Caitlín R. Kiernan

In the comments yesterday, the matter of Panthalassa came up, the matter of the focus my paganism. And I feel like I ought to explain something – not because anyone offended me – but just to be clear. My relationship with Panthalassa does not involve faith. Indeed, I am entirely lacking (or unburdened by) both religious and "spiritual" faith. Panthalassa, she asks for nothing, and I know I have nothing to give her. What's more – beyond the fact that she is objectively the world ocean – Panthalassa as a godhead exists only as a metaphor, and as a focus for psychologically healthy ritual. Which, if you ask me, pretty much puts her way ahead of Xtianity (or most other patrifocal religions), with its demanding, selfish, judgmental Old Man in the Sky. Or the "son" he supposedly sacrificed for our "sins." What I do, it's not drawing those lines – faith or failure, belief or torment. My meetings with Panthalassa are not about faith. Devotion, yes. And reverence. But not faith. Nor are they about communing with a conscious "higher power," as Panthalassa is not conscious. I am an atheist, and a pagan, and I know that bends some people's brains, but it ought not. I simply stepped outside several paradigms, all at once. Also, I have renounced the mess that Wicca has become.

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Yesterday was spent getting Sirenia Digest 69 ready to go out to subscribers, and if you are a subscriber, you should have the issue by now. If you're not a subscriber, you should immediately follow the link above and rectify this lamentable situation. Thank you. I hope people are happy with the issue, and if they have had time to read it, will kindly comment upon 69 today.

Today I go back to work on The Secret. And I wait for the CEM of The Drowning Girl: A Memoir. But I am not waiting with dread, only with mild and time-consuming annoyance. I know there will only be the annoying marks made by the copyeditor that, for the most part, I have to STET. The rest of September will truly be a crunch. I have The Secret, the aforementioned CEM, and we need to read through all of Blood Oranges (though that might have to wait until October).

Someone asked if there were plans for a Subterranean Press hardcover of The Drowning Girl: A Memoir. No, there are no such plans, but I will be speaking with other publishers, possibly, about this, and about a hardcover of The Red Tree. But neither of these are things that would be settled or come to pass anytime soon. Or even soonish.

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Kathryn was at the market yesterday and heard a woman actually say "LOL," aloud. That is, "el-oh-el." After I tweeted her traumatic experience, I have discovered from others that this is not an unusual phenomenon, nor one confined to "kids these days." You shame yourselves yet again, Western Civilization. You poop in your own undies.

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Speaking of poop, last night, for some reason beyond my comprehension, we watched John Carpenter's Prince of Darkness (1987), a thing I swore I would never do. And, for fuck's sake, this is a bad movie. Even a weird little role (with no dialogue) by Alice Cooper doesn't help, not one itty-bitty bit.*** At the center of this mess is a pretty neat little idea – evil is a viral being from outer space that arrived upon the earth billions of years ago, and the purpose of the Catholic Church was to fool everyone with religion until science could become sophisticated enough to cope with the swirling green entity in the cylinder. Fine. Very Lovecraftian. But. Carpenter takes that scenario and turns it into a dull, over-lit mess, with no suspense whatsoever. This film is the very antithesis of suspense. It's where suspense goes to die of boredom. There's no acting in sight, except for Donald Pleasence's overacting. The film pauses, now and then, to ramble off a load of nonsensical exposition, which is at least a break from the slog of the story. What the fuck? Had Carpenter spent all his money on blow and whores and had nothing left over to spend on actors, a camera crew, writers, and SFX? In short, stay far, far away from this one. It's actually much worse than In the Mouth of Madness (1994), and that's saying something.

For my part, I say Carpenter had a good run from 1981 through 1986, and then violently bottomed out – with, as it happens, Prince of Darkness. His masterpiece remains, by far, The Thing (released in 1982), and I think that's mostly because he had a number of great things going for him – "Who Goes There," Howard Hawkes' The Thing from Another World (1951), Rob Bottin's brilliant SFX and art direction, Ennio Morricone's wonderfully minimalistic score, the intentional allusion to Lovecraft's "At the Mountains of Madness," and, lastly, a great location. John Carpenter may not be what made The Thing a great film.

