in the pines

moving house

2009-10-31T11:57:00.002-04:00

It's been fun, but I am itchy for new digs. So I'm giving wordpress a whirl over here.

Mammoth Book of Best New Horror #20

2009-09-19T09:17:00.006-04:00

The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror #20, which includes my story "These Things We Have Always Known," is out--I received my contributors' copies yesterday and its release is being celebrated in a book launch signing at British Fantasycon today (even as I write this, I believe. Hurry over there! Free glass of wine with each copy purchased!), where I would like to be right now, but despite all my cursing and rending of garments, a box of cash did not in fact materialize where none had been before, so instead I'm watching the rain outside my window in Athens, Georgia. Which, you know, is not so bad, as these things go.

Anyway, Best New Horror is a reprint anthology of editor Stephen Jones's picks for the best horror stories of the year. (That would be 2008.) While you can buy it at Amazon, Amazon UK, and all the usual suspects, the UK cover pictured above is much prettier than the US one, although the maggoty grinning demon on the US cover does have a certain retro-80s charm, I suppose.

This is my third appearance in a volume of Best New Horror, an anthology series I've been reading since its inception, and I'm always happy and honored to be in such fine company:

Stephen Jones – Introduction: Horror in 2008

Peter Crowther – Front Page McGuffin And The Greater Story Never Told
Simon Strantzas – It Runs Beneath The Surface
Lynda E. Rucker – These Things We Have Always Known
Neil Gaiman – Feminine Endings
Gary McMahon – Through The Cracks
Tim Lebbon – Falling Off The World
Paul Finch – The Old Traditions Are Best
Ramsey Campbell – The Long Way
Michael Bishop – The Pile
Tanith Lee – Under Fog
Christopher Fowler – Arkangel
Ian R. MacLeod – The Camping Wainwrights
Reggie Oliver – A Donkey At The Mysteries
Steve Duffy – The Oram County Whoosit
Stephen King – The New York Times At Special Bargain Rates
Sarah Pinborough – Our Man In The Sudan
Mark Samuels – Destination Nihil by Edmund Bertrand
Albert E. Cowdrey – The Overseer
Pinckney Benedict – The Beginnings Of Sorrow
Brian Lumley – The Place Of Waiting
Steve Rasnic Tem – 2:PM The Real Estate Agent Arrives

Stephen Jones & Kim Newman – Necrology: 2008

Vincent Chong did that nice cover art on the UK edition.

Homeless Moon Chapbook 2

2009-07-22T09:37:00.002-04:00

Once again (twice in one week! Lordy!), I'm interrupting the peaceful, meditative silence of this blog, this time to point out that my compatriots over at The Homeless Moon (aka Erin Hoffman, Jason S. Ridler, Justin Howe, Michael J. DeLuca, and Scott Anderson) have released a second chapbook, which you can download for free or order in hardcopy at a nominal price. I suggest you check it out. I bet you won't be disappointed!

Moon Landing Monday

2009-07-20T09:00:00.001-04:00

Happy Fortieth Anniversary, Apollo 11 Moon Landing!

Check this site out: We Choose the Moon, a real-time re-creation of the mission.

Scientific American has a big moon special happening on their website, but I particularly enjoyed an article in the July print issue, "From the Moon to Mars," by Harrison H. Schmidt, the only geologist--in fact, the only scientist--to do field work on the moon. Right now, I'm reading Kim Stanley Robinson's Red Mars and really, really digging it, so the prospect of going to Mars "perhaps in the mid-2030s," as the article mentions, has me all excited.

Last space-related PSA of the day: If you haven't already, go see Duncan Jones's Moon. It's one of the best science-fiction movies I've ever seen (frankly, good science fiction films are truly few and far between), and Sam Rockwell is amazing in it. I used to worry about what would happen to a kid named Zowie Bowie, but it turns out he'll grow up to be Duncan Jones and do very very well for himself indeed.

those who sleep under the sun, the soil and the olive trees of spain

2009-06-10T22:06:00.003-04:00

A moving video about the seven surviving International Brigade volunteers who traveled to the Spanish embassy in London this week to receive honorary Spanish citizenship, seventy years later. Veterans recount their experiences and speak with pride of their service.

Space Shuttle Monday

2009-05-11T11:12:00.003-04:00

Weather permitting, the space shuttle Atlantis launches at 2 p.m. today. Part of their mission will be repairing the Hubble Space Telescope, which over the past two decades has given us astonishing images such as the ones you can see here. You can follow the launch progress over at NASA TV.

This week's New Yorker has a story from JG Ballard, "The Autobiography of J.G.B."

This article from the Guardian wonders whether, as the worldwide economic crisis takes its toll, emigration will once again become a way of life in Ireland.

And elsewhere in the Guardian, a piece on George Orwell's writing of 1984. I first read this book when I was about eleven or twelve, which was kind of traumatizing but also insured that its ideas became a seminal part of how I view the uses and abuses of power and the deployment of propaganda. After a chilling reread back in late 2007, I became pretty sure that the administration which was in power at that time had adopted some tactics straight from Orwell's dystopia.

I didn't mean to end on such a depressing note. Check out those pictures of the universe again; they have a way of putting the petty deeds of humans in perspective.

rainy Monday links, or -0p[rq1,mmEDdde

2009-05-04T09:38:00.006-04:00

The alternate title of this post is courtesy of my cat, whom I just found sprawled comfortably on the keyboard when I returned from getting more coffee. He obviously thinks there's something to it, so it stays.

There's a soft tropical quality to the late spring and summer rains here I'd forgotten about. My window's open and everything smells alive. I love it.

Without further ado, what I've enjoyed reading this rainy Monday morning:

Going Dutch: How I Learned to Love the European Welfare State Grabbed from a friend of mine who posted it on her facebook page. How the Dutch combine capitalism and socialism. Yes, it can be done.

Bright Lights Film Journal gives a thoughtful, favorable review of Charlie Kaufman and Hollywood's Merry Band of Pranksters, Fabulists, and Dreamers. You know you can still buy your copy in the US, the UK, or anywhere else Amazon's tendrils reach--although naturally, you should purchase it from your local brick-and-mortar--preferably independent--if at all possible.

Despite the Maoists' rise to legitimate power in Nepal, the government is still in crisis, the streets of Kathmandu still fill with protesters. Aside from the fact that outside of Nepal, being a Maoist has got to be a pretty lonely position to stake out these days, transforming from a revolutionary to a politician is almost never easy, it seems. Vaclav Havel did all right but I think he's a bit of an exception.

Happy May Day!

2009-05-01T08:16:00.004-04:00

photo by Derek Hill

One year ago today D and I marched through Malaga, Spain in the May Day parade. The sun was hot and the sky was a flawless blue. This is my favorite picture of that day. Workers of the world unite!

Best New Horror #20

2009-04-28T11:02:00.000-04:00

Last week I learned that Stephen Jones is buying my story "These Things We Have Always Known," which appeared in Black Static #8, for this year's volume of The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror. It's the twentieth appearance of the anthology and my third time to be selected, and, as always, I'm very excited to be included. I've been reading this series from its beginnings and quite a few writers I admire have made their way into its pages over the year. The book will be out this fall.

a little light reading

2009-04-28T11:00:00.000-04:00

Here are some links I've been meaning to post for a few days:

The New Yorker has a really interesting article on Edgar Allan Poe--and the economy of horror fiction.

Shortly before his death at 96, British union leader Jack Jones talks about his time in the International Brigades during the Spanish Civil War.

The Guardian has published J.G. Ballard's last short story.

ballard

2009-04-19T15:24:00.005-04:00

J.G. Ballard wrote what I have long thought one of the best opening lines I've ever read:

Later, as he sat on his balcony eating the dog, Dr. Robert Laing reflected on the unusual events that had taken place within this huge apartment building during the previous three months.

That's from his novel High Rise. If I had to pick a favorite it would probably be the weird post-apocalyptic imagery of The Crystal World. But I've probably only read about half of his total output. Reading Ballard was never a comfortable experience: those bleak assessments of humanity and the modern world, his savage extrapolations of our love affairs with technology, his brutal near-future dystopias (sometimes as near as the day after tomorrow, it seemed). His essays and the interviews he gave were at least as intriguing as the fiction he wrote.

I knew he was quite ill yet somehow news of his death still comes as a shock. He was writing to the very end and I think that's the sort of thing we all hope for (whatever it is that you do with passion). But he was one of my favorites and he was an original and I think he is a voice that we need, but of course those voices always fall silent eventually.

J.G. Ballard 15 November 1930 - 19 April 2009

promises, promises

2009-04-08T12:11:00.004-04:00

A couple of days ago I bought a bag of chips (that's crisps for my peeps back in Ireland) which not only claimed to be "Tuscan Three-Cheese" flavored (okay), but also promised, in writing across the front of the package, that they were "a Mediterranean vacation in a bag."

The chips were pretty tasty, but I'm sorry to report that, much to my surprise, they did not in fact transport me to the sunny shores of Catalunya.

Hm. If only those Lays brand jamón-flavored potato chips you can get all over Spain were available around here--I'm sure that would do the trick.

six weeks

2009-03-08T11:44:00.003-04:00

Six weeks ago we rolled out of bed in our Dublin hotel, popped a protesting kitty back into his despised Sherpa carrier, and caught a taxi to the airport. As we sat in the airport, as our departure time neared, the thought of leaving Ireland, and Europe in general, weighed upon me more and more heavily. I felt like I couldn't breathe. We boarded the plane, it trundled down the runway, and tears gathered in my eyes and spilled down my face.

Now, there are some wonderful things about being back in the US for us, don't get me wrong. The weather in Athens is lovely and sunny and warm right now (except for that little matter of seven inches of snow last weekend, but we'll just pass right on by that anomaly). The cost of living is considerably cheaper when you're living off US dollars and salaries (although of course the dollar is now worth more against the euro than it was the entire year we were over there--grrr!). I love love love the old house we found and that we both have quiet private spaces to work and our big backyard and being reunited with our books again (although as one might expect, we're finding that we did make a few mistakes in The Great Book Purge of 2008). I'm really excited about seeing old friends again and doing a lot of travelling here in the Southeast and along the East Coast. And did I mention the Mexican food?

Having said all that, now that the chaos of the last few weeks has begun to slowly recede into something resembling normalcy (I said resembling--there is, for example, a stack of unpacked boxes next to me as I write this and nowhere to put their contents, because furniture is scarce at the moment)--I am missing our friends in Ballinamore and I am missing something indefinable about the way people treat one another in Ireland. And I'm missing Spain and walking on the beach in Barcelona, which we were doing this time a year ago, and--I'm just missing it, being over there instead of here.

And yet I sound mournful but I'm not. I know mournful--I know all too well that feeling when the wanderlust lodges itself somewhere under my ribcage and just hurts, when I have to make myself stop reading or even thinking about other places because I know I'm not going travelling anytime soon and it's sort of like a phantom limb, the pain of absence and loss, of something that should be there and isn't and aches so unbearably. I don't feel like that. What I feel is a happy anticipation of what's ahead, of travels to come and going to places old and new.

I've got wandering on the brain, though, and to that end I've added a new link on the sidebar, travel and expat journals I like a lot. Some of them, like the two Spain journals, I've only discovered in the past year; others, I've been reading for a while and Wired 2 the World the longest of all, for a good 10 years, since the couple took their round-the-world journey. The travellers and expats that write them are singles and couples and families; they are different ages and write from a number of different perspectives, but they're all lively and interesting and engaged in the world around them. Check them out. Plan your own journey. See the world. Be alive.

Uncle Monty's cottage

2009-03-03T09:44:00.003-05:00

Twenty-some years after its making, I'm not sure if we can yet refer to Withnail and I as a classic film, but certainly another decade or so will do it. At any rate, I noticed a few weeks ago that Uncle Monty's cottage had been listed for sale. Now a fellow's bought it, one who sees the place as a cultural treasure and wants to restore it (though, one presumes, not too much!), preserving even the graffiti scribbled about the walls that fans of the film have left behind over the years. He's talking Wordsworth (it is the Lake District, after all). We can only guess how Mr. Wordsworth would feel about being spoken of in the same breath as Bruce Robinson's black comedy, but you can tour the cottage with the new owner (graffiti included) here.

higgledy-piggledy!

2009-03-01T04:17:00.007-05:00

It's March already! And it's been so long since I've posted, I'm just gonna jump right in here, and it'll get better from here on out.

1. Apologies to anyone local or faraway who I've been neglecting. It's not you, it's me. It's been a really difficult, chaotic move. I mean, not bad or traumatic or anything, but high on the pain-in-the-assedness index. It's only the last few days I've started to catch my breath and sort of feel like myself again.

2. I've been catching up with some movies I missed while I was away, via Netflix. My favorites so far are also among my most-anticipated: Woody Allen's Vicky Cristina Barcelona (although I was mildly annoyed by the fact that characters kept mentioning Catalan culture and identity but no one seemed to speak Catalan--including the purported Catalans--and the culture seemed wholly Spanish, not Catalan. But otherwise I loved it) and Persepolis, a film adaptation of Marjane Satrapi's graphic novel about growing up in post-revolutionary Iran. I have more to say about both of these films, but who am I kidding? I'll probably never get around to saying it here. Or maybe I'll surprise myself.

Also, Let the Right One In, which I was actually able to catch at Athens Cine, is one of the most moving and horrific horror films I've ever seen. Every time I think there can't possibly by any stretch of the imagination be any life left in the vampire trope (life left? vampire? get it? sorry...) someone proves me wrong.

3. My friend Dave Schwartz got nominated for a Nebula for his first novel, Superpowers! This book came out right around the time I got to Ireland and I tried to get the Ballinamore library to order it, but they never did. See, they should have, because now it's a Nebula nominee. Come on, Ballinamore library!

4. Speaking of Ballinamore, I've been having strange dreams in which various residents of Ballinamore appear in the usual unlikely dream situations.

I've been daydreaming, on the other hand, about Spain: just the other day I closed my eyes and I was back in the Plaza Larga on that sunny afternoon we sat on a bench people-watching, Spaniards and Romanys and hippies and junkies all going about their business and I said something like, "This would be a good place to disappear," which is exactly what I went on to have my poor character try and do in the story that will someday appear in the Apparitions anthology over there in my sidebar.

I remember those moments sitting in the plaza as among the most perfect of my life, as a part of those jeweled moments of absolute awareness and contentment that travel gives me every once in a while. They are usually mundane, utterly unremarkable, completely magical.

And one year ago today, we touched down at the airport in sunny Barcelona from rainy London.

5. February wasn't bad but it was....(hm, already used chaotic. Google a synonym for chaotic and get: anarchic, disordered, disorganized, every which way, harum-scarum, helter-skelter [yikes!], higgledy-piggledy (best word of all!), rampageous [I am not familiar with this word but I like it and will use it in a sentence as soon as I am able], riotus, topsy-turvy, tumultous, turbulent, upside-down. Yes, yes, and yes, it was all these things.) I'm planning on having a much better March.

status update, usa version

2009-01-31T05:00:00.000-05:00

We're doing well. It's sunny here. We have a deposit down on a gorgeous house. The kitty traveled well and is busy taking things over at my mom's house. We miss the hell out of our friends in Ballinamore, and frankly, the "security" at the Atlanta airport almost had us booking the next flight right back. Once we realized, as D pointed out, we don't have to live at the Atlanta airport, we settled down a little bit. (But we'd like to officially apologize on behalf of our xenophobic government to all you poor foreign visitors who have been treated like criminals flying in to Atlanta. If it makes you feel any better, they don't treat citizens much better. What a horrifying intro to the land o' the free.)

One thing many people probably don't know about me is just how dear to my heart the town of Athens, Georgia is. I never thought I'd live here again. I'm really happy to be here now. The sun has been shining for days! I need sunglasses! But I still wish I had a tardis so I could step through space and time and into McGirl's this weekend.

