When you spoke of the seven wonders and you reached in your coat for your telescope

[sovay]

This was not a bad week. There was the wiped-flat exhaustion from Readercon that I failed to notice until Tuesday or so, but there was also my brother's birthday and Legend of Korra with gaudior and The Blues Brothers (1980) with derspatchel at midnight, which I may now consider the ideal time to start watching that movie. I have been listening to Anaïs Mitchell's Young Man in America (2012), which is a kind of epic cycle of American myth; it's not so much that it pulls back from the archetypal scope of Hadestown (2010) as it is a different way of focusing the same body of music and stories, the stretching shadow of the Depression. Yesterday, however, was a bad day. I got a poem out of it, but it was still a very bad day.

Today, the mail arrived. I am looking at:

1. A certificate for my poem "Tapping the Vine" placing second in the 2011 Dwarf Stars Award.

2. Copies of Gil Adamson's The Outlander (2007) and M.R. James' Casting the Runes and Other Ghost Stories, sent me by handful_ofdust.

3. The Alan Turing T-shirt ajodasso sent me a link to on Tuesday and which I ordered promptly, because I know a necessary item of clothing when I see it.

Okay, universe, I'm sure there's a point in here somewhere.

Have some panoramic views of Mars.

Comments

[three-magpies.livejournal.com]

Best wishes for a better day and thank you for a sharing of Mars.

I was going to tell a story about Turing, but the words are coming slant-wise.. Another day, then.

[sovay]

Best wishes for a better day and thank you for a sharing of Mars.

You're welcome. Mars is too cool not to share.

I was going to tell a story about Turing, but the words are coming slant-wise.. Another day, then.

I can wait. I like stories about Turing. Or it might turn out this one wants to be told slant.

[three-magpies.livejournal.com]

If it comes out at all! Stories and I are a bit murky as of late.

There is a line having to do with indeterminate birds and freshly engineered soil. This I know.

[sovay]

There is a line having to do with indeterminate birds and freshly engineered soil. This I know.

I will wait for that.

[ashlyme.livejournal.com]

Thankee for the Martian vistas! I'm glad you had postal goodness. I hope you feel better now.

The Turing tee looks nice. I zipped through my first reading of this entry and saw "M. R. James T-shirt"; I have a facetious eye.

[sovay]

The Turing tee looks nice. I zipped through my first reading of this entry and saw "M. R. James T-shirt"; I have a facetious eye.

Man, I wish I had an M.R. James T-shirt to point you toward. He'd be so horrified.

[ashlyme.livejournal.com]

I checked, and there are none to be had. Monty can rest easy.

[sovay]

I checked, and there are none to be had. Monty can rest easy.

I really just want a shirt now that reads, "Oh, Whistle, and I'll Come to You, My Lad."

[moon-custafer.livejournal.com]

I always want to follow that up with "You know how to whistle, don't you?..."

[ashlyme.livejournal.com]

Yes! You could have that on the back of the shirt.

An acquaintance wrote a Jamesian pastiche entitled "A Warning to the Bi-Curious"; I haven't had the courage to read it yet.

[sovay]

Yes! You could have that on the back of the shirt.

Can you make this shirt happen?

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

That Mars panorama is fabulous. So hard to wrap my mind around the thought that that's a whole nother planet. I can't get there from here. But it's there. Looking like a place I could walk to, given enough time.

[sovay]

I can't get there from here. But it's there. Looking like a place I could walk to, given enough time.

Poem! Why should selidor have the monopoly on astronomy!

[selidor]

Exactly! Seconding poem-ness. MOAR MARS.

[ap-aelfwine.livejournal.com]

I'm sorry for the dies horribilis, and I hope today will be a better. I'm glad there at least wasn't a bad week before it.

Congratulations on the certificate! I'm happy for the books and t-shirt.

Thanks for the views of Mars! (I know, intellectually, that I'll not, but on some level every time I see something like this I hope I'll suddenly see thoats and flyers and red and green people, or at least a wooden landship under sail, with a snarling-beast figurehead and wheels spun of crystalline wire.)

[sovay]

(I know, intellectually, that I'll not, but on some level every time I see something like this I hope I'll suddenly see thoats and flyers and red and green people, or at least a wooden landship under sail, with a snarling-beast figurehead and wheels spun of crystalline wire.)

I think it's awesome that it's actual Mars. We know what the fantasies look like. The real thing is (flat, red, it doesn't matter: it's not a controlled environment) unpredictable.

(That said, you could totally write about a rover reaching fantastic Mars.)

[ap-aelfwine.livejournal.com]

I think it's awesome that it's actual Mars. We know what the fantasies look like. The real thing is (flat, red, it doesn't matter: it's not a controlled environment) unpredictable.

Well, yes, it is awesome.