But there's also Starman (1984), which I love, though a big part of that is Jeff Bridges' inspired performance. Escape from New York (1981) is loads of fun, as is Big Trouble in Little China (and Kurt Russell is a significant part of what works with both those films). But yeah. 1981 through 1986, and then Carpenter takes a precipitous nose dive. Hell, I might even be generous, and include The Fog (1980) and Halloween (1978) – though I don't really like either, they're gold compared with everything that came after 1986. And the plunge from Big Trouble in Little China to Prince of Darkness is almost inexplicable. So, yes. I say it was coke and whores.

Anyway, afterwards, we watched a couple of episodes of Law and Order: Special Victims Unit, and read more of The Stand. I read two more stories from The Book of Cthulhu. Both were by authors with whom I'd had no previous experience. First, John Horner Jacobs' "The Dream of the Fisherman's Wife" and then Silvia Moreno-Garcia's "Flash Frame." Both were quite good, but I especially liked Jacobs' piece. All this helped get the taste of the awful movie out of my brain and eyeballs.

Tonight, maybe some Insilico RP.

Rain today. Chilly. Summer's passing away.

Oh! Photos from Sunday, as Irene was finishing up with Rhode Island (behind the cut). So, these photos were taken the day before the last set of photos I posted.

Chilled,
Aunt Beast

( 28 August 2011 )

***Spooky says, "The episode of The Muppet Show with Alice Cooper was scarier than that movie."

1) This is the year that you may celebrate the last year of the first decade of the new millennium. Yes, you have my permission. I wouldn't have mentioned it, but I made such a big deal, in last year's New Year's Eve post, about how 2009 wasn't the end of the first decade of the new millennium.

2) Yesterday, I wrote 1,246 words on "—30—", which I should be able to finish tomorrow, for Sirenia Digest #61. I might have written more, but I had to pause to read Michael Drayton's "Nymphidia" over again. Also, yesterday Spooky sent the Dancy Cigar Box off to the winner of the auction, Mr. Steven Lubold.

3) Heads up. The super special sale price for the limited edition of Two Worlds and In Between ends at 5 PM (EST) this evening. At this point, more than 450 of the 600-copy print run of the limited have been reserved (originally a 400-copy print run). So, yeah. Last chance to save $20 on the limited. Take heed.

4) Yesterday I also corralled the best answers to the question I asked last year on the 30th of December, "If you had me alone, locked up in your house, for twenty-four hours and I had to do whatever you wanted me to, what would you have me/you/us do?", and those will also be appearing...belatedly...in Sirenia Digest #61. Also, if you weren't reading the blog last year and would like to get in on this, you can email me a reply today or tonight or tomorrow, to greygirlbeast(at)gmail(dot)com. All answers will be published anonymously, so feel free to feel free. But no answers about how you'd spend all that time reading to me, or how you'd make me take a nap, or how you'd cook for me, force me to go Outside, or help me write, or have long conversations with me about writing and literature and dreams and magick. I'm looking for something spicier here. Although, forcing me to write or talk about writing would certainly rank fairly high on the sadism meter.

5) Two movies last night. I was sort of in a crime/thriller/noir headspace. We began with Richard Shepard's Oxygen (1999), because we're determined to see everything in which Adrien Brody has ever appeared. Not bad, though Brody was by far the best of it. Next, we watched D.J. Caruso's The Salton Sea (2002), which I liked quite a lot, really. Vincent D'Onofrio can always be counted on to add something wonderfully weird to any film in which he appears, and this was no exception. The very ending felt tacked on, though, as if maybe the studio execs got skittish of the bleak ending we almost get before the film unconvincingly tries to fake you out so that Val Kilmer can walk away into the sunset. Also, I find it odd Caruso would make a film titled The Salton Sea, in which horrific events have occurred at the Salton Sea, but fail to take advantage of the surreal landscape surrounding the Salton Sea. Still, I liked it.

6) I'm not gonna bother with any actual "best of" lists this year, if only because the Lamictal has made such a mess of my short-term memory. I strongly suspect I've not yet seen all the best films of 2010, but I'm going to say that the best films of 2010 that I have seen are (in no particular order) Black Swan, Inception, Shutter Island, and The Social Network. I also adored Tim Burton's version of Alice in Wonderland and Kick Ass. Turns out, a lot of my favorite films from 2010 were released in 2009 (Neil Jordan's Ondine comes to mind). My reading habits are too spotty to say much at all about the best books of the year, though I did adore Patti Smith's Just Kids and Kristin Hirsh's Rat Girl. As for music, my listening habits have been even spottier, but, off the top of my head, my favorite album was probably Broken Bells' self-titled release.