More soon, once I'm better settled.

one week

2009-01-18T09:35:00.005-05:00

photo by Liz Lennon

It's hard to believe that in a week's time I'll be an on airplane headed back to the U.S., even though we've known this for many weeks now. This wasn't part of our original plan. But times and circumstances change, and the best-laid plans, etc. etc.

The good news is, it's been a remarkable year, and we'll be back in Ballinamore soon. That's why the banner in the above photo says Goodbye for now. Our friends here gave us the best of send-offs last night, from the food and drink at Maggie's beforehand to the surprise of McGirl's-turned-disco-bar (!) (sorry, regulars!). Smoke machine! Disco lights! Music! And a farewell banner! There are no words for the kindness of the farewell we've received. You can see the whole night in photos here.

And earlier in the week, Gabriel, whose wife Dee runs a shop up the street called The Forge, took us on a tour of County Leitrim--photos here. I'm going to miss it so much. All the people we've met here--too many to list you all without leaving someone out. The welcome you've all given us. The way you've made it feel like home. We didn't mean to leave so soon. We'll be back as soon as we can. Slán go foill.

snow was general all over ireland

2009-01-18T07:38:00.003-05:00

Last night and in the wee hours of the morning the snow fell, beautiful swirling fluffy white flakes, and when I woke up this morning it blanketed the ground outside, even though it's mostly melted now. It made me wish I could recall from memory the gorgeous final paragraph of James Joyce's "The Dead," nine sentences that make up one of my favorite closing passages in all literature...and which have always made me long to see an Irish snowfall:

A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.

3. Blood From a Stone

2009-01-12T15:16:00.005-05:00

At the beginning of the summer, my neighbor loaned me a stack of Donna Leon's Venice-set Inspector Brunetti mysteries, and I've been reading my way through a good chunk of the series ever since. With Brunetti, we trawl the seedy underbelly of Venice and of Italian bureaucracy; as in most of the crime and mystery fiction I enjoy, justice does not always prevail. Despite the cynicism, Leon's books are still a bit lighter than much of my usual fare in the genre: Brunetti takes pleasure and refuge in his family (his wife Paola is a left-wing professor of American literature), good food, good wine, and his two friends at the Questura--his fellow policeman Vianello and the indefatigable Signora Elettra, who, in the guise of a department secretary, hacks into systems all over Italy and (sometimes) keeps Brunetti's corrupt boss Patta at bay.

Blood from a Stone begins with the execution-style murder of a vu cumpra--one of the many African street vendors who entice tourists with knockoff designer goods--and wends its way through a web of international corruption and conspiracy. While this wasn't among my favorites of the series, Leon's always satisfying, always entertaining, and always leaves me with a bitter undertaste to counter the mouth-watering meals Brunetti enjoys as he relentlessly pursues his often-hopeless cases.

From the book:

When Rubini showed up more than ten minutes later, a stack of files in his hands, he explained that the delay was caused by his having searched for the file containing all of the photos that had been taken of the Africans who had been arrested in the last year. "We're supposed to photograph them every time we arrest them," he explained.

"Supposed to?" Brunetti asked.

Rubini set a large stack of papers on Brunetti's desk and sat down. From Murano, Rubini had been on the force for more than two decades, and, like Vianello, had moved up through the ranks slowly, perhaps blocked by the same refusal to curry favor with the men in power. Tall and so thin as to seem emaciated, Rubini was in fact a passionate rower and every year was among the first ten to cross the finish line of the Vogalonga.

"We did at the beginning, but after a while it seemed a waste of time to take the photo of a man we'd arrested six or seven times and who we say hello to on the street." He pushed the papers closer to Brunetti and added, "We call them tu by now, and they address us all by name."

Brunetti pulled the papers towards him. "Why do you still bother?"

"What, to arrest them?"

Brunetti nodded.

"Dottor Patta wants arrests, so we go and arrest them. It makes the statistics look good."

Blood From a Stone on Amazon UK

perigee moon

2009-01-10T06:37:00.003-05:00

Be sure to step out and take a look at the moon tonight, preferably when it's on the horizon, before it's fully risen in the sky. It's the biggest full moon of 2009. In addition to its brightness and its size, cold weather perigee moons often produce wonderful optical effects like halos.

black static #8 review

2009-01-09T11:00:00.004-05:00

Here is a review of Black Static #8 which includes nice words about my story, "These Things We Have Always Known" (and nice words about the rest of the stories as well).

I haven't actually seen the issue yet (or any issue of Black Static, for that matter), as I had it sent to a US address I'll be at in a couple of weeks' time. I'm really looking forward to checking out the other stories in it by my fellow contributors: Patrick Samphire, Steve Rasnic Tem, James Cooper, Steven Pirie, and Gary Fry.

2. Oryx and Crake

2009-01-05T13:33:00.007-05:00

Snowman lives in a tree, naked but for a sheet, cleverly avoiding vicious, genetically engineered animals run amuck and watching over a group of not-quite-humans...while their children raid the nearby beach for mysterious objects:

...a hubcap, a piano key, a chunk of pale green pop bottle smoothed by the ocean. A plastic BlyssPluss container, empty; a ChickieNobs Bucket O'Nubbins, ditto. A computer mouse, or the busted remains of one, with a long wiry tail.

Snowman feels like weeping. What can he tell them? There's no way of explaining to them what these curious items are, or were.

As far as Snowman knows, he's the only human left alive--and thus the only person who remembers the time before. The time before is the late twenty-first century, and it's recognizable to those of us living at the beginning of it: bioengineering, internet porn, elaborate video games, global warming, an obsession with the material, with youth, with eternal life. The schism between the have- and have-nots is so great that the former now reside, shop, go to school, live their entire lives in heavily guarded compounds, emerging only to take a bullet train through the pleeblands to another equally guarded compound. Now, seemingly thanks to Crake (but we don't yet know how), all that is gone. There's just Snowman and his Crakers, for whom Snowman weaves elaborate myths about a godlike Crake--and Onyx, their teacher.

This is the second time Margaret Atwood has used a speculative premise in one of her novels. (And the only two novels I've read by her are the speculative ones.) She prefers not to call it science fiction and I don't really care one way or the other; you can find all sorts of fuss about this on the internet if you bother googling. I'm not interested in defending or attacking her, but this 2005 piece from the Guardian does clarify somewhat her distinction. Beyond that, I want to lie down and die of boredom when these sorts of kerfuffles are raised, so if you're interested in pursuing it further I suggest the aforementioned power of google. I do want to note that it seems to me that some readers of genre science fiction (of which I am one) tend to approach her with big chips on their shoulders and nitpick her to death. I like The Handmaid's Tale, and I like Oryx and Crake, and that may be down to my love of post-apocalyptic and dystopian fiction and my ignorance of the sf genre compared to, I guess, someone deeply immersed in fandom. Or something.

I did find one review (lots of spoilers, so beware) of Oryx and Crake which reflected my own feelings pretty well, although I found the ending more successful than the reviewer did and my feelings about the characters Oryx and Crake were the reverse of hers: I found Oryx to be underdeveloped in comparison to Crake. The review also mentions that other reviewers tended to overlook the novel's satire. This surprised me; that the book is satirical seemed obvious to me, and the satire was effective. (For some reason I feel compelled to mention Mike Judge's flawed but often very funny film Idiocracy here. Really, it's got nothing to do with the Atwood book at all, but it does hilariously extrapolate from present-day lowest-common-denominator entertainment, as Atwood does to less hilarious ends. And that is probably the first and last time you will ever read a reference to Idiocracy and Oryx and Crake in the same piece!)

Among other things, Oryx and Crake is a cautionary tale about the path we're on, about the perils of playing God. But to suggest that it is primarily a didactic or cautionary text is to do it a disservice. It's an engaging mystery (I read it over just two days) and an effectively imagined dystopia, and it's intriguing to watch Atwood take two unlikeable characters--Snowman and Crake--and make them sympathetic. Well, Snowman, at least; Crake becomes less enigmatic as the story goes on, and perhaps that's the best we can hope for from such a figure.

I really liked the book a lot, enough that I think that in 2009 I'm finally going to look beyond Atwood's speculative fiction and seek out some of her other work.

From the book:

When they weren't playing games they'd surf the Net--drop in on old favorites, see what was new. They'd watch open-heart surgery in live time, or else the Noodie News, which was good for a few minutes because the people on it tried to pretend there was nothing unusual going on and studiously avoided looking at one another's jujubes.

Or they'd watch animal snuff sites, Felicia's Frog Squash and the like, though these quickly grew repetitious: one stomped frog, one cat being torn apart by hand, was much like another. Or they'd watch dirtysockpuppets.com, a current affairs show about world political leaders. Crake said that with digital genalteration you couldn't tell whether any of these generals and whatnot existed any more, and if they did, whether they'd actually said what you'd heard. Anyway they were toppled and replaced with such rapidity that it hardly mattered.

Or they might watch hedsoff.com, which played live coverage of executions in Asia. There they could see enemies of the people being topped with swords in someplace that looked like China, while thousands of spectators cheered. Or they could watch alibooboo.com, with various supposed thieves having their hands cut off and adulterers and lipstick-wearers being stoned to death by howling crowds, in dusty enclaves that purported to be in fundamentalist countries in the Middle East.

Oryx and Crake website--including an interview and essay
Oryx and Crake on Amazon UK

1. That They May Face the Rising Sun

2009-01-04T06:30:00.009-05:00

Hm, I wonder if I could manage to write a little something about all the books I read in 2009. Probably not. Let's find out!

John McGahern was a local (County Leitrim) writer. When I first arrived here several people mentioned him to me and I hadn't heard of him; then, as happens sometimes when you learn a new word and suddenly it's everywhere, I started seeing his name and books all over the place, touted as one of the finest Irish writers and one of the great writers of the twentieth century, period. I have a pretty decent sense of modern Irish literature; how on earth did I manage to completely miss McGahern? Am I blind? I felt pretty stupid and set out to remedy my ignorance.

That They May Face the Rising Sun was published in 2001, the last novel McGahern wrote before his death in 2006. (His Memoir, which I have yet to read, came out in 2005.) In the US it can be found under the decidedly less evocative and effective title By the Lake. It's a quiet, moving little novel, funny in places and melancholy in others, a chronicle of a year in the life of an Anglo-Irish couple living by one of Leitrim's many lakes, a tale of their neighbors and the town and the way of life that persists in this part of Ireland. McGahern doesn't date his tale but I'm guessing it's set in the 1990s. Characters may watch Blind Date on the television now but it's still weddings and funerals, and the cycle of haymaking and lambing, that mark the passage of time and bring significance to people's lives. I think that having lived in Leitrim for some months now I read this novel differently than someone unfamiliar with the setting might: I recognized people and places and ways of doing and being. McGahern is a keen observer of people and how they live alongside one another, the stories they tell, the things they say and often more importantly do not say. A gorgeous and deeply humane book--I say humane because of his exquisite, insightful portraits of the people: Jamesie and Mary, Bill Evans, the Shah, Johnny and the dreadful John Quinn and Patrick Ryan and Frank Dodd and all the others, vivid as the life outside my front door on High Street, Ballinamore. Highly recommended.

From the book:

Ruttledge left Jamesie and Mary to the early morning train. They were going to Dublin for the whole week of Christmas. Though he arrived early at the house they were already waiting, their suitcases and parcels on the doorsteps, the two dogs crying in their house, the key in the outside of the door ready to be locked, the brown hens shut in their house within the netting wire.

"Put yourself to no trouble," Jamesie raised his hand in a gesture that meant Ruttledge was free to do whatever he wanted to do about the place while they were absent.

Among all the bags and parcels on their doorstep there was only one medium-sized suitcase with their own belongings and clothes. Everything else was presents, the plucked turkey, the plum pudding, even the rare bottle of White Powers.

"We'll taste it in Dublin. Too good for us. No good for us here on our own."

Since they went to Dublin for their son's wedding seventeen years ago, a single night hadn't been spent away from the house. There was about them a spiritual quality, as if they were going forth as supplicants or communicants rather than to the small diesel train that would take them to Dublin in a couple of hous.

"The poor fellas," Mary said of the protesting dogs as they drove away. "They don't like to be closed in. They know full well that something is happening." Then she withdrew into herself, but Jamesie named every house they passed, not with his usual fierce interest but as if it were a recitation of prayer, until it began to irritate Mary. "You'd think it was to America he was going."

"Or to heaven," Ruttledge said.

"Much more likely the other place."

happy christmas to all

2008-12-26T06:27:00.004-05:00

Although there are things I miss a great deal about Christmas in the US--homemade eggnog from my grandmother's recipe, sausage cheese balls, the real white Christmas that Portland got this year--there are two things about Christmas over here that are far superior to Christmas over there.

1. The Doctor Who Christmas special on Christmas Day!! I'm pretty sure that the excitement of Christmas itself combined with this would have given me heart failure as a kid. It was a good one, too. Cybermen in Victorian England!

2. Sherry trifle. (That is not the excellent trifle that Liz made yesterday and it doesn't have sherry in it. It is, however, the trifle I plan on making as soon as I have a kitchen bigger than a postage stamp.)

journeys near and far

2008-12-20T06:43:00.005-05:00

A good traveling story: 40 years after the fact, an Australian man repays (with interest) the 5 pounds lent to him as a penniless traveler.

Also 40 years on--this Christmas is the anniversary of Apollo 8's moon orbit! Some iconic photos on this NASA page, as well as a link to the November 13 webcast: an evening with the Apollo 8 astronauts.

As for wonder right here on old planet Earth, check the Guardian's gallery of the aurora borealis.

not so wonderful

2008-12-19T09:06:00.003-05:00

Despite my affection for Jimmy Stewart, I've long thought the Christmas classic It's a Wonderful Life, far from being a heart-warming, life-affirming drama, was one of the most depressing films I've ever seen. Over at The New York Times, Wendell Jamieson agrees with me.

december afternoon

2008-12-18T06:26:00.000-05:00

I wrote this last Thursday, but I forgot to post it. So here it is a week late, on a different Thursday.

It's like a Portland December day here in Ballinamore: the ice and frost is gone and it's drizzly, dark, and wet. But beautiful, too; as I was walking down the High Street the mist had begun to creep in, shrouding the treetops and enveloping the bottom of the town. The Christmas lights twinkled like little beacons all along the street. It looked like the picture in my mind's eye of the quintessential Irish village as winter sets in.

thursbitch

2008-12-17T12:20:00.001-05:00

Alan Garner is one of my favorite writers, and I've waited years to read Thursbitch; it wasn't published in the US, and I could've ordered it from Amazon UK but first I had no money and then I had no time and I knew we'd be coming over this way anyhow so I thought I'd pick it up here. Of course, by the time we got to London the exchange rate was so appalling I still couldn't justify the expense. Let's hear it for the Ballinamore library!

I read Thursbitch in one sitting last night, as befits its brevity (158 pages) and intensity. Garner's sparse, poetic language is always hypnotic, and he's outdone himself with Thursbitch. It's vaguely reminsicent of his earlier Red Shift (inexplicably published as a novel for children), and it's about death and time and the English landscape and pagan rites, but as always with Garner, to imagine you are describing one of his novels by relating a bare sequence of events is to do the poorest sort of justice to his work. Garner is a brilliant refutation to the absurd assertion that style is separable from substance (as if a debate pitting one against the other has any sort of merit in the first place).

I have been trying to remember today who said of Arthur Machen's The White People (another favorite of mine) that (and I paraphrase, greatly) among all supernatural literature, it feels the most like one has stumbled upon a true account of an encounter with some sort of otherness, as if Machen merely discovered and published this young girl's breathless and unsettling tale of losing herself in something unspeakably ancient and alien and unknowable. Thursbitch gave me that feeling; it's very different in form, of course, from the pages of a young girl's journal presented in The White People, and Machen is equal parts fascinated and repelled by his subject matter, while Garner embraces his landscapes, his driven protaganists, and the forces that compel them. But as Thursbitch unfolds, in its spare style, every word chosen with care, rewarding the careful and patient reader with quiet revelation, it feels like a direct encounter with the numinous.

