-coated wheel marked with the hours.

A fan from a flea market in Japan. Anyone know what it says?

A very old, very beautiful, very well-loved double bridge pack of cards from the house of family in England.

And lastly, a child's toy from the same house (as are all the dolls in the bin at the top of the page).

This is only one afternoon's worth of finds. There is much more, like the things I unearthed last Friday: a set of opium weights, an opium pipe, a carving of a nasty little man from, I think, Irian Jaya (though I bought it in Kuching, on Borneo) who is clutching his penis and a knife, and who seems to have real teeth. A set of tiny old ninepins with beautiful wormholes in them. Some souvenir china from the Museum of Jurassic Technology. And on and on. I couldn't possibly put it all in my house, yet I have a hard time relinquishing it...

Social Sewing and Networked Objects

2009-07-17T11:49:00.000-07:00

My friend Gwyan sent me a link (via O'Reilly Radar) to a project developed for Microsoft Research's Design Expo, wherein a group of students came up with a wonderful networked object which is designed to be a comfortable improvement for a grandparent. The project is called Social Sewing, and was designed for Despina, grandmother to one of the people in the design group.

Despina was a dressmaker before she retired, working in a shop with several other people, all sewing and gossiping together as they worked. She did this for many years, until it became too hard to get to the shop. Apparently she is still working, but now does it from home – and finds it incredibly lonely work. So the group designed three little sewing-machine-like-objects, with different colored fabrics on each one, which are networked with her friends' sewing machines. When her friends are sewing, the needles on the faux machines go up and down and the wheels go around - with apparently the right sound - and a light goes on to illuminate the fabric, just like in a real machine. When Despina sits in her sewing chair, communication is activated by her weight, and she can talk to whichever friends are sewing at that time, thus making her sewing the interesting gossip-and-sew experience it used to be in the shop. Apparently the friends are all such good seamstresses that they can tell, just by listening to the sound of the others' sewing, what the others are making. By making the devices familiar in shape and sound, the group have enhanced Despina's life dramatically without making her learn anything outside her comfort zone.

For years people have been talking about humanity getting wired into the world, wearing earrings that talk to the bus (and pay the fare) and so on. But I think that is largely chatter. The real impact is going to be in ways like this, where individual people find ways to make their lives better in ways that corporate entities could never imagine. How well would a device like this sell - or perhaps I should ask how many people out there are retired seamstresses? Not many. And yet people like this group, and many of the people who come to events like Maker Faire, are finding incredibly individual and creative ways to use technology - including, as in this case, networking everyday objects so as to make them familiar and fun, without all the learning involved in a designed corporate interface. As far as I'm concerned, this is where combining humanity and technology will have real impact, when we have the tools to design our own technological objects, when the tools are in our own hands to make what we please, in much the same way we knit sweaters or design our own websites. We are all different from any other person; and so, too, should our technology be different. And part of our everyday world, not as "technology", like cell phones or the Internet, but incorporated into our clothes, our knitting needles, the things we like to do. It's where all the personalized interfaces are trying to go, but in a much better, much more interesting way.

(PS. I'll be posting about Maker Faire in the next few days, I hope).

Old Man Bites Tenderly

2009-07-17T11:15:00.000-07:00

I came across this entirely by accident, but it's hilarious (if a bit brutal), especially toward the end.

When I lived in Japan, the TV was full of shows like these: people having to put their faces into cages full of live snakes or having to dance on giant slimy inflatable balls, or being dropped in cars from 100-foot-high cranes. Most of the time they didn't seem funny to me, being largely about humiliation and doing things that looked insanely dangerous. This one, however, is made funnier by the inanity of the punishments and by the stricture of having to be quiet in a library. And what the heck is that American guy doing there? No idea, but it's very typical of the genre.

There was also a series of Arnold Schwarzenneger commercials when I was there for what we called a "genki drink" (energy drink), where Arnold behaved like a lunatic, which struck all of us gaijin (foreigners) as extremely funny, in that "Oh, my God" kind of way. Here's one, below: "Bui" is how the letter "V" is pronounced in Japanese, and "Daijobu" means "no problem"; so the "Daijobui" is a kind of play on words for the name of the product.

Hard to imagine, in those days, that he would become the governor of California.

My closest brush with this kind of silly show was when a TV crew came to the gaijin house (a kind of residence hotel) where I lived for awhile and filmed us all making dishes of our own concoction out of Japanese ingredients. The crew were very polite, but the TV show, when it came on the air, ended up just as sensationalized and inane as all the others. Still, it was extremely interesting to see oneself through the lens of another culture's media.

Number 9, Number 9

2009-07-05T22:47:00.000-07:00

So I was contacted recently by the people at Focus Films, who are whipping up a buzz about the forthcoming film called 9, a post-apocalyptic animation piece about some little stitched-together folk who must survive in a harsh environment full of really strange and feral machines who hunt them. It sounded familiar, so I did some research and found the original short film by Shane Acker, which won a number of awards (and was nominated for an Oscar) - for good reason. Below is the full film, courtesy of Youtube. It runs about 10 minutes long, and is really excellent.

Apparently Mr. Acker is directing this new, longer, and more complete film, which is produced by Tim Burton and Timur Bekmambetov. The website given to me by the Focus people, full of backstory and cool imagery, was very interesting, much more encouraging and intriguing than the trailer I originally unearthed, which looked and sounded, as my ten-year-old daughter said, "Like it was made by gamers."