7) Most years, I give the whole idea of New Year's resolutions the middle finger (which I was recently amused to hear described as the "Massachusetts State Bird," which is fair, given that the Rhode Island State Bird is the Dunkin' Donuts Cruller). Anyway, this year I actually do have a few resolutions, which I mean not only to make (which is easy), but to keep (which is hard). For starters, unless I'm too sick, I will leave the House at least once every four days. I've also decided to work harder at witchcraft and magick, which is one of the parts of my life that's been sort of lost in the chaos of the last two years. I'm going to read a lot more and game a lot less. And so on and so forth. You get the idea.

8) One of the coolest things I can say about 2010 is that I only got sick once (we're not counting my long list of chronic maladies here, just contagions). Back in January, I caught some sort of hideous bug when I did a reading in Brooklyn, and was down for a few days, but that was it. Garlic and hot, hot peppers, you rule.

And now, it's time to make some Rhode Island state birds....

Hot now in Providence. Summer arrived (again) a couple of days back, and here in the House, we are sweltering. Dr. Muñoz tries to keep us coolerated, but he is such a very small droid and it's such a very large old House. But, still, I am glad for the heat. All that rain and belated March was wearing me more ragged than my usual raggedness.

And here it is Litha, so this evening we'll go down to the sea. It won't be anything elaborate, but at least it will be the sea. I have to admit, I find myself reluctant to go to the shore. And I know it has something to do with what's happening in the Gulf of Mexico, and with my own complicity in that horror. When the sea is your goddess (even if she is a nonconscious goddess) and your species continues to befoul her at every turn, slowly transforming her into a corrupted morass of petrochemicals and floating plastic debris and dead zones and sewage and fertilizer runoff, the shame has to be embraced, not denied. The sea will, in time, when humans have gone, cleanse herself, but that will be a long, long age from now.

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For the past two days I've been working on a new piece for Sirenia Digest, "Tidal Forces." It actually has nothing much to do with the sea, despite the title. I refer here to other tidal forces. More sorts than one, really. Saturday, I wrote 1,051 words, and another 1,005 yesterday. And yesterday I read it to Spooky, and she likes it.

Night before last, we watched Rowan Woods' Little Fish (2005). It's a very, very good film, though it's also a hard film to watch. Cate Blanchett is excellent, but Hugo Weaving steals the show in what might be his finest performance that I've seen so far. I haven't been reading much, mostly comics and paleontology stuff.

Spooky's begun a new round of eBay auctions, if you'd be so kind as to have a look. Thanks.

And a very happy birthday to faustfatale!

I need to wrap this up and get to work. But I did want to mention that the demolition of the old overpass, where Point Street becomes Wickenden (or thereabouts), has resumed. I noticed a few nights back. Last night, on the way to the market for dinner, I got a couple of photographs of what remains of the southside of the mural (behind the cut):

( 20 June 2010 )

Winter seems to have come to Providence last night. A low below freezing, frost warnings. I'm sure it'll warm up a little again, but...can't pretend it's "late summer" any longer. Cloudy and foul looking out there today.

Which is why Spooky made me get out of the house yesterday. We both knew no writing would be getting done, so there was no point in hanging about here. I'll go "back to work" tomorrow, after we spend today cleaning the place a bit. We've both been so busy, the clutter has gone wild. But yeah, tomorrow is all interviews: The South County Independent and the Brown University bookstore's newsletter. Then, on Saturday, I need to get started on Sirenia Digest #47. I am truly in no mood for interviews, but there you go.

Anyway...yesterday.

Actually, not so much to tell. I'm still trying to get untired, so it was a low-impact day out. I just wanted to see some autumnal trees. Spooky suggested Wickford. As we were leaving Providence, we saw the most remarkable sky. I took photos (below), but they fail to capture the weirdness of that sky. It was all about color and contrast and a peculiar flatness. It was a videogame sort of sky. Some trick of sunlight and clouds and high-altitude ice crystals, I suspect. In Wickford, there weren't many interesting trees. I think we'll have to head out towards Conancut Island for that, or north towards Woonsocket. But we walked about the harbor and window shopped. We visited the worst witchcraft shop in New England. Truthfully, it's not a witchcraft shop, and I shouldn't dignify it with that label. This is the place that had never heard of athames. Just a big ol' New Age place. Lots of Buddha pop, crystals, chakra crap, chicken soup for the fluffy bunnies. They do "aura" photography and interpretation. That sort of nonesense. I mostly only go in there because it seems to make the employees nervous, ever since I explained athames to them. Anyway, yeah...we walked around and looked through dusty shop windows and at antiques and old houses and boats on the water. Wickford turned three hundred years old this year. The tide was coming in. The sky went from sunny with clouds to flat and leaden. I visited my favorite Wickford boat (again, photos below). That was about it. We were home before six p.m.

