greygirlbeast: (tentacles)
So, during our most recent visit to Beavertail (recounted here, with photos), we encountered a peculiar organism in a high tide pool, among the slabs of phyllite. I had Spooky take a few photos, thinking I would be able to identify it when I got back home. So far, though, no luck. Admittedly, I don't have a lot of resources to draw upon, not here at home, and I've been relying heavily on Kenneth L. Gosner's A Field Guide to the Atlantic Shore from the Bay of Fundy to Cape Hatteras (1978). It was trapped in a very small pool, which contained not much of anything else. My first thought was that it was likely some form of sea weed with which I'm not familiar. possibly a member of the "green sea weeds" (Chlorophyta). Spooky's comment was "Gross," and I have to admit that, yes, it was sort of gross. The main body of the central "polyp," excluding those long terminal "buds," was approximately 16 centimeters long, maybe 1 centimeter in diameter at its widest point. It was motionless, and did not react when prodded. Here are two of the photos:








Right now, I really have no idea what it is. Maybe my first guess was right, and it's some variety of Chlorophyta. I've also considered sponges, cnidarians, bryozoans (it looks a little like the "Rubbery Bryozoan," Alcyonidium spp., though the colour's wrong), polychaete worms, and a number of other groups. It may, of course, be the larval form of some species, or only a fragment of a much larger organism (part of a larger plant, perhaps). But, at the moment, it's got me stumped, and I think, from now on, I'll carry specimen jars with me, so I can get beasts like this under the microscope. All in all, this guy seems as "odd" as anything from the Burgess Shale fauna...
greygirlbeast: (Howard Hughes)
I don't know how long now it's been since I've had to struggle with "dreamsickness" in the ayem. The pills have been doing their job, so I know that it's been a long time. But this morning, it's on me like hair on a yak, the inability to detach from there and be here. Dreamsick. And, even now, it seems a rather silly sort of dream to have one's head stuck inside of, a silly dream to be so locked onto. Here's the Hollywood pitch: A Riddick movie, that's really a Batman movie, only the Joker wears V's Guy Fawke's mask. See? Oh, and I was the Riddick/Batman character. I made a bomb from a fire extinguisher. If that can be done in waking life (and I expect it can), don't tell me. And no, I was not male in the dream. You have to imagine a fusion of Richard P. Riddick and Batman who happens to be female.

Also, I cannot believe that I waited this long to create a Howard Hughes icon for the journal. He's so very dashing in that photo.

Thanks to the cool air of Dr. Muñoz, I had quite a good writing day yesterday. 1,366 words on Chapter Two of The Red Tree. And I begin to see something I should have seen long since. Not only will this novel be, in many ways, unabashedly biographical, but I also find myself, from time to time, using the immediacy and intimacy of its first-person narration to grind axes. Yesterday, it was those annoying people who have had trouble reading my books because of the way I blend dream sequences into the narrative (here we are, back at bloody dreams), without "warning," without telling the reader what is a dream and what is not. Those unperceptive people, and the sort of instructors, etc. who teach that using dream sequences in prose is a "cheat." By now, you should know that my attitude towards both sets of people is "Fuck the lot of you," but it also seems to be the attitude held by Sarah Crowe in her lonely old house off Barb's Hill Road.

Another thing. A couple of days back, James Owen ([livejournal.com profile] coppervale) was commenting on the length of novels. He wrote:

Well, the accepted definition (I believe) is that to be a novel a work must be at least 40,000 words. Fine. But when was the last time you saw, read, wrote, or bought a 40k word novel? Half of my friends on livejournal are working on novels, and I'd be hard-pressed (in a pinch) to find one working on anything smaller than 100,000 words. In the last week, I noted two with uncompleted books with wordcounts already exceeding 150,000 words. And these aren't trilogies (in progress) but single books (which may be parts of a series, now I think on it). So, based on a totally unscientific perusal of my working friends' 78blogs and my recent-acquisition bookshelf, there aren't many novels anywhere NEAR the low end these days - unless you look at the YA shelves.

