Addendum: From the Storm

A hard rain, here in Providence, as Hanna bears down on us. I don't really expect we'll lose power or anything of that sort. But we do have a tropical storm warning, a flash flood advisory, and so forth. Anyway, I thought I'd post some photos from our trip down to Beavertail on Thursday:

The "fairy trail" leading to the rocks and the shore (view to the north).



Lions Head Chasm, into which I almost fell. View to the northeast. Note the fisherman (upper, center) for scale. Exposed in the cross-section are interstratified beds of the Cambro-Ordovician Fort Burnside and Jamestown formations.



An Upland Sandpiper (Bartamia longicauda).



View along the chasm, back to the west. The tide was rising.



View from inside the chasm, near its opening to the sea, looking towards the northwest. Note the high-tide line marked by seaweed.



Lichen growing among veins of calcite.



More lichen.



View back to the south, towards Beavertail Point and the lighthouse, just before dark.

All photographs Copyright © 2008 by Kathryn A. Pollnac.

Currently listening : The Fragile By Nine Inch Nails

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If we can’t make you open, we will take it out in blood.

Bad Lortab hangover this morning. The world is slick and gooey, and my stomach wants to rebel. Spooky woke at 6:30 ayem to find the bathroom flooded and water pouring in through the ceiling. As she was trying to mop it up, one of the guys from downstairs knocked. His bathroom, which is directly below ours, was also flooding. This morning, we're really not sure where the water originated from. Not upstairs. And we have to hope there won't be more of it when Hanna actually gets here tonight or tomorrow. So far, we've had only the first outer rain bands. Naturally, I slept through all the drama.

Yesterday, despite the heat (86F inside), I wrote a more than sufficient 1,606 words on Chapter Five of The Red Tree. I have decided, if I can just do 1,500 words a day on the book most days between now at the beginning of November, all will be well. It can't be half as unpleasant as last year's Forced March of Beowulf, since this is a book that I actually want to write (and I will try not to think about the fact that it will sell only a small fraction of the books that the Beowulf novelization sold, much less will it be translated into umpteen million languages like Beowulf).

This morning, I have not even had breakfast, my stomach is a stormy sea, and all I seem to desire is whiskey and a pack of Camel's.

I did not leave the house yesterday. I'll try to get out this evening. Tuna sandwiches for dinner last night. Then unspeakable frustration regarding terraforming in Howards End. All I want are tunnels. Is that too bloody much to ask? Tunnels. Vacuities in the earth. I hope people in the rp group are keeping up with the notecards, because I've been sending quite a lot of them out. I'm getting a lot of good character proposals. So, thank you for that.

Some decent rp in SL last night, when I could no longer endure the tedium of not-building, so thank you, Joah. Truly, my opinion of Second Life...no, wait. Let me rephrase this. Truly, my opinion of the people who infest Second Life, preventing it from realizing its potential, has dropped to an all-time low. I've been struggling with this great idiot beast since May '07, because I see how SL could be used. Of course, ultimately, the Lindens are at fault, because they surely encourage the multiverse's overpopulation by morons who only want a chat room with a visual interface. What does it matter to Linden Labs, so long as people come. Any people will do. It doesn't matter how they use the place, so long as they do use the place. I suspect that Howard's End will be my last attempt at making SL work. It either will, or it won't, and if it doesn't, I'll nuke the sim and go back to whatever my life was before I slipped into that thunderous mess. Yes, this ayem, I have only pure hatred for most of SL, but for the handful of determined artists and writers and actors who are trying so hard to make it something worth our while, I still have sympathy. Rest assured, Howards End will never be a self-congratulatory, wankfest social club for those without a First Life.

My left arm, the one that I used to break my fall into Lionshead Chasm, it quite sore and stiff this ayem.

Oh, I registered Nebari.net for another two years yesterday. However, that was mostly to stop the domain from being squatted. Nothing's been done with the site since August 2007, and later this month I'm going pull the plug. I'm tired of paying $20 a month to keep it up and running.

And I think that's quite enough for now. Maybe if I stick a fork in my eye...

Currently listening : No, Virginia... By The Dresden Dolls Release date: 2008-05-20

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Sometimes you sulk, sometimes you burn...

A bit warm here in Providence. 81F in the apartment right now, and that's with Dr. Muñoz blasting in the middle parlour. It was worse yesterday. But the remnants of Hanna are headed our way, and the promise of rain and cooler weather. Right now, Ike's a scary looking beast, even after dropping to a Category 3.

