THE SIR TESSA USA ’06 TOUR – DAY 1
Melbourne -> Auckland -> Los Angeles -> Seattle

Ugh.

If there is a hell, if hell is personalized for the individual needs, if I am going to hell, then it will involve being several thousand feet above the Pacific Ocean, in a tin can, suffering motion sickness, with no relief in sight.

Let me rewind.

They slotted in a nightshift before my annual leave kicked in, to minimize the number of days I had to apply for. Working ten days in a row means getting six days off afterwards. Some of you may remember that that particular nightshift kicked my arse. Even after several days of sleeping and resting, the day before I flew out I was still very FUBAR. I was stressing about the long flight and motion sickness that I knew awaited me, so of course I did not sleep that night. I wasn’t really expecting to.

As I was due to flight out of Melbourne with Air New Zealand at noon, I had to be at the airport by ten, (this being before the English caught those smuggling liquid explosives on board, with check-in times still something reasonable). That meant leaving home at nine, which meant getting up around eight for a shower. I was up a bit before seven.

From the carpark to the check-in counter was the first time I carried my rucksack for any length, and with the strap around my waist secure, the weight was off my shoulders, and it was surprisingly comfortable. Black Wolf make a good sturdy bag.

But of course, my flight was delayed by an hour.

There was time to sit around the tiny food court, and notice just how banged up Melbourne airport is getting. She’s showing her age; the lights aren’t being replaced, the tables are chipped, the grills fallen out. The poor old dear. We drank tea, shared a Danish, and watched the painted Qantas jet take off.

I’m not very good at waiting when my nerves are up. Hear that stomach churn.

Finally, I told my family to go home. They hadn’t intended to wait with me the whole time as it was, and the extra hour was just more time staring at the walls. It was, in my mind, a step towards going – I hugged and kissed them at the wailing wall, and passed through The Sliding Doors of Doom. Through Customs, to be pulled aside by the most unsettling security worker I have ever met. It was a standard explosives swipe, but his manner, the way he spoke...he was either high as a kite, or dumb as a rock. Possibly both. And he was unsettling. According to mum, they’re independent contractors. Make of that what you will.

After an airport-priced sandwich, I sat, and waited, and waited, and churned.

The flight from Melbourne to Auckland is on a smaller plane (2 seats by 3 seats by 2 seats), and takes only four hours. Air New Zealand has great food in my experience, and given the sandwich was all I’d eaten, I was looking forward to lunch.

Tip: airline stewards will not, if you are sleeping, wake you up for food.



Morris ze Dinosaur. On a plane.

We came up to New Zealand in dusk, with the sun behind that famous long white cloud. I hogged the window, and watched as New Zealand drew closer, and closer- and then we passed over it in thirty seconds, to come around for another pass. I could imagine the pilots crying, “crap! We just ran out of New Zealand! Go back, go back!” It was pretty, with the lights coming on, dotting the islands and hills. I will get there in a more than transitional way, one day.

At Auckland I changed planes, not flights. The leg from Auckland to Los Angeles is 12 hours in the dark, and after an accidental nap, I didn’t like my chances of sleeping through it. Churn, churn. I sat in the waiting lounge on the floor, by a family who were reading books to their daughters, one of whom was a Tessa. This little Tessa had an enormous pink shiny unicorn stuff toy. It had wings. And pantaloons.

Thankfully, the Fates, Destiny, Chance and Luck decided to take pity on me, and I was granted a window seat as well as an empty seat next to me.

Tip: if there’s an extra pillow, claim it. Right now.

And thus began my ascent into my private hell. New Zealand vanished in seconds, and then there was nothing but plane.

I felt yuck.

The exact magnitude of ‘yuck’ will be lost on any of you who haven’t experienced motion sickness. Imagine you are sick, a minor case of food poisoning, for example. Normally, a decent vomit will result in you feeling much better. Not the case with motion sickness, as what is making you sick is not what’s in you’re stomach, but what you happen to be sitting in. There is no way to alleviate motion sickness without stopping the motion, which needless to say, wasn’t an option.

Still, when you get to the point of vomiting, it’s better to have something to bring up than nothing at all. Once the dry heaves start, they don’t stop.

Tip: for those of you who get plane sick, eat everything they give you. Just do it.

Further tip: chew lots. Masticate that sucker into mush. That way, it won’t hurt so much on the return trip.

I discovered during dinner that moving made me feel worse, and so after a very nice dinner of roast chicken and vegetables, and some absolutely wonderful ice cream, I curled up with my pillows and jumper, pulled the blanket over me, put the chair arm up, put my feet up, and tried not to move for the next 12 hours.

The extra pillow comes in there. The chair arms against the wall don’t move, so if you want to lean against it, you’ll need some padding. I didn’t sleep. I spent those 12 hours very awake, very ill, very miserable, and very focused on my misery. There used to be a display in the Air New Zealand flights, showing where the plane was on the map, and how many hours to go. They’ve replaced it with a very fancy entertainment system that I can’t use for aggravating my motion sickness. This misery had no known end.

I remember being that upset with my circumstances, that I decided I was never going to leave Australia again. Flying was just too bloody awful, and no destination would be worth the journey.

The sun came up. The blinds came up. They served breakfast, and I chewed well, and moved little. We began our descent into Los Angeles. The end was finally well and truly nigh. About bloody time.

The descent also destroyed the intense willpower I’d exercised during the whole flight, and just before we touched down, I hurled dinner and breakfast into a wax paper bag. We landed at noon, and I felt ever so much better.

Tip: two chuck bags are better than one. If you’re stuck holding it, well, it’s only waxed paper, you know.

