Showing posts with label philosophizing. Show all posts
Showing posts with label philosophizing. Show all posts

Monday, July 11, 2022

Immortals


On this lovely afternoon I've been thinking about immortality ... not so much as a personal preference, but the way it's presented in fiction.

You can't dip your toe into a paranormal without coming across some character who is an immortal vampire or minor godling. My problem is, these folks don't seem to have learned anything from their centuries or millennia of life. There ain't no wisdom on display, no accumulation of knowledge, no self-control, no long view.

I mean ... I'm not the same person I was fifty years ago. I don't say half a century has made me noticeably wise, but I have some perspective.

I don't think this shortfall in characterization is an authorial failing. It's authorial choice. The fiction I read is created for amusement and gentle distraction. Readers want to see characters they understand and identify with. This kinda precludes writing characters who could realistically have been around for centuries.

ometimes Dr Who gets this right. Mostly not -- but they make plausible choices.


Thursday, October 14, 2021

Carbon Paper

 It occurs to me that some folks have never seen carbon paper in action. 

The first couple minutes of this program show somebody using it.
So I share.

My first book was typed on a manual typewriter like this, an Underwood, and I used carbon paper.




 




Friday, September 03, 2021

Celebrating Language Change

I wouldn't want anyone to think I'm a language fuddyduddy, clinging to past-pull-date English. Language is a living thing. I don't expect it to freeze solid in 1969*.

Language chases after change in the real world. Names are born for the new stuff: wiki, tweet, google, go cup, podcast, bitcoin, DNA, penicillin, page view, Peace Rose, moonwalk, on brand, quark. 
Bright, shiny new things, these words.

Words let us look at familiar things in new ways:
right-size,  single-use, metrosexual, non-binary, slipstream,  catfishing, mansplaining, fail as a suffix (skateboard fail,) salty, to "ghost" on somebody, Black Lives Matter, geek, I can't even, slut-shaming, binge watch, photobomb, throw shade, because reasons, because awesome, nerd, gender fluid, double down, rewilding, first world problem, singular they . . .  
 
We play with language.
I adore that**.





*1969 is the first use of "pull date" according to Webster's
 
 ** Careless errors of grammar, OTOH are not useful nor clever nor beautiful.

And, in truth, there are days I stomp grumpily along the transitional boundary where the newfangled grammars ooze into general acceptance, me sneering and fluffing out my feathers.
(The proper use of lie and lay, for instance. Gone. Hrumph.)
So maybe I am a fuddyduddy.

Tuesday, August 24, 2021

Violence: Deep Country Version


 So. Here's what we get up to in this neck of the woods. Happened a few weeks ago.

"Investigators from the Sheriff’s Office processed the victim’s vehicle and located evidence related to this incident. Investigators were able to identify the suspect and obtained several charges.

Wyant, a 31-year-old white male from Buena Vista, Virginia, was wanted for attempted malicious wounding, abduction, use of a firearm in commission of a felony, shooting from a vehicle and possession of a firearm by a convicted felon."

 As you can see, authorities threw the book at him.

I bet you didn't know that shooting from a vehicle is a separate charge all on its lonesome.

Tuesday, August 10, 2021

Random Comments on the Day

photocredit: veronika_andrews

 8-10-21
 
 More and more hummingbirds are coming to sip my sugar water. More and more butterflies nestle in my butterfly bush.

 Listening to some mellow jazz .

 This time next week, I'll be in New York City.

 Life is good.





Monday, August 09, 2021

Rurouni Kenshin


Netflix is showing two Rurouni Kenshin flicks. The first, Ruroumi Kenshin: The Beginning, gives us interesting plotting, subtle acting, complex reveals, unexpected assumptions.

Always nice to see a new cultural take on familiar material. Lovely photography. Fairy tale level of realism. Glacially slow in places. Full of folks getting killed.

Glad I saw this.

https://www.netflix.com/watch/81313229

Sunday, July 25, 2021

Movies: The Irregulars and Gunpowder Milkshake

Both these movies have multi-racial casts and pass the Bechdel test.
For me, that's icing on the cake rather than a requirement.
But
— iced cake.
 

I've been looking at Fantasy, Urban Fantasy, and Paranormal books for a while now. Lately I've expanded to movies and TV series.
Endless delights delivered to my computer screen.
We live with such splendid technology.