I often wonder how authors feel when their efforts are, by editorial command, given garish book-covers and inaccurate blurbs, as has happened to many fine writers like Philip K. Dick, supposedly to appeal to the genre reader. In previews, when choices are made about music and editing that feel like they are aimed at a specific kind of audience (not who the art and direction of the film seem to be targeting), it does make you wonder how the filmmaker feels about it, and if they get some say in the publicity.

In fact, it does look like it has the makings of a complex and even clever film, with a slightly grimy aesthetic that includes cobwebs, parchment, brass navigational instruments, books, dead machines and things in jars, to name a few, and an interesting glowing quality of light which perhaps is part of this particular vision of a doomed world. The vision is pretty interesting, a bit like Mad Max meets da Vinci meets the Muppets, with a steampunk twist.

I admit, though, I'm still trying to figure it out. The marketing is strangely mixed, and seems to be trying to appeal to the steampunk contingent while keeping an eye on metal-loving gamers. Perhaps the director has some kind of hybrid vision? For some reason, the fact that only one out of nine main characters is female makes me think this might be true. It's really an enigma, one I'm not entirely certain will work. The victoriana of steampunk and the geeky back-to-basics wonder of clockpunk communities tend to be very female-friendly, with a strongly feminine streak mixed into the rivets and brass. So, unless the art direction is only giving a sort of nod in that direction, I am curious to see how they will pull it off.

On the other hand, perhaps the marketing assumption is that gamers watch previews, and other types look at websites...? Or perhaps, that women look at the web, and men look at previews?

Still, (and I am getting on my soapbox here) it strikes me as strange: I've seen three trailers now and they all use the same song, a generic semi-metal instrumental by Coheed and Cambria. What's with this sole choice of music to represent their movie? My beef with it is not so much a matter of my personal taste so as the genericness of the choice. If they are wanting to make the film look intriguing, why are they going so mainstream (and such a specific kind of mainstream, at that)? It's true that Mr. Bekmambetov has made movies of comics, and the lead singer of Coheed and Cambria wrote the Amory Wars series, above, but still. Does that style (see picture) really reflect the kind of movie they're making here? I mean, I actually had goosebumps watching the most recent preview - until the music started. If it's supposed to be a creative film, why not use more creative music, like Abney Park, or the awesomely versatile talents of In The Nursery, who did, among other (and totally disparate) things, the modern soundtracks for such silent classics as The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and the wonderful Hindle Wakes? I mean, we might get tired of Danny Elfman sometimes, but even he could do better than this; his music would at least be tailored to the film (he did do a passable semi-metal thing himself for Mr. Bekmambetov's own movie Wanted). Or try looking at some of the other possibilities, like these and these. {/soapbox}

In any case, the people at Focus have vowed to send me cool stuff, and I will duly filter it and pass on anything that seems truly unusual. It's not my style to hype about media, but I do have to say some of the initial images and stories in the website above seem potentially quite in line with the Cabinet, so I am ever-hopeful. Keep your fingers crossed.

(Update: I seem to have gotten on some kind of list. I've now gotten another email from another cinema company asking if I would participate in the discussion of some other upcoming films. Sorry, guys, that's just not my cup of tea. Live and learn!)

Little Vampire (and Other Little Folk)

2009-07-01T20:52:00.000-07:00

Just a brief post to say I love Joann Sfar. And possibly Emmanuel Guibert.

I first became aware of his work through, bizarrely, a little annual comic (a compilation of stuff put together for kids to read, in a cheap format similar to a TV guide) which my kids bought at a vide grenier (a village-wide garage sale) in France. Mostly it was full of fluffy kids' comics, but there was this one story which caught our attention, in which evil mermaids who make horrible honking and tooting noises (expressed in French as "Onk! Onk!" and "Tut! Tut!") capture a girl and boy. The kids fight the mermaids with a found sword, and then... well, the next frame is of them sitting around a table with a couple of huge fish skeletons on plates, looking very full. The annoying mermaids (sans tails) are left on an island, still alive and honking, to enrage a skinny guy and a superhero-type guy, while the two kids and their pirate friend fly off in a spaceship.

Now, first of all, the concept of cutting off (and eating) mermaid tails is wildly arresting. I was initially rather shocked, and then thought, "Wow, the French sure are open-minded!" But the whole thing - drawings and all - was weird: who was the guy in the superhero suit, and the skinny guy with the tall head and beak-like lips? And why are these kids flying around in a spaceship with a pirate guy? My French simply wasn't good enough to get my head round it.

But I also couldn't forget it.

Then one day I was in my local comic book store and there it was: a little comic called Sardine in Outer Space, by Emmanuel Guibert and Joanne Sfar. I couldn't believe my eyes: a whole book of that gross humor, drawn in hilarious style? I had to get it, and then I got the skinny: Sardine, a girl (or little witch?) whose black cat rides around on her hat, and her friend Little Louie, travel around space with Sardine's uncle, Captain Yellowshoulder (known as such, apparently, because of his ubiquitous shoulder-riding parrot), committing deeds of derring-do (and sometimes deeds of pure annoyingness) against the stupid President of the Universe, Supermuscleman (known by the same name in French) and his evil genius advisor/superior Doc Krok. The stories are unique, individually and as a collection. My daughters love them, particularly the younger, who likes funny stories with occasional gross jokes about badly-behaved people - and particularly if they are drawn as wildly as these.