No writing again, yesterday. Someone made a comment about Clive Barker's "The Hellbound Heart," and I started rereading it, and there went the day. This can't continue. Today, it's back to The Red Tree. Anyway, that's the first time since 1986 or so that I'd read "The Hellbound Heart." It's a far sight better than the film that was made from it (we won't get into the sequels, except to say I have an odd, soft spot for Hellraiser II), but really wasn't as good as I remembered. The sexual elements are too important not to have been handled better. Storywise, the last half wanders about, to and fro, as though it's not quite sure how to wrap everything up. But the Cenobites remain delightfully eerie (and sexy) creations, as does the "Lemarchand configuration." Ironically, in the end, I was left wishing that Barker had written it as a longer work, at least as long as "Cabal." Either that or a much shorter work. Still, it has a spark.

After Spooky picked up our weekly bag of produce at the Dexter Training Grounds (and this week, we got tomatoes, lettuce, kale, two nice eggplants, peaches, and green beans), we headed down to Beavertail. Spooky's taken to watching the tide charts and surf reports, and we knew the waves would be pretty good. We walked back down the green path to the more northerly section of the rocks, far above the lighthouse. We walked until we encountered a large cleft in the rocks at Lionshead (41°27'18.20"N, 71°23'26.98"W), a sort of fissure, roughly 25' across, maybe 20' down to the rising tide. To get around it, we'd have had to follow it west a ways, and night was already coming on, so we stopped there. I allowed myself to pay more attention to the geology than my footing, and stepped on a slick bit of algae and took a fall. I only scraped up my left arm a bit, though I narrowly missed sliding over the edge and into the sloshing water-filled fissure*. I guess I haven't forgotten everything I learned, way back when, when I had to climb rock faces for a living, because I fell well and managed to stop myself from going over. I think it scared the piss out of Spooky, but we were both laughing about it as soon as I'd gotten back up onto stable ground. We spotted an Upland Sandpiper (Bartamia longicauda) in amongst the usual assortment of gulls, cormorants, and plovers. It was dark by the time we made it back to the car, maybe nine thirty before we made it home. I have photos, but don't have the time to get them up this morning. Maybe tonight.

I did a little SL, mostly stuff related to Howards End. We got a couple of sea gulls for the sea cliffs (buying animated scuplty animals in SL always gives me Bladerunner flashbacks), though I think we need about eight more. The terraforming continues. It's taking a little longer than I'd expected. Later, we watched the first half of Tim Burton's Sweeney Todd. I'd taken a Lortab for my damned aching mouth, and it had me woozy and slightly ill, and we went to bed about 2:15 ayem.

Yesterday, I received page proofs to read over for a new Call of Cthulhu gaming supplement that will include the Benefit Street ghouls. Obviously, this is being done with my consent. It's a nerdy sort of flattery, and I never get enough of that.

Please, if you have not already, consider ordering a copy of the NEW mass-market paperback edition of Daughter of Hounds (or picking one up at your local bookshop). Also, subpress is taking pre-orders for my first sf collection, A is for Alien. Thanks.

*Postscript (12:46 p.m.): I just found this news story from July 2007 about a woman falling into the very same fissure. There's a photo.

Currently listening : The Bends By Radiohead Release date: 1995-04-04

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He had a Colt .45 and a deck of cards...

So, yeah, I think my unwillingness to become too deeply mired in human politics has reached the point that I have become functionally apolitical. For example, my first thought upon hearing that McCain had chosen Palin as his running mate was, "What the fuck is Michael Palin doing hanging out with war-mongering Republican assholes like McCain?" So, learning the Palin in question was actually a homophobic, anti-choice former beauty queen from Alaska, and not a former member of Monty Python, came as a huge relief.

Er...anyway. Yesterday. Yesterday was not a writing day. It was, instead, a reading day. Looking at the beginning of Chapter Five, and being rather uncertain What Happens Next, I needed to think. And I tend to think best when reading or when watching movies. So, I reread (Is that actually a word? LJ seems to think so.) chapters 20 and 22 of Danielewski's House of Leaves (2000), section 6 of Chapter 4 of Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House (1959), and Angela Carter's "The Tiger's Bride" (1979). Old favourites that I know so well reading them does not require too much of my attention, but which still manage to hit all the right buttons. And I found the idea I needed to begin Chapter 5 of The Red Tree today.