First, consider the tongue-in-cheek, cynical, and bloody romp that is The Irregulars.

It's "a British mystery adventure crime drama television series" created by Tom Bidwell for Netflix."*

Some paths in the Magical Wood  are well trampled. Beer bottles and McDonald wrappers litter the roadside.
I'll admit to being jaded about powerful lost heirs, schools for angsty teenage wizards**,  colorful squaddies on the battlefield of clashing magical empires, and other staples of the genre.

One could make the case that The Irregulars is wuxia
which is trope and utterly predictable,
but it's a story I like.
Finding such a story with good tropework is sweet. 

Irregulars is a nugget of gold in the spoils pile of the Sherlock fictive universe.


Gunpowder Milkshak
e also pleased me.
This one glows with subtle, intelligent acting from everybody on the set.

Now, there are long sequences of car chases and kung fu fighting and extras dying bloodily ***.
Presumably the intended audience likes car chases, martial arts, and gore.
Me, I fast forward through that stuff and it does not interfere with my enjoyment of the movie.****
Ain't technology grand?

A study of Jackie Chan's corpus of work might have kept the frenetic action scenes from being so boring.
I dunnoh.
Maybe it would have subverted the spirit of the story . . .
I have no wisdom in critiquing movies and my taste is not especially commercial.

Final thoughts on Milkshake is that it worked for me and I recommend it.  

 

I pulled the description from the wiki so it must be true.

** I wasn't much interested in teenagers even when I was one.

*** Some of the violence is disturbing. Most of it is like those old Westerns where cowboys have 37 bullets in their handguns and spin and fall dramatically when hit,

**** Some Romance readers flip past pages of the explicit and go on with the story. It's a skill.

 

Sunday, May 30, 2021

Adventuring In My Own Way


I have a little machine called a Eufy that glides around my floors and picks up dog hair and cat hair from underneath the chairs and the bed. It's like a roomba but cheaper. *
I am a creature of the cheaper alternative, always.

The cat and dog eye the Eufy with grave suspicion but it does not terrify them which is a good way to live one's life.

Today my little machine friend managed to pull out one of the wires essential for the operation of my internet.
The possibilities being manifold it was not immediately obvious which of many potential problems was now mine.
Even after I decided there must be a physical lacunae in the system ., . well, I have lots of cords running around behind the desk.

By dint of** some dusty scrambling about and muttering I finally managed to lay my hand on the cord that had been pulled from its proper mooring. ***
Yeah me.

While I was on my hands and knees doing this I noticed a UBS port on the side of the offboard hard drive I recently added to my collection of mysterious black box sitting about.
It appeared to connect the external hard drive to what may be the router.
I didn't even know I could connect the backup to the router though I had rather wanted to.


So now I have wireless access to my Time Machine.
I am doing backups automatically.
Even though I am not adventuring with the Doctor
my life is bright and shiny and I feel very clever.

I have signed up for pottery wheel access. It starts tomorrow. I will now be both artistic and clever.

 

 

 

 * Here's a video of a cat on a roomba. It is not my cat. My cat is smarter than that.


** The dint in "by dint of," you will be pleased to know, is from Old English dynt "blow dealt in fighting" (especially by a sword), from Proto-Germanic duntiz (related to Old Norse dyntr blow, kick.)
This dint is probably not directly from the co-existing dialected dint of C15 that comes to us from PIE "dent" meaning tooth but doubtless they lived on the same street.

"By dint of" as a phrase for "by force of, by means of," is early C14 so it is a fine, strong, ancient little set of words.

*** This picture is a slight exaggeration of the number of cords I have around my desk.
But not by much.

Monday, May 24, 2021

Computer Stuff


An exciting weekend in which I set up my external hard drive.

On a Mac this means buying a black plastic box the size of a good novel, fiddling through my barely finite collection of twiddly wires, and then blindly following the directions of Some Guy on the Internet.

The problem with getting advice from YouTube videos is that they're all for systems five or seven years old. Every two minutes the nice geek with the oddly untrained voice tells you to, for instance, "Click on Options" and you discover there is no Options key because they threw that out in the 2015 OS.

Once again, the world betrays you.

You prove inadequate to a task that is completed handily by 16-year-olds.
(Don't ask me about my cell phone.)