Sfar has gained some fame in the U.S. with The Rabbi's Cat, which won an Eisner Award and has gotten excellent reviews. He also did the Donjon (Dungeon) series with Louis Trondheim, another of my favorite (very irreverent) comic people. Sfar's Klezmer: Tales of the Wild East sounds pretty fun, and The Professor's Daughter seems intriguing. I have to admit, though: I haven't personally read any of his adult stuff yet.

I did just get Little Vampire, which includes three stories about a, well, little vampire, the son of the man from the Flying Dutchman and his suicide bride. He lives in a haunted house with his horrific-looking but kindly father and his beautiful, but blue, mother, with a small red demon-like dog and a host of yucky monsters. When he makes friends with a human boy, these create some minor obstacles, being initially daunting for the boy; but the boy soon gets used to it. The stories are, in true Sfar style, truly unusual, though they have more structure and a little more empathy than the unapologetically bad-mannered Sardine books.

I really, really like them. Sfar has an unerring eye for what it's like to be a kid, and a certainty about a child's understanding of its place in the world: he understands the simple irritants of kids trying to deal with stupid adults, and finding ways to mess with their boring desire to control things; at the same time he knows that adults are not always bad, and that being a kid can be difficult and confusing. If his adult stuff is this spot on, I'm in.

A Bit of Soap

2009-06-29T21:57:00.000-07:00

Warning: one slightly gruesome picture, below, about halfway down)

There is a story in my head, certainly a conflation of two different stories. In one of the stories, a man who endowed some institution stipulated in his will that he should be preserved upon his death and seated in a cabinet in the foyer of the institution, so that he might oversee the comings and goings of the people who came after him. The other story involved a fat man who had been buried in just the right conditions that he had been turned entirely to soap. I pictured him, my conflated man, sitting in a chair in a cabinet somewhere with a suit on, a solid block of man-seeming soap, watching with saponified eyes the comings and goings of his modern brethren.

The man in the cabinet turns out to be Jeremy Bentham, an influential London philosopher (and the founder of Utilitarianism) who had his body preserved and set into a cabinet he called his "auto-icon" (see more here). The soap-man of my conflation, on the other hand, is actually a man who was dug up at the same time as the Soap Lady who resides at the Mütter Museum, that holiest of weird medical museums. Both bodies had been disinterred somewhere in Philadelphia, possibly as part of a street-widening project.

"Due to the unusual nature of the two bodies, Dr. Joseph Leidy, a prominent physician, scientist and professor of medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, was notified. It is unclear how Dr. Leidy acquired the cadavers, but he eventually presented them to two separate museums." (link) The woman ended up in the Mutter Museum, and the man went to the Smithsonian. Unfortunately, the man is no longer on display, but the Soap Lady can still be seen, for a fee.

My early vision of a person converted into a solid block of soap, liable to dissolve in floods, is not actually accurate either. Adipocere, otherwise known as grave wax or mortuary wax, "is a water-insoluble material consisting mostly of saturated fatty acids. It is formed by the slow hydrolysis of fats in decomposing material such as a human cadaver by action of anaerobic bacteria...Corpses of infants and overweight persons are particularly prone to adipocere transformation. Adipocere formation begins within a month of death, and in the absence of air it can persist for centuries."

This process, called saponification (also used to refer to the reaction which makes common soap) happens in cold, moist environments where the lack of oxygen keeps aerobic bacteria and other agents of dissolution from doing their work. My guess is that the anaerobic bacteria actually live off some byproduct, such as the alcohol which comes from the conversion of fats to soap, and so they actually precipitate the transformation to that end.

In regular soap, fats or oils are boiled with an alkali agent, such as lye or wood-ash, and the resulting mess which comes from this combination of heat and pH is a solid substance with a curious molecular makeup. On one end of the molecule is hydrophilic, meaning it likes water: it can be dissolved by water. The other end of the same molecule is hydrophobic, meaning it doesn't like water, and this end is actually able to dissolve grease molecules. "The hydrophobic portion (made up of a long hydrocarbon chain) dissolves dirt and oils, while the ionic end dissolves in water. Therefore, it allows water to remove normally-insoluble matter by emulsification." [wiki]

In other words, it magically bridges the gap between two universes: that of oil and water, which we all know do not normally intermingle.

Interestingly, one of the beneficial uses of hot-fat saponification is in the kitchen:

"Fires involving cooking fats and oils... burn hotter than other typical combustible liquids, rendering a standard class B extinguisher ineffective. Such fires should be extinguished with a wet chemical extinguisher. Extinguishers of this type are designed to extinguish cooking fats and oils through saponification. The extinguishing agent rapidly converts the burning substance to a non-combustible soap. This process is endothermic, meaning it absorbs thermal energy from its surroundings, decreasing the temperature and eliminating the fire." [wiki]

In the ancient world, many people did not, apparently use soap for bathing. The earliest form of soap, made by boiling fat with ashes, was probably only used for washing Babylonians' clothing; and there is some evidence that the Phoenicians were producing it, probably as a hair pomade, in about 600 BC. The Greeks and other mediterranean ancients, commonly cleaned themselves by rubbing with scented oils and then scraping themselves with a metal strigil, bringing off the dead skin and dirt with the oil (this is making a comeback now as a "modern" beauty method).

The Celts, on the other hand, seem to have had soap from a relatively early period. While the Romans had baths, and seem to have looked down on soap's crude smelliness, the Celts may have had a cruder approach to cleaning altogether. When one is crouched in a cold stream, in a cold country, one tries to get on with the job as quickly and efficiently as possible.