The book warns you before you even begin. The page just before the narrative itself begins is blank but for the admonition Go back. What was must never be. And there you are, already lost. And later you raise your head as you close it and you feel somehow surprised that the world is still there, and quite certain it's not as solid as it seemed before you opened the cover, before you turned those first pages.

black static update

2008-12-17T07:01:00.003-05:00

I was wrong in my earlier entry (since amended to reflect reality); my story "These Things We Have Always Known" is in Black Static #8 which is out now. Check it out.

an Irish update

2008-12-04T14:31:00.001-05:00

I haven't written anything about our life here in ages.

This past week it got really, really cold here. Oh, not cold like you Midwesterners and Northeasterners back in the US and all you other folks from cold climates know. But pretty darn cold considering we are living in a 100-year-old stone cottage heated largely by a coal fire. (And considering that I am an admitted wimp about cold weather.) The question of heat, and how to afford it, is a popular topic of conversation here these days, as popular as exchanging condolences over our appalling summer weather was a few months ago. Is your house warm enough? What do you use to heat it? Where do you get your coal? How much are you paying for it? The SuperValu grocery story at the bottom of the village delivers for free (one of the things I love about this place) and brings us 25-kilo bags of coal, which we've been burning through (literally) at an alarming rate in recent days. Most people still don't have central heat in this part of Ireland and heating is still largely of the solid fuel variety. There may have been a time when this sounded very cozy and romantic to me. However, when a hard freeze comes on, when ice is freezing on the garbage bags stacked outside and the all-day frost turns even the nettles black, it's not cozy...it's just cold!

With the frost comes the sun--as in Portland, it's the cloud cover that keeps the temperatures here moderate, and when it clears it also gets much colder. It's been nice to see the sun, even if I'm too cold to appreciate it properly.

As the freeze came to an end, our immersion heater sprung a leak! As a mini-flood threatened the little hallway leading to the bathroom, Pius the repairman swept in to the rescue and sealed off the pipes. The disgraced immersion heater now resides outside in the back garden and we await a new one. We never got much hot water out of it anyway, so heating water in the electric kettle for dishwashing will work as a temporary solution. Fortunately, the water for the shower comes from a separate electric unit (ah, the electric shower, so ubiquitous across Ireland), so we won't be offending anyone with stinky unwashedness or anything like that.

The town has shut down for the winter. It's dark at eight in the morning and four-thirty in the afternoon. Since the Moo Wine Bar closed, there's not really a central venue for meeting up with lots of folks, and most nights it's so stormy and rainy and cold out it seems easier to stay in. But Saturday is the birthday of our lovely (and erstwhile zombie) next-door-neighbor Maggie, and there will be drinks and much revelry at McGirl's (possibly the best pub in Ireland). Meanwhile, Maggie's decorated the window with Christmas cheer at Smyth's gift and tourist shop across from us and there's a nativity scene in progress in the platform down the street. Today while doing the shopping I saw a sign that said the Christmas tree would be lit this Saturday at 8 p.m. We'll be there! I am actually hoping Santa brings me coal in my stocking this year. Perhaps if I'm very, very bad in the weeks leading up to Christmas.

black static and apparitions

2008-11-21T06:53:00.007-05:00

This week I received the happy news that my story "These Things We Have Always Known," which has languished long in inventory at the excellent magazine Black Static (which used to be The Third Alternative), will be appearing in issue #8 in December 2008. Visit the TTA Press website to subscribe to the magazine.

I've also updated my story list to include my most recent acceptance, "The Moon Will Look Strange," for Michael Kelly's Apparitions anthology, due out from Screaming Dreams Press in July 2009. The acceptance actually came months ago but I wasn't sure whether Mike was ready for word to get out or not. I'm excited about this story for a number of reasons. One, it's the first time I've been asked to contribute to anything. Two, I admire the work of the co-contributors I'm familiar with. Three, this was the first new story I've finished in a very long time (a long slog through graduate school, which includes writing a thesis that includes medieval mystics and obscure Arthurian poetry and the complaining of Hoccleve + working more or less full-time + lots of other stuff happening will do that), and the shape and tone and characters came alive for me as I wandered the streets of the Albaicin district in Granada, southern Spain, falling heedlessly and helplessly head-over-heels in love with the city. The story itself is rather ghastly, so I hope that won't put anyone off visiting there. I remain utterly infatuated with the place!

The end of the Dell saga

2008-11-21T06:00:00.001-05:00

First part of this story is here and the second part is here.

At last report, we had just learned that, according to the Dell website, Derek's replacement laptop was not scheduled to arrive until November 21. Much gnashing of teeth and rending of garments ensued.

The intrepid Geoff at Dell contacted us right away after hearing the news. He promised to see what he could do to find out what the delay was and expedite the building and shipping, and offered to look into a refurbished system, which might come more quickly, if that was an acceptable option. We said yes, but it ended up not being necessary. After a few more minor glitches which continued to give the impression of the left-hand-knowing-not-what-the-right-hand-was-doing, we got the happy news on Tuesday the, uh, 4th, I think? (Day 41) that the system had shipped. On Friday (Day 44) we woke filled with excited anticipation and relief that the day had perhaps come. No such luck. On Friday evening our time, Geoff contacted us to see if the laptop had arrived and was a bit surprised to hear our answer. He promised to look into it and see if he could get a tracking number to see where it was and when it would be joining us.

On Monday, Day 47, the replacement computer arrived at last!

So, what do I think of Dell now? I think Geoff deserves an Employee of the Century Award. I think their customer service needs some real work. I know that Dell knows this. And I've heard that other companies, such as HP and Sony, have even worse reputations for customer service.

The bottom line is that I still don't know for certain what kind of laptop I'll get to replace my aging Dell next year. On the one hand, despite our horrific experience, it's nice to know that you can eventually find a responsive person at Dell, and I'm not sure that's true elsewhere. On the other hand, everyone loves their Apple, right? And although in more than 10 years of owning a computer I've only ever had to call a company's tech support one other time (HP, 1997, weird problem with brand-new computer that was easily resolved by reinstalling the OS if I remember correctly), the thought of ever having to telephone Dell customer service kind of makes me want to break out in hives. And there's that saying: Fool me once...

But back to that first hand, I've never in my life had a company work so hard to right a wrong. That makes a difference. I like my Dell. I liked the Dell desktop we had before this one. I liked Derek's dearly departed laptop and I like his new one. I like their prices. (Well, as long as you don't consider the existential angst suffered over the last couple of months as part of the price, but let's just put that behind us for the moment.)

When the time comes I'll let y'all know what I decide to do.

President-Elect Barack Obama

2008-11-06T03:54:00.010-05:00

Email from my 70-year-old mother in Georgia*, lifelong Democrat, Obama campaign volunteer (she was one of the folks getting out there in the hot sun registering people to vote this summer), on November 4 at 2:45 pm my time, 9:45 am her time:

Have my Obama shirt and a steak ready for tonight.

Email from my mother at 1:45 am my time, 8:45 pm her time on the evening of November 4:

I had my steak and have my Obama shirt on. It has suddenly hit me. What if we lose? I don't know what I'll do.

Well, sadly, the state where Dr. Martin Luther King was born didn't turn blue for the nation's first African-American president (though a few counties came through), but enough of America did. I've been waiting for this moment since 2004, when I was sitting around watching the Democratic convention and trying really, really hard to feel an excitement that wasn't there when this guy named Barack Obama--about whom there'd been some buzz, talk that he was dynamic and exciting, had real potential--got up to speak...

...and I'd never heard an American politician give a speech like that in my lifetime. As soon as he was finished I ran to the phone and called Derek at work and said, "I just saw America's first black president speak."

I never imagined it would be so soon, and honestly, a big part of me didn't believe it at all. Imagining that anything other than a white, male president could be possible was the sort of thing that rose from the reservoir of hope that a lifetime of observing politics and eight years of the present administration had drained just about dry. But I liked thinking that such a thing could be possible--in the America we're told we live in, the one in which we all start out equal and we can all grow up to be anything, so long as we have the aptitude and the drive for it.

We're sure not there (and the passage of California's Proposition 8 and its ilk reminds us we still have a long way to go) but we're one giant step closer. And so, for the first time in my life, I understand what people mean when they say proud to be American. I don't go in for nationalism; the logic of being proud about something you had nothing to do with--that you were fortunate enough to be born into an affluent society with lots of opportunities, as opposed to, say, some poor country bombed and occupied by the world's only superpower, or collapsed into warring factions, or crushed under a dictator--well, the logic of that escaped me. And in my lifetime, I haven't seen my country do much that's made me proud, and I've seen lots that makes me ashamed--aforementioned bombings and invasions, for example, and the fact that the richest nation in the world can't feed and house and look after the health of even its most vulnerable citizens. The last eight years in particular have revealed a mean streak, an ugliness, a hatred of people who are different, born of fear and ignorance. Speaking of ignorance--somewhere along the way it became a virtue, it became celebrated, for crying out loud. An inability to communicate with any sort of clarity made you just folks. The narrower your world became, the safer you seemed, the more like us, and we just got tighter and smaller and meaner and angrier and crazier and more suspicious, not just of outsiders but of one another, and suddenly protest was criminal and dissent (that supreme American value) was treason and where the hell did my country go?

Until the wee hours of Wednesday morning--I finally fell exhausted into bed at 6 am my time--I didn't realized how much hope had deserted me over the last eight years. And I'm going to keep basking in this for a while, thanks. I don't think most rational people need to be told that President-Elect Barack Obama (oh, it feels good to write that) can't move mountains and that all the hard work is ahead of us, although I see a lot of people online and elsewhere setting up that straw man: He's not a miracle worker, you know. This country is a mess. And this doesn't mean the end of racism, either. Don't think this heals all wounds.

I think these people are missing the point. And on Tuesday night (or Wednesday morning, for me), I wanted, for just one night, to be back in America. I wanted to be shoulder-t0-shoulder in a bar with my fellow Americans, watching the results come back, crying and laughing and cheering. I wanted to spill out into the streets and celebrate. I wanted, more than anything, to be in Grant Park, watching President-Elect Barack Obama (I just love writing that) address that euphoric, celebrating crowd. As my mother reminded me in the first email:

The Obama celebration will be in Grant Park in Chicago where the Democrats fell apart in '68. This was the cohesive party that was formed in '32 and had been struggling since the '68 fiasco but it appears they're back on track. That's the reason you have had to endure so much of the right wing Republicans in your life time.

See, I've been waiting a long time, but she's been waiting a whole lot longer. She's of that generation in whom something perished along with John F. Kennedy in Dealey Plaza in 1963, who saw the assassination of Robert Kennedy and the riots and the beatings outside the DNC in 1968 and then the forty years of wandering in the wilderness that followed. She wasn't an activist or a member of the counterculture; she was just a regular person, with a family and a job, who, like lots of other "regular people"--the Republicans don't have the market on these regular folks, whatever they may have claimed during their campaign--saw a hope for a new and different and better way. And for the first time in my life, I feel a swell of that idealism reaching across the decades, like if we work hard and we keep our heads on straight we might start again to build the kind of world that murdered leaders like RFK and MLK might have helped us make and not this mixed-up dystopian nightmare we seem to have been hurtling toward since the century turned.

So please don't feel like you need to sound a note of caution. I'm studying my ACLU list of Actions For Restoring America and planning on doing everything I can to pressure the next administration to roll back the attacks on civil liberties, both ours as citizens and those of people around the world. We've got to stop letting the government spy on us, and raid our homes without probable cause. We've got to stop kidnapping and torturing people (and we've got to stop wrapping it up in meaningless verbiage like "extraordinary rendition"). We know we've got to fix our economy, our health care, our educational system. There's so much to do that it's overwhelming, and it's going to take a very long time to do it all. We know that. But I didn't vote for Barack Obama because of the color of his skin; I voted for him because he is intelligent, and cautious, and thoughtful, and although I disagree with him on several issues and he will govern far to the right of what I would prefer, I believe he will govern well.

Whatever side you're on, you can't dismiss the symbolism of this moment in American history. And for a few more days, even weeks, I'm going to bask in this good feeling, because Ezell A. Blair, Jr. and David Richmond and Joseph McNeill and Franklin McCain sat down at that Woolworth's lunch counter in North Carolina in 1960 so this could happen someday; James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner were murdered in Mississippi in 1964 in pursuit of a day like this; Medgar Evers, Rev. James Reeb, Viola Liuzzo, countless others, nameless others, were tortured, murdered, assassinated, gave their lives for this; because of W.E.B. Du Bois and Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman and on and on back, years and generations, four hundred years back. And because Langston Hughes said I, too, am America and he was right. I was born in Bull Connor's Birmingham. We are some way from those firehoses, those attack dogs, though not nearly far enough. I expect the next four years will stoke plenty of racist fires even as it heals other divides. But we have taken a step toward showing the world what we've been saying since our birth as a country: that we are a land of opportunity. And more recently: that we are a land of diversity, a place of increasingly mixed ethnicities and cultures, and Barack Obama is a wonderful symbol of that mix. He is truly the first president for the twenty-first century, and for the first time in many years, I believe the twenty-first century could be a bright one after all.

*who is not, contrary to reports you may have heard, the last Democrat left in Georgia.

Dell, Day 39: Still the Worst Computer Company?

2008-11-02T10:59:00.005-05:00

This is a continuation of this post, titled Dell: Worst Computer Company in the Woooorld...

Happy ending, thanks to Geoff at Dell, can be found here.

*Sigh.* That's right, Day 39 of the Dell saga is upon us. Now, the fellow who posted in the comments on that previous post has so far attempted to make good on his promise. He's refunded the $295 for the extended warranty that wasn't. He's been working with Dell UK to replace the laptop with a model which can be repaired on both sides of the Atlantic.

But don't start singing the Hallelujah chorus too long or loudly just yet...because take a look at that title again and notice that it is Day 39. That's five weeks and a half weeks now since things went all pear-shaped. It's two weeks and a day since we were contacted by Geoff of Dell (on his day off, I might add), and ten business days later.

On Thursday, October 30 (Day 36) Geoff was able to provide us with an order number for the new unit so we could follow its progress on the Dell website. Later that day, we received a phone call from customer service, informing us that we would need to pack up the old computer and have it ready for pickup on Monday, November 3 between 2 and 5. The replacement laptop would then arrive in "a couple of days." Fair enough then. It had been a long battle, but (once again) it seemed that things were finally days from resolution.

But then...we plugged the order number into the Dell website and learned that Derek's replacement laptop would be arriving on...approximately November 21. Three weeks later. More than 5 weeks after someone in a Dell corporate office got involved. More than 8 weeks after the original laptop failure. Derek emails Geoff, who replies that he'll see if he can make it any speedier.

Note that they seem to have no trouble turning up to take the old broken laptop. They seem to be very efficient when it comes to reclaiming what they see as their property.

On Friday (Day 37) we received a phone call from customer service, informing us that we would need to pack up the old computer and have it ready for pickup on Monday, November 3 between 2 and 5. Yes, you read that right. That's not a typo; we got the exact same phone call. Now, given the number of times Dell dropped the ball, I guess we can't really complain about their being overly conscientious about following up. On the other hand, it doesn't really do a lot to make them look like they're on top of things.

So. This is where we find ourselves, on Day 39 of this saga with possibly 19 more days to go. We were starting to feel pretty good about Dell again (all companies have customer service problems, after all, and when else have you heard of someone higher-up in a company going to this extent to remedy it?). However, the warm fuzzies are getting cold and prickly. We had really counted on receiving a replacement in the coming week and it's seeming less and less likely. I don't doubt that Geoff is doing what he can, but at this point, Dell really needs to come through for us. I'm not going to start listing all the work that's gone undone in those weeks, the time and income we've both lost as a result of this disaster, because it would be tedious for you and too depressing for us.