Last night, after Night Three of Spooky's patented four-night soup, we watched David Lynch's Inland Empire, which I'd been avoiding because I knew it would do a number on my head. And it did. A stunning, brilliant film. Mother and I are still collating. Also, I read the latest Buffy the Vampire Slayer trade paperback collection (the comic), Predators and Prey (Vol. 5). Other than Lovecraft Unound, I've been working my way through the September '09 Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, and, over the last few days, I've read: "A New Species of Apateodus (Teleostei: Aulopiformes) from the Upper Cretaceous Niobrara Chalk of Western Kansas, U.S.A.," "The Anatomy and Systematics of Colepiocephale lambei (Dinosauria: Pachycephalosauridae)," "Diprotodontid Footprints from the Pliocene of Central Australia," "Cranial Mechanics and Functional Interpretation of the Horned Carnivorous Dinosaur Carnotaurus sastrei," and "A New Beaked Whale (Odontoceti, Ziphiidae) from the Middle Miocene of Peru." We got in some WoW after David Lynch. We both needed something familiar and mindless, and WoW fills that bill. Our Draenei characters made Level 49.

And that was yesterday (and etc.).

Now I'm going to go help Spooky unclutter the house. Here are some photos:

( 14 October 2009 )

Like I said yesterday, not ready for autumn. But it's here all the same. And I will greet it as best I can. Spooky and I are taking the day off. We'll go to Beavertail, to the sea, and by her parent's farm for eggs and green tomatoes (and probably other things).

A joyous Mabon to all who observe the Sabbat, to all who celebrate the turning of the Wheel of the Year.

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Yesterday, I did 1,039 words on "Charcloth, Firesteel, and Flint," the second piece for Sirenia Digest #46. And discovered that what I needed to be a 2k-word vignette is determined to be a 4k-word short story.

And as soon as this story's done, I need to sit down and gather all my notes and thoughts on Blood Oranges into some sort of coherent whole. And begin my Martian YA story, which is due November 1st. It will be set on the same Mars as was my "Bradbury Weather."

And promotional stuff for The Red Tree continues.

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Last night, we saw Paul McGuigan's Push (2009), which I actually liked quite a lot. It was rather like an especially good episode of Heroes, only less goofy. We played some WoW; I'm really getting addicted to doing the battlefields, but, gods, I wish Blizzard could give us battlefields that were actual battlefields, something a little more imaginative than endless rounds of "Capture the Flag." No, I wish they would, because they certainly could. Then again, I see plenty of players who can't seem to grasp the simple concept behind "Capture the Flag." Later, we watched another episode from the second season of Dead Like Me. I didn't notice this so much the first time through the series, but Season Two really loses direction. It's not surprising, given the way the network ditched the show's creator, Bryan Fuller, back in Season One. The performances remain true, but the scripts just sort of flail about.

That was yesterday.

A happy and fine Beltane to all who wish to be wished a happy and fine Beltane. I was just looking at my entry from this day one year ago, and there's something from that entry that I'd like to repost:

For a long time, I could not allow myself to involve choice in matters of belief, as I held belief back for objective science and material concerns. I did not see how one could ever choose to believe. Partly, the epiphany simply required a different perspective on things I've been saying for years. The Cosmos (=tripartite goddess/horned god/divine adrogyne/etc.) may, in my veneration of it, assume any form. It contains all forms within it that can be realized or conceived. It hardly matters if I "worship" Brighid or Mórrígan or Aphrodite or Kali. They are all merely attempts of a conscious being to sum up an incomprehensible and nonconscious universe. They may, perhaps, each function like characters in a novel, avatars that grant access to the story of existence. It does not matter if they are not factual in their existence, as their existence is true, if they are true in our minds. If they contain within them useful truths, as is the way with all myths. It is not their objective existence which makes them useful avatars, but their subjective truth, what these deities mean to each of us. For me, this is the heart of Neopaganism. Designing ritual and godforms to function as conduits between conscious organisms and the remainder of the Cosmos, which is generally a nonconscious entity.