Castile soap came to London in the 1500s, the first true hard soap to be seen in those parts; it was made by boiling wood ash and olive oil, and then adding brine to make the soap float to the surface. By adding salt, the soap separates itself more thoroughly from the lye and the other byproducts of the soap-making - creating a hard, white soap which grows harder with time (without losing its whiteness).

Which is interesting, because people who have observed saponified corpses have often compared them with this kind of soap. Sir Thomas Browne describe it this way:

"In a Hydropicall body ten years buried in a Church-yard, we met with a fat concretion, where the nitre of the Earth, and the salt and lixivious liquor of the body, had coagulated large lumps of fat, into the consistence of the hardest castle-soap: wherof part remaineth with us."

In Lake Crescent, Washington, a murdered woman's body came to the surface of the lake three years after her death in 1937, and a witness said, "She had the consistency of... Ivory soap."

The Higgins children, from the Hopetoun Quarry murder case, Edinburgh

But how could a body, submerged in water, be acted upon by anaerobic bacteria? One would think the oxygen in the water would preclude it. A very likely answer is that there is a thermocline, a layering effect where the upper, changeable parts of a body of water separate out from the deeper, colder, temperature-stable areas; these remain undisturbed for long periods of time. This means the oxygen mixing that goes on at the upper reaches of the water doesn't make its way to the lower reaches. I suspect the cold environment and the stillness, also mean that any aerobic bacteria use up extra oxygen until there isn't enough to support more oxygen-thirsty life forms.

So when Hallie Illingworth's body was pulled out of that cold Washington lake, she looked almost perfect. "She was full formed as in life; what had been an attractive woman; even her mass of auburn hair seemed strangely natural, almost untouched in appearance by the watery grave from which she had just been removed." She was white as marble, almost shiny in her perfection. If she were a saint, it would be safe that she would be designated incorruptible.

Grave wax (adipocere) tends to be a strange substance, smooth and, when it's had time, relatively hard and brittle (not always; it depends on the conditions). The Soap Lady is considered so fragile that they don't dare move her unless absolutely necessary. It tends to begin on the outside of the corpse - the longer the body has been interred, the deeper the saponification penetrates. This has led to some rather extraordinary mistakes. Augustus Granville, for example, in 1821, performed the first really scientific dissection of an egyptian mummy, taking six weeks to unwrap it and examine every inch of the remarkably beautifully-preserved corpse. He very accurately surmised a number of things about her: that she was in her mid-50s, that she had been quite well-fed, that she had an ovarian tumor. However, in examining the body he found she had been preserved in a way not described by Greek historian Herodotus' 5th-century eyewitness accounts - that being the record which Granville was working from.

There were, according to Herodotus, two ways of preserving a corpse: the cheap way and the expensive way. Both ways involved removing the organs from the corpse - and yet, Granville's mummy's organs were still almost entirely intact and in place.

"Granville concluded that the embalmers had used a method Herodotus had missed. One clue to the technique was the softness of the skin and muscles and the pliable joints. Another was the presence throughout of a waxy substance, which Granville believed was a mix of beeswax and bitumen. He deduced that the body "must have been plunged into a vessel containing a liquefied mixture of wax and bitumen and kept there for some hours or days, over a gentle fire." He tried the treatment on stillborn babies. It seemed to work." [from New Scientist's article on same]

Granville decided to give a scientific presentation of his findings, but was unable to resist his flamboyant urges, and made his presentation in a room lit entirely by candles made from the "wax" he scraped from the corpse. It wasn't until Egyptologist John Taylor joined the British Museum in the late 1980s that Granville's sample cases were found again, and the "wax" discovered to be the saponified flesh of the mummy herself.

Making candles of the flesh of the dead is not unheard-of, however, though it is usually done more intentionally than Granville's dubious debut. The Hand of Glory, for example, is a sort of grisly candle holder made from the cut-off hand of a hanged man. Take a candle made from the fat of a (possibly the same) hanged man and put it into the grasp of, or attach it to the fingers of, the hand. Now light the wick (preferably made from the hair of the dead man), and all the people in the house will sleep without waking while you plunder their treasure. It cannot be put out by any means except dousing with fresh milk, and there are many stories (rather startlingly like urban myths in their repetition and style) of intelligent chamber-maids putting out the candle and waking the house when the thieves were busy.

The recipe for preparing the hand, which must be cut from the corpse while it is still hanging in the gibbet, goes as such:

"Squeeze the blood out of the hand; embalm it in a shroud and steep it in a solution of saltpetre, salt and pepper for two weeks and then dry in the sun. The other essential for its use is a candle made from hanged man's fat, wax and Lapland sesame." (This according to the Whitby Museum in Whitby, England, where such a hand is housed. There is also, supposedly, one in the museum in Walsall, England).

Hangings these days are rare, and when executed are rather brief and hygenic. It is hard to imagine there would be an opportunity for cutting off the hand while the body is still in the gallows (since gibbets are no longer used, this would be your only option). Still, it is tempting to consider a discreet proviso in one's will about where you will be buried - in the hopes, someday, that your remains might be turned to soap. As a contribution to science, of course.

Links:

James G. Mundie's awesome photos and drawings of exhibits in the Mütter Museum

A Short History of Soap: fascinating stuff!

Soap Lady, a children's book by underground comics writer/artist Renee French, about a dirty boy who meets a naked woman made of soap who has washed up near his town. With its storyline about friendship and acceptance, it was apparently a departure from her usual style, which has been described as "surreal" and "grotesque."