The Land of the Free, the Home of the Brave. Or the other way around. I left my chuck bag on the seat, and fled the plane, dreading the return trip. I was rank with vomit-induced sweat, having stewed in my clothes for a good day already, and more than a little wobbly on my feet, and damn I was happy to be on solid ground.

No, wait. Possibly my personal hell will involve dealing with the Los Angeles International Airport, again, and again, and again.

I, and a few hundred other souls, rolled down the corridor, to meet up with a few hundred souls from an Air France flight that had arrived at the same time, and we headed to the immigration line-

-which was staffed by eight people.

I remember it taking a long time to get through immigration last time I visited the States, and since then they’ve ramped up security measures to include taking everyone’s finger prints and photos. It took me well over an hour to get through immigration. The immigration works were trying to be proactive, shuffling the queues around, which only extended my wait. I watched the minutes tick by, and tried not to think about my connecting flight to Seattle, which was down on my itinerary as 1530. It was close to two when I finally hit the line. My impatience must have worked its way to my fingers, as my prints went through first time. Now, if I resort to a life of crime in either Australia or America, I’ll have to do it with gloves.

I grabbed my bag, shouldered it, and wobbled my way to domestic transit. American Airlines flight to Seattle at three-thirty.

Except, the woman working the terminal said, checking her sheet, there was no such flight.

This isn’t exactly what I wanted to hear.

Did I mean Alaska Airlines? They had a flight to Seattle at four-thirty. I had no idea. I didn’t want to know. A check of my itinerary didn’t help.

You mean Alaska Airlines, she said firmly, terminal four.

Okay, I said, and went. There comes a point when you stop fighting back (generally after 12 hours of motion sickness), and can’t even work up the energy to be worried, stressed, frightened, or frustrated. Zombie mode can be your friend at times.

There isn’t much difference between inside and outside LAX. It swelters. I staggered my way to terminal 4 – my bag really is a comfy bag, despite the weight – and found Alaska Airlines. As I had nothing in the way of a confirmation number, I couldn’t check-in electronically, and had to go via the service desk. There was a queue. It took an hour. There was a small child with a remote control car that he insisted on driving into every obstacle around him, including me. I have mad jedi skillz when it comes to patience. LAX = standing in queues in the heat.

Yes, it was Alaska Airlines, not American Airlines, and yes, the flight was at four-thirty, not three-thirty, and yes, everything was as it should be. I was too zonked to be relieved.

After proceeding through security, which aside from having to take off my boots and show my boarding pass five times was no different to any other airport security, I ducked into the toilets and tried to clean up.

Tip: it’s not just emergency undies/socks/bra you need, it’s an “I really smell” t-shirt.

I took my tee off, and just wore my jumper. I sprayed deodorant everywhere. I wiped my face, neck, bits I could reach. It made very little difference. The best I could do was not move, and thus keep my aroma to myself.

Next order of duty was to find food.

Melbourne Airport might be showing its age, but in comparison, it shines. LAX is a shithole. It’s nothing more than a bunch of portable buildings which should have been replaced years ago, and each terminal has maybe two places to eat. In the case of terminal four, you can choose between Burger King – a great big lump of greasy might-be-meat – or Starbucks - cakes.

All I wanted was a piece of fruit.

But lo! There was a chicken Caesar salad sitting in the Starbucks fridge, and even though it was pretty ordinary, it was the best Caesar salad I’ve ever had. Food has a wonderful way of making you feel better. The zombie wore off, and something resembling normalcy returned. Salad is best for those with a twitchy tummy and another flight to go. Nevertheless, chew that sucker into oblivion.

I watched as business glass and special member passengers were allowed on first, and watched the rest of us plebs mill about and edge closer to the queue. They let me on, and yes, the last leg! The end was almost nigh! I’m not sure flying business in a USA domestic airline is worth it – the seats are a bit wider, but that’s about it.

Saw the painted Qantas plane as we took off, and left bloody hellfire LAX behind.

I can’t say I remember much of this flight. I know I was trying not to move, as I was in a middle seat and thus wanted to keep my smell to myself, and that’s about it. I roused when we landed.

First impression of Seattle; gosh, that’s a lot of green trees. Actual green trees. I never realize just how grey/black/brown gum trees are until I look at something else.

Picked up my luggage without issue, and wandered around like a lost dog until I found a shuttle bus – any shuttle bus – that would take me downtown. The Greyline folk were very helpful, and called in a connecting shuttle to get me to my hotel.

The ride from the airport to Seattle proper was spent re-emphasising the tyranny of absolutely green trees, and staring at planes. The Boeing plant takes up most of the highway, and makes for interesting scenery. There’s something amusing about seeing bits of plane lying around like a do-it-yourself kit. The hotel had information about tours which run through the plant and aviation museum, but I didn’t go on any. I’d had enough of planes.

Perhaps it was because I was so exhausted, perhaps it was because it wasn’t my first time in a foreign country alone, but there was no fear to be had. The last time I visited the States, and I had to find a shuttle bus to my hotel for my one night in Los Angeles, I was terrified. I was alone, and nothing worked quite the way I expected it. This time, I didn’t even freak out when the bus started driving on the wrong (right) side of the road.

Probably because I was so exhausted, I forgot to tip the driver. Sorry, mister.

I was dropped of at the Days Inn on 7th, and on check in discovered that all non-smoking rooms had been taken. I didn’t care at the time, I just wanted a room. As soon as I got to said room, I cared, oh boy did I care. If you book a non-smoking room 6 months in advance, make some noise when they don’t give you one. It reeked. There was some fierce stench ground into the carpet. I stopped smelling it after a while, thank goodness.



After 24 hours travel, you'd look green and blurry too.