This is still pretty much where my head is, though I've added Panthalassa ("all seas") as my primary "deity." Which is to say, I may look to and venerate the Mórrígan, and Hecate, and Demeter, and Cernunnos (and a small host of others), but the concept of Panthalassa acts as a sort of godhead, freed of any connotations of gender or consciousness, morality or anthropomorphic form. Panthalassa is, by definition, a vast, impersonal, and almost inconceivable force. Anyway, yeah, I'm still getting better about belief as choice. And, by the way, this is what works for me, I'm not the least bit evangelical in my paganism, excepting where the beliefs of others attempts to infringe upon my day-to-day life or my ability to practice witchcraft as I've chosen to practice it.

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Yesterday was just about as tedious as expected. The image behind the cut, multiplied by a whole bunch, will give you some idea:

( Yesterday )

We read back over "At the Gate of Deeper Slumber" and "The Peril of Liberated Objects, or the Voyeur's Seduction" (formerly "Untitled 34"), and I made lots of line edits to both. I wrote the prolegomena for Sirenia Digest #41. I did the layout on the issue, and realized that we really need to do an article on Virgil Finlay. When the issue was all nailed together, I sent the files off to Gordon (thingunderthest) to be PDF'ed. And then we read through Chapter 3 of The Red Tree, which got us to page 138 of the page proofs. And that was yesterday.

By now, all subscribers should have the new issue of the digest. Just let us know if you didn't get it. I'm pleased to have included Sonya Taaffe's (sovay) poem, "The Coast Guard," in this issue, along with the two new stories.

And now..well, it's Beltane. I'll do no more work than I have to do.

Well, first the good news. Peter Straub has selected "The Long Hall on the Top Floor" for Fantastic Tales: American Stories of Terror and the Uncanny, which he's editing for the Library of America. The volume is due out in October 2009. I count this, with the reprint of "In the Water Works (1889)" in S. T. Joshi's American Supernatural Tales (Penguin Classics, 2007), as among my most notable accomplishments thus far. "The Long Hall on the Top Floor" first appeared in an issue of the now-defunct Carpe Noctem magazine, in 1999, and was thereafter collected in Tales of Pain and Wonder.

But, the bad news is that it looks like my plans for a March "vacation" are going to have to be scrapped, as I owe ellen_datlow a story, and somehow the deadline, and, indeed, the whole book, had slipped my mind, until she emailed me about it last night. So...I have until March 23rd to get that done, and when you figure in Sirenia Digest #40, the month is pretty much shot. I might be able to squeeze in a week between the story and the digest, maybe.

I spent all this morning figuring out fair-use and public-domain questions concerning three quotes used in The Red Tree. Specifically, a quote from Seneca the Younger's Epistulae morales ad Lucilium, one from Hesiod's Theogony, and another from The Maxims and Reflections of Goethe. All these were, of course, translations, and what is at question is when the copyright on the translations I used expired, or if they have not yet expired. Turns out, we're clear on Hesiod (Evelyn-White translation) and Goethe (Saunders translation), but not on Seneca (Gummere translation). Fortunately, sovay is very kindly providing me with a new translation of the Seneca passage in question, so I won't have to cut it from the book. That was my extra-tedious morning.

Here in Providence, the day is cold, and the sun blindingly bright off all the snow that isn't melting. Right now, it 29F, but 19F with wind chill factored in.

I'm still looking back over comments I've made regarding sf, and my science fiction, in particular, and there's this interesting bit from March 5th, 2006:

matociquala (Elizabeth Bear) and cpolk (Chelsea Polk) have coined a literary neologism for a certain sort of sf, a term which I'm finding extremely useful: eco-gothic*. I quote: "We look around at the world and we're fucking scared. There's this underlying idea of the implacability of the universe and the smallness of humanity. We know that there is no guiding, caring force. That life is amazing in its tenacity and persistence, but that ultimately, it's completely pitiless. And if you take it too far, if you unbalance it enough, it will crush you. This idea of the tenacity of life in a pitiless universe. And nobody else seems to fucking GET IT. Because life is tenacious, but humanity is disposable. It's not a tragedy that the passenger pigeon perished. And it won't be a tragedy when we go either...God doesn't care if we persist. We're not special. We're not essential. The universe doesn't love us bestest of all. Because you know, there's this critique that a Black Novel is not Relevant because it's about Blackness, not Humanity. Which upon I call bullshit. Because a human novel isn't relevant. Because it's about humanity. Six point five billion ugly bags of mostly water on a second-class planet in an arm of a barred spiral galaxy. Pretending like Hell that we signify." Click here for the transcript from which this quote was cobbled together.