A thirteenth century description of soapmaking by King Al- Muzaffar Yusuf ibn `Umar ibn `Ali ibn Rasul

A creepy post-mortem love/obession story

Germany's modern problem with their corpses not rotting properly

Top 10 famous corpses

An interesting article about a corpse garden created for forensics students at the University of Tennessee to learn about rates of decomposition (WARNING: Not for the squeamish)

Make your own castile soap with these soap recipes.

The Hand of Glory in the Harry Potter Wiki, which I only just discovered.

Ze Widow, She Is Black

2009-06-19T21:59:00.000-07:00

One of the not-so-great joys of my new trailer is that it came with an infestation of black widow spiders. We would open the galley, and there one would be: black, and shiny, with horribly pointy legs and a big, fat abdomen. And a few days ago, for the first time, I saw the Hourglass. Red and very clear, it shone on her chitinous tummy. She quivered in her web, horrified that we had opened the lid on her lovely darkness.

We don't see a lot of black widows here; they tend to like it warm and dry, like in the central valley, and they don't like being disturbed. They like the dark. They like it still and they like hard, close places like the spaces between woodpiles or behind cabinets.

Latrodectus hesperus, the Western black widow, is, like all widow spiders of the Latrodectus genus, very shy. If you intrude on her life she will flee first and ask questions later. Though her bite is incredibly venomous, she prefers not to bite unless grabbed, pinched or squeezed. I have seen black widows (in my precious trailer, no less) with abdomens more than a quarter inch across, and leg-spans close to one and a half inches (the males look very different, smaller and differently-colored and -patterned, so when I say "she" I know for sure that it's the female I'm talking about).

The male black widow isn't even black, most of the time

Unlike brown recluse spiders, whose venom is cytotoxic, meaning it is meant to slow down the prey, partially digesting the tissues and making for failure of the prey's systems, the black widow spider's venom is based on a neurotoxin, which I would much prefer. In mammals, when they are bitten by a spider with cytotoxic venom, it means the tissue surrounding the bite turns necrotic (dies) and is often unable to heal afterwards. There are some truly horrific pictures on the Internet of brown recluse spider bites several months on, which I would rather not contemplate.

"Spider venom falls into two categories: neurotoxic and cytotoxic. Neurotoxic venoms interfere with the transmission of nerve impulses to the muscles, frequently causing spasm and paralysis. Neurotoxins act rapidly, important to spiders confronted with large or dangerous prey intent on escape or retaliation. Cytotoxins, on the other hand, act more slowly. They principally act to slow down the prey, and actually begin the process of digestion by liquefying the tissues of the prey. Such venom can cause tissue necrosis in mammals, wherein the flesh surrounding an injection site dies, and heals very slowly or not at all."

The venom of a black widow, being a neurotoxin, has a more widespread effect, entering the bloodstream and being deposited at the nerve endings where the endings insert into the muscles. This causes intense, painful cramping and muscle spasms, and is very painful. It lasts a few days and then disperses, leaving only a few minor symptoms - spasms, tingling, nervousness and weakness - to remember her by. For me - though I would not want to encounter a black widow bite - the biggest fear has been for my children, because the smaller the body mass, the more likely the venom is to cause shock to the system and death.

Ultimately, though, I think black widows have gotten a bad rap. They really, really do not want to bite you. And only one kind of widow has been sighted as actually devouring the male of its own species after sex, in the wild. And although they are not artistic - building sticky, tangled and irregular webs from which they hang upside down to catch their prey - their silk is, like many spiders, stronger than its own weight in steel. If you built a bridge of spider silk, I remember hearing, it could be a hundred times thinner than the steel cables used in modern suspension bridges, and still just as strong. Less brittle, too. In fact, the strands are so fine and strong that for many years they were used in the crosshairs in the reticles for rifles and navigational instruments.

The chitin of the black widow, her exoskeleton, is so shiny and tough that simply spraying her living quarters with Raid will not kill her; you must spray it directly on her body for the insecticide to take effect. Even then, you have to use some pretty strong stuff for it to work. And it means you can't kill her without a little personal, face to face combat. Some people say that any strong essential oil will drive the spider away, as they prefer unlively quarters with little or no smell. Personally, I'm a big believer in a tightly-constructed house and a live and let live mentality; usually, I catch them in a glass (or get someone braver than me to do so) and release them far from where my children are likely to be. Sometimes, when I'm enraged (usually because I've been taken by surprise), I squash one - and then immediately regret it, because it always feels like I am killing someone, not something, when I kill a spider - they are so very much smarter than flies and their ilk. Plus, those widows are big, and it just isn't pleasant.

I remember once, in a shop in southern San Francisco where I went to buy a lizard when I was younger and had more time to be interested in the impression I made on others, I saw a large tank full of black widow babies. The shop was either displaying them (presumably under the same youthful impulse to be cool that made me buy a tegu, one of the world's most hostile lizards - sorry, another story) or they were selling them. I remember being in awe that the store owners, or the future pet owners, could be that hardcore. Despite the heavily-tattooed and pierced person behind the counter (very much less prevalent then than now), and the array of odd pets on display, I hadn't considered that anyone would be into selling poisonous spiders. Now, when I look back, I can't help seeing it as a little irresponsible, spreading poisonous beings who are pretty good escape artists via people who probably have no idea how venomous their new pets really are.

In any case, we tend to live side by side, the spiders and I, and I try to keep to the busy light and let them live in their quiet darkness. And if I or my children enter or move those dark places, we check carefully to see who we're disturbing before we go there. We demand the same awareness of the denizens of the dark, and if they cross that line, we do not forgive them. But all in all, we leave each other alone, living our lives and raising our children as if the other side did not exist.