As things currently stand, as much as I appreciate the hard work of one Dell employee, I'm afraid it remains dwarfed next to the overall inability of the company to resolve this in an even remotely timely manner. The conscientiousness of this one Dell representative is utterly undermined by what seems to be a corporation-wide inability to, well, do much of anything. I think it's great that Dell is giving some time and energy to reaching out to dissatisfied customers online. I think it's unfortunate that they have so many dissatisfied customers that this is necessary. The bottom line is that if we can get this resolved in the coming week we might return to the Dell fold again (and that's a fairly big might). Otherwise, I don't see us being foolish enough to ever be Dell customers again. Waiting more than eight weeks on a solution to a computer under warranty is practically no solution at all.

on anxiety (and patti smith)

2008-11-02T06:50:00.005-05:00

How does it become a man to behave towards the American government today? I answer, that he cannot without disgrace be associated with it. -Henry David Thoreau

I'm fretful about the US election and I know they say you should shut off the news and focus on something else, but I can't seem to do it. Despite my scorn for magical thinking, it's as if some part of me believes if I keep reading, watching, monitoring, it's going to change something, as if watching closely enough will make the bad dream of the last 8 years give way to a future that holds something besides despair. I've voted, I've donated, and that's all I can do, yet I can't stop paying attention, however much I need to.

And there's something cathartic about it, too. Take this wonderful piece, in which American writers reflect on the last eight years and what the future holds. It makes me feel less alone to read Tobais Wolff's outrage, matching my own. And several of the writers raise what I believe to be one of the most depressing points of all: what does it say about us, as a nation, as a people, that we let this man be re-elected? And (my own point, not theirs) that the current race remains as close as it is?

But! I can turn away for a moment. Here is a piece on the incomparable Patti Smith. (And David Lynch makes a cameo!) One of my favorite Portland events is the annual HP Lovecraft Film Festival, and Patti herself, a Lovecraft fan from way back, made an appearance there a few years ago. She read her poetry, and Howie's (that's what she called him); she sang on an empty stage, just her and a guitar. And she spent the weekend there, dressed down, faded jeans and a T-shirt, boots, and you'd have never known she was a legendary rock star if you hadn't known.

Turns out, Patti's stressed about the election as well. So much for turning away. It's like we've all had a collective low-grade headache for a while now and it's flared up into a full-grown migraine and we all need to lie down in a dark room for a couple of days, or longer if it turns out the last eight years were not just a long nightmare but the new way that we live now.

Either way, I'll see you on the other side. Depending on the outcome, it might take me a while to resurface.

Halloween fun at the Rushmore Academy

2008-10-27T13:58:00.003-04:00

It's almost Halloween. Do you have your costume yet? Hey--maybe you should dress up as Margot Tenenbaum, Steve Zissou, one of the Whitman brothers, or some other character from a Wes Anderson picture. Then you can head right on over to the Rushmore Academy and submit your photo in time for their Second Annual Wes Anderson Inspired Halloween Costume Contest. You can win great prize packs, including Noah and the Whale's album Peaceful, the World Lays Me Down, Coin Laundry Loser's EP Summer, and, of course, Derek Hill's Charlie Kaufman and Hollywood's Merry Bank of Pranksters, Fabulists, and Dreamers (also available at Amazon US, Amazon UK, and your friendly local bookstore). Or, if dressing up in style on Halloween isn't your thing, at least cruise on over to the blog and check out the pictures from last year's contest.

you are history. you are legend. we will not forget you.

2008-10-26T04:28:00.018-04:00

I wanted to note that yesterday, throughout the city of Barcelona, Spain honored surviving foreign volunteers of the International Brigade who rose up to fight fascism and Franco between 1936 and1938. This article is a couple of weeks old but I like it better, because it's full of interviews with the volunteers themselves. I first read about these plans in a tapas bar in Spain, nestled in the labyrynthine whitewashed streets of Comares, tucked up at the counter with my glass of cerveza, messily peeling a plate of boiled shrimp. A few British expats--though few tourists--have found their way to the little white village, so when the bartender heard my mangled Spanish she kindly passed me an English-language paper produced somewhere on the coast. The paper included a photo of a few of the surviving volunteers: elderly men, now, some in ill health, still proud of what they'd done and committed to the ideals of their youth.

Can you imagine this happening today--young people, working class leftists, writers and artists, journalists, joining up to fight in another country? I'm not romanticizing it--the civil war was ghastly even as wars go and the pro-Stalinist branch of the communists that eventually prevailed betrayed many who fought against fascism, including George Orwell. No, what I mean is that we seem to be living through a time in which we no longer believe in big ideas, things larger and more important than ourselves. In some ways that's not a bad thing. Caring first and foremost about your loved ones, particularly above "causes" that will never love you back and even have ways of turning on you when you least expect it, is not a position lacking in virtue. Ideologues of all stripes frighten and depress me. And yet I fear we've developed our tunnel vision too acutely. I'm afraid it's become too easy to distance ourselves with cynicism and irony and "common sense," and declare that there's little or nothing outside ourselves worth fighting for--or that the other guy can do it for us. We laugh at idealists and pat ourselves on the back that we're clear-eyed and sensible. We vote along a narrow continuum and call anything outside that narrowness "radical," as though nothing could be worse.

I'm not excusing myself from this characterization. I don't know what I'd have done in 1936. Is timid inaction worse that righteous misguided action? Is there anything worse than apathy? Are all forms of idealism doomed to be manipulated and exploited by larger forces? Is it worse, thirty-eight years after Franco's death, to pursue his associates as mentioned in the first article above or to leave them be? I don't know the answers to questions like that. Some people seem so sure. Sometimes, usually when my big mouth gets going on a rant, I sound sure, too, but I can be as full of hot air as the next guy.

Antony Beevor knows it's not simple; in his introduction to The Spanish Civil War he writes:

These two extremes [Hitler and Stalin], which yet had so much in common, exploited their enmity shamelessly. Their apparently implacable antipathy created artificial alternatives through gross simplification. They set out to persuade their audiences that the individual was redundant; the great enemy could only be defeated with mass organization, discipline and a supra-human ideology.

Such total mobilization required artist, writers, and intellectuals to subordinate their talents and beliefs to political necessity. This of course had a profound, almost traumatic effect on the intellectual life of a generation. On the left most withdrew their support from the Communist Party as a result of events in Republican Spain and the Nazi-Soviet Pact in August 1939, five months after General Franco's victory. The utter disillusionment which so many of them faced probably explains in part the comparatively restrained commitment of intellectuals thirty years later during the war in Vietnam.

Here are a couple of other pieces the Guardian published about the International Brigade leading up to yesterday's ceremony:
For Whom the Bell Tolls
In Praise of...the International Brigades

currently reading: The Spanish Civil War, Antony Beevor

Beneath Ceaseless Skies

2008-10-25T06:54:00.004-04:00

I've been remiss in mentioning the debut of a new webzine, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, helmed by my fellow Odyssey workshop alum Scott H. Andrews, mostly because I've also been remiss in cracking the electronic covers of the first two issues. That, however, has been remedied, and having just finished Parts I and II of Chris Willrich's "The Sword of Loving Kindness" I can heartily recommend the magazine. Beneath Ceaseless Skies describes itself as a venue for "literary adventure fantasy" or "literary sword and sorcery"--you can go there yourself to see what they say about themselves. Sword & sorcery is a genre I've only dabbled in as a reader--I haven't gone much beyond the late great Karl Edward Wagner's Kane stories, which I adore. But I'm excited about what Scott's doing, and if you like well-written, swashbuckling, secondary-world adventure fantasy, give it a try. I don't think you'll be disappointed.

Dell: Worst Computer Company in the Wooorld*

2008-10-18T05:14:00.015-04:00

*You have to say it in Keith Olbermann's voice to make it work.

An edit as of October 21: The Dell representative who posted in the comments below has been working with us to fix this situation. I'll post an update on the resolution. Might even bring me back into the Dell fold... November 2nd update here.

Final update, with happy ending--thanks to Geoff at Dell from the comments below--here.

Never, ever, ever buy a computer from Dell. Don't let your loved ones buy a computer from Dell. Friends don't let friends buy Dell. They have the worst customer service in the world. (And I can indeed say "world," having now talked to "support" people on three continents.)

Let me see if I can get all this down in a very condensed format without spontaneously combusting from rage. As you read our sad tale, keep in mind that we both work on our laptops--so Dell's refusal to address this problem is not just a matter of "I can't read my email"; it is the equivalent of having the car you drive to work break down, having no one to fix it, and no other way to get to work.

Also keep in mind that this version is, as I say, extremely condensed.

September 24, Day 1. The screen of Derek's nine-month-old Dell Inspiron 1420 laptop starts to show squiggly lines and black out. We spend the day trying to fix it. We run a number of diagnostics. (Keep those diagnostics in mind. Blank customer service reps from Dell reading from scripts will return to the damn diagnostics over and over in desperation. If you love your diagnostics so much, Dell, why don't you marry them? Nyah, nyah, nyah.)

I suspect it is something to do with a driver. I loan Derek my laptop so he can chat online with Dell tech support. First guy runs diagnostics. Tries to get him to download driver. Screen goes down completely during the process of trying to download something called a BIOS update, so nothing can be done. The guy suggests sending a motherboard, a screen, and a video card to the US. Problem: we're in Ireland and won't be back in the US anytime soon and anyway what the hell are we supposed to be with a motherboard, a screen, and a videocard? We're writers, Jim, not technicians! Guy says they can't ship the parts to Ireland. (Why? We have yet to find this out.) Chat is abruptly terminated or otherwise mysteriously cut off at this point, after about an hour and a half.

Derek starts a new chat. Goes through the process again. New guy seems more helpful. He says he can fill out an international dispatch and have someone come out to our place in Ireland and fix the computer. He says we should hear from somebody in 4-5 business days and the repair will take 5-8 business days.

October 1 & 2, Days 8 & 9. No one has contacted us. On October 2, Derek calls tech support in Ireland. They have no record of this supposed tech visit. We've already lost more than a week waiting for something that was never going to happen. Furthermore, Dell Ireland can't help us. Our warranty's no good here. But if we call Dell USA, we can purchase an extended warranty and have a tech come out and fix the machine here in Ireland.

October 3, Day 10. Derek calls Dell USA back. He explains the situation and pays $295 for a warranty which will supposedly extend his coverage to Ireland. Making this simple purchase involves talking to at least 4 people (one of whom wants to run that damn diagnostic again) and an hour and a half on the phone. By the time he's done, Dell offices for Ireland are closed for the weekend because they're only open during business hours.

October 6, Day 13. Derek calls Dell Ireland again. Has to explain everything again because they have no access to US tech support info. Guess what? The Inspiron 1420 isn't supported in Europe. We paid $295 for nothing. They agree to send a tech out with a screen to look at the computer.

(Here's the thing: these offices are all in India anyway. They claim they can't access information from one another. Dude, y'all are the same company. Maybe you can't access the information, but somebody can.)

October 8 Day 15. We wait all day for the tech. In the late afternoon he calls. He's lost. Eventually, he turns up. He's the one decent person we've dealt with through all of this. Of course, the computer boots up perfectly. He's too polite to tell us we're insane. He downloads a few things to make the machine run better and is getting ready to leave when Derek restarts the computer and the screen goes blank.

Nice tech gets down to business. Opens it up and is shocked at how hot it's running. Tries to replace the screen, but the machine has been put together wrong in the factory: the screw is so tight he can't do any work without stripping it and ruining the machine. He puts a call in to Dell. Tells them the machine is not repairable and they need to replace our computer. "I know it's a lot to ask," he tells them, "but this machine can't be worked on. And it's running very hot. Extreme heat."

He gets off the phone and says Dell will follow-up with a phone call. "Dell is great at follow-up," he says. "You'll hear from them."

We don't hear anything that evening.

October 9, Day 16. Still no follow-up call from Dell. That night, Derek emails Dell Ireland. They have 24 business hours to respond, which means we have to wait till noon Tuesday.

Have I mentioned yet that throughout this process Dell keeps telling us how much they care about their customers and how much they want to "work with us"? Has anyone ever educated Dell about that little principle "Show, don't tell"?

October 14, Day 21. Still no follow-up from Dell, either on the tech call or from the email. Derek emails again. That evening the phone rings. A woman from Dell Ireland (which is actually in India, and which is actually not Dell Ireland at all but Dell UK) says they can't do anything because we have an Inspiron 1420 and it's not supported in Europe. Derek points out that he paid $295 for the warranty. The woman parrots the same thing again. She says to get in touch with Dell USA.

October 15, Day 22. Too demoralized to move.

October 16, Day 23. Email to Dell USA. Below it can be seen part of a long paper trail of our trials and tribulations. We include a cut-and-paste of our most recent email to Dell UK/Ireland. Tell them they need to pass this email up to someone who has the authority to do something.

In the meantime, I find an official Dell blog which seems to specifically address our problem. It appears it's actually a known issue with a faulty chip. The keywords are NVIDIA mobile GPU. On the blog, Dell pledges that they are committed to "supporting customers worldwide." After we collapse on the floor for several helpless minutes of hysterical laughter at this phrase, we pick ourselves up and manage to post a desperate plea for somebody, anybody, at the company to help us out.

October 17, Day 24. Dell USA responds by email. Have we filled out the international warranty transfer? Once we have done that, Dell Ireland/UK will be happy to assist us! Here is their number!

He's joking, right? We filled out your stupid warranty transfer on October 3, the day you charged us $295 to subsequently be told there was nothing you could do.

There's also an email from the customer care guy at the Dell blog. He wants to know...did we fill out the international warranty transfer? Also, Inspiron 1420 isn't supported in Europe. But he'll see if he can find someone to contact us!

Reply to customer care guy. Give him relevant case numbers. Ask why Dell sold us a $295 warranty without telling us no actual support would accompany it. Cc him on our response to Dell USA dude. Tell Dell USA dude that giving us another number to call is not an acceptable response. We want someone who's read up on the history to contact us and tell us when we can expect our new computer to arrive.

Cry. Think about a suicide pact, only that would give Dell the satisfaction of getting rid of us. Get ready to rinse and repeat next week.

I hate you, Dell. And all you useless "customer service" reps that passed us around and didn't do a thing for us? I saw on the Travel Channel about those couriers in India that pick up lunches from home and deliver them to offices and what a low failure rate they have. I hope the odds weren't with you. I hope you all got the wrong lunches and they all gave you indigestion for days.

To be continued...

best political quote ever

2008-10-15T11:21:00.004-04:00

From Socialist leader Jose Luis Uriz, in the town of Villava, Spain, in response to a battle of flags being waged in town hall:

"The Iron Maiden flag means a lot to me. If I have to put up with their flag, they'll have to put up with Eddie's face."

of feminism, and sarah p.

2008-09-13T05:48:00.006-04:00

I've been thinking about feminism a lot lately, what with the election brouhaha and all.

I am a feminist. Horrifyingly, in everyday life, you do not meet many women, especially my age or under, who will utter those four words. (You find it more on the internet, but the internet is not everyday life.) And when they do it is often equivocal. "I'm a feminist, but . . . " (Heaven forbid we should come across as too threatening, and most of all to men.) For a long time there's been a strain of thought going around that "being a feminist means choice . . . so whatever you choose that makes you a feminist--as long as you are the one doing the choosing!"--(which is problematic all over the place, not the least of which is the fact that it fails to address the underlying assumptions and social/cultural conditioning that would lead one to unconsciously make an unfeminist choice in the first place.)

From the sidelines I've watched people duke this sort of thing out online--or worse, not duke it out at all, but make statements similar to the above regarding choice to a chorus of affirmatives. And all I can say is: seriously? You really, really believe that? So never learning--or not continuing--to take care of yourself in the world is a choice as long as you make it "freely"? (And by taking care of yourself in the world, I mean supporting yourself, paying your bills, getting your car fixed, talking to the accountant, earning your way.)