You lose.

So you go to Google to figure out where Mac has hidden the action you wish to undertake. And you

have to decide whether you want your GUID (whatever that is) to be a table or a map.

Half an hour later you close your eyes and pick at random
because the hell with it anyway.

This is like ordering in an Azerbaijani taverna far, far off the beaten path where nobody speaks any language with which you have a nodding acquaintance,
except less prone to moments of delightful surprise.

Or like when your car has an extra bobble on the PRSNL to put the stick in and you have no idea what it does but the car seems to run okay either way so you ignore it.

I now have an operating back up and a Time Machine
or I don't
and I am back to limping along with my severely crippled version of Word except for (probably) backup.

This is not exactly adulting, but I muddle along.

Saturday, May 22, 2021

Exponential

I came across, "He’d lost an exponential amount of blood," in a book recently.

The weakening of the word "exponential" from meaning
"a
number that gets multiplied by itself"
to just meaning
"a big hulking, scary number"
is very sad.

We take these delicate, specific, useful adjectives and empty them by the slop-bucketful till they're just one more of the thousand bland, lank, meaningless synonyms for common concepts.
Our word shelves become full of Twinkies and Wonderbread.

Thank god for slang, that's what I say.

Thursday, May 20, 2021

Music Hath

Jerusalema

Haven't though about this one in a bit, but it cheered me up today.

Lyrics in translation here.

Jerusalem

x 2
Jerusalem, my home.
Rescue me,
Join me,
Don't leave me here!
 
x 2
My place is not here,
My kingdom is not here,
Rescue me!
Come with me!
 
Save me, save me, save me,
Don't leave me here,
Save me, save me, save me,
Don't leave me here!
 
My place is not here,
My kingdom is not here,
Rescue me!
Come with me!
 
Save me, save me, save me,
Don't leave me here,
Save me, save me, save me,
Don't leave me here!
 
Thanks!
thanked 1143 times

Precizați site-ul sursă, dacă preluați traducerile mele. Merci!
Share music and kindness! :)

Submitted by Super GirlSuper Girl on Tue, 29/09/2020 - 10:50
https://lyricstranslate.com/en/jerusalema-jerusalem.html-0

Monday, April 19, 2021

Technology and the Blog

I had a little problem with the comment aspect of my blog.

I pursued research on the net. Then I did stuff that will probably make it worse.

My actions are in the spirit of the village shaman trying a new varietal of sage in his cleansing ritual. Ya gotta have faith.

Somewhere in the middle of the Twentieth Century technology moved beyond the ability of the human mind to comprehend as a whole. Outside our tiny area of specialization we're no more than chimps with socket wrenches. We bang on the metaphorical carburetor and try pumping the gas a couple times and once in a while the thing starts.

Technology is smarter than we are.


Saturday, April 17, 2021

Turn and Live With the Anmals

I'm drinking a cup of coffee before dawn and listening to my recently-booted furnace wheeze into life. 

When I get up in these transition days of spring and crawl out from under the warm covers of my bed and find myself shivering, sometimes I go close the window and turn on the furnace. 

Right now I'm thinking about that one small choice. First choice of the day.

It's not that I mind shivering as a matter of principle. There's no moral imperative to stay at 70° plus or minus 4. Discomfort usefully reminds us we're living beings, not enameled birds sitting on a golden bough.

hank greely

Speaking as a responsible citizen of the commonwealth of the world, it makes a lot more sense to put on a sweater and warm up the 1.76 cubic feet (on average) of a human body than to heat the 17,000 cubic feet of the main floor and basement of a house. 

I like leaving the windows open because it makes me feel part of the natural world, at least that world as expressed by this well-groomed and almost-painfully-cozy small town neighborhood.
It's not precisely "Nature is red in tooth and claw" here -- unless you count the battle of the political yard signage -- but there's sky and bird song and green stuff growing. I can close my eyes and feel a little connected to the oncoming dawn.


I heat the place for the dog. 

She's getting old. She sleeps most of the time now, sitting on the sofa, tucked up close to me. The fur of her muzzle is white. When I take her to the dog park, she mostly sits and watches the other dogs chasing back and forth. When the house cools down over the night she curls up close and circular on her dog bed. 

I turn on the heat because I want to keep her warm.
Taking care of the dog is also part of the natural world.
Humans have been doing this a long time. 

