Your Friday moment of zen.
Another flower from the Bull of the Woods hike at Taos Ski Valley. © 2006, 2009 Joseph E. Lake, Jr.
This work by Joseph E. Lake, Jr. is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
Posted: 5:39 am Fri November 20 2009 | Comments(0) |
A reader reacts to Green [ Powell's | Amazon
The Guardian on best science fiction titles — In which I am favorably name checked. And title checked.
Enterprise — Star Trek paintings. Heh. (Via Drawn!.)
Police: Would-be Seattle ninja impaled on fence — “The man was “overconfident in his abilities,” and that alcohol likely played a role. Um, yeah. (Thanks to
Europa might be teeming with fish — Wow. Just wow.
Underwater river of hydrogen sulphide — Wow.
?otD: What is the little voice inside your head saying?
Posted: 5:36 am Fri November 20 2009 | Comments(1) |
This is her fourth installment, from an email dated September 22nd, shortly after her return.
The Sierra Club sponsored and organized and provided all the logistical support for our week of volunteer work at Grand Canyon. All we really had to do was get there and put up our tents and provide our own eating utensils. Bruce and Larry managed the rest. All we knew about Bruce and Larry was that they are life partners and coleaders of Sierra Club outings such as this one. This much was made clear in the info sent out prior to the trip.
Bruce was our liaison to the park staff, Larry was keeper of the commissary, chief cook and shopper. Both were in charge of safety and sanitation. The only rules they had for us were to drink lots of water, use hand sanitizer before touching communal food, and go in groups of at least three when tipping the rim. Nice phrase, isn’t that? Everything else was by mutual agreement.
The first evening as we gathered we agreed to their suggestion that we not talk to each other about how we made our living… or how we had done in the case of the many retirees. We decided we would reveal all on Wednesday at suppertime.
How do we know who to salute and who salutes us? We determine age, gender, and occupation/education of our new interlocutor, then we know our relative status. I aint sayin’ this is right or good, just that its what we usually do. So here we were pretty much in the dark. Well it was pretty obvious everyone was well educated, a little conversation was all it took. It was pretty obvious everyone had a lot of varied interests…Jim played baroque music on his recorder in the evenings. Jane took close up pictures of plants. Tom and Rich liked to sing 60s songs. Larry cooked up excellent meals to suit every possible dietary requirement of a group largely made up of folks over 60. Sarah went out early by herself to maximize solitude and opportunities to see the wildlife. Mia was on her way to a bug show after we were finished. She had driven her classic VW bus (a mid sixties model) from Ontario, and was going on to a VW rally where she expected to win in her class.
On Wed evening we all looked forward to knowing more about each other, but we already had made friends and knew we liked each other, and who we liked best. (Jane, and her husband Ira in my case… a couple in their 70s) So we did a truth and a lie and tried to figure out whether Marshall was a producer of adult movies or a radiologist. Whether Larry was a tax attorney or a slumlord. Jane claimed to be either a garden photographer or a scuba instructor. Jim’s wife Pam was either a museum curator or a small business owner. Sue was a salesperson at the largest Mercedes dealer in LA or else a medical administrator. Jessie was a high school teacher or a jazz singer. Sarah was a linguist for the State Department or a fact checker and copy editor for a major scifi publisher.
Turned out we all sort of mixed up our truths and lies, much like I did. Neither was actually true, but both had to do with my background and interests. They voted me a linguist because I had worn my Sofia shirt with Cyrillic letters, and no one believed that scifi needs fact checking. Hehehe. And I won a goth baseball cap with GCNP spelled out in rivets for telling the most interesting lie. Wheeee!
Then we all actually did introduce ourselves in a more ordinary way. We had a professional gardener who runs her own business, retired doctors and lawyers. A hospital administrator, teachers, social worker, college professor (Ira, of course). And dear Jane, who was born in the blitz of London is actually both a garden photographer and a scuba instructor and underwater photographer who works with Scripps.
About who you would expect on a trip that requires a certain sort of financial resource and a certain worldview that is larger than the block we live on.
Nice people, nice week, good for the Sierra Club.
Posted: 5:13 am Thu November 19 2009 | Comments(1) |
Your Thursday moment of zen.
Flower on Bull of the Woods trail, about 9,500 feet, Taos Ski Valley, NM. © 2006, 2009 Joseph E. Lake, Jr.
This work by Joseph E. Lake, Jr. is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
Posted: 5:12 am Thu November 19 2009 | Comments(0) |
A reader reacts to Green [ Powell's | Amazon
SFWA with a podcast of the Google Books Settlement panel I was on at WFC
The Polish Army in France — WWI poster from Vintagraph.
What the Future May Hold — Bob Herbert on infrastructure. What he said. “Deferred maintenance” is one of the worst ideas our business and political culture ever had.