It's hard to get away from the specter of performing paid work as a primary tenet of feminism. It's not that I think that there is anything particularly fulfilling or important about much of the work done to bring home a paycheck, and in fact much unpaid work is frequently far more important to our lives, our communities, even to feminism, than work we are paid for. But like it or not, working for pay is the only way to achieve independence in our present capitalist society. You can figure out ways to need less and work as little as possible; if you are persistent and fortunate you can find work that is consistent with your values and lets you eat and put a roof over your head and care for your dependents--but in the end work we must, or put our lives, our independence, our autonomy, in the hands of others. I know it's not easy, practically speaking--partners may switch off to provide support to one another at different times in the life of the relationship so that one can achieve something without immediate (or any) monetary reward; children thrown into the mix complicate things (although I would ask why it is still, today, more often the woman who gives up paid employment, and I would gently point out that for white-collar and some pink-collar professions the cost of lost income is not just the money brought home weekly--which yes, may well equal your childcare bill--but a less-easily calculated cost of lost retirement savings, lost opportunities, lost expertise). But don't call it feminism when it's not.

Yet I hear it all the time: well, if I don't like my job and I decide to let my husband support me that's a choice. And since I've thought about it and made the choice--he didn't tell me not to work outside the home--that makes me a feminist. (Does he like his job? In heterosexual relationships you never hear about men quitting their jobs and letting their partners support them on the basis of "Well, he really didn't like it and he wasn't bringing home that much anyway." Well, you do, but we have a word for men who do that, at least in the South where I grew up: bums.)

And here's something too: sometimes you make the best choice for your family and your situation and it's not the feminist choice. And that's okay, because we are not automatons and we should never be ideologues. You can still be a feminist and sometimes make choices that aren't, just like saying or thinking racist or sexist things on occasion, as we all do, does not automatically make us a racist or a sexist. But please don't try to dress it up as feminism when it's not. In current election parlance, you can put lipstick on a pig but it's still a pig.

In some circles there is a real reluctance to define feminism. "Who am I to say whether another woman is or isn't?" people say. "Who has the right to apply a kind of purity test to another woman's life and decide whether she is 'feminist enough'?" (This seems to me a stereotypically "female" approach, broadly speaking; the "male" impulse is to classify and exclude. Please note that I used the word stereotypically here; I am speaking about perceptions, not about biology and not about reality.) As with all words, if we are careless with the definition of "feminism," it loses its meanings. The problem is, if we don't define feminism, it is defined for us. And that leads us to Sarah Palin.

So. Being a feminist doesn't mean doing whatever the hell you feel like doing it and calling it a feminist choice. And being a woman in a position of power does not automatically make you a feminist. Sarah Palin is a woman who got where she is by, if I may be inflammatory for just a phrase here, colluding with the patriarchy. Sarah Palin has achieved as much as she has thanks to the efforts of so many women who fought so hard and sacrificed so much before her, but never would she have stood alongside those women. Sarah Palin is not a feminist. She is part of the same good ole boy network that so many male politicians belong to. And yeah, you can be a girl and a good ole boy at the same time.

There's a blog now called Women Against Sarah Palin. A few women asked a few other women why they did not support Sarah Palin's vice presidency, and they were deluged with responses. You can go there and read what women have to say about John McCain's choice for the vice president, "real" women (as if there is some other type?), all kinds of women from all walks of life--women in their 80s and women in their 20s, Christian women, Democrat and Republican women, women who are community organizers and women who are elected officials, red state women and blue state women, women from the South and the West and all points in between. Vote for the McCain/Palin ticket if you must but do not tell your daughters and your nieces and your sisters and your mothers and your women friends and yourself that there is anything feminist about it.

interview at Kamera Books

2008-09-12T09:12:00.004-04:00

Derek has another interview up, this one at the Kamera Books site itself. Read more about the American New Wave and follow the links provided to buy Charlie Kaufman and Hollywood's Merry Bank of Pranksters, Fabulists, and Dreamers.

of poems and plumbers, playwrites, tv programs, and even a little more politics

2008-09-06T03:30:00.005-04:00

The Guardian* gave me lots of stuff to read with my hot cuppa this wet and windy Saturday morning:

The power of the pen. British poet Carol Ann Duffy reacts to the news that one of her poems has been removed from the GCSE (for "glorifying knife crime." I am not making this up. Not to make light of knifings in Britain, which have been the cause of deaths of London-area youngsters at an alarming rate this year, but would that anyone paid this kind of attention to poetry, teenagers most of all!). Here is her response.

Bird Island on Antarctica's looking for a plumber. As I wrote here recently, I used to think it would be fun to work a season in Antarctica but I am fed up with cold places. (Plus, I am not a plumber, although had I followed the sage writing advice of Mr. Joe Lansdale his ownself--want to be a writer? become a plumber, because the pay's great and you set your own hours--I would be eligible.)

An interview with one of my favorite playwrites, Tom Stoppard. The writers that dazzle you as a teenager never stay with you in quite the same way as you grow up and grow older--because, as with Stoppard for example, there is no substitute for the amazement of first discovering that the fourth wall could be demolished. Still love his work though.

The Wire's David Simon on urban decay in the US. The Wire is the best (non-fantasy) television show ever. (Also, here is an opportunity for me to mention a writer I haven't for some time: George Pelecanos, who also wrote and was story editor for the show. As I always say, Pelecanos is not just a great crime writer--he is one of America's greatest living writers, period.)

*The Guardian is my homepage, which is why lots of my links come from there. I am only happy with it as a homepage perhaps 50% of the time. The reason it is my homepage is because I like to have a news site as a homepage and sometime shortly after 9/11** I began to suspect that (I know this will shock and awe you all) the news as it was being reported to us in the US was not quite was the rest of the world was hearing. I only knew The Guardian vaguely as a left-wingish paper I'd always enjoyed picking up when I was in London, so I made it my homepage. Now I complain about it constantly and bellyache about much of the writing (and ironically they are particularly poor when they try to editorialize about the US) but I've grown quite attached to this sense of perpetual dissatisfaction and hard-done-byness, plus I enjoy much of their arts coverage.

**Up to that point, CNN had been my homepage. I will always remember that morning, sleepily puttering around the kitchen making coffee and wandering back to the computer to see that the CNN page wasn't loading, refreshing a couple of times until the news appeared, a lone unbelievable story on a sea of white. Having said unbelievable, let me hasten to add that unlike many of my fellow USians I don't actually believe that Nobody Has Ever Suffered Like Our Noble Selves So Now We Have Carte Blanche To Kill Everything Forever And Ever Amen. Why, as a matter of fact, some people have to live with that kind of unbelievable reality on a day to day basis. Which kind of remains me of this genius Onion piece from last year, the kind of devastating(ly funny) bit that's so true vis a vis many US attitudes you don't know whether to laugh or cry. Yes, I am still feeling especially raw, and political, and angry of late, and expect to do so at least through the US election.

under the milky way tonight

2008-09-05T05:57:00.006-04:00

photo by Don Van Dyke
(note: poetic license taken; our view last night was not nearly this spectacular!)

My neighbor Liz tells me County Leitrim is among the places in Ireland with the least amount of light pollution. Last night was cold and so clear that Derek and I stepped out into the backyard to stargaze and we could see the band of the Milky Way stretched gloriously across the sky.

When I was a kid, my mom used to take me outside to look up at the stars and tell me that whenever I felt troubled, I could look at the night sky, and suddenly me and my problems and worries would seem so insignificant in the face of that grandeur, that astonishing beauty. She was right.

Here's a piece I really enjoyed reading last summer in a New Yorker about light pollution's affect on star gazing.

agent provocateurs among RNC demonstrators?

2008-09-04T07:16:00.004-04:00

This will be my last post on politics for a while, because the other thing I remember about why I don't write about such things on here is that I get even more sickened and frightened than I do when I'm just thinking and talking about the topic. But I did want to add this one last link to what I've posted here over the last few days: Making Light on the possibility of agent provocateurs. This isn't far-fetched; over the last eight years such agents have been discovered infiltrating various anti-war and other nonviolent left-wing groups in the U.S. Making Light is, in fact, my favorite all-purpose current events site, for the level of discourse and the great pointers to other places.

And this: "RNC 8" charged with terrorism-related activities under--you know it--the auspices of the 2002 Minnesota so-called "Patriot" Act. This is an attempt to intimidate further protests, pure and simple. I despair.

And now I'm officially bowing out on this final thought from Edward Abbey: "A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government." Lots of good people are fighting to do just that.

interview at The Rushmore Academy

2008-09-03T07:46:00.004-04:00

Derek's interviewed over at the Wes Anderson fan site The Rushmore Academy about Charlie Kaufman and Hollywood's Merry Band of Pranksters, Fabulists, and Dreamers, out now in the US and Canada!

Buy the book in the UK.
Buy the book in the US.

bearing witness

2008-09-03T06:57:00.004-04:00

My friend Dave writes more about the RNC protests and police actions. You can either click through the photo essay at flickr--select each pic to read the text--or just read the text version at his blog.

this is what democracy looks like?

2008-09-02T15:13:00.005-04:00

In general I leave the discussion of politics* online to cooler heads, to people dedicated to writing consistently and coherently in a way that illuminates contemporary issues and concerns. Loathe to express my opinions I am not, but other people are willing to devote the energy to do it better than I'm prepared to and mostly I leave it to them.

Having said that--my friend Dave's blog first pointed me to these stories of the abuse of power leveled against peaceful protestors by Twin Cities (and federal) law enforcement as the RNC gets underway. That link goes to Glenn Greenwald on the arrest of Amy Goodman of Democracy Now, plus lots of video--he's updating all the time though. It's my understanding this is receiving little mainstream media attention in the U.S.

I have been a peaceful protester, marching in the streets against the actions of this administration. If I were in the U.S. right now, and the RNC were being held in my town, I would be there: and so I might be one of the tear-gassed, one of those harassed and perhaps even arrested on trumped-up charges while acting in a way I see as truly patriotic--because I was raised to believe that this is my right, even my duty, as a citizen in a democracy. To speak up when I see my government going wrong. To participate as fully as possible in shaping the policies of my government.

I don't understand my country any longer; increasingly, I believe that I never did.

*In the strictest sense; however, the personal really is political.

just how bad the summer weather is...

2008-09-02T04:43:00.003-04:00

I haven't found similar figures for the Republic of Ireland, but the word from the UK is that this is the 'least sunny August since records began.' And Northern Ireland had it the very worst, with a mere 65.8 hours of sunshine. We are only 13 miles from the border of Northern Ireland, so yeah, that's us as well. It's not that I don't like rainy days, but I am pretty sure I have filled my quota for the next several years to come on that account. Experiencing both climate types back to back this year--and seeing how differently each made me feel mentally and physically--has confirmed for me that I'm a sunny-and-dry-climate type of girl for sure.

You're On Notice!

2008-08-31T06:35:00.004-04:00

To the stupid boys from last night who smashed the pretty flower arrangement that Liz and Maeve made for us a few weeks ago, as well as everyone who's walked up the street this summer wrecking people's plants and windowboxes: Stephen Colbert says you're on notice! I'm keeping an eye out now and, as Harrison Ford once said, "I am an American, and I am crazy!"

I'm watching you!

the darker side of lovely leitrim: Dead Meat

2008-08-29T04:36:00.006-04:00

You know how the story goes. You move to a little village in Ireland. At first everyone seems so nice (...maybe...too nice!). It's this thing that comes up in conversation a few times...something called Dead Meat. First one friend mentions it at the pub, then your next door neighbor acknowledges involvement. You begin to suspect that your friends and neighbors are not who they seem, that perhaps they even have a sinister past...as shambling zombies!

Now, I am a longtime fan of the zombie subgenre of horror movies. I am going to sound exactly like that whiny music fan who's mad because someone outside of his circle of six friends had the audacity to listen to a band that he "discovered" but seriously: time was when you told people you liked zombie movies, you were looked on as some kind of cretin. It was like admitting you read the most exploitative type of true crime for pleasure--far too lowbrow and gross to ever be hip, even ironically. Now everyone's all about the zombies. Where were you people when everyone was looking at me funny and thinking I got some kind of charge out of intestine-munching? You can't just waltz in like johnny-come-latelys (latelies?) and start talking about head shots and the best ways to survive a zombie holocaust and saying things like "Braaaiiiinsss" and "They're coming to get you Barbara!" just like that! It's not fair! When did zombies go mainstream? Was it 28 Days Later? Shawn of the Dead? Some kind of annoying livejournal meme?

I trace my own love probably back to a midnight showing of Dawn of the Dead in the late 1980s. And it was mostly all about the movies: until reading Max Brooks' World War Z I'd have sworn the conceit didn't work for novels, although comics from Deadworld to The Walking Dead and more tackled it successfully. My favorite treatments of the subgenre effectively combine two of my favorite things--horror and the apocalypse--so what's not to like? Anyway, I digress further and further from the subject at hand, which is--my friends and neighbors are zombies!

Dead Meat is a zombie movie made by Irish director Conor McMahon right here in County Leitrim (thus we get the extra frission of not only seeing these creatures hunt for human flesh through landscapes we know, but there's also the chill of hearing the radio report that Ballinamore is affected!). It's played mostly straight but has a real Irish sensibility (and sense of humor) about it and there are several effectively creepy scenes--and my next door neighbor Maggie is the famous wedding zombie who gets her head knocked off while stumbling down the road! Apparently, according to the director's commentary, Maggie's star turn gets the biggest response from festival audiences anywhere he goes. The movie's fun and well-made, worth checking out if you're a fan of the genre.

I have a longtime ambition to play an extra in a zombie movie, so I'm a little disappointed I arrived here a few years too late to see this great dream realized. Looks like I'll have to live vicariously through Maggie and Kevin and my other friends here, alas. In the meantime, if you ever visit County Leitrim...keep an eye on the cows.

Josef Koudelka, the nomadic photographer

2008-08-24T06:15:00.004-04:00

A piece on one of the principle photographers of the 1968 invasion of Prague, his life and career (they are one and the same). (Dare I call this story "inspiring"? It's a word overused and made insipid.) I admit that, unfashionable and arguably immature as it may be, I've never shaken the notion of the artist as somehow moving outside the currents of everyday life, and Koudelka's life embodies that notion.

It's a monkey--it's not like it did anything bad, or, News From Around My World

2008-08-21T05:34:00.012-04:00

News from places I know and love:

In Nepal, a judge has ruled that the little girl chosen as the Kumari, or the living goddess, must be educated like any other child, enjoying the same rights. This story was poorly reported in The Guardian, which claimed that the tradition had been "scrapped," which is not the case. The little girl--who is chosen around the age of five after a series of elaborate tests and rituals--lives as the embodiment of a goddess until she first sheds blood (either through injury or, most commonly, menstruation, shades of the fairy tale princess who pricks her finger there). She isn't mistreated and is taken care of throughout her life (at least by the standards of many women's difficult lives in Nepal). I visited the Kumari when I lived in Nepal in the early 90s. The visit consisted of standing under a window at which a tiny little girl, elaborately made up and exquisitely dressed, appeared briefly before running away again. I have no idea what the practical ramifications of this ruling will be or whether this is a sign of a new regard for the quality of women's (and girl children's) lives in Nepal

In the Czech Republic, yesterday was the forty-year anniversary of the end of the Prague Spring. The Guardian has a gallery of photos from that day. This was still a fresh wound for many people when we lived there in the mid-90s; the protesters who flooded into Wenceslaus Square twenty years later during the Velvet Revolution knew well that history could easily repeat itself.

Nobody quite seems to believe me when I tell them just how bad the summer weather is here, so I bring you another Guardian gallery, this one of "the wettest August in Britain in 100 years." Yeah, so we're not in Britain, but if anything our summer has been even worse, and there are several shots in there from Northern Ireland. We're not paddling boats down Main Street, so I guess things could be worse.