Shepherdess me, six thousand years ago, would have crunched through the new snow to check out the spring lambs in the early dawn after a chilly night. My dog would be at my heels,or leading me to any particularly vulnerable creature who'd had problems in the dark hours.

When we sat down to share breakfast I'd check her paws and pick cockleburs out of her fur. Scratch her back and fluff her fur and comb her with my fingers. Talk to her as the sun comes up.

So this morning, that was how I communed with the Natural World even in my muffled-up, still and quiet, house.
Me and the dog, man. Me and the dog.

Monday, April 05, 2021

Unheroic Protagonists

ErikaWittlieb

I spent today thinking about sacrifice and resolve. These are not among my strengths, unfortunately.  

I have written characters who just bubble with these virtues. Do we always write about traits we admire rather than traits we happen to have?

Anyhow, I was mulling on things like . . .

Can we write suitably upbeat stories about protagonists who are not and never will be heroic?
If we did, would those be better stories?
More honest work?
More perceptive creations?
Can we sorta compromise by writing strong and virtuous protagonists, but including ordinary weak, realistic, conflicted characters as well-regarded secondaries?

I thought about this while I was buying barbeque from Mel's here in town. I am trying to find a barbeque place.

When I lived on my mountain I had a first-rate BBQ place down the hill on a small obscure road.It was convenient to my cabin insofar as anything was convenient. It sold traditional, wholly authentic, and just whoop-de-doo good country BBQ on Friday and Saturday and Sunday.

Hhere in town Mel's didn't please me. I will feed the rest of it to the dog Mandy who is less picky. But Mel's is well regarded. Goes to show something.

I've decided we need all sorts of stories for all sorts of readers and there's no harm in writing what comes naturally even if it isn't very realistic. 

So I'll pretty much do what I want and not worry.

Saturday, March 27, 2021

Biscotti

Wikipedia says

"The word biscotto, used in modern Italian to refer to a biscuit (or cookie) of any kind, originates from the medieval Latin word biscoctus, meaning "twice-cooked".  In other countries, the term "biscotti", used as a singular, refers only to the specific Italian biscuit known in Italy as cantuccio."

So now you know enough to talk intelligently about æ•biscotti.

 

I am passing along an exciting discovery I made yesterday. 

Many biscotti are disappointing because they are not crispy and hard. They are just biscotti-shaped ordinary cookies. Whole Foods, which is often excellent in the baking department, makes disappointing biscotti.
They are not cooked enough to dry them out.

Whole Foods and most of the recipes I find on the net missunderstand the whole concept of "Twice Baked."

Here's how to twice-bake Whole Foods biscotti.

Take the Whole Foods, already-cooked biscotti home
and put them on a baking sheet in a 200
° F oven
for two and a half to three houses.

It's not quite "immediate quite good biscotti"
but it is "two or three hours later, quite good biscotti."

Store in a tightly sealed jar. They should last weeks.

 

This is labelled philosophizing because I find food philosophical.


    * * * * *   

 

A couple weeks ago I withdrew from Twitter and FaceBook and Word Wenches. I did this because I was getting burned out by social media.
I wasn't writing.

So I'm putting the little snippets I would normally drop into Twitter into the blog here.
It's bleeding off the urge to chatter mindlessly online.

 

.

    * * * * *   

 

 

 


 

Saturday, March 20, 2021

The Equinox


Today is one of the four cardinal points of the solar year.
The Vernal Equinox

.Night balances day. Darkness balances light.

It's a good day to think about balance in life.
Also a good day to put a lighted candle in the window to delight oneself and the passers by.
Also a good day not to set the house on fire.



Saturday, October 21, 2017

Potting about

Me with my hair tied back, in the studio,
consulting my lab notes, deciding how to
glaze a cup

Some of you folks may know, I throw pots in my leisure hours.
This is sensei. My teacher in flinging clay.












Writing is a cerebral kind of job, abstract and fancy. Words do what I tell them to. If I don't like what I've got, I make them line up in a different order. Within the limits of my ability, I am all powerful.