Thomas Friedman on why it doesn’t matter whether or not you believe in global warming — He’s right, but I’ll add that not believing in global warming is like not believing in evolution or gravity. It’s happening regardless of what your wilful blindnesses may tell you.
?otD: Who was she watching, anyway?
Posted: 5:11 am Thu November 19 2009 | Comments(0) |
Nice walk up Twin Peaks this morning. I’ll miss it, as I don’t know when I’ll be back in SF in the foreseeable future. I’m likely under a travel restriction through about July, though I may be able to sneak down to California briefly over the holidays.
I’m returning to Portland this afternoon,
Lots of busy coming up, including the Niece’s sixth birthday party on Friday and an early family Thanksgiving on Sunday. This is good, as the surgery is a week from today, and by about Monday I will be an utter wreck.
Had a stray thought while walking about the difference between my business writing (Day Jobbery) and my fiction. Yesterday I executed a quick project, only a few hours, in which I repurposed some existing text from our Web site and from a handful of sales proposals. This is completely normal behavior, because it preserves brand consistency, keeps me on message, and helps the salespeople by offering predictable language they’re already familiar with. I’m not required to be original every time, in fact, quite the opposite. The creativity there comes from figuring out how to meet the requirement in the first place, writing introductory, bridging and concluding text, and generally positioning the whole project. Whereas in my fiction writing, I never deliberately repeat myself. (Well, almost never, but it’s very unusual.) I go to a fair amount of trouble to not repeat other people, though we all do it by accident sometimes.
This may be about as revelatory as noticing the sky is blue, but I’d never thought of things this way before. Ah, brain, I knew there was a reason I take you for walks.
Also, I’ve continued to write through all this. Currently revising
All in all, my head and heart remain unusually calm these last few days. Let us hope for more of the same.
Posted: 5:51 am Wed November 18 2009 | Comments(0) |
Your Wednesday moment of zen.
© 2009 Joseph E. Lake, Jr.
This work by Joseph E. Lake, Jr. is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
Posted: 5:39 am Wed November 18 2009 | Comments(0) |
A fascinating roundup of some (starkly contradictory) reviews of my novel Green [ Powell's | Amazon
Fantasy and Fitness: Interviews with Jay Lake and Elizabeth Bear
Get Fuzzy on what writing really is — Plus bonus parts of speech!
Faults “intollerable and euer vndecent” — Language Log is rather funny about 16th century prescriptivism. With primary sources, no less. A must-read for word geeks and grammar geeks.
Hippos biting a crocodile to death — Wow. And yes, this is a violent photo. Nature red of tooth and claw.
PETMAN prototype — A walking robot that approaches the uncanny valley from a different direction. (Thanks to
?otD: Where did you leave your heart?
Posted: 5:36 am Wed November 18 2009 | Comments(0) |
As my cancer surgery approaches, and the indeterminate recovery period, followed by the runup to chemo, I am closing out my commitments. Some have been met, some I am shedding. I’ll deliver “The Specific Gravity of Grief” to the requesting editor before surgery next week, and I’ll meet my contract commitments on Endurance next spring. Other than that, everything’s being cut until I know what my resources are, in terms of time, energy and my ability to write under adverse medical circumstances.
That being said, if I’ve promised you a story, or I owe you a blurb, a book in the mail or something else, and you have not heard from me already, now would be an excellent time to remind me. (Among other things, stress is rather savagely robbing both my memory and my focus on follow-through.) After early next week, my ability to even pay attention, let alone deliver, will be compromised for a while.
So please, hit me in comments or via email if it looks like I’m not going to do something you’re counting on. We’ll negotiate from there.
Posted: 8:14 pm Tue November 17 2009 | Comments(1) |
Two nights ago we got on the subject of things we are thankful for and she told me, “I’m thankful for the earth and all the planets. And I’m thankful for the solar system. But I’m not thankful for wormholes. They take you places and you can’t get back.”
Last night we got into a conversation about periods, she wondered about the blood and why it happened, so yes we did end up talking about ovaries and the uterus and how a woman’s body prepares for a baby and when it does not get pregnant we have a menstrual cycle. She noted that she didn’t have a period and we talked about how her body was still young and not ready to have a baby, and I told her was like those parts in her were still brand new and hadn’t been opened yet.
Then we talked about how even though your body thinks its ready in its teens, when most girls get their period for the first time, your mind still isn’t ready until years later. She talked some more about her body was still too young and I said yes, her parts were still in hibernation. She said, “No Mom, my ovaries aren’t hibernating. They are pointing at my stomach and my liver and laughing and saying, ha ha, you have to work and I don’t!”
Posted: 7:56 pm Tue November 17 2009 | Comments(1) |