19 October 05
Yolo Crow
A poem of mine got published in the Yolo Crow, a new literary magazine. A copy came in today’s mail.
I seem to find myself around people whose ambition it is to start a literary magazine; often they don’t make it beyond the third issue. I hope that’s not true for this one…
23 September 05
Collaboration
Qarrtsiluni just started. Head on over and have a look, and if you’d like to contribute a piece (this month’s topic is “Something About to Burst”), please do! Instructions are on the site.
21 September 05
An Evening With Terry Pratchett
Terry Pratchett was speaking tonight at Cody’s in Berkeley, part of his Thud! book tour (he found out just before his appearance that it was #4 on the NYT bestseller list; this was someone who could hardly get his books published in the US in the 90s).
It’s bad when there’s no standing room.
He was funny, even hilarious, throughout. He’s much shorter than you’d think from his author photo. The line to get books signed snaked through Cody’s, but if you didn’t want a signature (I didn’t), there was a nice space off to the side for furtive sketching.
4 September 05
This Must Be A Sign
Though I’m not sure of what.
Yesterday I took a walk west out the Putah Creek levee. After passing under the freeway, I found some scattered pages torn out of a book. I picked these up and read—it was Candide.
30 August 05
Science Writing
Partly for professional reasons—the need to inform myself about West Nile Virus and the possibility that Avian Flu will emerge in lethal and pandemic form any minute now, and will possibly enter the United States via California, possibly in wild birds—I’ve been reading about epidemics.
John Barry’s The Great Influenza is an excellent read not just about the horrifying events of 1918 but about the emerging field of medicine in the U.S. My grandfather got this flu when he was a quartermaster in the Canadian Air Force, but his letters mention it only obliquely (“I had a mild case, unlike some of the others”—for “some of the others,” read “poor bastards writhing in cyanotic agony, blood streaming from their eyes and ears,” but you don’t write this in letters home to mother, especially when said letters are censored. It’s extraordinary how little has actually been written, fictionally or otherwise, about this pandemic given how many millions of people it affected.). Then, while I was in L.A. a couple of weeks ago, I picked up a copy of Mike Davis’ new Monster at Our Door: The Global Threat of Avian Flu.
Both these writers are journalists and have written a lot about non-scientific subjects. Yet the way they both approach science is inspiring to me: it’s hard to make a virus with codenames such as HPAI H5N1 interesting, but Davis has written a searingly compelling book. So has Barry.
I want to write like this. I want to take a subject about which I know ostensibly little, research it, and write like this. I wish I knew how to start. (Of course the way to start is to start, and there are lots of reasons for not starting such as I’m working 50-60 hours this week and so on, but still.) Anyone have any suggestions?
7 August 05
Omniglot
This site is a guide to written language which seems pretty comprehensive. All manner of scripts are covered, everything from Glagolitic to Tengwar. The multilingual tongue-twisters are quite fun as well.
19 July 05
Hurrying Through Harry
Not long after Pica finished the new Harry Potter book yesterday did I take it up, and finished it myself around 9 PM this evening. It’s a far better read than its predecessor, which was in need of about 200 pages worth of excisions. And lines are already forming, or at least should be, for the release of the seventh book. There are, as they say, major plot developments in need of resolution.
I also found today that Wikipedia has a great set of articles discussing the Harry Potter series. And yes, they’ve been updated in the past couple of days!
17 July 05
Tour de France or Harry Potter?
In July, my mornings tend to go like this: I get up, get the tea on, get online to check on the Tour de France website to see what’s going on. The time lag between California and Europe means that normally I can catch the last hour or so; there are newsflashes every few minutes.
A friend brought over my copy of the Half-Blood Prince last night. She stayed to have a bowl of gazpacho with us. I stopped reading around eleven; got up around 7, intending to intersperse my TdF newsflashes with Harry.
It was not to be; the intense heat has driven a lot of ants indoors. They were swarming over one of the catbowls. This is the hardest day of the Tour, with six brutal Pyrrenean climbs. I caught the end and George Hincapie’s stage win.
I finally finished the book at 2:30 this afternoon. Several readers of Feathers of Hope are reading it too, so I will say nothing except hurry up so we can talk about it…
15 July 05
Hot 'n' Harry
It’s hot, the kind of heat that if you go jogging in at six pm you’re risking your life. We are getting the Delta breeze at the moment but it’s still really hot.
But it’s a dry heat.
Barring Alaska, Hawaii, and a few other Pacific islands, the west coast is the last place on the planet to get hold of a copy of Harry Potter legitimately today. There is a free showing of the third film at the Avid Reader which started about 45 minutes ago, and which will end pretty much at midnight in time for readers, young and not so young, to be able to pick up their copies and lug them all over Davis with them all weekend.
We’re off on a drawing class tomorrow at the Sacramento Zoo, and I can’t stay up till midnight tonight. So the earliest I can get my copy is around five tomorrow afternoon.
See you at the other side of this.
13 July 05
Resh
Yesterday afternoon a friend happened to mention she was starting Advanced Beginners Hebrew that night. (Davis is a great place for contradictions in terms.) I decided to join her. No long, thought-out language learning strategy, here. I seem to remember I started classical Greek in much the same impetuous way.
This class is only an hour long, once a week. This means there is lots of work outside, but 8-9 on a Tuesday I can handle.
Aleph. Bet. Gimmel… Mem sofit.