And finally, I like monkeys, and I like Tokyo, so what's better than video of a monkey gone berserk in Tokyo's Shibuya Station? (Spoiler: even better, the monkey gets away!!) (Actual story here. Includes the excellent quote used in the title above.)

Here's to you, Ronnie Drew

2008-08-17T05:40:00.001-04:00

The great Ronnie Drew died last night in a Dublin hospital. Back in February, we caught the all-star tribute to this founder of the legendary Irish folk band The Dubliners on The Late Late Show. Ronnie Drew was meant to be one of the musicians as well, but his health had already taken a turn for the worse by the time of the broadcast. I was going to post video of that clip and another Dubliners' performance, but D already beat me to it, so head on over to Detours for that.

The Dubliners lived hard and played music even harder. Here's a great piece on Drew and the rest of the group. And this piece from RTE includes links to videos, an interview, and a career retrospective.

a Moon in the Gutter Q&A with Derek Hill

2008-08-11T11:55:00.004-04:00

The great website Moon in the Gutter has an interview up with Derek. Check it out! (Then check out the site itself, which is fab.)

Charlie Kaufman and Hollywood's Merry Band of Pranksters, Fabulists, and Dreamers is listed as not being out in the US until September 1, but Amazon appears to be shipping copies now, so you might find it at your local bookstore already, too.

festival week

2008-08-11T05:24:00.003-04:00

All summer long we've been hearing about this week: it's homecoming here in Ballinamore, when everyone who's ever lived here comes back and there's music in the pubs every night (and on an outdoor stage erected just up the street from us) and a fun fair and an agricultural show and a literary tour and much much more and it all culminates in a mad fancy dress parade up the middle of town next weekend at midnight. Needless to say, we do not have appropriate fancy dress* (when you're packing light for a long time abroad you might splurge on space by throwing in a decent-looking skirt for a non-grungy night out on the town, or something impractical like a little memento from home--but I'm pretty sure no one has ever said to themselves "I'll throw in my most recent Halloween costume just in case"). Last night the streets were abuzz and earlier in the day I actually saw a traffic jam!

*for those of you playing along at home, fancy dress = costumes--not tuxes and evening gowns

guestblogging at The Rushmore Academy #3

2008-08-07T05:58:00.006-04:00

Derek's third guest post at The Rushmore Academy looks at Wes Anderson's use of music with a few favorite film clips. By now you know the drill: Charlie Kaufman and Hollywood's Merry Band of Pranksters, Fabulists, and Dreamers is out now in the UK and will be out in just a few short weeks (September 1) in the US and Canada. You can also pick it up at Foyles, Waterstones, Eason's, Barnes & Noble, and Borders, but if you like the folks at your local independent, by all means buy it from them.

finding Ballinamore

2008-08-04T17:13:00.002-04:00

I think the question I am most often asked here is "How did you end up in Ballinamore?" It's not as though it's a place that doesn't exist on maps, but for all the recognition on the face of many Irish people when you mention it, it might as well be.

So, how did we end up in Ballinamore? We knew we wanted to come to Ireland to live for a while. We had initially pinned our hopes on Galway, but Galway is expensive and outside of the charming city center, infected with sprawl. We considered: a village, someplace rural, someplace undisturbed by the hourly rumble of tourist buses. Someplace beautiful. Someplace where we could walk. Someplace with good pubs and friendly locals. I wondered if we might find it in Kerry, a part of Ireland I love, but is it possible to get off the beaten path in Kerry? Ah, it must be, but I didn't know where to start. We knew the place we were looking for, we just didn't know where to find it. But I was certain it must exist. "We'll get there and we'll just know we've found it," I said to Derek. Still, as April turned into May and we still lacked any concrete plans, I started to worry a little bit. The prospect of spending summer--the most expensive season anywhere in Europe--wandering around Ireland--the most expensive country in the EU--hauling around our increasingly unwieldly bags, trying to keep up with our work, looking for our Shangri-La, was unappealing.

Then one May morning in Spain I woke up and read this article in the Guardian. Leitrim resident DBC Pierre writes:

When you dissect what it is we're looking for among the tin whistles and windswept vistas, it boils down to a passage out of our time - the thing that attracts us to Ireland's promise is a continuity of magic, the powerful potential for spontaneity and unexpectedness that happens when you combine the speeds and times of life. And it's all here, enjoyed by Leitrimers, in a setting that has a "roof of the world" feel to it, where some of the cleanest air in western Europe swirls with fast-moving clouds, sun-showers and rainbows, over 140 lakes and barely 30,000 souls (the population has shrunk from over 150,000 in the 19th century, as its many moss- and fern-clad ruins will attest).

When we started thinking about the county's main town centers, we kept coming back to Ballinamore. Something about it just appealed. Then I found Liz's blog and from one comment I left there, she and I started emailing one another, and next thing we knew we were moving in three doors down. Now we have library cards and an account at the credit union and we can't walk down the street without running into half a dozen people we know. Okay, so for the likes of me, the weather is just awful, unspeakably so (literally--I have written and deleted a number of posts here that were little more than moaning about the cold wet summer, just because I couldn't stand to listen to myself complaining any longer) but it's probably just the thing for some of you the-moss-can't-grow-on-me-fast-enough Portlanders, who wilt once the mercury climbs past 75. So: Lovely Leitrim, don't come here for the weather, but come for the beauty, the craic, the kindness of strangers, for the Ireland of your imagination. It's right here.

in Japan they've got high shoes and lots of makeup

2008-08-03T05:28:00.004-04:00

That's my favorite quote from this piece in which children who have emigrated to Britain with their families are interviewed about their experiences and thoughts about life in their new country. I also like this one, from a 12-year-old American girl: "We went in to London to take a look around. Seeing all the statues it was like: 'Ugh, America is so boring compared to here.'" Or from a 13-year-old Nepali girl: "I was surprised because in Nepal the houses are made of bricks and stones but here when I saw the house I thought, 'Is that a real house?' I was thinking it was fake. When you walk on the floors it makes noises."

there's water in that there soil...

2008-08-01T12:05:00.003-04:00

Oh, how could I have forgotten to mention the most exciting news of the day? NASA has confirmed it: there's ice (which used to be water) on Mars!

And while twitter is one of the more irritating internet-type-thingys to come around in a while--it's pretty cool that the Phoenix Mars lander has a twitter...thingy.

a rainy Friday

2008-08-01T11:46:00.003-04:00

It's been raining again the last two days. I don't mind as much as I did, because it's not really cold and we had some sunshine over the last week or ten days. Still, I hope summer comes back before, you know, it's gone entirely. I am aware this may be a futile hope.

It's been a quiet week and probably more of the same for the foreseeable future. We both have a lot of work to do. I take breaks to play with my neighbor's new puppy, or the little cat who showed up here a couple of weeks ago that all the cottages in this row have been taking care of. Other things I've been up to: working, finishing a story for a ghost story anthology (details to come), working, getting enough sleep, catching up on Doctor Who (yay) and Battlestar Galactica (yay!) and Torchwood (boo!), working, reading (a real pleasure, as it finally seems to have dawned on me that I am finished with graduate school and can read whatever I want). (And yet I am a masochist: I miss school. I sigh over course descriptions and daydream about seminars.) Things I have not been doing, much to my regret: studying Spanish, taking advantage of the great walks in the area, writing more fiction.

One thing I have learned about myself here this summer, much to my surprise: I really, really hate being cold. I'm not sure when this aversion started. I did, after all, flee the southeastern US in part because I couldn't bear the hot, humid summers. And--please don't laugh too hard--I used to think it would be cool to work at Antarctica's McMurdo station. What was I thinking? I can barely survive an Irish summer. I would die at McMurdo. Right, so no more regrets for that road-not-taken.

Anyway, we are quietly and contentedly settling in and doing our thing here. Do I still miss Spain? Oh, you bet I do. As the Clash sang: Yo te quiero infinito, yo te quiero, oh mi corazon. . . .

six months

2008-07-27T14:33:00.007-04:00

I saw a gorgeous sunrise this morning, and not because I got up at the crack of dawn. No, I was walking home in the wee hours following my neighbor Liz's birthday party. The sky was blue, streaked with orange and red (it's been a mostly-sunny weekend). The night itself was filled with talking and laughing and singing (from Irish tunes to "American Pie") and dancing, one of the best nights I've had since we moved here. Great, great craic--even if it's left me mostly useless today.

And: six months ago today--also a Sunday--we raced out of our Portland apartment to a waiting cab, dragging (among other things) one last garbage bag of "stuff" destined for Goodwill (we asked the cab driver to stop off there on the way to the train station). We made it to the train station with a few minutes to spare, boarded the train, and collapsed exhausted into our seats for our cross-country journey. About that time I remembered that as I walked out the door of our apartment building for the very last time, I'd wanted to think about the passage from Tolkien about the road outside your door connecting all the other roads you journey along in your travels. Too late! But I'm sitting here in Ballinamore now with a road outside my door, and I'm thinking of all the places we've been since that day six months ago, across the American West, Chicago, DC, Georgia, Dublin, Galway, Connemara, London, Barcelona, Granada, Andalucia. I'm thinking about that mule path we hiked to the village in the Spanish countryside, and the route through Malaga's streets when we joined up with the May Day marchers, and getting lost on Hampstead Heath, and climbing Diamond Hill outside Letterfrack, and strolling on the beach in Barcelona, and walking along the Shannon-Erne canal, all those different roads. What a lot of adventures we've had so far. What a lot we have ahead of us. And I've finally hunted down that bit from Tolkien I wanted to say to myself on this day six months ago. I think Frodo's just finished singing a bit of The Road Goes Ever On. I had a notebook in seventh or eighth grade that I copied many of my favorite poems into, and that was one of them. Frodo goes on to say:

"Certainly it reminds me very much of Bilbo in the last years, before he went away. He used often to say there was only one Road; that it was like a great river: its springs were at every doorstep, and every path was its tributary. 'It's a dangerous business, Frodo, going out your door,' he used to say. 'You step into the Road, and if you don't keep your feet, there is no knowing where you might be swept off to. Do you realize that this is the very path that goes through Mirkwood, and that if you let it, it might takeyou to the Lonely Mountain or even worse places?' He used to say that on the path outside the front door at Bag End, especially after he had been out for a long walk."

I'm so glad we stepped out on that road.

class warfare at the Guardian!

2008-07-26T05:35:00.005-04:00

As a former waitress myself--the hardest job I've ever done--the comments on this piece are cracking me up! (It's by a New York City waiter complaining that Brits are, by and large, lousy tippers.) As several people have pointed out in the comments in response to people claiming ignorance: does no one out there remember Reservoir Dogs? What, you wanna be like Mr. Pink? Seriously, when somebody tells you what the customs are in another country and that you just might be running afoul of them, the proper thing to do is say something like, "Oops, didn't know, sorry, will do better in the future," not work oneself (collectively speaking) into increasing fits of shrill defensiveness shouting about torture, WWII, and child labor in Asia. My favorite suggestion (behind "get a better job!"): rather than following US tipping conventions, posters instead suggest that food service workers in America ought to organize themselves into a union and demand better working conditions! Oh my Gawd! I never thought of that! So, like, this whole health care crisis we've been having there for years and years, where people are losing their homes and dying and committing suicide because they can't afford (or even obtain) medical treatment? Is that all we have to do to fix it? Really? Wow.

(As an aside, if you get truly rude service in a restaurant, by no means should you feel obligated to tip afterward. But I think I can count on one hand the number of times this has happened to me. If staff treating you poorly has become a constant refrain in your life--it's you, not them.)

guestblogging at the rushmore academy #2

2008-07-15T06:13:00.004-04:00

Visit the Rushmore Academy to read an excerpt from Derek Hill's Charlie Kaufman and Hollywood's Merry Band of Pranksters, Fabulists, and Dreamers. It's about The Darjeeling Limited (my personal favorite of Wes Anderson's films, perhaps because of its setting and the soundtrack which is largely taken from Satyajit Ray's films and the India-based movies of Merchant Ivory). As always, you can order the book from Amazon UK, Amazon US (out on Sept 1), Amazon Canada, or your friendly local bookseller.

let's go to Mars!

2008-07-14T06:58:00.002-04:00

There's talk of launching an enormous international mission to Mars sometime in the next decade, one which will bring back samples of rock (and perhaps life?) rather than simply testing it on the planet's surface. Apparently this is a first step to launching an eventual manned mission--which could happen as soon as 2050.

Ad astra, indeed!

Banksy "revealed"

2008-07-13T17:49:00.006-04:00

Or so claims that stalwart of UK journalism, the Daily Mail, says the BBC.

Here's what I don't get: what's with the need to "reveal" people? Banksy doesn't want me to know who he is and I don't want to know who Banksy is. I don't want to know who John Twelve Hawks is, either (although I'm glad he has a sense of humor about himself), and I'm sure Stephen King wishes that one guy who tracked down Richard Bachman (in the pre-web days, no less!) had just left him alone as well. I'm reminded as well of the wonderful story (one any writer would be proud to claim as his or her own) "The Vanishing Life and Films of Emmanuel Escobada" by a forever-to-be- anonymous-author which appeared in an issue of Nemonymous magazine.

In this day and age when everybody is blogging and facebooking and livejournaling and youtube-ing and we all know far too much about just about everybody, there is something magical about a person who can remain a true enigma while still making public art.

looking for Henry Miller

2008-07-12T16:14:00.004-04:00

Found this while poking around online today: Cosmodemonic Telegraph Company: A Henry Miller Blog. The blog author describes himself as "NOT an expert on Miller, just a long-time enthusiast," which is a pretty fair description of me as well, so I'm looking forward to reading more. And looking around at the site reminded me of the many Paris Review interviews with writers (including Miller) which are now online. I also found this: a website about Henry Miller walks you can take in Paris.

The weather here continues to be cold and miserable and wet and despair-inducing, and so I was thinking of Henry today (I always think of him as Henry), running around Paris in the 1930s, broke and hungry and up to absolutely no good at all, while the world hurtled toward another great war (which I certainly hope is not a parallel with my own situation, but it's still good to be far from all the saber-rattling right now). Jumping without a parachute, leaping into the dark--pick the cliche of your choice, these things are always daunting and a little mad and yet that's what makes them worthwhile. Still, I'm certain I'd feel better about it all if I could just feel the warm sun on my skin again.

guestblogging at the Rushmore Academy

2008-07-07T07:13:00.004-04:00

Not me, Derek, blogging about his love of Wes Anderson's Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou. Anderson's one of the subjects of his book, Charlie Kaufman and Hollywood's Merry Band of Pranksters, Fabulists, and Dreamers. The book is available now in the UK and for pre-order in the US. As you are doubtless already aware.

update from the ark

2008-07-03T12:56:00.003-04:00

1. I take back everything I said about the weather improving. We are back to dark days and rain, rain, rain (okay, it is still not quite as cold as it was a week ago). I'm told Ireland had sixty-something days of rain in a row last summer. Apparently an endeavor is now underway to break the record. Perhaps someone here could have a word with the folks in Beijing who came up with the idea of controlling the weather in order to ensure a sunny Olympic summer?

2. Today I learned that one of my favorite character actors, Don S. Davis, has died of a massive heart attack. I've been a fan since his turn as Major Garland Briggs on Twin Peaks (though I've never liked the Stargate franchise, which I suppose he is best known for). The most incongruous role I've ever spotted him in was in an educational film about--a submarine, maybe?--I can't remember--in the sea exhibit portion of the excellent Royal BC Museum in Victoria, British Columbia back in 1996. Also, he made art! So I'm sad Mr. Davis is no longer with us.

3. I really need to see the sun.

going native

2008-07-01T13:46:00.005-04:00

It is said that people in Ireland love to talk about the weather. And it's true. If you are ever stuck for conversation here, it is a great ice-breaker or filler-in of awkward silences. "Lovely day we're having," or "Terrible weather, isn't it?" But there's a very good reason for it. In Ireland, you spend a great deal of time being 1) appalled by the weather 2) grateful beyond words for the weather or 3) confused by the weather, because, for example, the sun is shining and it's raining at the same time. Or the sun is shining out your front window and it's nothing but black clouds gathering out your back. (I did not make either of these examples up.)