It took me 15 minutes to figure out how to work the shower. Don’t laugh – it was the one thing that had kept me going since LAX. It nearly broke my heart. To save you the same torment, I shall impart the secret bit of wisdom to you.

Secret Wisdom: Pull and hold the knob thing in the tap up, until the water diverts to the shower. Water must be running while doing this.

There. Look, it wasn’t obvious at the time, okay? Greatest shower of my life.

Clean, and with clean clothes, the only thing left to do was get some dinner. Unfortunately, by the time I’d made myself human against, it was getting towards ten at night, and nothing was open. The receptionist directed me to a service station a couple of blocks up the road. There were police cars and families every where, due to a torchlight parade. I felt, with my inability to cross roads without a lit crossing and inability to press the right crossing button – like everyone could see the great neon flashing sign on my head, crying “foreigner!” It was a lovely night for walking. Coming from Winter to Summer is a bit of a shock. I’m not a Summer person by nature, but I do love a warm balmy night for walking.

Service stations don’t tend to offer much in the way of decent food. I found a hard bagel with cream cheese, a piece of banana bread (BANANAS!), and I figured I’d be safe with a Kit-Kat. I was terrible bemused that a meal which would have been around $7-10 at home cost a mere couple of dollars, and that I was getting change in 1 cent pieces. With my great bounty, I headed back to my rank abode.

At this point, I discovered that while my phone would work, my carrier wouldn’t, and no other mobile network wanted anything to do with me. I’d promised to give the family a buzz to let them know I’d arrived without hitch, which left me with the hotel phone. There was an 85% hotel surcharge tax on international calls (oh my freaking-), but I figured, a 5 minute call couldn’t cost that much.

All the stress and exhaustion piled up when I heard their voices. I nearly cried, I don’t know why. It was a relief to know that despite the fact that I’d woken up in another place and another time and I’d vomited in front of strangers, they were still there, normal, sane. Touch base, children, touch base.

I channel surfed. I find foreign TV fascinating, especially so given that so much of American culture appears to revolve around the TV. I was stumped to see there was a channel just for asian programs, and that it was actually called AZN. That tickled the gamer in me. I caught Tokyo Godfathers just as it was starting, and watched till I couldn’t watch any more.

Morris Ze Dinosaur surveys the Mountains of Puppy Dogs

I had a bed, once.

PLUTO WILL ALWAYS BE A PLANET TO ME.

I wandered out to find a flat head screwdriver, and when I came back, my DVD tray was open.

Apparently my computer can read minds.

Hydrate or Die

I have remembered how to use my computer. I have remembered all my passwords. Photos have been downloaded, but I'll need to go about resizing them all to something swallowable before I can put them online. There are something in the realm of 1300 photos, so this might take a while.

My computer decided to partially break itself (because not being turned on for a month is such hard work), and my DVD drive will not respond. The tray won't open from the physical button, or from software commands. Bloody Evil Pixies hath found the Decepticon. I have no idea how to fix this, other than to get a freaking crow bar and tear up some plastic. It puts a dent in my photo plan, as I was going to burn the pictures to disk and so free up some hard drive space.

My desk is, as always, a huge mess. Not all the creative shuffling in the world can save it.

The dogs picked up their habits immediately, and as soon as I sat down here, both demanded to be up on my bed, and went to sleep.

This all feels very strange. I know you all want stories, but I'm too lost to give them to you.

Hello, my freaky darlings.



I am home.

<3

two shirt sleeves waving as we go by



Everybody, this is Morris. Morris, this is everybody. Morris will be accompanying me on my travels, acting as stand in for a garden gnome as a projection of myself. Being as I'm going to be the one taking the picture 90% of the time, Morris will be my stage double. You can see the likeness, yes?

This is it, kids. I have packed for the last time, and remove enough stuff that I might need, but will make do without, that there is now space to spare. Most excellent.

I don't know how much internet access there is in the mountains (not much, methinks), and even whilst in civilsation, I'm not going to put a lot of priority on sitting in front of a computer. I'll check in when I can though. If for any reason you need to contact me, use the email address on the right there. I'll check it at some stage. Those of you who might need my number, have my number. Let's hope it works. (Miiru, you've already given me yours. Twit. :P)

I'd take a photo and blow you all a big sloppy kiss, except I'm busting out a coldsore. Yes. I KNOW.

I'm flying out tomorrow at noon. Don't break the world while I'm gone.

<3 Sir Tessa

Hey, you've reached Sir Tessa's journal, not Sir Tessa herself. She can't come to the internets right now, so please leave a message after the yo. Byeeee!

Yo.

Untitled (Working Title)

I hate packing. Not that I haven't said that before.

I have packed one and a half times, and tomorrow, I'll take everything out, and pack again. Why? Because that's just the way I ween out all the things I won't need, but have shoved in "just in case". "Just in case" is the bane of my life right now. I know I can ween out one of those windcheaters - heat wave and all that. Cold nights I can deal with via the sensible application of layers.

Shit. I keep thinking of all this stuff I need to leave room for. Like thongs (that's flip-flops, NOT underwear). Craaaaap. I forgot all about them. And books. Shit. I've limited myself to two, which, considering how many I could take, is a mighty effort and triumph on my part. Except I suspect one of those books has been packed away, and I'm going to have to break my back to find it. Wait! I tell a lie. It is merely behind other books. Most excellent. At any time now, I will stop browsing the panelist list to see who ELSE is going. Closing the window...now.

Right now, I've swung away from "zomg excited squee!" to "zomg what have I got myself into?" something I did last time as well. Imagine how I'll be next year, when venturing to a country whose language I do not speak (but the food will be so good).