By the way, looking back over The Haunting of Hill House yesterday, I became angry all over again at the insistence of so many publishers, and the expectation by many readers, that novels must be great long things. The Haunting of Hill House is about 240 pages long, quite a bit shorter than, say, Daughter of Hounds (which is 431 pages long, in the tpb edition). Now, I do agree that a novel should be as long as a novel needs to be, but included within that maxim is the corollary that a novel should never be longer than it needs to be. Many novels today, especially bestsellers, are absurdly long (or at least the font size is increased to give that impression), and this follows largely from books being thought of as only another product marketed to consumers looking for their "best value." Longer books are better than shorter books, since a long hardback and a short hardback (or paperback) tend to cost about the same. Novels have been "supersized," as it were. Regardless, I suspect The Red Tree will be no more than 80,000 words at the most (Daughter of Hounds was, by comparison, 133,000+ words in length, but then, it needed to be). Books are not to be judged by page count any more than they are to be judged by their covers. And, as long as I'm titling at windmills and speaking of excessively thick books, if Laurell K. Hamilton is the idiot stepdaughter of Anne Rice, then Stephenie Meyer is, at best, Hamilton's parthenogenic hysterical pregnancy (and I think we've taken this metaphor as far as it can possibly go). Truly, it amazes me, some of the shit people send zipping to the top of the bestseller lists. Truly, crap floats.*

Oh, and I also read "A ceratosaurid [Dinosauria; Theropoda] from the Late Jurassic-Early Cretaceous of Uruguay" in JVP, but it really had no bearing on the novel.

As for last night, for dinner Spooky got pizza from Pizza Pie'er on Wickenden, because we had a Howards End build-team meeting at 7 pm. And afterwards, I had my first real rp in days, but, sadly, it was at Toxian City, where I'd sworn I'd never, ever go again. I really will be glad when the HE rp is up and running, and I can discover, once and for all, if I am capable of fixing all the things that are wrong with SL roleplay. Maybe I can't, but at least I can try. And if I can't, I can step away from the whole sorry mess knowing that I gave it my best.

A comment and question from a reader:

I liked The Five of Cups. You don't have any intention of re-releasing any other books (Murder of Angels, Threshold or The Dry Salvages) in hardback by any chance? or know where it might be possible to procure a copy of said magnificent books?

You have to forgive my disdain for The Five of Cups. I was 28 when I wrote it back in '92, and that was a long time and a lot of words ago, and neither the novel nor I have, in my estimation, aged well. All novelists are allowed to feel discomfort at their early efforts. It comes with the job. As for the other books, there has never been a hardback of Murder of Angels and probably never will be. There's not yet been a hb of Threshold, but there has been some talk of subpress doing a tenth-anniversary edition in 2011. And while The Dry Salvages is probably out of print for good, there will be a revised version released next year as a free ebook (to coincide with the release of A is for Alien).

* It occurs to me that i have to write a response to myself tomorrow, since the scatalogical generalization "crap floats" is obviously flawed.

Currently listening : Murder Ballads By Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds Release date: 2006-01-31

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a sickly moment of dark surprise

Yesterday, I wrote 822 words on "Some Notes on an Unfinished Film," which is becoming quite interesting. But now I have to set it aside and go back to work on The Red Tree. The story will still be there later this month. I might have time to finish it for Sirenia Digest 34, maybe. If not, it will likely show up in the October issue. Vince and I have agreed to do something very different this month. Usually, I write a story or vignette and send it to him to illustrate. This month, however, he's going to do a drawing, and then send it to me, at which point I'll write a story based in it. Look for the result of this experiment in Sirenia Digest 34, later this month.

Sorry, no pretty photos of the seashore today. Today, all you get is me.

I forgot to mention that Not One of Us will be reprinting "Flotsam" in an upcoming issue. October, I think.

Last night, Spooky sold the Palaeozoic Museum in New Babbage (SL) for me. It has left a weird, sad feeling. On the one hand, I'm glad it won't be torn down. It's been there for over a year (which is probably ten years in SL time), and one of the things that New Babbage (and all of SL) suffers from is a lack of place-identity, which is aggravated by an absence of history, a paucity of sense of self and place. I am grateful to the buyer, who desires only to preserve the structure. On the other hand, well, maybe there is no other hand. I will be keeping the Abney Park laboratory in New Babbage, but most of my SL attention has to be focused now on Howards End, both the build and the roleplay.