I suppose that as much as anything else I find it amusing that, despite having known about the real Mars (or at least the then-current understanding of the same) since before I knew any of the fantastic versions, I still wish, on some level, for one of the fantastic versions, or at least something like,* a place with languages I could learn and artefacts I could analyse.

(That said, you could totally write about a rover reaching fantastic Mars.)

Good point!

I don't seem to be any good at writing anything but sappy romance, silly comedy, and the combination of the two, but it could be worth trying, sometime.**

*I'm very fond of Alexander Jablokov's 24th Century Mars (seen peripherally in Carve the Sky (1991) and directly in River of Dust (1997)), which has had underground colonies for a few hundred years. You could do archaeology there, and not only chasing possible traces of the Acherusians (might-or-might-not-be-real million-years-absent aliens). The (thoroughly human) Martians are people who eat vanilla-flavoured porridge for breakfast, who learn swordplay as soon as they can walk, and whose emergency rations are brutally over-spiced. They'd be overwhelming to live amongst, but I wish I could meet a few.
**Of course, it has been done. My favourite (and I hope I'm not bringing up someone who's been rude to you or to any friend of yours) is probably the S.M. Stirling version from In the Courts of the Crimson Kings (2008) where the Viking probe ends up being hauled aboard a landship and taken away to the nearest university, whose scholars pay the ship's crew a small fortune for it.

[nineweaving.livejournal.com]

Nice haul! For some reason, when I look at Mars I get the Wallace & Gromit theme tune runningmthrough my head...

Nine

[sovay]

Nice haul!

The fact that my friends know to send me links to Alan Turing T-shirts makes me very happy. The fact that the company obligingly same-week ships them is a bonus.

For some reason, when I look at Mars I get the Wallace & Gromit theme tune running through my head...

Nah, that would be a panorama of the moon.

[handful-ofdust.livejournal.com]

Whoo-hoo! How excellent they got there that quickly; I hope you enjoy them both.

Yeah, it's been a weird week over here--constant rain, which was fun for a while in that it finally broke the heat, but then became wearing. Still, today I netted a truly outrageous haul of stuff from various DVD stores, including a Civil War zombie film, a cult movie about LSD that makes all your hair fall out, a copy of Jose Ramon Larraz's Vampyres, a 1980s adaptation of Stoker's The Jewel of Seven Stars in which Charlton Heston falls in love with his own daughter, The Big Easy, the Criterion copy of Roeg's Walkabout, MIchael Winterbottom's Code 46, Nina Paley's Sita Sings the Blues, Ken Russell's Altered States and the legendary Queen of Black Magic, an Indonesian film featuring a pennanggalan.

[sovay]

Still, today I netted a truly outrageous haul of stuff from various DVD stores, including a Civil War zombie film, a cult movie about LSD that makes all your hair fall out, a copy of Jose Ramon Larraz's Vampyres, a 1980s adaptation of Stoker's The Jewel of Seven Stars in which Charlton Heston falls in love with his own daughter, The Big Easy, the Criterion copy of Roeg's Walkabout, MIchael Winterbottom's Code 46, Nina Paley's Sita Sings the Blues, Ken Russell's Altered States and the legendary Queen of Black Magic, an Indonesian film featuring a pennanggalan.

PENANGGALAN!

. . . you're right, that's ridiculous. Damn. Enjoy!

[strange-selkie.livejournal.com]

You aten't dead. There is that. And I'm tossing things around for the magazine of That Nice Mr. Benson.

[sovay]

You aten't dead. There is that.

I do think this is a preferable outcome.

And I'm tossing things around for the magazine of That Nice Mr. Benson.

Huzzah!

[ashlyme.livejournal.com]

*Huzzah*

Seconded! That's good to hear.

[clarionj.livejournal.com]

I'm coming here late and hope the days have improved! Congratulations on the poem award. You continue to fill the world with tactile beauty in your words.

(So strange how your poetry, and no one else's I can think of, always makes me imagine eating the images. Okay, that sounds weird, but it's like trees in fall. There is something so striking in that color that...it's not that I taste flavor, but ...what? Maybe it's a return to infancy and the suckling, the need to experience the new by putting it in our mouths? Or maybe it's that I feel I've consumed something? Your words, phrasings, images ...well, I didn't make this any less weird, did I.)

[sovay]

Congratulations on the poem award. You continue to fill the world with tactile beauty in your words.

Thank you! Yes, I think things have been improving. I just haven't been writing much about them. I should.

So strange how your poetry, and no one else's I can think of, always makes me imagine eating the images. Okay, that sounds weird, but it's like trees in fall. There is something so striking in that color that...it's not that I taste flavor, but ...what?

I am happy to be a conduit for synesthesia. It's one of the ways I think.