Links:

Stringybark graphics has a fabulous redback spider pattern which they will put on t-shirts, linen dress shirts or any clothes they produce (click on the "prices" link). Guaranteed to stop conversations when you walk in. My friend Gwyan has had one for years and loves it.

A gruesome article, in the vein of the tegu store people, from the oh-so-reliable Sun tabloid where, of all the poisonous species in a man's home, the Widow takes the rap.

The Black Widow Hearse Club is a group of people who love funeral coaches.

Arachnids poster from the Big Zoo

Spider web ear wrap, covers your ear with a silver spider web

Travels and Travails

2009-06-16T16:57:00.000-07:00

Life the past month has been unending chaos, so my apologies for the silence. Summer vacation starts NOW, this MINUTE - so I will work to remedy things, as soon as my head reinflates. Expect something in the next week or so, as I've had numerous posts churning around in my head for ages now!

On a (hopefully not too) prosaic note, LOOKIT my NEW TRAILER!! This is my investment in cheap travel, for the economic travails ahead. I have long loved teardrop trailers, as they are called, and this is a nice one, made by a man who creates hot rods in the Central Valley of California.

The typical teardrop is basic, just a bed and a little galley (kitchen) area, and this one is no exception, except for the extra-wideness of it and the spoke tires, apparently a sign of hot-rodness incarnate (and to be honest, not a selling point for me, though I get many admiring remarks - about the trailer - from certain kinds of men at gas stations, probably for that reason particularly).

The teardrop trailer was a phenomenon popular from the 1930s through the 1950s, an era (interrupted by a war) where the streamlining of lifestyle was a popular pursuit; the Ayn Rand vision of individual freedom and the pursuit of aesthetic practicality were in full swing, and Gernsbackian visions of shiny, teardrop-shaped futuristic vehicles were sending ripple effects throughout American culture.

My own reason for liking these trailers is more practical. Cuteness and coolness aside, I like the fact that they are still about "real" camping (well, car camping anyway) - in other words, about being outside. You live outside, you cook outside, you only go into it to sleep (which feels a bit like being in a tiny, round cabin. And we all know I love tiny spaces). But mostly, it's a practical place for your stuff to live, so you don't have to spend a lot of time packing and unpacking, setting up and taking down. I am rubbing my hands at the mere thought.

Full of plastic bins: not the cool way to go.

Now that I have a bit of time, I want to put a little work into the galley, making shelves and little spaces for storing things so they don't rattle around on the journey, and every object, like in a ship's galley, has its place. Bwahaha. It will be like a Camping Wunderkammer. I might even try a mod or two, think of ways to get it really weird and fun. Any suggestions?

But then, I do awfully like it how it is...

Book Signings R Us

2009-06-01T21:05:00.000-07:00

Just for the sake of formality, I've got two short stories coming out in anthologies, and will be at four different related events in the coming months (who am I to turn down opportunity?):

July 18th (6-8 pm) I will be at Borderlands Books in San Francisco for my story Artifacts, which is coming out in Footprints, an anthology from Hadley Rille Books. Jay Lake, author of Mainspring and Escapement, who edited the anthology, will be there too.

Then July 20th I'll be in Berkeley at Dark Carnival, for the same story, from 6-8 pm. This will actually be the anniversary, nearly to the minute, of the 1969 Apollo 11 moon landing, the first time man ever set foot on the moon.

I believe both of these events involve some reading and signing, though I don't know how much.

At WorldCon in Montreal, I will be reading for Hadley Rille at some so-far unspecified time. Uh, signing, too, if anyone wants that.

August 29th, the Writers of the Future awards ceremony (I got second place for my story The Candy Store) is going to be an enormous bash because it is the 25th anniversary of the award. All kinds of notables are expected. I'll be there, receiving the award and signing afterwards and generally trying not to look too horrible in an evening gown thingie; and I believe they have a book signing the next day at some so-far unspecified book store, probably in Hollywood somewhere. Although it's been in Pasadena and elsewhere around L.A., so there's no knowing. I'll post it when I know.

It's all very exciting and a little scary. I only just figured out about two days ago that getting a story in an anthology actually means critics might mention the story and say bad things about it. Believe it or not, I never thought about that part of it, thinking so much about actually getting in the anthology that I didn't look that far ahead...!

Come if you can, I'd love to meet some of you!

Gorey Ways to Be Deflowered

2009-05-20T13:09:00.000-07:00

A friend of mine came across this while looking up information about the late, great Edward Gorey. Apparently an early effort, and very silly, but it's fun to know that achieving greatness does not mean an author is immune to silliness. It makes one feel better, rather. It is extraordinary how many possible deflowering situations there are, including By Marimba Player, At Seance, On Cross-Country Bus, In Moroccan Palace, and many, many more.

I first learned about Mr. Gorey's works at age 12 or so when a very erudite student of my father's gave me a copy of Amphigorey. I spent a lot of time trying to puzzle out what was really going on in The Curious Sofa: A Pornographic Work by Ogdred Weary, which really only hints at being pornographic - and does contain such phrases as "well-endowed", which I didn't understand until much, much later.

My greatest regret nowadays is that I did not see the production of Edward Gorey's Dracula, with mind-boggling sets by same, in Massachussetts where I happened to be staying the summer I was sixteen. The starring role was played by Frank Langella, who did a remarkably intense Count in a heartthrob movie version of Dracula: a love story, which of course enthralled me as an adolescent. Nowadays, of course, Mr. Langella is still a very compelling and professional actor, though not quite such a sex symbol.