My thanks to the people who've taken the time to comment on the latest issue of the digest, and I'm quite pleased that the reaction to "The Z Word" has been so positive, and that people seem to have enjoyed the interview with (and artwork by) Max Sauco.

Not much else to say about yesterday, really. Spooky made corn on the cob and beef stroganoff for dinner. I had another go at EVE, but I think I've decided that it really is too absurdly complicated, and commerce obsessed, and I'm not up to investing so much time and energy in a game, no matter how pretty it might be. I read "A new species of Velociraptor [Dinosauria; Theropoda] from the Upper Cretaceous of northern China" in the newest JVP. That was about it for last night.

If you have not already, please do pick up a copy of the mass-market paperback of Daughter of Hounds. The actual release date was yesterday, and I completely forgot. Anyway, now all my novels (except The Five of Cups, thank fuck) are available in inexpensive mmp editions. Also, if you have not yet pre-ordered A is for Alien, there's no time like the present.

And now, I need more coffee....

Currently listening : The Bends By Radiohead Release date: 1995-04-04

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"We are of the going water and the gone."

Great relief over Gustav. This time, Cuba took the blow.

A black day of unfocused and unfocusable anger yesterday, and so a Lost Day. A mostly Lost Day. There was a hint of redemption towards the end.

Day before yesterday, well, that was spent getting Sirenia Digest 33 ready to go out (thank you Gordon, and Vince, and Geoffrey), but I also managed to write another 700 or so words on "Some Notes on an Unfinished Film." I may try to work on it again today, but then it has to be shelved, so I can get to Chapter Five of The Red Tree.

Oh, I actually have some cool news from dreaded Dragon*Con. Sissy spoke with Ted Naifeh about allowing Ziraxia to do a Dancy Flammarion T-shirt using his artwork, and Ted agreed it was a great idea. The artwork that gets used might be an illustration from Alabaster, and it might be a drawing of Dancy that Ted did for Sissy and Kat back in 2004. Either way, it will be very cool, and I'll keep you posted. I will assume that all subscribers have received 33, but if you haven't, email Spooky.

Yesterday...I'm not exactly sure how the day began, but by one p.m. or so, I could see it was going nowhere good, nowhere healthy, nowhere productive. So, we decided to head towards Watch Hill, at the very southwestern corner of Rhode Island, because it's place we love and we'd not managed to make it down there since we arrived in June. We hoped the Labor Day crowd wouldn't be too bad, but anything would be better than me stalking furiously about the house. Well, no, as it turns out, that was not the case. The sky was an impossible carnivorous shade of blue, not a speck of cloud anywhere, and the sun white as hell, and all of it just making me want to lie down somewhere and dig my fingers deep into the earth and hold on. There is no explaining my "sky anxiety." And to make matters worse, we reached Watch Hill to find it awash and teeming in a foul blanket of tourists. I was heartened to see that "Book and Tackle" is still open, albeit in an inappropriately tidy new building. Also, it was good to see the Aphrodite moored right where I first saw her two years ago.

I told Spooky to just keep driving, to just get me out of all that light and out from under that hideous sky, away from all those people, and we headed back towards her parents' place in Saunderstown. It was shadowy there, under the trees, and I hid upstairs and napped while Spooky sorted through photographs from her childhood. By six p.m., I was calmer, and my head not so full of light, and we headed down to Point Judith, planning to have dinner at Iggy's, hoping the setting sun would have sent most of the tourists scurrying back to their respective points of origin. And mostly, that was true, just not true enough. There were still tourists, and worse still, this year's crop of college students. The line at Iggy's was too long to even consider, and seeing all those faces, my appetite died anyway. We drove down to Harbor of Refuge, where we were able to slip into the underbrush and blessedly away from the throng of fishermen and surfers and college kids. We climbed the steep hill above the Point Judith Fisherman's Memorial. The view from up there was wonderful, the day's first fleck of wonder. The poison ivy is turning red, the air was filled with dragonflies, and the western sky was catching fire. Spooky noted a great deal of rabbit poo, so (thank you, Edward Gorey), we dubbed the hill the Rabbit's Restroom (41°21'43.58"N, 71°29'6.75"W). We watched the surfer's over at the Point, near the lighthouse. There was a marvelous surf, and the largest waves were there, of course.