Despite having done only three and a bit nights of nightshift, my sleeping pattern is still severely fubar. I wake up at 4am, go back to sleep at 8am, and this happens no matter when I go to bed. Guh.

You know what scares me the most? The 17 hour flight. Having to wait 4 hours in LAX suffering from motion sickness. That's some very special misery, waiting for me right there.

One of the things that perks me up is the thought of venturing out of the hotel in Seattle and seeing a mountain. At least, I assume there's a mountain to see. Google images indicated as much. A BIG one.

Don't ask me what my thing with mountains is.

Of COURSE, now that I shall be away from my computer for a month, I've had the great urge to write. Three novels. The one I'm currently working on, it's accidental sequal and another totally unrelated have all had thinking breakthroughs in the last week. Ah, timing.

Again, tell me what I've forgotten.

Going to watch some TV now. Calm my nerves.

Fuck. This. Horse. Shit.

I don't deal well with being sick, because it's very rare that I am. Headaches, I know exactly where I stand with them. They're horrible, but old hat. However, when the rest of me decides to go wrong, my coping mechanisms go to pieces.

Nightshift has the added bonus of taking my depression, which is normally passive, and amplifying it x 100. PMS has nothing on nightshift.

So in the past couple of days, I've randomly burst into tears three times and been unable to stop, I've had one single on-going tension headache, permanent nausea, aching muscles and bones, and I had to come home at 2 in the morning on Saturday. I was so wrecked I couldn't hold my head up; I was resting my head on my hand, and typing with the other hand. My body was that stressed out my period came two weeks early, and now I can't eat.

I've had bad nightshifts, but not THIS bad.

Suffice to say, I'm pretty fucking miserable. The third bout of tears was an hour ago, because I went to the doctor, and he was rude and didn't give a fuck, and I couldn't handle that.

And now for some sleight of hand; Yunyu's new album is now available at earshot and will soon be available at cdbaby. Her film clip for Lenore's Song can be seen here and it is awesome.

This is all the typing I can handle right now. I have to go concentrate on not vomiting.

Learning Sometimes Sucks

Discovery: Stress-induced periods suck.

1. Periods suck in general.

2. Unexpected periods, say, two weeks before you're due, suck even more.

3. The shit you have to go through to actually inflict a stress-induced period on yourself makes the period itself about as incidental as a side salad.

The Answer To That Question I Didn't Mean To Ask

I need to stop posting at 1am. I need to stay up till 4am at the very least. Can't see that happening. Not without some random don juan climing in my window and keeping me awake, and let's be honest, if any one were to try and climb in my window now, they'd get a hockey stick in the face before they could say "Mon amie! I'm here to be your love pony!" And then I wouldn't be able to go on my trip, because I'd be in the remand centre, waiting for my court hearing, and trying to not get shanked by some scary butch woman's shiv.

The answer is: yes.

The question was "Am I writing because I write? Just as couples stay together because they're together and it hasn't occurred to them to go their separate ways."

All the workshops I've attended, all the little introductions I've had to adlib, I've said the same thing. I never started writing. I just never stopped. It's something I've always done, it's always been the larger part of my identity, and so trying to imagine myself as 'not a writer' is a bit like trying to imagine myself as 'not female'. Its fundamental in just that way.

Writing is the comfortable option. The easy option. I know writing. I can even kid myself that I've acquired one of the first few levels of skill and technical knowledge. I'll never be great, but I can aim for good.

Which can't be too different from settling for second best.

Because there are alternatives, sharking around the edges. They lean against walls with a thumb hooked in their jeans, showing of their sexier than thou hipbones, and giving me 'come get it' eyes.

I could write...

...or I could draw.

This isn't as new as it sounds. Drawing was a large part of my life as well, for a good while there. I doodled on everything in highschool, did pretty well in my art subjects, and made the greatest birthday cards ever. I don't know where the drawing went. It just...slipped away while I wasn't looking.

I want to draw. I want to be great at drawing. If I'm honest with myself, and I'll let myself be honest with myself, I want to draw so I can draw my stories. I should be writing comics instead. The accustations of writing too visually and too video game-like are regular visitors.

Part of me wants to turn away from words and catch the world with lines instead. Teach myself a new way of seeing things. A new way of catching stories. A new challenge.

Another part of my thinks this is just...excuses. To give up before I get anywhere. I think I'm afraid of success.

Don't take that statement as arrogance, it isn't intended that way. Failure doesn't daunt me. If I fail, there's anger and disappointment and my god, I throw myself at it again till the damn thing is conquered. But success? That's a scary thought. I aim for success. While I keep my expectations realistic, I don't see the point of chasing a dream unless it's a really big fucking dream. I'm trying to catch the sun with my own two hands. I'll probably fail, but I might...

I think it was Clarion that trigged this. There were too many compliments. People were paying attention to my fun little ditties, and suddenly they weren't little anymore.

A couple of weeks back I dreamed that Daikaiju 2 was finally published. I walked into a bookstore and there it was, big and garish on the shelf. At first I was delighted; at last! After two years of waiting, the story was in print. But then, as I stood there holding the book and staring at the table of contents, the implications of publication started to sink in. People were going to read it. Oh yes, people were going to read my story, and some of them might like it, and some of them might dismiss it, but gods, people were going to read it. The story wasn't mine anymore.

I woke up feeling anxious and mildly panicked. The book isn't even out yet. I can't be the only writer afraid of publication. But hey, I am. It's taken me a while to admit this. On an intellectual level, I'm laughing. I'm afraid of the very dream I'm chasing, but then, maybe the best dreams are the ones that frighten you.