This is an old gripe with me, and one that has direct bearing on the writing of The Red Tree. Many of my favourite novels are, in fact, quite short, and certainly far under 100K words. For example, The Haunting of Hill House, Cannery Row, Grendel, The Wasp Factory, The Road, Billy Budd, Turn of the Screw, and Ironweed. The list could go on and on. Great novels, many under 75k, or even 50k, words in length. But I was made to sign a contract that specified a novel that would be 100k words in length. So, rather than allowing the novel to be as long (or, rather, as short) as is needed for the story at hand, I must attempt to push to, pad it, stretch it, or try to convince my publisher to accept a shorter book. And one should never, ever force a story to do anything that is not required of it. There, that's an actual piece of writing advice. I will confess that, being generally disinterested in the ins and outs of publishing, the reasons for this bloating of the American novel escape me. If I had to guess, though, I'd point back to the rise of the blockbuster novel in the 1970s and 1980s. Often, these were thick books. Very thick books. Obscenely, unnecessarily thick books. The example that leaps immediately to mind is Stephen King's It (1986). Could have been half as long, and would have been better for it. But then I still maintain that the original version of The Stand (1978) was far and away better that the longer 1990 publication (which, among other unwise things, "updated" the story from 1980 to 1990). Or look at J.K. Rowling. The books get fatter as the phenom of Harry Potter grows, and that last one is so flabby as to be almost unreadable. Anyway, if I point to the oft-bloated bestsellers as a trend, then maybe I can also suggest that this led to a sort of reader expectation. "Good books are long." Something like that. "I want my money's worth." Along those lines. I can easily imagine many indiscriminate readers buying into (and/or actually creating) this expectation. It becomes, in a consumerist world, a question not of quality, but of quantity. Books have become, in the last twenty or thirty years, unreasonably expensive. So, who wants to spend the same amount of money on a "thin" novel when they can "get their money's worth" with a fat one? Frankly, I think that people thinking of novels the same way they think of pizzas is one of the signs of the Apocalypse.

Regardless, I'm looking at where I am at this stage of The Red Tree, and I'm guessing that it's a 75k-word novel, maybe. I've written a little more than 20k words at this point, which means I'm getting a feel for its length. Which leaves me with difficult decisions ahead of me. And, I should say, I am not inherently opposed to long novels. Not at all. If they need to be long. Moby Dick, The Lord of the Rings, Watership Down, Dune. It's just that I am opposed to the idea that novels must be long. Bigger is not, we are beginning to see, better. All-you-can-eat-buffets, Hummers and SUVs, those grotesquely vast McMansions, the human population, and the bloated novel...all these things rely on the lie that more is, by definition, better, when, in fact, many times, it's disastrous.

Not much to the remainder of yesterday. There was a very satisfying email exchange with Peter Straub, whom I would run away and visit this very day, were I not chained to this desk (Spooky keeps the key). I spoke with my new editor at Publisher's Weekly about the specifics of the reviews I'll be writing for the magazine. Spooky and I played three games of Unspeakable Words (I won two, she won one). I read part of Chapter Four, "A Hint of the Sea," of Fraser's book on the Traissic. Late, I had some grand rp in Second Life (thank you Lorne, Bellatrix, and Joah). And yesterday was the 100th anniversary of the Tunguska event, and hardly anyone seemed to take note. And no, I have not forgotten I said I would post photos from Sunday evening's trip to Moonstone Beach. They are behind the cut:

Moonstone on June 29th )
greygirlbeast: (redeye)
Running a bit late this morning. I did my daily email before this entry, when I usually do things the other way around.

Yesterday, I wrote 1,062 words on Chapter Two of The Red Tree. Which made it a decent writing day, but not as decent as I needed it to be. The office was just too hot to think clearly. The sun blasting through the blinds, I thought my brain would bake. I feared I'd written nothing but several pages of crap, though when I read it back to Spooky afterwards, it seemed okay. One of my greatest regrets about this book is that I almost certainly will not be able to see it printed as it should be printed, but different typefaces and various drawings and photographs included.

Also, I got word that Frank Woodward's Lovecraft documentary has been accepted for its first film festival, the 2008 Comic Con International Film Festival in San Diego, California. Specifically, for those attending the festival, it will be screened Thursday, July 24th, in Room 26AB from 8-9:45 p.m.

When the writing was done, about 5 p.m., I told Spooky that I just couldn't take the heat anymore, and asked could we please, please flee the house south to Moonstone Beach. She was looking pretty wrung out, as well, having spent the day hanging pictures. She agreed at once. By the time we reached South County, the sky was overcast and a fog was settling across everything. We missed the turn off from the Matunuck School House Road onto Moonstone Beach Road, because we were distracted by great hoards of young rabbits. So, we had to backtrack a bit. The beach was beautiful, the fog getting thicker and thicker, the sky a slaty grey-blue. The surf was rougher than I'd ever seen it at Moonstone, the breakers roaring over the sand as the tide rose. Spooky went off to search for shells and stones, and I sat down and worked on my Book Of Shadows, something I'm writing there about Panthalassa. But the sound of the sea soon distracted me, and I joined Spooky. She'd made one of her impromptu arrangements of pebbles and cobbles. We picked through the the debris washed up along the strand. She found another long frond of kelp, which I think must have been Saccorhiza dermatodea, but now I'm confused over whether or not it's the same species Sonya ([livejournal.com profile] sovay) found at Beavertail last weekend, which I identified as another genus and species altogether, Laminaria agardhii. I'm trying very hard to become familiar with the local marine fauna and flora, but I'm starting the accept it may take me years (and unpacking my microscope). Other taxa I identified yesterday included a convex slipper shell (Crepidula plana; shells of any sort are rare at Moonstone), sea potato (Leathesia difformis), a large and very dead common spider crab (Libinia emarginata), Irish moss (Chrondrus crispus) and sea lettuce (Ulva latuca).