After a time, we climbed down to the rocky beach (approximately 41°21'42.99"N, 71°29'9.14"W) just east of Harbor of Refuge and sat in the ruins of Fort Greene (WWII, built in 1941). And finally the weight of the sky lifted from me, the weight of all that light. I lost myself in the crash of 10-15 foot waves against the rocks, and the sound of each wave withdrawing to make room for the next. There, the withdrawing water makes the most remarkable sort of noise, and Spooky and I have both struggled to find the right words to describe it. It's bit like hearing popcorn popping, if the kernels were the size of cobblestones. It's a bit like hearing bubbling hot oil, especially if an ice cube is dropped into the oil. We sat there with the gulls and cormorants and Semipalmated plovers while the sun set, astounded at the force of the incoming tide, at the concussion traveling through the stone beneath us. And here is magick, true magick, wild magick. The interface of Panthalassa and Pangea, which one might call mother and father, goddess and god, if one were so crass as to reduce either to merely anthropomorphic abstracts of their true selves. We stayed until dark, and Spooky took a lot of photos. On the way home, we stopped at George's in Galilee for fish (very, very fresh) and chips.

There are photos:



View from atop the Rabbit's Restroom, across the salt marsh, to the east, and slightly south, towards the Point Judith lighthouse.



View from atop the Rabbit's Restroom, back to the west, and slightly south, of Harbor of Refuge. If you look closely, there are two dragonflies in this shot.



Down on the beach, in the ruins.











Another of Point Judith, as the sun sets.





Last photo of the day.

Currently listening : Automatic for the People By R.E.M. Release date: 1992-10-06

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At Least I’m Not At Dragon*Con (Part Three)
Current mood: awake

Not enough sleep last night. I got to bed too late, maybe 3:30 ayem, and then the pain in my mouth woke me at nine. I took more Advil and managed another hour of sleep, dreaming of demons and such. Here in Providence, the sun is bright, and the weather is warmer, a last taste of summer, maybe. I've spent the past half hour squinting at the screen, at the projections and radar images of Gustav and Hanna on the NOAA website. There is nothing I can do but watch, of course. Times like this, I envy those who believe in the efficacy of prayer.

Yesterday, I wrote 1,007 words on something called "Notes on an Unfinished Film." I found myself in a weird place, work-wise yesterday. I was waiting on everything I need to put Sirenia Digest 33 together — the interview and Vince's illustration for "The Z Word" —— and rather than start Chapter Five of The Red Tree and then have to stop today, I thought I'd try to get ahead on next month's digest. I tried to start a simple vignette, going back to my recurring artist of the grotesque, Albert Perrault, with the thought that he was briefly involved with a film project in the mid to late eighties, one that was scrapped three weeks after shooting by skittish financiers, but the test footage has become a holy grail of "lost film" buffs. The film would have been a sort of pornographic impressionist re-imagining of various fairy tales. And I think I was likely inspired by all the things Giger has written about his trials and tribulations working on Alien. Sadly, it looks like it wants to be a short story, not a vignette, and so I presently have no time to write it. We shall see, though, once the I put this issue of the digest to bed.

I've realized that I currently have a sort of triple-tiered responsibility thingy. First, there's The Red Tree and Sirenia Digest —— because that's what keeps the bills paid (and I just love doing the digest). Secondly, there are the books I do for subpress, which are, artistically, probably my most important work. This second tier also includes commitments I have made to write for "high-profile" anthologies that pay well (because money is necessary, and visibility is a good thing). I would also squeeze the work on the Howards End sim into this second tier. The third tier is a murky place, occupied by requests for stories from small-press magazines, mostly, stuff that I know I'm never going to have time to get around to. As it is, I'm looking at having to pull out of a number of those second-tier anthos in order to be sure I have time for other things. Right now, I'm tired and, honestly, wish there were nothing but Tier One bidding for my time.

Yesterday, I read "The oldest African crocodylian: phylogeny, paleobiogeography, and differential survivorship through the Cretaceous-Tertiary boundary" from the new JVP. The paper not only describes a new gavialoid, Ocepesuchus eoafricanus, the aforementioned oldest-known African crocodylian, from the Latest Cretaceous Moroccan phosphates. But it also looks at how marine reptiles (mosasaurs and plesiosaurs) fared across the K/T boundary, vs. the survivorship of marine crocs across the boundary, and the possible reasons why crocs were pretty much unscathed, while non-croc species went extinct.