I don't want to be good at a lot of things. I don't want to drift from medium to medium in my life, and master none of them. I want to master something. I want to be able to say, without a doubt, 'hell yes I'm good, and this many people agree." I want to catch the sun, this sun, with my own two hands.

And I will.


When I stop sabotaging myself.

Spartacus - Howard Fast



That cover is incorrect. The gladiators were made to fight naked, and Varinia is blond. Nor, I might add, does Kirk Douglas look like a sheep. Several times throughout the book, Spartacus is described as having a face like a sheep. I've yet to figure out exactly what is meant by that.

I enjoy all the books I read, but it has been a long time since a book left me utterly heart-broken and bereft simply because I finished it. Perhaps I read too much, too fast, too lightly. Perhaps I'm becoming immune to books - now there's a frightening thought. But Spartacus left me wandering around the house, grieving, because I will never be able to read this book for the first time ever again.

It isn't true to say this is Spartacus's story, but the story around Spartacus. It unfolds after his rebellion has been crushed, he has been slain, and the Appian Way is lined with crucifixions, an example of what happens to those who dare defy the might of Rome. What we see is the rammifications of Spartacus's actions on the Roman world, in terms of its society and politics. Through the eyes of a noble born youth, the general who finally defeated Spartacus, and the senator who saw what the slave uprising might trigger, the reader is given insight into what Spartacus represented.

He is only portrayed in the light of legend, as no one knows what sort of man he was. They talk about stories they'd hear, ponder on rumour and fact, and will never understand Spartacus, because they are free people who believe that it is the natural law for some to rule, and some to obey.

While they were busy trying to get inside Spartacus's head, I was putting all my effort into trying to get into theirs. The Roman mind is a strange thing, and while they couldn't fathom how Spartacus had the means, will, intelligence to do what he did, I couldn't fathom how they couldn't see it coming. It took a lot of work, but they presented their justification for slavery, and on such a scale. Something to do with a total disregard for life; the Romans appeared to be in love with death, courting it where ever and when ever; with their gladiator games, the many campaigns they waged, their politics and schemes and terrible, terrible terrible diets (tit lark tongue pastries?). They go to such great lengths to distract themselves from life, not unlike the current world.

The slave is afforded none of these distractions, and can do nothing but lay down and die, or live, and live.

There is a passage, which of course I can't find now, which described why the slaves defeated the romans so many times; they would not be defeated because they could not afford to be. They weren't fighting for land - they had no land to run to, no place to retreat, no safe haven. They fought for their lives, and so they fought with their lives. Because there was no other path open to them.

It was interesting to watch the story change focus, from being on Spartacus, to his wife, Varinia. Spartacus was doomed from the beginning, and although his ripples would last for ages, he, his comrades, and the slaves contempory to him were consigned to misery. That close in, it's hard to see the change. But Varinia was hope, and it is comfort to know hope lives on.

Fairtrax, hanging on a cross, said "I will return and I will be millions."

Verdict: Brilliant. Mind-catching. Wonderfully written, with fantastic characters and such wonderful passages. I should have marked down everything I wanted to quote. I grieved to finish this book. I wasn't ready to leave yet.

London Revenant - Conrad Williams



So my mouth and nose aren't the same shape, and my eyes are open. And I'm not the cover of a horror book. Thankfully.

One day, I will pay attention to my reading history, and learn from it. I will not, for example, start vampire books in the middle of the night. Or, in this particular case, start a horror book that concerns itself with people on trains, while standing on a near empty platform in the middle of a night, waiting for the last train to arrive. The first chapter of this book concerns someone sneaking around platforms, pushing people in front of trains.

Riding trains alone at night is threatening enough, even though I've done it for a year now, and absolutely nothing has happened. My imagination is a busy creature. I had to stop reading.

London Revenant follows Adam Buckley through his every day life, and in doing so explores the urban decay of the city, and the inner decay of its inhabitants, and the slippery nature of identity. Adam himself is a lost soul, although I'm not sure he realises this until he isn't.

It's wonderfully written, full of grit, dirt, and harsh language. His take on the city is complex, being full of life, yet hollow and near dead as well, and he pulls it off well. The city is quite a frightening creature. It actually curbed my desire to visit London.

I was disappointed that, for a book with the Underground logo all over it, that started on trains, and talked about subways and ended underground, not a lot of time was spent actually on trains. Adam fears the Underground, he can feel it in the souls of his boots, yet rarely visits, and when he does, Williams keeps his travels short. Adam spends more time walking and driving, each a different mode of transport with separate evils and trials. Being a heavy train and foot user, I'm constantly aware of what a journey with either will entail, something I missed from this book.

Williams uses London Above and the Underground as a means of exploring identity, with the Underground acting as London's subconscious. It isn't a flattering reflection. Adam moves between the two, struggling with his own identity as the city struggles as well. To be honest, I'm not sure this aspect of the book quite fell in place for me. I reached the end, and was not clear on what Williams was trying to say. Nor was I particularly clear on Adam's reasons behind his own decision. Neither of the two identities he wavers between appear to bring him any comfort. One is always trespassing on the other, yet he is afraid of both.

This might reflect more on my own ideas about identity. Identities are fluid creatures, and we only have limited control to exercise over our own. For example, there is the me no one sees but who sees everyone else, the me I try to be, the me I actually am, and the hundreds of mes that everyone else sees. Memory will step in and influence identities. Mood will too - identities fluctuate, they shift from one to another. It is not possible to choose an identity, and that decision to be static. Identities don't stay still.

Perhaps I missed the point, and the book is less about identity, and more about finding the place you belong. Finding home.

Now that I've typed it, I'm sure that's it. The book makes a lot more sense now. The two aren't separate concepts; we try to change our identities to force ourselves to fit where we think we should fit all the time.