Here's one of my recent pots,  a little bowl
with Walnut Spice base and Blue Monday decoration.
Pottery is entirely different. It's physical and intuitive and damned stubborn. I can't talk the walls of a too-thin bowl into standing upright no matter how persuasive I am and how much I know about the origins of the clay and composition of glazes and the shape of Medieval or Roman pots.
Mere thinking, mere knowledge, doesn't help. I am at the mercy of reality.

This is a spread of some of last month's work from the class. The bean pot in the lower right corner is mine.
The art building on the Community College campus
 Go fifty yards in any direction and you're in the middle of a cow field.
Here we got excellent facilities and excellent students.
Writing is hand-wavy and subject to change.
Pottery is solid.
You can see why I like potting,
though I am not so terribly skilled.

Since I produce rather more pots than I can possibly use, I give them away to folks on my mailing list.
(Join by dropping a line to joannabourne@gmail.com )






Tuesday, October 03, 2017


I was eating a kiwi fruit the other day. It showed up coyly snuggled next to a breakfast sandwich sold to me by the delightful ladies who run the catering and breakfast bar at the Rockfish Gap Community Center.

I found myself trying to remember when I’d first seen kiwi. I was young and they showed up in the grocery store one day and my mother, who was a wild woman in her own way, brought them home and figured out how to serve them. They were just mind-bogglingly exotic to me. Furry fruits. I rather distrusted them.


Wench fruit 2
There are many different kinds of kiwi fruits, not just the ones in US supermarkets
Kiwis apparently came from China and were originally called “Chinese gooseberries” as they spread around the world.

The Chinese themselves called them "macaque peaches" but that didn't catch on so much.

The fruit was popularized in the US by WWII servicemen who’d met them while stationed in New Zealand. And they seem to come to the store from California, not New Zealand. Life is a rich pageant of happenstance, isn't it?

“Hmmm,” I hmmed to myself while I was feeding much of my breakfast sandwich to the dog Mandy but eating all the kiwis, “What did my Georgian and Regency heroine encounter as new and exciting fruit as she went about her adventures?” Kiwis and avocados hadn’t arrived in her world. Apples and apricots and even dates were known from Roman times and before.

I thought of two possibles.Albert_Eckhout_-_Bananas _goiaba_e_outras_frutas 

 Bananas. (Did you know bananas are technically a berry. That’s the kind of little fact that’s likely to get you excluded from the company of all right-minded people if you go around pointing it out.)

Bananas spread from southeast Asia to the Middle East and Africa, making everybody happy as they went. The first written trace of their arrival in England was a recorded sale in 1633.

But archeologists found an ancient banana in a Tudor rubbish tip so a few of them were sneaking in even before the Tudors.


A Regency miss might have found one an expensive imported delicacy even in 1798 or 1811. Bananas didn’t get common till after refrigerated transport. Maybe her hero knew somebody who knew somebody in the shipping business.

“You can't teach calculus to a chimpanzee. So just share your banana.” John Rachel


Pineapples.

These would be both familiar and unfamiliar to our Regency heroine.

Wench Still Life with Fruits and Pineapple 1833 - Johan Laurentz
Isn't that a pretty pineapple. There are all kinds of pineapples too.
The plant comes from South America and was spread by Spanish colonialists across the tropical regions of Asia and Africa. The Dutch took it from Surinam to Europe in the Seventeenth Century. Pineapples were ready to catch on, but it wasn’t at all easy to bring them halfway round the world.


So the Europeans grew their own in the cold gray north, being stubborn.

The first European pineapple was successfully reared at Meersburg in 1658. In 1723, a huge "pineapple stove" was built to warm the hot house at the Chelsea Physic Garden. Louis XV was presented with a pineapple grown at Versailles in 1733. Catherine the Great grew them. These were not your everyday cabbages. They were status fruits.

“When life gives you lemons, sell them and buy a pineapple. How to Better Your Life 101.” Davin Turney

Wench 1761 The pineapple at Dunmore Park (l.  photo National Trust)
Yes, it really is the Dunsmore Pineapple
So expensive and snazzy were pineapples in these early years of the Eighteenth Century that they were at first used for display at dinner parties rather than eaten. Like flowers.
Rumor has it the town fruitmongers would snap pineapples up as they came into dock and rent them out for parties . . . till they became questionable even as decoration.