Reconstruction of the skull of Ocepesuchus eoafricanus.

Currently listening : Murder Ballads By Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds Release date: 2006-01-31

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At Least I’m Not At Dragon*Con (Part Two)
Current mood: awake

The current eBay auctions are ending today. Please have a look, if you are so inclined. That seems to be our last copy of the sold-out trade hardback edition of To Charles Fort, With Love.

---

Woke to a rainy morning here in Providence. It is impossible, of course, not the check into the NOAA website to keep an eye on the progress of Gustav, and for that matter, Hanna. I know too many people in the paths of each storm not to worry.

A week or so ago I mentioned being somewhat pleasantly baffled that Trisha Telep chose "Untitled 12" and "Ode to Edvard Munch" for her anthology, The Mammoth Book of Vampire Romance. From Amazon, the following quotes illustrate my point. A reader reviewed the book story-by-story, giving each story a star rating (X out of 5). Of my two, she wrote, "My least favorite were both of Kiernan's entries...the vague poetic style of these stories left me unconnected to their characters." I am amused:

"Ode to Evdard Munch" - Caitlin Kiernan - A man shares his blood with a mysterious vamp for a piece of her dreams. (3 stars - no romance and the connection between the leads was odd)"

and especially

"Untitled 12" - Cailtlin R. Kiernan - A sick woman searches until a vampire finds her. (1 star - I detested this one. More on the horror side, the vampire and the turning were truly icky, though I debated giving an extra star to the author for inspiring such strong negative feelings with so few words.)"

There's no place here where I can say that the reader seems to have misunderstood anything, unless, perhaps, it was the fundamental principles of fiction and that low-brow bit about "vague poetic style." I am rather pleased that "Untitled 12" inspired such loathing, as it was written, in part, as a response to the glut of "romantic" vampire prOn, and "Ode to Edvard Munch," being, in part, a dream cycle, is undeniably "odd" (I am left to wonder how a mortal and a vampire would have a non-odd connection). I think this gets back to what I have said before about the expectation of genre readers defeating texts, and writers who cater to such readers. And the "supernatural romance" crowd is at least as bad as the hard sf crowd. For my part, I'm pleased that Telep wanted these two stories in her book, and that pleasure arises specifically from the knowledge that they were so completely opposite of what the readers would be expecting. You know, blood, instead of red cotton candy. In the end, I blame Anne Rice (who once knew better), and her idiot step-daughter, Laurell K. Hamilton, for the the sad state of affairs with vampires in genre fiction, as well as this whole absurd "paranormal romance" subgenre thing.

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Yesterday. It throws me off making entries late in the day. But, yesterday there was...stuff. Last night, Spooky and I watched Martin McDonagh's genuinely brilliant and thoroughly delightful In Bruges (2008), which I recommend most highly. Great cast. Great script. And Bruges. I read another paper from the new Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology —— "Mahajangasuchus insignis [Crocodyliformes; Mesoeucrocodylia] cranial anatomy and new data on the origin of the eusuchian-style palate." Mahajangasuchus is one of those grand bull-dog crocs, and the observations on the evolution of the "hard" palate in in crocodyliforms was especially interesting, that it might have arisen both as a response to the need to decouple the oral cavity from respiration (an advantage only to aquatic forms, and pretty much the leading idea since Huxley proposed it in 1875) and also as a response to torsional feeding stresses. I even have a picture:

Cast of the skull of Mahajanasuchus from the Late Cretaceous of Madagascar

Currently listening : Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea By PJ Harvey Release date: 2000-10-31

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At Least I’m Not At Dragon*Con (Part One)

Yeah...so...there was a pretty good day off yesterday. As days off go. I slept late as I could, which wasn't that much later than usual. I read from the stack of Science we brought back from Saunderstown: spreading "dead zones" and the consequences for marine organisms; a review of a book on the biohistory of the Mascarenes; a new and more accurate model for mapping global warming "hot spots" across the US; a study examining the possibility that ferruginous conditions dominated Neoproterozoic deep-water chemistry; the invasion of arctic marine environments by more southerly molluscan lineages, following from global warming; etc. I had a long bath. I napped. I had udon noodles for lunch. I talked with Vince about his illustration for "The Z Word" (Sirenia Digest 33, and I suppose that was sort of cheating on the fundamental concept of a day off, but whatever).