Piece of the book worked more than others. I never quite bought Adam's uber-alter-ego, nor the arch-villain. In contrast, Yoyo's finding of streets that weren't on the map and places of rot took my breath away. There are pieces of genius in this book, which are occasionally distracted from by chase scenes in the dark. The final climax felt anti-climactic to me, and after all the brilliance of the preceeding book, a tad cliché.

Williams is an excellent writer, and this book was, despite the willies it gave me, begun, read, and finished while travelling on trains. As it should be.

Verdict: Very cool, very fresh tasting, with wonderful likeable and loathable characters. You should see what he does to London.

Shadows and Ice: Kicking Arse Comic Style

'Shadows and Ice' was an internet moniker I made up when I was 16. In the throes of adolescent angst and misery and woe. It was probaby accurate at the time, which doesn't stop me cringing slightly now. Oh, drama.

Still, it stuck for 8 years. You can still see it hanging around here and there - my login on the Voyager Online forums (which I should really check more often), my livejournal login, various utility logins, my actual Shadowmarch login, it was my previous domain name and email address - it was well loved.

And now it has a brand spanking shiny sparkling twinkling new aura of coolness, by being used as the Super Villain name of a web comic character. Michael (aka The Microphone on the Smarch boards) even gave her my nickname's nickname; Shads. And she rocketh muchly. There are only two strips up at the moment, as he's just starting, but have a gawk anyway. The sparklies compel you.

And so it was that on the 25th day of the 6th month, 20 days after her 25th birthday, Sir Tessa found her first grey hair.

Nay, let it not be grey. Grey is such a lackluster word. Let it be silver.

The reaction, in three parts;

GLEE
Proof that I am, in fact, aging.

SHOCK
Proof that I am, in fact, aging.

MEH
No one can see it anyway.

You realise now that once I grow a few more, I'll have to grow my hair long again, so I can swan around like Sephiroth.

Where ever I may roam

I arrive in Seattle 6pm on the 29th of July. I'll be sick. I'll spend that first night crawling between bed and toilet, and generally feeling miserable. My tour leaves Seattle at 7am on the 1st of August, so I have Sunday and Monday in which to roam about Seattle and do touristy things.

At this point, all I've decided on doing is the underground tour, which will only take a couple of hours. Any suggestions of stuff to do, preferrably in the inner city, will be much appreciated.

Even more appreciated would be recommendations of comic/book stores.

I get into Los Angeles the evening of the 21st of August, and Worldcon starts on the 23rd, so I have the 22nd, a Tuesday, in which to do touristy things in LA. I'm staying in a hostel on Melrose Ave, in West Hollywood, so anything in that area, or close to public transport, preferred. I don't have any real desire to see Disneyland.

And again, recommend comic/book stores. Please.

I figured I'd take the train from the hostel to the con hotel, as there's a line that runs straight to Anaheim. If trains are for some reason supremely dangerous, however, let me know. (Bare in mind I catch the train alone at midnight 50% of my work shifts.) (For that matter, if anyone can take a stab at how much it will cost to take a taxi from, say, LAX to West Hollywood, let me know.)

Jaime, Nadine, we still have to find a place to stay on Sunday night.

I'm serious about the comic/book shops. I want to spend half my money on books.

It's a month away. Argh.

I've managed to narrow myself down to taking only three books with me to maybe get signed. There's no way I'm carrying a Tad book around, so I'll just have to buy something there for him. Say, Otherland in hardcover. Phwoar. I wish. But Simon R. Green (I've had and reread Blue Moon Rising since primary school), Tim Powers and Naomi Novik, well...you know. They're not big books.

(I've bought my membership to Nippon 2007, and if you're planning on going, just keep in mind the price goes up at the end of the month, and it's already pretty expensive.)

GIVE ME YOUR SUGGESTIONS.

Currently listening to: Three blank characters, by three blank characters. I really need to get around to installing the asian character fonts on my system. Regardless, it's Chinese rap, and cracks me up.

WHAM! YOU ARE ENLIGHTENED! SUCKA!

(ZZZ hunting. Skip as necessary.)

The dream started normally. I was some wizard scubadiver from a wooden submarine, and we were trying to lose a large galleon that was chasing us. I don't know what I was supposed to achieve, except that everytime I looked at the hull of the ship, some sort of illusion was flung up, and it turned into a giant fish with very big teeth, which is a rather alarm thing for a diver to see. But I foiled the illusion, and floundered my way back into our submarine with my three, er, companions. Party members would be accurate. It was very much a role-playing party feel.

As my party flounded out of the waterlock (like an airlock, only not), the captain, or someone of authority, came to greet us. My companions froze, and the captain proceeded to tear apart everything I thought my life was. My friends were actually figments of my imagination, people from my childhood who'd died, and whom I had kept alive by projecting them into the world, thus they became demons of sort. This was a terrible shock, but still pretty standard dream fare.

And then....wham. All of a sudden, I was enlightened. Although I had, and still have, no idea what terrible thing it was I'd actually done, I had done a terrible thing, and realisation of it floored me. I lay on the concrete beside a pool with the autumn leaves blowing around me, and I couldn't move I was so stunned. With this, came an entirely out of the blue piece of enlightenment.

Rebirth, for those who do,
Darkness, for those who don't.

The meaning of which was the opposite of Buddhism. It meant that you only ever had one chance to get your life right. If you did, you would be reincarnated. If not, then nothing.

For some reason, knowing this was killing me. And as I lay there, dying, I couldn't figure out if I was glad that I wouldn't have to go through reincarnation, and another life, or grieving that I'd failed, and that everything I was would end utterly.