Today when I woke up and heard it raining yet again I was (1) but then when I realized that for the third day or so running it was, at least, not cold (not what you'd call warm, mind you, but I could sit around in short sleeves) I edged toward (2) and then, this afternoon, when the sky went a glorious shade of blue and the sun fought its way out of the clouds I fell to my knees in the back garden sobbing with relief. Well, not quite all that--but my point is, I really felt the sun, and it wasn't the dry-oven heat of Spain, when we'd lie outside on the terrace in Andalucia and reenact Ray Winston's opening speech from Sexy Beast (Roastin'...boilin'...baking...swelterin'...It's like a sauna...a furnace...you could fry an egg on my stomach...) but it was glorious in a different way. It's an Irish summer afternoon, which is soft and gorgeous and like summer nowhere else in the world, I think.

broadband arrived today...

2008-06-30T14:35:00.006-04:00

...and it only took one month! Why, yes, you may have heard a bit of sarcasm there. At any rate, I should be able to update regularly now. The weather here is dreadful. I mean, even for Ireland--cold and miserable and rainy. But we did see some sun yesterday and today it stayed dry enough for a walk along the Shannon-Erne canal. The grey skies can be quite beautiful and yes, it is very green. And hey, I haven't worn long underwear in a couple of days! The 10-day forecast I looked at online promises more of what we've been having--rain, and temperatures no higher than the fifties--but it's been wrong once or twice before.

I try to keep my soccer talk to a minimum here, but for the past almost-twenty-four-hours I've been completely euphoric that Spain played to a beautiful championship finish in Euro 2008. Viva Espana!

Weather and football: that's the sum total of the inside of my head at the moment. It will get better after this, I promise. I'm rusty.

one week in Leitrim

2008-06-08T09:56:00.004-04:00

During my first week in the wild northwest of Ireland, I have:

been stung by nettles (and was given a plant remedy for the stinging--dock leaves--which really worked well!)
battled giant spiders and other scary insects, bringing to mind that horrifying spider pit scene in Peter Jackson's King Kong. Some small inoffensive-type bugs were collateral damage. Sorry, guys.
eaten probably the recommended number of fry-ups for an entire year
painted some walls
seen The Savages in a traveling mobile cinema
built my first peat fire
sat outside at the neighbor's in the rain in the middle of the night, eating sausages and hamburgers cooked on the grill while people with lovely voices took turns singing traditional Irish songs
been the recipient of an extraordinary amount of kindness from strangers--who are now friends
seen for myself the truth of the song titled "Lovely Leitrim"

No wonder I feel completely worn out.

status update, Ireland edition

2008-06-04T06:35:00.006-04:00

For those of you following along at home wondering what's become of me . . .

1. We are safely landed in Ballinamore, Ireland. Really, there's lots more to tell (like: County Leitrim has a mobile arthouse cinema!), but we're racing off to clean the cottage we've rented here.

2. Superpowers is out--the debut (and dare I say long-awaited?) novel by David J. Schwartz, my longtime friend and an excellent writer. It's available in the UK right now and you can buy it in the US from June 10.

3. Much more work, cleaning, painting, and a few weeks of iffy wireless access awaits me. Back when I can with updates and photos.

end of the hindu kingdom

2008-05-28T05:42:00.003-04:00

Because I used to live in Nepal--pre-Maoist insurgency--I have been watching the recent elections there with interest. I am cautiously optimistic about the new republic, and I guess I did not fully process what the results would be: now I can say I lived in the last Hindu kingdom in its final years. It is strange to think of the Royal Nepal Airlines being just Nepal Airlines now, and of the palace turned into a museum. One of these days I will make my way back there, and I hope that the country will be on a path to a more peaceful and prosperous future.

life on Mars

2008-05-26T17:09:00.002-04:00

Tomorrow I leave for London--a few tears have been shed as I say goodbye to Spain. And last night, after midnight my time, the Phoenix lander touched down on Mars. I will miss the wide and beautiful sky here and tonight I'll look up at the stars one last time and think about the stalwart lander rolling along the surface of the red planet. If you had told me, when I was a kid, that someday I would, with a few clicks of a keyboard, look at images transmitted from the surface of Mars--while sitting in the living room of a little cottage in the mountains of Andalucia, no less--I'd . . . well, I'd have thought the future looked pretty damn cool. Almost makes up for never getting those flying cars we all expected.

Some pictures from Mars are here and here.

My fingers are crossed they'll find some evidence of life on this mission.

three more days

2008-05-24T02:50:00.004-04:00

hiking in Axarquia, photo by Derek Hill

Lots to do before we go: packing and cleaning, and laying the groundwork for the next stage of our adventures, and our regular work, and the temptation is to veer from frantically stressed to sad and back to frantic again. But I don't want my last three days here to be like that. Today we hike into the village for the last time (on this trip). We'll walk around and take some photos and when we feel sad we'll remind ourselves that in the fall or winter we'll be back again for a visit.

last days in Spain (for now)

2008-05-23T03:50:00.006-04:00

hiking in Axarquia, photo by Derek Hill

Already missing you, Spain.

Only four full days left, counting today. This time Tuesday we'll be at the airport in Malaga, waiting on our flight to London We'd stay longer, but the day we fly out is our 88th day in the Schengen zone, so we have no choice. I'm trying hard to get excited about our new adventures ahead and focus on enjoying the time we have left here, but I admit when I think of leaving, I feel like crying.

My mother said this in an email to me a month or so ago:
It will be three months of great memories as your first time there and I'm sure you will return again and again but this will be your "special" memory..........an introduction to Spain.

So true. Spain, I never dreamed you'd steal my heart like this.

hiking in Axarquia

2008-05-21T16:01:00.005-04:00

Last Thursday, we decided to celebrate the UK publication of Derek's book by taking a day hike through the mountains, one which would eventually bring us into the village where we'd reward ourselves with canas y tapas. We set out on our hike with a hand-drawn map provided by the owner of the cottage we're renting, and the map was a perfectly good one but our instincts were not: we took, literally, every wrong path we could have. So there was a lot of backtracking and slogging uphill and at one point we went in a complete circle, emerging to the exact same landscape we'd seen earlier, albeit on a higher stretch of the trail--the Comares Witch Project! But we prevailed, and were rewarded with gorgeous views of the valleys and canyons. At long last we found ourselves perched on stools at a local tapas joint where we feasted on gambas (shrimp) and albondigas (meatballs) and glasses of beer. We stopped at the grocery store on our way out of the village to stock up on supplies and made our way back by our familiar (and much shorter) trails, and were home well before dark even though it was close to 9 pm. A good way, I think, to celebrate one's first book publication. I think we'll make it a tradition.

Charlie Kaufman and the American New Wave

2008-05-09T04:08:00.006-04:00

If you are living in the UK you will want to pre-order your copy of the hot new title above, as it hits the streets on May 15. Try Amazon, your local chain, or best of all, your neighborhood independent bookstore. It's an entertaining read and a fantastic introduction to both the French New Wave and some of the trends in independent and not-so-independent contemporary cinema, with Kaufman and his gang of misfits at the center of it all: the movies of Spike Jonze, Michel Gondry, David O. Russell, Sofia Coppola, Richard Linklater, and Wes Anderson. You'll also get a side trip to the outer isles for a look at oddities like Schizopolis, Donnie Darko, Punch-Drunk Love, and CQ.

How can I be so sure it's a good book? Well, let's just say I had a bit of a sneak preview. I kind of know the author, see...

And if you are in the US, get the jump on your friends and pre-order for a September release.

the duck-billed platypus is weirder than we thought

2008-05-08T06:33:00.001-04:00

Is anything stranger and more wondrous than the natural world around us? The awkward yet fascinating duck-billed platypus continues to astonish and teach us.

lost in andalucia

2008-05-06T05:03:00.006-04:00

photo by Derek Hill

I am out in the country, somewhere in the mountains of Andalucia. I am actually not that far from civilization (if you call the Costa del Sol civilized, which I might quibble with), as the crow flies, but we don't have a car here, so practically speaking we are rather remote. We are living in a gorgeous old cottage that we have rented for most of the month, and it feels quite spacious considering we've spent the last three months living in studios and B&B rooms. We are surrounded by cacti, olive groves, date trees, and mountains. Our cottage also appears to have come equipped with a complimentary dog and cat, who have adopted us. The light is remarkable and changes the appearance of the mountains hourly. The stars are brilliant at night. The birds never stop singing, even at midnight. I never want to leave.

A charming white village is under a 40-minute walk away. This is fine, as we are used to walking--we didn't own a car in Portland. On the other hand, we didn't have to hike through mountains along mule trails to get to the grocery store back in Portland, either, so this is a little bit different. We've made a couple of treks into the village so far, which is another Moorish maze of tiny walled streets. On our first trip we got lost there, on our way in and out, and were press-ganged into buying almonds from a woman who ushered us into her house. ("A quarter kilo," I kept insisting in Spanish, but she was firm that we would buy a half kilo!) They are, admittedly, the best almonds I have ever eaten, strong and almond-y like the extract. Suddenly I think I've never actually eaten an almond before now.

I'm very happy here. Did I mention that part yet?

It's May Day

2008-05-01T07:04:00.004-04:00

...which, since I am a stupid American, completely slipped my mind when I planned for us to travel today from Malaga out to a little mountain village nobody's heard of. But the bus service is canceled due to the fiesta, so tomorrow morning we will get a chance to reenact the Martin Sheen scene from Apocalypse Now: "Malaga. Shit. I'm still only in Malaga."

How could I have forgotten what a big day this is in Europe? Anyway, Happy May Day to all!

Where to Stay in Granada

2008-04-30T18:30:00.005-04:00

I had a comment recently from Carloz, who writes the excellent Spain: The Blog asking me "What happened to you?" following my long-ago posting from April 5. I was alternately too busy and having too much fun in Granada to post (and I will post, all the ones I promised, plus I will tell you all the reasons I currently think Granada is possibly the finest place on earth). But I did want to mention this: here is where we stayed in April in Granada, Casa del Aljibe, a lovely home in the heart of the Albaicin, and now I wouldn't consider staying anyplace else in the city. Not only was Michael, the owner, a wonderful host, but the house and setting itself was beautiful. We spent April living just off a gorgeous walled garden with a menagerie of goldfish, frogs, birds, bees, and one very sweet dog. Michael, who lives with his family on the top floor, knows Granada well and is not only generous with his insider knowledge, but is a delightful raconteur to boot. I highly recommend the place.

One Against Twenty: Boris Spassky in Granada

2008-04-05T05:03:00.003-04:00

photo by Derek Hill

"So, what did you do on your third day in Granada?"

"Oh, I slept in, worked in the morning and afternoon in the garden outside, and then I hiked up to the grounds of the Alhambra and watched a three-and-a-half-hour chess match. Actually, twenty of them."

We fortuitously arrived in Granada just as the Hay Festival Alhambra began, which I only stumbled across because I was googling the Hay-on-Wye festival a few days ago. I jumped on the Umberto Eco tickets while the chess-head half of our traveling team set out to educate me on the career of Russian grandmaster Boris Spassky and his professional rivalry with the brilliant and utterly unhinged American Bobby Fischer in the 1970s. All of this was documented in the book Bobby Fischer Goes to War, by David Edwards and John Eidinow, which D and other friends raved about back when I was too busy living and breathing Middle English lit to get around to. Now I'm sorry I didn't find the time; it was thrilling to watch a Grandmaster in action but would have been even more so had he become a kind of hero figure for me, as he was for my friends who read about him.

Watching chess unfold for 3+ hours is actually much more interesting than it sounds. (Or perhaps that sounds wonderful to you. What do I know?) Spassky, still an imposing figure at 71 with snow-white hair and dark glasses, stood in the middle, surrounded by 20 opponents of different levels and abilities, the youngest a couple of whiz kid twin prodigies of about nine. The first guy was eliminated about a half hour in, but after that it was about another hour before anyone else went down. The third or fourth game to finish was actually a win for Spassky's opponent--by a stressed-out looking guy whose thoughtful, conservative moves had Spassky studying the board for long minutes. That dude was the hero of the night: pretty girls and little kids came up to him to look at his scoresheet (autographed by Spassky) and chat about his tactics. A Brit eliminated in much later rounds sounded giddy and exhausted when I overheard him talking to his friend afterwards: "There's this sort of growing pressure as he works his way round to you!"

Eventually, everyone fell, with the last holdouts defeated between eight and eight-thirty. (The twins, by the way, were among the last to go down.) Despite the fact that I'd cracked more than a few sarcastic jokes beforehand about the white-knuckle excitement of watching three hours of chess, the entire endeavor was enormously exciting. Once upon a time Spassky was a Cold War pawn, a symbol of the West's fear and loathing. Now Bobby Fischer is dead and the world doesn't have much time for chess rivalries any longer; Spassky lives a quiet life in France, and how fitting that he makes one of his rare appearances at a conference dedicated to dialog between the East and the West, in a new era of fear ratcheting all the way up to paranoia from a different part of the East. The setting, in and around the grounds of the Alhambra, reminds us it's a conflict that goes back long before any of us can remember, before we were born, before our great-great-great-great grandparents were alive, East and West in an eternal dance of fascination and repulsion.

Keep an eye on Detours, where D will be publishing video of the great Spassky in action. I'll let you know when it's up.

Tales of the Alhambra

2008-04-03T07:38:00.003-04:00

I have failed miserably in my planned thematic reading thus far. No Flann O'Brien in Ireland, while Orwell and Montalban went neglected in Barcelona. But I'm determined to do better now, and to that end I've found a copy of Washington Irving's Tales of the Alhambra online (which is better than paying 6 euros for a battered abridged copy from one of the tourist stalls near the entrance). Or, if you prefer simply the supernatural tales, The Literary Gothic has selected those out. I've already begun reading the full e-text version. And elsewhere, I found this article from the Atlantic about southern Spain's Islamic past (and future?): Tales of the Alhambra by Culleen Murphy.

Granada: First Thoughts

2008-04-02T04:44:00.003-04:00

Still a food entry to come on Barcelona, and I have at least one Ireland story that must be told, but: first impressions of Granada. Granada is a city in southern Spain that was under Moorish rule from the eighth to the late fifteenth century, and that history is reflected in its architecture, most notably the grand Alhambra Palace--a view of which I will pass by everyday I am here, and the snow-capped Sierra Nevadas beyond. More history later, but for now, only impressions: sunny and warm--a temperature gauge I saw today said 25 degrees Celsius, or about 77 Fahrenheit. It's still cold at night, though. We are staying in an apartment in an old house (how old? I'll find out and let you know) in the Albaicin, the old Moorish quarter, walls of whitewash and graffiti, timeless, tiny winding streets made of steps. The town is charming. I'm in love with it, too, just like that, and as hard as it was to tear ourselves away from Barcelona I'm so glad I've come here now. How does this happen, that a country you never thought about very much, that was never high on your list of places to visit (a confession: I originally planned to come to Spain because I wanted to watch the Barcelona soccer team play) work its way into your very bones like this? There is so much to see and learn here; I think for the first time in my life I understand how people fall in love with one country and devote themselves to it, never bothering or needing to visit any other places. I feel like I have stumbled upon a great treasure I did not even know I was looking for. I want to learn Spanish, really learn it, not my stupid pidgen utterances, and keep coming back here. I want to walk through the mountains and talk to people and sit in the sun.

leaving Barcelona

2008-03-29T05:54:00.002-04:00

We are both more than a little disconcerted by the realization that in two days' time we will have to pack everything up again and find our way onto a train to our next destination. Somehow in our comfortable perambulations around the narrow streets and beaches of Barceloneta we slipped out of traveling and into resident mode, and I've rediscovered the sheer joy of idleness, something that was in short supply--nay, nonexistent--during my long slog of combining work and graduate school. I suspect this all means we are just about ready to find ourselves a base somewhere, a place we can move out from without having to carry everything we own with us every time we want to explore someplace new. But not quite yet. Stay tuned for our further adventures in Granada, where the Moors left their mark and I hear the tapas are free!

new blogging kid on the block

2008-03-24T17:41:00.004-04:00

At long last, D has a new blog, Detours (I still recommend the archives of Nightmare Town for lovers of film). And I'm sure you've pre-ordered your copy of Charlie Kaufman and Hollywood's Merry Band of Pranksters, Fabulists, and Dreamers: An Excursion Through the American New Wave, right?