Certainly, all of my sf would fall into this category of "eco-gothic." The Dry Salvages, "Riding the White Bull," "Faces in Revolving Souls," "The Pearl Diver," "Persephone," "Hoar Isis," "Between the Flatirons and the Deep Green Sea"...all of it. And I think one thing I found particularly intriguing was the suggestion that writers of "eco-gothic" sf may, perhaps, do so because "we were the second-class geeks who took life sciences instead of physics with the hard-line geeks." That's one of my dirty little secrets. Sure, I took chemistry and physics and mathematics in college, but I had no real aptitude for it. It was in the life and earth sciences that I excelled, particularly in paleontology, which is often disparagingly labeled by the math and physics types as a "soft science." Anyway, it's just something I wanted to note, because of the things I said about sf on Friday, and because it's something I want to think about. I have no problem with a neologism or a literary category so long as it is useful and needed and I suspect this one may be both. It is, of course, inherently Lovecraftian, and minor caveats and questions do arise. Perhaps I will come back to those later. Not only does this remind me why I shall never appeal to those sf readers who dislike "dystopian" sf, but also why I shall likely always find myself in a rather minuscule fraction of Wiccans. The gods do not care because, after all, they're only hopeful metaphors for needful humans. Anyway, thank you Bear and Chelsea.

So, it's not surprising that Elizabeth Bear ended up writing an afterword for A is for Alien, an afterword which, in part, explores the idea of the eco-gothic.

Also, it has been one year to the day that I announced in the journal that Spooky and I would be moving from Atlanta to Providence. What an eventful year it has been.

Yes, the Immaculate Order of the Falling Sky has duly noted the Earth's recent near-miss by a Tunguska-sized asteroid. Hope springs eternal.

Last night, I stumbled across some bloody frakking idiot, somewhere on the web, who'd referred to Echo (from The Dreaming) as a "Mary Sue" character, and I'm still laughing...

* matociquala later found a use of "eco-gothic" dating back to 1996, in a description of Stephen Palmer's novel, Memory Seed.

The snow is falling hard again. Hubero is sitting on my desk, watching as the white world gets a little whiter. I have promised him that it will be at least Wednesday before the weather forces us to eat the cats. Hubero replies he is grateful to now live in the world of corner stores.

Bad insomnia again last night. But I did manage to get to sleep before 5:30 ayem. While Spooky was reading to me from The Historian, I could hardly keep my eyes open. As soon as she stopped, I was wide awake. This is no reflection on the book.

No writing again yesterday.

Yesterday, the mail brought my contributor's copies of the new PS Publishing edition of Ray Bradbury's The Day It Rained Forever (originally published in 1958), which includes my introduction, "The Most Beautiful Music I've Ever Read." At this point, depending what one does and does not count, I've written and published upwards of seven novels, something like a hundred and fifty short stories, novellas, and vignettes, dozens of comic scripts for Vertigo, won a few awards, and so forth. But, honestly, I think I've never been half so proud of anything as I was of seeing my name on the title page of The Day It Rained Forever ("Introduction by...."). It completes a sort of circle, as Bradbury was such an enormous formative influence. I am very grateful to have been given this opportunity. Among my comp copies was the deluxe boxed set, which includes the PS Publishing editions of both The Day It Rained Forever and A Medicine For Melancholy. Almost, but not quite, the same collections. There are four stories in the former that were not included in the latter, and vice versa. Essentially, The Day It Rained Forever was the UK edition of A Medicine For Melancholy.