The whole thing was very startling, what with enlightenment and death (which is what happens to other people in my draems), so I woke up feeling unsettled.

Hair In The Now Frontier

:: It's REALLY COLD.

:: Short hair merely means irritating in new and unexpected ways.

:: The general reaction at work is wide eyes, grab the back of my head, and cry "Oh my god your beautiful hair!" And then a very quick "But it looks good." The addon is making me paranoid, and I'm starting to think it looks shyte.

:: BEDHAIR. WHAT BRIGHT SPARK THOUGHT UP THAT IDEA. I LOOK LIKE A RUDDY GREAT TRICERATOPS.

Further Adventures With Dot Points

:: Racoons are cute and heartbreaking.

:: I had a week off. I was so relaxed. Two days of typing for 8 hours and my shoulders are killing me. It alarms me that I've been walking around with muscles this stiff and sore and thinking it natural.

:: It's really cold.

:: Amazon, if I specify 'few shipments as possible', I do NOT mean ship them one at a time. Within 40 minutes of each other. I have to pay for every single one of those transactions, plus the exchange rate conversion fee. Bad Amazon, bad.

:: NO! I AM SPARTACUS!

:: All you kids going to Conflux, remember to always use protection. All you kids running Conflux, remember to always use protection. And lube. You'll need plenty of that for things to flow smoothly.

:: Don't look at me like that.

:: It's really cold.

Hair, or Hair Not

I was going to hold of with the pikchurs, as I've already run down the batteries on my camera, and it's too cold for me to seriously consider walking outside to buy some more. You'll have to be content with shonky webcam pikchurs instead.

Before:



I didn't realise my hair was that long till I saw this photo. I mean, wow. That's a lot of hair. What are you supposed to do with a mop like that? Do monster impressions on request -



- or strangle myself -



- the possibilities aren't endless.

After:





I have emo hair! Or anime hair. And every now and then, I look like a boy (if you ignore those things on my chest).

Things I've learned:

:: I have a back of the neck? I do? I do!

:: Damn it's cold in here. That's what having a back of the neck and not having your own personal hanging blanket does.

:: You can't towel dry your hair, that's just dum- OMG I CAN TOWEL DRY MY HAIR.

:: I turn my head, and I can't feel it in my scalp. My hair isn't moving.

:: 25 years my hair has dictated my movements. The way I put clothes on, the way I sit down, lie, roll over - all these things I do in a certain way to work around my hair. Now I don't have to. Which doesn't stop me reaching around to pull half a metre of hair out of my jumper when I first put it on.

:: Short hair won't stay tucked behind your ears. Dammit.

:: I have too much brush now.

:: Hairdressing salons are strange places. An entire world I've never walked in. I felt like an alien, and sitting in the waiting room weireded me out more than the snip of scissors.

:: My head weighs a quarter of what I thought it did.

:: Product? Oh you're kidding me...

In my head, it was a really big deal. I had short hair when I was born. There are photos of me as a child with shortish hair, only because I hadn't yet been alive long enough for it to grow. 25 year of long hair. No, my whole memory of long hair. No one has ever seen me with short hair aside from my parents. As much as we try not to make our identities physical, I was my hair. People who haven't seen me since primary school recognise me because I haven't changed. Ever.

But when she cut it, and cut and cut and cut it, it wasn't a big deal. I stepped outside, and it really truely was not a big deal. It just felt strange.

So, there you go. I didn't die after all.

Tessa New Year

And lo! It was the Fifth Day of the Sixth month of the Twenty-Fifth Year Of Tessa. Twenty-five years of Tessa On Earth. What a waste of air. Every birthday I reach, I'm suprised I'm still here, moving around, making strange noises. It feels like a triumph, but over who or what, I don't know.

Still, quarter century. Go me.

I spent some time pondering on how to mark this occasion. Chinese New Year involves lion dances (which would be cool, but I have no lions), fireworks (I have no fireworks), red pockets (I have no red pockets), food (hell yes!) and a lot of noise.

Australian New Year seems to involve fireworks (I have no fireworks), barbeques (IT IS SERIOUSLY FUCKING COLD RIGHT NOW), getting utterly smashed and throwing up in the street (I do have some dignity), and lots of noise.

But hey, I like doing things my way, and so to sing in the new year, I indulged in a fair amount of self-mutilation;



I, uh, cut my hair.

Happy New Year.

(I may not have red pockets, but I can give you all this: Drop - by Cornelius. It makes me happy in a playing in the bath sort of way. If you like, JB hi fi are selling the album for $14.)

Monkey - Wu Ch'eng-en, translated by Arthur Waley

This translation was first published in 1942, and this particular reprint in 1979. You can see proof of its age by looking at the colour difference between the spine and the cover. Ah, the poor thing, it's faded despite being kept well out of the sun. The recommended retail price on the back is $4.95AUS. I wish.

After finishing Shadows Bite I'd run out of vampire books, so had to turn to the supernatural in general, still seeking out books that wouldn't in any way tempt me to alter my current writing world. I remember just staring at my bookshelves, when I should have left for work a couple of minutes prior, seeing this, and just grabbed it and running. I've been meaning to read it since I was a child. People of my generation talk about growing up on Transformers, Voltron, He-man and She-ra, and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles - I remember them all, but what I adored was the Monkey series that was on ABC after school. Monkey could have kicked all those wannabe cartoons easily (and then be told off about it).