In the June issue of the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, which I'm only just now getting around to, I read the type description of the new species of "rauisuchid" archosaur Postosuchus alisonae from the Triassic of North Carolina. A marvelous beast (pictured below). I visited the type locality —— the Triangle Brick Co. Quarry near Genlee, which exposes the beds deposited in the Deep River Basin section of the Newark Supergroup —— way back in 1996, when I was touring Triassic localities in North Carolina. All I found were a few bones fragments and a phytosaur tooth.

Postosuchus alisonae, based in large part on the better-knwn P. kirkpatricki. Bones recovered shown in black. Scale bar equals 50 cm.

Currently listening : Outside By David Bowie Release date: 2008-03-01

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Postcard from a Day Off
Current mood: okay

Yesterday, for the first time, we read aloud through "The Z Word," start to finish. I hadn't heard any of it out loud, which is unusual, as we usually read the days pages aloud right off. Anyway, it holds up. Vince has already begun work on the illustration. The rest of the workday was spent going over the Daughter of Hounds excerpts that will also appear in Sirenia Digest 33, and I wrote an extra-long prolegomena for the issue (or so it felt, at 661 words). I also spoke with Bill Schafer about doing a third erotica collection for subpress next year, and that project now has a green light.

Please note that the copy of To Charles Fort, With Love included in the current eBay auctions appears to be the last copy of the trade edition that we have for sale. Which came as a surprise to Spooky and me both. So, considering the collection is sold out, and this is likely my last copy for eBay, you might want to have a look. Also, if you missed it yesterday, A is for Alien now has a cover (art by surrealist Jacek Yerka, which just pleases me no end).

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When the work was done yesterday, Spooky said, "Let's go to the beach," so we did. Only, first we stopped in to see her mom and dad in Saunderstown. We talked about apples, Wyoming, rock climbing, Colorado, jellybeans, and the subversiveness of science. Her dad had several back issues of Science for me, all of August, I think (he's a department chair and Professor of Anthropology and Marine Affairs in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Rhode Island). Then we headed south to Moonstone Beach, which we'd not visited since way back on July 28th. This beach has so many moods, and yesterday it was still and quiet. Not much surf, and the air was so clear we could see south all the way to the northern shore of Block Island, about 13 miles away. We waded a bit, and both got a lot wetter than we'd intended. There were tracks of plovers, gulls, and cormorants everywhere. Tiny dinosaur tracks. We saw a flock of almost forty cormorants, when we'd never seen more than three or four together, previously. The last of this year's rose hips have ripened. We saw the pair of swans on Trustom Pond we've been seeing all summer long. A beautiful evening. There are photos below.

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Back in Providence, we got some Chinese takeaway and, being in the mood for something goofy and charming, we watched Jane Fonda and Lee Marvin in Cat Ballou (1965, directed by Elliot Silverstein). Then I did some work on the first go at a set of rules (the "do's and don'ts" sort) for the Howards End players and sent it out. It will need a good deal of expansion and revision before we begin in October, but it's a start. Basically, I'm looking at all that time I've spent in other sims and other rps, at everything that's mucked up rps in which I have taken part, and trying to weed out the problems before they arise. The terraforming is coming along nicely, most notably the warrens and necropolis by the sea, and the old train tunnel under College Hill. Oh, and I got a really oogy new skin for my Ravnos antitribu character (from Corvinus, a different rp), so now we no longer have to pretend she has welts and blisters and seeping open sores due to her horrid photohypersensativity. Now she looks the part. Oh, and Spooky worked on the Bailff avatar, who is looking quite a bit like Sid Haig

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Today has been declared an Official Day Off, my first since Monday the 18th, nine days ago. I was getting kind of ragged. Anyway, here are the photos:

Looking northwest, back towards Trustom Pond.



View to the south.



View to the south. Look closely at the horizon, and you can make out the silhouette of Block Island.



The bleached carapace of a Blue crab (Callinectes sapidens).



An amphipod, the "beach flea" Talorchestia megalophthalma, in Spooky's paw.



Back out on Moonstone Beach Road. Joe-pye-weed, probably Eupatorium dubium.

Currently listening : Takk... By Sigur Rós Release date: 2005-09-13

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