Wench c.1810 Jean Louis Prevost- Still life
But the real fun for the great of the land was in growing them competitively. Hothouses became more and more elaborate as aristocratic gardening rivalry grew. The Earl of Dunsmore built a great hothouse on his estate topped by a stone cupola 14 metres high. They called it the Dunsmore Pineapple. (Earls just wanna have fun.)

By the end of the Eighteenth Century, the pineapple had become a staple of the well-to-do country garden hothouse. The carved pineapples on the Squire's gates promised lavish hospitality at the manor.

August: shift the succession of pineapples into larger pots, in which they are to bear; give but little water to ripening pines, lest the flavour be weakened.
      American Edition of the British Encyclopedia, 1819


Wench c.1685-1710- pineapple on the towers of present St. Paul's Cathedral  London
Pineapples on the towers of St Paul's Cathedral, London
Unless my Regency heroine is a card-carrying member of the haut ton, she might have grown to adulthood having seen the carved stone fruit but never having tasted pineapple.

When she’s served a slice, perhaps cooled on ice, she’d know she was being coddled.

Pineapples, you will be pleased to know, are technically a collection of berries. Yes. Pineapples too. Berries are awesome.


“Be a pineapple: Stand tall, wear a crown, and be sweet on the inside.” Katherine Gaskin

Wednesday, August 16, 2017

Interviews in which I reveal many secrets

I did three interviews recently. 
One at USA Today Happily Ever After ...
with Keira Soleore

and one at All About Romance
with Dabney Grinnan.

And another one with Anne Gracie at Word Wenches. That one's at:

http://wordwenches.typepad.com/word_wenches/2017/08/beauty-like-the-night.html

I talk about the characters in the Spymaster Fictional Universe and what they're up to when they're not appearing in the books.

I say stuff like:

"He (Lazarus) gave up stealing women in 1812 after My Lord and Spymaster. You could say he’s reformed,"

"... as people of the future we know the British won. My characters don’t know that. The possibility of invasion and defeat is very real."

"When my agent went to publishers with Spymaster’s Lady and couldn’t sell it month after month, I’d take the dog for long walks, seeking out lonely, windswept paths around the suburbs, whimpering, “They were right. You can’t sell a story set in France,” and stuff like that there, rather than planning who should be the protagonist of book six."

so, since they are fascinating interviews, do go check them out.

In other news, 
This is not my turtle. This is someone else's rescue turtle.
I keep using wiki images, not having my own
I stopped this morning and picked up a box turtle that was about halfway across the Blue Ridge Parkway. I parked on the grass verge and picked it up. I carried it a mile or so south to a place that seemed better for its longevity.

Smallish box turtle. I don't know if that's the local breed or if it was a young and stupid turtle. No picture because I didn't think of it. I had not yet had my coffee.

My turtle ... shall we name it Helen ... had totally retreated into its shell and was sitting there in the middle of traffic. I dunnoh. Maybe it was trembling in fear. With turtles, it's hard to tell.

If I had cars whizzing past me I would curl up and do the same, but it is not a successful strategy when dealing with cars. This is a nature observation of wide applicability.

Monday, August 07, 2017

A rainy day in the country

A very happy plant
A rainy Monday.

It's one of those days when I don't know whether the rain is helping the farmers out or spoiling the standing hay, so I just send general good will to the plant kingdom and hope they are all as happy as my fuchsia.

Fuchsia is one of those words I never spell right the first time and I don't use it often enough to make a mnemonic for it. (I can spell "mnemonic" though, which is one of life's little ironies, isn't it?)
This is whatit'll look like tomorrow

My writing friend showed up with thoroughly wet hair -- drowned-cat-level wet hair -- and I thought she'd parked the car in Timbuktu, (... took me a while to spell that one,) and run into the safety of the cafe.

She said, No, she'd gone running and taken a shower and that was why she was wet.

I associate with people who get up at dawn and go running in the rain. It is no wonder I feel taken aback in most encounters with real life.

Andrea Pickens, Mary Jo Putney and me
In other news, I m hacking away at the WIP and while I do not have just exactly an order of events, I am getting the character voices settled down which is almost as good and maybe even better.

To the side is a picture of Andrea Pickens, Mary Jo Putney and me at RWA National where we talked about "Why History" and generally enlivened an early morning with our observations.

There is also a picture up top of one of the plants on the back porch of the cabin, picture taken in the bright sun of last month but now enjoying the driving rain.