English-language bookstores in Barcelona

2008-03-24T16:46:00.005-04:00

We finally took the time to check out the two main English-language bookstores in the city, Elephant Books and Hibernian Books. Both are near metro stops, Poble Sec and Fontana, respectively--both line 11, the green one. Both have a mix of junk and good stuff. Hibernian Books is by far the better organized, will give you store credit for used books, and in particular has a good selection of literary classics (modern and older), and not a bad science fiction section as long as you are not looking for anything recent--amid the media tie-ins and a puzzlingly large amount of L. Ron Hubbard books (as well as several copies of several years' worth of Writers of the Future anthologies, which is not the same thing), I found books by Octavia Butler, Robert Charles Wilson, James Tiptree Jr., Michael Bishop, among others. Unfortunately, I was in a science fiction mood and what they did not have was anything I was specifically hoping for--Ken MacLeod, Alistair Reynolds, Nicole Griffith's Slow River, or dear departed Sir Arthur (they did have a couple of his books but none I hadn't read).

Elephant Books is a jumble of a place, and on first walking in you think something along the lines of, "Oh dear" and suspect you'll never find anything there. But they are friendly and helpful and there is a method to the apparent madness: they can help you look for something, and despite our initial impression, we ended up finding so many books we wanted to buy that we had to put some back. D came away with Lucius Shepard's Life During Wartime and a collection of M.R. James short stories and I found what I was looking for (besides science fiction, of which they have very little): two books by Barcelona crime writer Manuel Vazquez Montalban, Murder in the Central Committee and An Olympic Death. (I read his Offside last year, which was excellent.) Montalban was a popular novelist and food writer, and his detective, Pepe Carvalho, does not let the time he spends on the seamier side of Barcelona's streets interfere with his consumption of good Catalonian cuisine. I won't get through them both before we leave here (George Orwell's Homage to Catalonia, about his service in the Spanish Civil War, is still on my bedside reading shelf) but I'm looking forward to reading about Montalban's Barcelona with a new appreciation.

Elephant Books also serves coffee, tea, and biscuits (that's cookies to you Americans) and serves as a kind of meeting place for local expats as well. They will buy books from you at 60 cents apiece. I'd recommend checking both places out when you start to get that panicky-running-out-of-things-to-read feeling, or even if you're just looking to while away a couple of pleasant hours. I believe all of Elephant's used books are under 3 euros, while Hibernian's sf/f/h section, at least, was divided between 1.75 and 3.50 euros, plus some bargain books of the 1980s mass market paperback "women's fiction" variety.

loafing in Barcelona

2008-03-22T05:09:00.007-04:00

Lately we've been working and, frankly, loafing a lot, rather than doing touristy things. The loafing, alas (at least to this extent) must come to an end, as we do have responsibilities and obligations to fulfill as well as the usual writing projects etc etc blah blah blah. The point of all that was to explain the relative silence here. If you are hankering for another Spain story, I did write a little piece over at a pretty move.

What we have been doing is actually just what we wanted to do here: living our ordinary lives, only in Barcelona. We get up; we work; we walk on the beach; we buy food and bread every day; we people-watch. Neither of us has ever been hardcore tourist types, racing from attraction to attraction. Still, we have only a little bit over a week left in Barcelona now and there are still two must-see attractions we'll be fitting in: a tour of the Camp Nou museum and grounds and a day trip to Montserrat. Other planned excursions, such as this interesting walk around an ancient Iberian village, trips to Girona, Tarragona, and Figueres for the Dali museum, will have to be postponed to our next visit. Oh, yes, there will be a next visit.

It's Easter week here, or Semana Santa. This is less of a big deal in Barcelona than in other parts of Spain. As it turns out, there was a Holy Week procession here yesterday, although we didn't figure out where it was in time and missed it, alas. The smaller villages in Catalunya celebrate in a bigger way; down south in Seville is one of the grandest of all. See pictures here.

If you haven't seen it already, I had a rather interesting conversation with a Catalan-American in the comments section of this post, about outsiders' views of all things Catalonian.

Finally, drop me a line for a link to our flickr page with loads of photos. I've endeavored to get it out to family and friends but doubtless some folks got missed.

My God, it's full of stars!

2008-03-19T04:33:00.006-04:00

My favorite book by Arthur C. Clarke--and there are many I haven't read--is Childhood's End. I love his books because they truly convey science fiction's much-ballyhoed sense of wonder. More than any other writer I can think of, he infused science with a cosmic awe.

A bit of trivia: Arthur C. Clarke, or A.C. Clarke as he was known, was a very popular author in the Czech Republic in the mid-90s when I taught English over there. I lost count of how many students listed him as a favorite author and the stores were full of his books.

He was ninety years old and lived a good, long life. I'm still very sorry he's no longer with us. The world is a poorer place indeed. Over at the Making Light blog, Patrick Nielsen Hayden says far better than I can what made his work so special, and many wonderful tributes follow in the comments.

New York Times obituary
The Guardian obituary
BBC obituary
NPR's morning edition tribute
The Arthur C. Clarke Foundation

why Barcelona is a great place to learn Spanish. and why it is not.

2008-03-14T18:04:00.003-04:00

Barcelona's a great place to learn Spanish because people here do not any of these three things, all of which I have encountered in other countries:

1. Get so impatient at the sound of your mangling the language that they just reply to you in English
2. Want to practice their English really badly so they reply to you in English
3. Stare at you stony-faced and uncomprehending (or at least pretending to not comprehend) when you try speaking to them in Spanish

Our experience thus far in Barcelona has been that a lot (not all, and I don't know about most) of people can speak English, but would just as soon not do so. However--and this is important--when something they say produces a look of complete incomprehension on your face, or a No entiendo (I don't understand) or when you are pathetically reduced to grunting and charades to get your point across, they will switch to English with grace and friendliness--even if they don't speak much, even if they have to struggle to come up with a word or ask a coworker. In short, they are laid back about the whole business.

On the other hand, Barcelona can be a confusing place to learn Spanish because Spanish is not actually the language here. Catalan is. Catalan, while a Romance language, is emphatically not a dialect of Spanish; don't make the mistake of thinking so, although the two are mutually intelligible, I think, for native speakers. I think of their relationship as similar to that of Hindi and Nepali--a language I used to speak reasonably well--in that as a nonnative speaker, I can still understand a lot of Hindi words, although the language is different enough that I couldn't carry on even a simple conversation in Hindi.

Anyway, Catalan makes things difficult because lots of things are written in Catalan--signs, restaurant menus, newspapers--and so you must be careful about what you commit to memory based on what you see around you every day. Lots of words are similar--bread, for example, is pa in Catalan and pan in Spanish--but plenty are not. (Por favor versus si us plau for please.) The names of goods on price labels in grocery stores do not match the names on the products themselves, because the product names are usually (not always) in Spanish, while the little labels on the shelf are in Catalan. Sometimes, when you speak Spanish to people, they will answer in Catalan. If you speak Spanish already you will quickly sort out which language is in front of you without too much trouble. If, like me, you showed up only with the ability to count and do a few other tricks, you won't know which language people are using much of the time but you will pick up on telltale markers in the written language that allow you to sort which one you're looking at fairly quickly.

I sense that the Catalan-language boosterism is a source of frustration for some foreigners and expats. I can't really sympathize: the language was suppressed under Franco and has enjoyed a fantastic resurgence in the decades since his death. Far be it from me, a complete outsider, to wade into the murky political waters of Catalan nationalism. It is, however, my understanding that an increasing autonomy within the nation of Spain rather than secession, is the goal for many. I've also heard that Catalans tend to be inclusive: learn the language, give your child a Catalan name, and you're welcome.

I originally planned to speak some Catalan here but my first couple of days it was all I could do not to s'il vous plait people and tell them things were Raamro chha (good, in Nepali) and even Czech tried slipping out, Prosim instead of Por favor, which is just absurd because I've never gotten past a few rudimentary words and phrases in Czech. Now that the initial panic has subsided I try to throw in a few Catalan phrases for good measure where I can, si us plau and adeu (goodbye). Sooner or later, though, some poor Barcelonian is bound to get a sentence that starts in Spanish, segues into French, and finishes in Nepali.

And that's not so bad. Because I'd still rather do that and make a fool of myself than do what I've seen people do (and not just Americans by any means) far too often all over the world: walk up to a person in a shop or a restaurant or at a desk and just start off speaking in English. And then they wonder why all the people in such-and-such a place seem surly and rude. It's not difficult at all to learn simple greetings: please, thank you, and the all-important Do you speak English or even better, May I speak English? These little considerations can go a long way in transforming what kind of experiences you have out there in the rest of the world.

Dave Stevens RIP

2008-03-13T14:13:00.003-04:00

As a longtime fan of The Rocketeer (and one of the few people who actually saw and enjoyed--twice!--the film adaptation in the theatre) I am saddened to learn of the untimely death of the comic's creator, Dave Stevens, at 52, from leukemia. The LA Times obit is here and a memorial page is here. His beloved Bettie Page outlived him in the end.

I still wish I had my very own rocket pack.

Spanish Time

2008-03-10T16:13:00.005-04:00

I've long heard that Spaniards are notorious for the late hours they keep compared to the rest of us. And it's no lie: "morning" here really does mean anything before 2 pm, at which time everything stops and shuts down (except for restaurants, which finally get around to opening) for large, leisurely lunches followed by siestas. Siesta ends at 5 and everyone ostensibly returns to work until 8. And then tapas time begins: drinks and small plates at various joints till dinnertime arrives at 10 or 11 at night. After that, if you are far more energetic than D and me, you head out to dance and drink the night away.

We keep late-ish hours ourselves, by American standards at least, but not quite this late. And yet somehow we find ourselves creeping more and more toward Spanish time: we don't seem to manage to get lunch going until around 3 in the afternoon and we are usually startled to look up from dinner and realize it's 9 or 10 at night. Somehow the time just slips away from you; even in a city the size of Barcelona no one seems to be in a hurry. Just a little while ago, around 8 pm, we made our daily stop at the neighborhood bakery and the bread we purchased there was still warm--because they were still baking. No racing out in the morning before the fresh loaves are gone for this country. Last night we went to see FC Barcelona play at the world-famous Camp Nou stadium, and the game we attended last night started--not ended, started--at 9 pm. So I took advantage of siesta time to, well, siesta for a couple of hours. This whole country is enabling us! And why fight it? As they say, when in Spain...

Spanish Socialists Retain Power

2008-03-10T06:51:00.004-04:00

The results of Spain's elections are in and the incumbents stay. Spain's prime minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero swept into office following the 2004 Madrid train bombings (90% of the Spanish public opposed the Iraq war and tossed out the government that dragged them into it in the first place).

And on my narrow little street in Barceloneta, life goes on as always. People hang out their laundry and families take walks together and children play and little knots of old ladies gossip and dogs lead their masters around and couples of all ages stroll about the smell of delicious cooking wafts in our windows and things are good.

Jules Verne in space

2008-03-08T15:30:00.003-05:00

Europe prepares to launch its biggest spacecraft ever, with a 100-year-old original hardback of Jules Verne's From the Earth to the Moon in the hold.

It's things like this that make me think us crazy monkeys deserve to make it another few hundred years--and off this beautiful planet and on to other worlds--after all.

Ex-Councillor Killed Days Before Spanish Elections

2008-03-07T14:23:00.002-05:00

This is very sad. Spanish elections are on Sunday, but campaigning was halted today in the wake of the tragic murder of a Basque politician. Basque separatists are blamed.

the politics of architecture

2008-03-07T04:33:00.004-05:00

This article is certainly reflective of what I have observed in Barcelona thus far: this is a city of astonishing and innovative architectural achievement. I mean, almost any major city in Europe that escaped the worst ravages of war over the centuries has astonishing old buildings, but Barcelona thrives in the post-Franco era. Then, of course, there's Gaudi. We're off to visit the Sagrada Familia today, in fact.

Sleeping at Gatwick. Rousted by coppers!

2008-03-03T13:21:00.002-05:00

Budget travel has driven me to such uncomfortable lengths as taking a bus from Prague to London (twenty-something hours), a Greyhound from Atlanta to New York (one of the ninth circles of Hell), and let's not even talk about what fifteen hours on a Nepalese night bus does to you. Despite having slept (or not) in some uncomfortable places in the interest of saving money, I've never spent the night in an airport. A few days ago, looking at our tight budget and facing a flight leaving Gatwick at 6:55 a.m. with a boarding time of 6:15 a.m. and adding in time to get to the airport, check in, and make it through security, we realized there was no point in paying for another night's accommodation where we would toss and turn for maybe three or four hours before getting up to start the long trek to our departure gate.

So naive was I about the world of sleeping in airports I had no idea until last week that there was an entire site devoted to the subject. Alas, I can report that the information in the Gatwick thread about the chapel being a good place to sleep is out of date, as we were settled no more than ten or fifteen minutes when two policemen with very large and scary-looking guns rousted us, in the nicest way possible. They were fairly apologetic even while checking our tickets to make sure we weren't transients who'd snuck in to catch a little shut-eye and even downright chatty about Barcelona's attractions once they saw where we were headed, but I was too tired to chat back. Sofas in the coffee shops were already claimed by savvier sleepers, so we eventually found some cushioned benches downstairs around the corner in the arrivals area, set apart and empty but for other sleepers. Despite earplugs it took me hours to finally drift off (ah, chapel of calm, we hardly knew ye) and then some man sat on my feet (although there was plenty of room) and went to sleep there sitting up, and I kept kicking him, so that was awkward. D wrapped his scarf round his eyes and got more rest than me. Around 4:30 we were awakened by two men who chose to sit right next to all the sleepers and conduct a conversation loudly, because of course there was absolutely nowhere else in the airport said conversation could possibly have taken place. By 5:30 am the line for security was already ghastly, so it was a good thing we'd decided to sleep there.

I'm still undecided as to whether I slept less on the Eurolines bus between Dublin and London (which would have been okay but for the driver deciding to subject us to his crappy radio station all. night. long.), but my final verdict on the whole experience is that I think I will try to avoid sleeping in airports in the future. Also, I still maintain that a respite for weary travelers is a perfectly appropriate function for a chapel.

a shoplifting in Barcelona

2008-03-02T07:06:00.003-05:00

Our first impression of Barcelona--after merely a day here--is that it has a very mellow vibe. That may in part be because we are staying in a more residential and less touristy area. But last night we went to the supermarket to pick up a few items that can't be purchased at the markets--like cereal, soap, milk. As we waited at the checkout counter, a guy walked right past us and and through the security gate, setting off alarms. Our checker called after him but she never seemed particularly exercised about the whole thing and the guy actually walked back in with his ill-gotten booty--two bottles of vodka--looking sheepish. He handed them back to her, she set them down, and in the time it took for all this to go down a fairly unthreatening-looking guy in a security coat finally turned up and hurried out the door after the perp--who was ambling off down the street. In the meantime, some crazy American dude carrying a guitar--clearly the kind of guy who's been on the road way, way too long--wandered in and started berating the cashier in English: "Man, you shouldn't have done that! That could really lead to some violence! What you don't know about that guy is that he's Polish, man, he's Polish! All he took was a couple of bottles of vodka. I saw it myself. He's Polish!" The checker just kept shaking her head at the crazy American's tirade, shrugging, and continued ringing up our groceries.