After a while, we sat back down on the sand, and I worked on a meditation exercise involving drawing mandalas in the sand, within which Spooky built still more stone mounds. There were still remains of the altars she'd made back on June 10th. We watched several Piping Plovers (Charadrius melodus) racing about on the sand. It was, genuinely, a magickal evening, and when we finally left, about 8 p..m., the day's heat was forgotten, my clothes and hair covered in sand, damp from sea spray and the fog. There's still sand in my hair this morning. Before making the trip back to Providence, we swung by Spooky's mom and dad's farm in Saunderstown, to get eggs (we also got a jar of rather spicy bread-and-butter pickles). Her parents had just returned by train from Brooklyn, where they'd spent a couple of days visiting with her sister, Stephanie, and infant nephew, whose name is Miles. There are photos from the beach, but I have not yet edited them for the journal. Maybe tomorrow.

It was almost ten by the time we made it back home. We warmed up Saturday night's chili, and then I slipped into Second Life for a several hours of good rp (thank you, Lorne and Pontifex). The story of Labyrinth grows and grows.

And I should really go now, because that novel refuses to write itself.

Postscript (1:41 p.m.): I almost forgot. Today marks our one-month anniversary since the escape from Atlanta and our arrival in Providence.
greygirlbeast: (Sweeny1)
Listening to the new Dresden Dolls disc this morning, No, Virginia, an early birthday present yesterday from Spooky. I'm liking it quite a bit more than Yes, Virginia (2006), though I did like Yes, Virginia. Meanwhile, here in La Casa de Kiernan y Pollnac, all is chaos. Well, a very ordered sort of chaos. There are hundreds of boxes, I think. We spent the better part of yesterday packing paleontological and anatomical specimens. Skulls — Smilodon, Hoplophoneus, badger, fox, coyote, alligator and Nile crocodile, nutria, mink, otter, domestic cat, lynx, et al. — and trilobites and ammonites and casts of dinosaur teeth and a gar from the Green River Formation in Wyoming (Eocene) and a cast of a snake from the Messel bituminous shale of Germany (also Eocene) and a mosasaur humerus from the Pierre Shale (Late Cretaceous) of South Dakota, and so on, and so forth. Packing the books and the fossils are the worst of it. Spooky says we are "sooooooooo" close to having the house packed, and I can only hope that she's right.

I started work on the layout of Sirenia Digest #31, but didn't get as far as I should have. And today, today we must away to Burningspam, but should be back early this evening.

A reminder: the Stiff Kitten T-shirts are still on sale at Ziraxia. Just clicky-click the pretty image below for details:

Stiff Kitten


After all that packing, we had a short walk about Freedom Park, just as the sun was going down. It was beautiful out, but not yet late enough for the bats. There were swallows, though. I will miss Freedom Park. The tree that fell recently has been reduced to a stump, but Trees Atlanta has already planted two replacement saplings.

Back home, we watched Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989). It's not as good a film as Raiders of the Lost Ark, but unlike Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, it is a good film. It's a logical sequel to the first film that doesn't dissolve into self parody. Sean Connery is delightful, and the father/son chemistry between him and Harrison Ford is spot on, just as I recalled. Alison Doody plays her quasi-villainess role quite well, and it's great seeing Dr. Marcus Brody (Denholm Elliott) and Sallah (John Rhys-Davies) again. There's a bittersweetness to the marvelous 1912 prologue, knowing that River Phoenix had only a few years left to live. Anyway, this film flows so seamlessly from Raiders that it's best and easiest to simply pretend that ToD was never filmed. I do sort of the same thing with the Star Wars films, which for me is a trilogy composed of Star Wars, The Empire Strikes Back, and Revenge of the Sith (minus that silly and unnecessary Frankensteinesque bit with Vader at the end of RofS).

Also, read Chapter 6 ("Osborn, Man, and Nature") of the Henry Fairfield Osborn biography. And another chapter of the book I'm reviewing for Publisher's Weekly.

And today is World Biodiversity Day. Because who the fuck wants a planet composed of nothing but weed species. Thank you, They Might Be Giants:

King Weed.
King Weed.
That's what they would call us human beings.
King Weed.
King Weed.
But no one'll be around to disagree with me.
King Weed.