For the record, one of my favorite Gorey pieces at the moment (they change all the time) is The Unstrung Harp; or, Mr. Earbrass Writes a Novel, in which the unfortunate Mr. Earbrass once again goes through the horrific process of creating literature.

A sample:

"Mr Earbrass has been rashly skimming through the early chapters, which he has not looked at for months, and now sees TUH [The Unstrung Harp] for what it is. Dreadful, dreadful, DREADFUL. He must be mad to go on enduring the unexquisite agony of writing when it all turns out drivel. Mad. Why didn’t he become a spy? How does one become one? He will burn the MS. Why is there no fire? Why aren’t there the makings of one? How did he get in the unused room on the third floor?"

You can find it (expensively) in its own volume, ca. 1953; or you can find it just as pleasant to read in the first volume of the Amphigorey series of his collected works. All hail Mr. Gorey!

A few extra things:

- When I googled Mr. Earbrass, I did come across this search result, which struck me as extremely funny:
Mac Forums - View Profile: Mr.Earbrass
Mr.Earbrass has no contact information. Additional Information, Group Memberships. Song Recs: 0. Mr.Earbrass is not a member of any public groups ...

- Lastly, and apropo of nothing: today is the birthday of Honore Balzac. I heard on the radio he used to have a light supper and go to bed at 5 or 6 pm, then wake up at midnight and write for fifteen hours straight, subsisting on cup after cup of strong coffee. (Well, now you know, why aren't you more productive already??)

The Muse as Moment and Place

2009-05-15T11:30:00.000-07:00

This morning I went over to Neil Gaiman's blog to see what was up (actually, I was trying to see what his schedule was for WorldCon, but got distracted by the posts, as usual). He wrote an excellent response to a reader who was complaining about George R. R. Martin not cranking out the next book in a series.

Mr. Gaiman replies, very rightly,

"For me, I would rather read a good book, from a contented author. I don't really care what it takes to produce that.

Some writers need a while to charge their batteries, and then write their books very rapidly. Some writers write a page or so every day, rain or shine. Some writers run out of steam, and need to do whatever it is they happen to do until they're ready to write again. Sometimes writers haven't quite got the next book in a series ready in their heads, but they have something else all ready instead, so they write the thing that's ready to go, prompting cries of outrage from people who want to know why the author could possibly write Book X while the fans were waiting for Book Y."

There is much more than that, of course. But hard on the heels of my discussion of the "I Suck" moment and what to do when the writing needs a rest - and how color helps recharge those tired batteries - it made me think a little further about that process. The nice thing about Mr. Gaiman's post is that he describes the fact that writers have lives. People die, the house needs painting, or your pet needs to go to the vet. This is normal. It is easy to think of writers and artists - creative people - as being these lone madmen who drink too much, staying in their little apartment or cabin (or whatever), creating like a rabid monkey, typing or painting away to the detriment of their health and human relationships.*

This vision, of course, made me have to go find Anne Lamott's great essay about Shitty First Drafts, from her book Bird By Bird, and reread it, again:

"People tend to look at successful writers, writers who are getting their books published and maybe even doing well financially, and think that they sit down at their desks every morning feeling like a million dollars, feeling great about who they are and how much talent they have and what a great story they have to tell; that they take in a few deep breaths, push back their sleeves, roll their necks a few times to get all the cricks out, and dive in, typing fully formed passages as fast as a court reporter...

"Very few writers really know what they are doing until they've done it. Nor do they go about their business feeling dewy and thrilled. They do not type a few stiff warm-up sentences and then find themselves bounding along like huskies across the snow. One writer I know tells me that he sits down every morning and says to himself nicely, "It's not like you don't have a choice, because you do--you can either type or kill yourself."

Sometimes, I admit (much less often than BC: Before Children), I find myself bounding along like a husky through the snow. But usually it's following a long fallow period, where the ideas have been allowed to grow and mate and become fully-formed, and are now dying to get out.

So what is it that makes the muse happen? Where do the ideas come from?

I've often thought of ideas as spores. I walk around with the back of my head hanging open like a cargo plane, waiting for things to drift in. Sometimes I can feel them tickling in there when they alight, but I know by now that if I touch them at that stage they'll wilt. So I do the dishes or water the garden or drive to town, with my inner eye turned back there, peeking hopefully at the little sprouts. And eventually, some die, but some begin to get robust enough to deal with me pawing at them, examining them and even elaborating on them. Sometimes, I'll handle an idea thoroughly and then put it back into the cargo area so that other spores will land on it and change it into something beautiful. Sometimes, it meets another nice idea back there and they get together and have a happy marriage.

But they're never right in front of me. They're always in the back, or slightly to the side. They're rather slippery, and delicate, and they don't like being stared at too hard. They prefer being made concrete via my hands. If I talk about them too much, they fade; and if I get partway through making them concrete and then stop, sometimes they grow in the interim. The robust ones will poke me if I ignore them too long. The really delicate, lovely, strange ones will disappear if I don't do something about them right away, because they're too much like dreams, and don't do well in the workaday world.