I desperately needed to get Outside yesterday, if only to see Providence blanketed in all this snow. It took us about half an hour to dig out the van, so we could escape the driveway. I brought a yardstick down, and measured the snow depth in a number of undisturbed spots. An average of 9 inches, with drifts well over a foot. We drove (very slowly) from Federal Hill, across the river to College Hill. The roads were slushy and brown, and not as many people were out as I'd expected. This was already late in the day, after four thirty by the time we reached Wickenden Street. Eastside Market was open, and we stopped for a few things, then headed back towards Benefit Street. There are photos below. The sky had gone the color of blue-grey clay, and it was snowing hard. We followed Angell Street west, then ended up on Congdon headed south. By fits and starts, we reached Benefit Street. I saw Lovecraft's "Shunned House" (the "Yellow House" of my own stories) in the snow, which made it look quite a bit more imposing. I glimpsed the Fleur-de-Lys House (from "The Call of Cthulhu") through the storm. We headed back across the Point Street Bridge, and stopped to take a few photos of the Providence River and snow-shrouded College Hill. The river was like slate, and the waves seemed more like chips in stone. The old wharf that, in the summer, is usually covered with gulls and cormorants, was buried in snow and ice. And that clay sky above it all. We made it back home just before sunset.

And now it is Solstice, and the days will grow longer. And that is a great relief. The rebirth of the "Great God," if only metaphorically. Though, truthfully, a metaphorical Cernunnos or Pan is as useful to me as would be one whose reality were less subjective. Here it is truth that applies, not fact. The wheel turns, and the Horned God wakes again. The long night of winter will end soon enough. A happy and/or blessed Solstice/Yule/Midwinter to all those who wish to be wished such.

Yes, this entry is wandering a bit, isn't it?

A reminder that the current eBay auctions are ongoing. Please do have a look. Now, the photographs from yesterday:

( Saturday, December 20, 2008 )

One day off turned into two days off. One day Outside became two days Outside, and I didn't argue. So, this will be a long catching-up sort of entry. But, first, I want to mention the current eBay auctions, which end tomorrow, and which seem to have drawn far less attention than usual. Please do have a look. Bid if your are interested and so disposed. It will be greatly appreciated. Also, a quick explanation regarding Sirenia Digest #34. Rather, a quick explanation regarding that second copy that went out yesterday. There were a number of very minor errors in the first PDF, and, all day on Tuesday, while I was trying not to think about work, they bugged me. That "Untitled #33" should have been "Untitled 33." That the captions for Karl Persson's paintings were in Courier, when the font should have been Times New Roman. Stuff that I doubt anyone but me would have ever noticed, but...anyway...thingunderthest kindly produced a new and corrected PDF. And that's why you got two. The second is the keeper.

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Tuesday: We didn't manage to get out of the house until after 2 p.m., because I had to dither over this and dither over that. I squeezed in a little work-like activity, such as begging off a review for Publisher's Weekly, the first book in a fantasy trilogy, and as I told my editor, I was entirely wrong for that. And then, when we left, we couldn't go very far, not as far as any of the beaches, because the windshield wipers still have not been fixed (we're waiting on the part) and the sky was threatening rain. But, first, we drove over to check the p.o. box, which I'd not done in a while. There was a contributor's copy of Not One of Us #40, which reprints "Flotsam." Then we headed back towards the river and the Old North Burial Ground (estab. 1700). We wandered among the tombstones, marveling, especially, at the slate markers from the 18th century. The maples had gone bright red, ringing in October, and there were truly enormous, ancient European beeches (Fagus sylvatica). It's a beautiful cemetery, and none of the groundskeepers or security even seemed to look at us twice, much less harass and threaten us the way the Swan Point asshole did (oh, and turns out, when Frank Woodward was there filming for Lovecraft: Fear of the Unknown, he got crap from the Swan Point security, even though he had permission to film). Anyway, it was very pleasant, there among the dead, and we read inscriptions and took photos. The trees were filled with noisy grackles. The air smelled like rain, and the sky was dark.

Afterwards, we drove towards downtown and parked on Point Street and walked out over the bridge across the Providence River. There was a little mist, but no actual rain. Beneath the bridge are the rotting wooden pilings of some manner of old dock or pier, which seems to have been left in place for the multitude of cormorants and gulls that congregate there. The water itself is a little dispiriting. The color of a ripe avocado skin, and with a slightly oily sheen. There were an alarming number of dead fish near the banks (and trash, including Dunkin" Donuts cups and a rusting, half-submerged bicycle). Still, this river must have been much worse off back in the 70s and 80s, before Rhode Island got serious about cleaning up its waterways. After the bridge, we headed back towards home, stopping for a while at White Electric Coffee on Westminster (where they always seem to be playing Patti Smith, whenever I drop by). Having secured our caffeine fix, we checked out a nearby abandoned building that Spooky had been wanting to photograph, the burnt-out ruins of the What Cheer Laundry (or Loutit Laundry) building (ca 1906 and vacant since 1987, partly demolished by a fire in 1991) on the north side of Cranston Street. The entrance surround is comprised of pilasters supporting a broken arched pediment with a panel bearing the words: “What Cheer Laundry” and depicting Roger Williams meeting Native Americans. The air was turning chilly, the day growing late, and afterwards we headed home.