Roaches survived five extinctions before.
I guess they are good, but I don't know what for.

Dandelions can adapt and renew.
Seems like they grow best right under my shoe.

What about the adaptable and rugged housefly?
Their life is so lousy they're too tired to die.

Mice can survive another ice age intact.
A mouse can't survive a single night with my cat.

Now house cats, they're also right here on the list.
Good luck to a cat with no Kibbles 'n' Bits.

Sparrows will survive, in the sky they ascend.
If you like eating worms, then I guess you'll have friends.

Worms, oh yes worms, he said they'll be around.
And they're living like kings in their holes in the ground.


Er...now I must find coffee and clean clothes and glue myself together so my doctor is only appalled at my condition. Any visit to the doctor without forced hospitalization is a good visit, I say. Platypus!
greygirlbeast: (earth)
Here we are on Thursday, and we head back to Atlanta on Monday. This long, long trip is almost done. The last couple of days have been rather full, and since we're spending today and tomorrow winding down and getting rested for the arduous drive back, I thought I'd spend part of this afternoon on a couple of entries, trying to catch up with myself.

Though we got a much later start than planned, yesterday afternoon Spooky and I made it back up to Boston, to Cambridge, where we met Sonya Taaffe ([livejournal.com profile] sovay) for my first look at Harvard's Museum of Comparative Zoology. Over the last twenty years or so, as a working paleontologist or a visitor, I've seen most of America's major natural history museum's (and many of the minor ones). But I'd never made it to the MCZ. What a marvelous place it is. It stands today as one of the world's last remaining Victorian natural history cabinets, more or less as it was arranged upon its founding in 1859. It's holdings are gigantic, including the collections of famed naturalist and MCZ founder Louis Agassiz, and what can be viewed on display is merely the tip of the iceberg.

We didn't reach Cambridge until almost three p.m., so we had only two hours to look at a museum that needs many days to do it justice. I took in as much as I could and saw many specimens I've known from photographs and written descriptions for much of my life, such as the enormous Australian pliosaur Kronosaurus, the generic holotype skull of Triceratops, the holotype of Pterodactylus "elegans", and the type specimen of the enormous extinct turtle Stupendemys. The vertebrate paleontology halls alone would have kept me occupied for at least a day, though the real centerpiece of the MCZ is its great gallery of recent mammals. Complete skeletons of several species of cetaceans hang from the ceilings — sperm whale, right whale, narwhal, pygmy sperm whale, etc. The gallery is a glorious maze of antique glass cabinets, occupied by hundreds of taxidermied specimens and skeletons — giraffe, okapi, monkeys, bats, rhinoceri, and on and on and on. There is a glorious clutter to this place, many of the zoological specimens placed in no particular or consistent order, whether taxonomic or geographic, and, for me, that clutter, complete with dust and trays of mothballs, reflects something genuine in the diversity of life on Earth.

Indeed, the MCZ is itself as much an artefact as the millions of specimens held in its collections, a chance to wander through a time capsule, a sort of museum that is fast vanishing from the world. So it saddens me to hear talk of updating the exhibits and the possibility that the displays may be moved from Agassiz's great and musty cabinet to a new campus across the Charles River. It will surely be the loss of a historical treasure, and I only hope that I have the chance for a much longer visit before any such renovations or relocations occur. In an age of garish "infotainment" and interactivity, when museums become ever more like theme parks and are increasingly dumbed down, the Museum of Comparative Zoology is a much-needed breath of stale air. It is a veritable cathedral of evolution, alive with all the romance and mystery that attracted me to science and my love of the natural world. If you can possibly visit it, I urge you to do so.

After the museum, Sonya led us to a very good sushi restaurant in Arlington, where we talked writing and books and many more things than I can now recall. I think I had the best cucumber/avocado roll I've ever yet tasted. Also, I should thank her for the drad little Japanese octopus bead and a copy of her poetry collection, Postcards from the Province of Hyphens, which I hope to begin reading this very evening. After dinner, we gave her a drive home, then headed back to Rhode Island. On I-95, Spooky spotted Perseid meteor #11. I think we got home right at ten p.m. A shame we didn't have more time in Boston. Cambridge was beautiful, from what I saw of it.

The 30th-anniversary edition of Spider Baby (1964) on DVD was waiting for us in the mailbox, courtesy Netflix, so we got a big goofy dose of cannibalism, arachnids, and a very young Sid Haig before bed. Which was, somehow, a perfect end to the day. More to come...

Ah, and there are (big) photos behind the cut:

16 August 2006 )


Photos copyright © 2006 by Caitlín R. Kiernan and Kathryn A. Pollnac.
Ellapsed time: 12:42 p.m.—3:27 p.m.

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Caitlín R. Kiernan

February 2012

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