In every historical discussion inspiration is seen as being, by its nature, beyond the control of the person being inspired. The Greeks, for example, saw inspiration as coming from the muses, creatures born of either Zeus and Mnemosyne (goddess of memory), or of Uranus (the Sky) and Gaia (the Earth). The muses were seen as repositories of all knowledge from the ancient age, who embodied the arts and inspired the creation process with their graces "through remembered and improvised song and stage, writing, traditional music, and dance." [wiki]

Later, the muses may have lost some of their anthropomorphic properties, but inspiration still remained outside the purview of rational, conscious thought:

"In the 18th century John Locke proposed a model of the human mind in which ideas associate or resonate with one another in the mind. In the 19th century, Romantic poets such as Coleridge and Shelley believed that inspiration came to a poet because the poet was attuned to the (divine or mystical) "winds" and because the soul of the poet was able to receive such visions. In the early 20th century, Sigmund Freud located inspiration in the inner psyche of the artist. Carl Gustav Jung's theory of inspiration suggests that an artist is one who was attuned to racial memory, which encoded the archetypes of the human mind." [wiki]

In American society, which is based more than we would like to think in the puritan, or Protestant, work ethic, the idea that something could be so uncontrollable, so beyond the reach of deadlines and time management, is unimaginable. We think that by eating right, by sleeping right, exercising, having good oral hygene, using underarm sprays and meditating, by learning to schedule play-time and carrying our watches and organizers with us everywhere, we can make sure that all the terrifying alternatives are covered and everything will go as scheduled.

Which is true of many things. But other than clearing some time so that you can clear your head, time management simply doesn't apply to inspiration. Eating, unless you're a restaurant critic, is unlikely to bring the muse. Sleeping enough might give you good, inspiring dreams; but then not sleeping enough could do the same thing. The rest of it... well, there is something to be said for the wild-man-in-the-cabin trope. At least he's not wasting valuable cargo space in the back of his head remembering music lessons and mortgage payments.

The back-to-the-land movement in the late 1960s and 1970s saw people clearing space in their lives to make room for the muse. Like the Puritans in the 1600s, the back-to-the-landers were fleeing what they saw as an oppressive society which did not let them live the life they believed in - one free of music lessons and mortgage payments. Unlike the Puritans, however, they did not believe their choices were shaping their entry into Heaven. They went to the country for much more earthly things - to grow their own food, build their own houses, and make the things they lived with. Most of the people who tried it, though, were unfamiliar with the hardships of rural living, and failed crops, leaking roofs, and lack of money to buy supplies eventually drove all but the most resourceful back to the cities.

Still, this movement planted the seeds for the voluntary simplicity movement, a more mature variation on the theme, advocating sustainable living patterns (solar power, homegrown or locally-grown organic food, and fewest possible consumerist items like credit cards and television, which eat up time and encourage spending).

"Some people practice voluntary simplicity to reduce need for purchased goods or services and, by extension, reduce their need to sell their time for money. Some will spend the extra free time helping family or others... Others may spend the extra free time to improve their quality of life, for example pursuing creative activities such as art and crafts...

"Advertising is criticised for encouraging a consumerist mentality. Many advocates of voluntary simplicity tend to agree that cutting out, or cutting down on, television viewing is a key ingredient in simple living. Some see the Internet, podcasting, community radio or pirate radio as viable alternatives." [wiki]

Unlike the desire in the 1960s to escape Baby Boom America, the new movement is a much more pragmatic desire to remake how we do things. The idea that one can take a breath and step outside the rat-race, take away all the extra parts of one's life - the things one doesn't really need but are paying for because of a perceived lifestyle definition - is not a new one. Epicurus, a philosopher of the fourth century, pointed out that troubles entailed by maintaining an extravagant lifestyle tend to outweigh the pleasure of partaking in it. Henry David Thoreau (another man in a cabin!), was famous for his desire to find a quiet place to write books, where he lived like a hermit (with weekly visits from his mother, who brought him goodies to eat).

Sometimes, though, we are simply tied to the life we have wrought. Not all of us can drop everything and go off to Walden to live alone in a cabin. Many of us have children, and must provide a place for them to live, and food for them to eat. Uprooting everything for a dream is not a simple thing. However, making time to think is not the lazy pursuit we are taught to believe. That mental space-clearing, the opening of the cargo hold and the time for the spores to take hold, is actually sacrament. Don't let anyone tell you otherwise.

Many writers and artists I've spoken to have said that giving the muse a chance to speak is their secret to productivity - in other words, making that moment every day for her to come in and then sticking to whatever comes. One man I knew, a potter, said to my father once, "I've made a deal with myself. I have to go down to the studio every day, and put my hands in the clay. Then, if I don't want to make anything, I can wash my hands and go back to the house. But usually, by the time I've gotten my hands in there, I might as well throw a pot or two." Cory Doctorow said, at Viable Paradise, that you need to make a time every day to write. You don't have to get heroic - 500 or 1,000 words each day will do - but you need to put fingers to keyboard every day. And just like my potter friend, you might find yourself writing a story or two.

Sometimes, though, like Neil Gaiman says, the house just needs to be painted. And then that's your work time, 'cause while you're watching that color spread with the roller, your brain is just going to keep collecting the spores, keep turning the ideas over and looking for worms underneath. So when you go back to the easel or the keyboard, you'll be ready.

"To have laughed often and much;
To win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children;
To earn the appreciation of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends;
To appreciate beauty, to find the best in others;
To leave the world a bit better, whether by a healthy child, a garden patch, or a redeemed social condition;
To know that one life has breathed easier because you have lived;
This is to have succeeded."
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

__________________________

*Until they leave for Africa to become gun-runners.

Apologies

2009-05-15T08:38:00.000-07:00

I did not realize I had published the previous post, "Drunk on Color:" I wasn't finished editing it!! All fixed now - many apologies for unpolished and confusing writing!