Tuesday night, we watched Scorsese's Gangs of New York (2002) again. I don't think either of us had seen it since we saw it at the Fox in Atlanta in the summer of 2003. Still a beautiful, sublime epic. It had seemed like a good film to follow Miller's Crossing, and left me wanting to go back to Mark Helprin's Winter's Tale (1983). And I think that covers Tuesday fairly well. We took a lot of photographs, and I'll get some up later this week. Oh, and I read, in the June JVP, "The vertebrate fauna of the Upper Permian of Niger. IV. First evidence of a gorgonopsian theraspid."

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Wednesday: Not nearly as interesting as Tuesday, but Spooky made sure I spent most of it out of the house. We wandered about points south of Providence — Warwick, West Warwick, East Greenwich, and Wakefield. We did locate a wonderful little witchcraft shop in West Warwick —— The Bella Earth —— and I got a new pentagram pendant to replace the one I broke a couple of month's back. Unlike, say, The Grateful Heart in Wickford, The Bella Earth isn't a mess of trendy, fluffy bunny, New Agey junk, but is mostly devoted to Wicca.

Last night, we watched the director's cut of Tarantino's Death Proof (2007), which is even cooler than the theatrical cut. Zoe Bell rocks our socks, and the last half hour or so is pure, vengeful fun. Later, I pulled the plug on the Howards End sim in Second life. This decision was hard, and I'm going to write about it in detail in another entry, maybe this evening. I do appreciate all the effort that various people put into it, but, in the end, I'm just too busy, too unwell, too fed up with SL, and...well, like I said, there will be an entry specifically devoted to the termination of the sim project. It was not an easy choice to make. Also, I played a few hours of WoW. Mithwen, my night-elf hunter is at Lvl 23, and is now running missions out of Astranaar in Ashenvale. Meanwhile, Shaharrazad, my blood-elf warlock, has reached Lvl 12, and was just invited to join a guild ("The Flaming Fist"), which includes a couple of Lvl 70 warlocks. Got to bed about three last night, and there was a very brief absence seizure yesterday, but it was hardly a blip. Oh, and I read, again in the June JVP, "Hyaenodon chunkhtensis and the hyaenodontid fauna of the Upper Eocene Ergilin Dzo Formation of Mongolia."

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One last thing before I wrap this up. Spooky stumbled across the trailer and website for Darren Lynn Bousman's forthcoming Repo! The Genetic Opera, and it looks astounding. I have been pretty much unimpressed by Bousman's Saw series (in fact, I saw only the first one, I was so unimpressed, and can't even imagine there are four of the things). But I am greatly intrigued by Repo!. Yeah, sure, you have to ignore the fact of Paris Hilton, but we get to hear Anthony Stewart Head sing again (!!!), and there's Bill Moseley, Nivek Ogre, Poe, Sarah Brightman, Joan Jett, and the whole thing just looks gorgeous. So, we shall see.

Okay. Today, it's back to The Red Tree....

Soooooo...a Joyful Mabon to all those who mark the turning of the Wheel of the Year.

But, I'm making this post because a few of you expressed interest in joining me and Spooky in World of Warcraft. And I discovered this morning that I goofed when I set up my account last Saturday. You may recall, I was in the throes of tooth pain and Oxycodon. Instead of choosing an RP server, I chose a PVP server (Anub'arak). And we didn't catch it until this ayem, which might say something about the usefulness of WoW for actual rp. Anyway, despite the fact that my character, Merricat, was LvL 19+, and Spooky's, Syllahr, was 17+, tonight we started we've both started over on an RP server — Cenarian Circle. My new character looks exactly the same, but is named Mithwen, instead of Merricat, as I was in the mood for Sindarin (Mith = "grey" + the suffix wen, "maiden"). Spooky is still Syllahr, and she says I shouldn't be Tolkien's bitch. But I am. Anyway, as I write this, I've made it back up to Lvl. 8 (since 9:00 pm). And that's the server where we'll be, if anyone is looking for us. Apologies for any inconvenience.

I'll make a real post tomorrow.