For those of you who aren't familiar with the story (you're not?) Tripitaka is a priest on a mission from Go- Buddha to fetch the holy scriptures from Thunderclap temple in India, and save all the lost souls in China. To aid him in his incredibly long journey, he has King Monkey, Great Sage, Equal of Heaven, Pigsy, Ex-Grand Marshal of all the Heavenly Hosts, and Sandy, Ex-Supreme Commander of the Heavenly Hosts. While the three of them possess all sorts of magical abilities, Kuan-yin, the Compassionate Bodhisattva, couldn't have picked less suitable dweebs. Along the way, they're beset by all sorts of demons and monsters, and Tripitaka has is work cut out for him making good buddhists of his disciples.

Unfortunatly, the first thing I discovered upon reading the introduction was that this particular version was not a complete translation - the entire of Journey to the West is some hundreds of chapters long, whereas this is much abbrieviated, being a mere thirty chapters. Oh well.

I read it anyway, and the cheekiness I thought was a modernisation designed to pander to a current TV audience turned out to be taken straight from the original story. Oh my goodness. All folktales need to be like this. It's so rude and immature, no wonder I loved/love it.

(On second thoughts, most folktales are gruesome and cleaned up for a modern audience. But gruesome is an entirely different kettle of fish to immature/cheeky/mischievious/omigod did he just DO that?)

For example, at one point Tripitaka and his disciples come to the kingdom of Crow-cock, which has come under the sway of three spirits, who in turn have outlawed Buddhism and raised Taoism high. In the middle of the night, Monkey, Sandy and Pigsy decide to sneak into the Taoist temple. They stick the portraits of the Taoist Trinity in the toilet, eat all the offerings, and when the Taoist monks come to investigate all the noise, pose as the Taoist Trinity come to earth. The three spirits see this visitation as a prime opportunity to ask Lao Tzu for some of his life elixr. The disciples decide to oblige them, and on sending them out of the room, piss in three jugs, and hand that over. At which point I was just about in tears laughing, because that wasn't the first time urine featured in the story.

The greater part of this translation concerns itself with Monkey running amok in Heaven. Heaven being something of a great celestial bureaucracy, is in no means prepared to deal with the Great Sage, Equal of Heaven, and falls apart much as bureaucracies do. The Jade Emperor's complete lack of leadership made me giggle, and their inability to do anything other than send more people to fight and lose to Monkey made me giggle more.

Interestingly, while it is evident what unwholesome qualities both Monkey and Pigsy are supposed to depicte, I'm never quite sure what the go with Sandy is. Neither, it turns out, was Waley. The TV series made him something of a wannabe-intellect, a know-it-all who doesn't, but the others are guilty of the same often enough.

(I did love Tripitaka in the book. Every time they come to a river, or mountain, or something that might be difficult to cross, he bursts in to tears and gives up all hope there and then.)

Reading this, combined with an impending nightshift, led me to go out and buy the complete Monkey series on DVD.

Alas, while there was no feeding pee to Taoists, it stands the test of time, and my god, is possibly the greatest TV series EVAH. It has a mad genius that allows for Buddhist teachings among non-stop bickering between the three.

Now I need to get myself a copy of the full translation of Journey to the West, as the transition between Cheeky Monkey to Enlightened Monkey is far too fast in thirty chapters.

Verdict: Great, great fun, terribly amusing. You'd have to have a pretty unfit sense of humour not to enjoy this, and even if you did, there's still a lot to learn about both Chinese culture and history.

Shadows Bite - Stephen Dedman



Now, if I'd know this was the sequel to The Art of Arrow Cutting I would have held off reading it. But I'd run out of junk books, and was still on a vampire kick, and the blurb just rocked, so my reasons not to read it weren't particularly pressing.

Still, it was a stupid thing to do. One day, I will not just know, but understand, that vampires scare the willies out of me, and so NOT start a vampire book in the middle of the night. I got the willies in the first chapter, and got them bad. I slept with the light on.

The basic plot is; a powerful sorceror's son goes and falls for a girl who really wants to be a vampire, becomes one, is kept around because powerful sorceror likes to indulge his son, and because vampires run amok, the vampire runs amok. Los Angeles suffers for it. An attorney, stuntman and photographer who are totally badarse find it up to them to save the day. It's incredibly fun.

Dedman's characters are fully fleshed and potty-mouthed (just how I like them), sad and hopeless and pathetic, and megalomanic and world-domineering, and even those housemates who only flittered briefly through the paragraphs were fascinating creatures all on their own. Everyone is the star of their own movie, and Dedman makes this true.

I was particularly taken with his vampire lore, and the many different types of vampires available. In this particular case, the vampire can feed by drinking her own blood, which in turn takes blood from those she shares blood with, like her parents, or anyone she'd had a transfusion from. It enabled her to kill and create without even going near her family, and came with all sorts of horrible implications that made it worse than just another vampire story. How many of you know who your blood came from? The other side of the country? Eeeee, and so it just spreads and spreads.

Unfortunately, while the whole book was great fun and more than well written, it never quite lived up to those first few chapters detailing The Photo. That photo was creepy as fuck, and I never recovered from it. Creepiness of that magnitude is hard to follow up with, and when it came down to shotguns in a cafe, the creepiness was sadly irrelevant.

(I still believe shotguns are purely for zombies.)

I'm going to have to hunt out the first book now. Drat.

Verdict: Yah, I know these aren't great write ups, but I'm reading faster than I'm noting, so I need them done. This book is great fun, a fantastic oddball take on a vampire story, and fantabulously written.

Boogiepop and Others - by Kouhei Kadono, translated by Andrew Cunningham



It's a weird name, I know. Boogiepop is a secret saviour, a knight who comes to the protection of the world when such protection is required. He doesn't exist outside these circumstances; he is a split personality. In his own words, he's bubbles. He floats to the surface now and then. Hence, he's a boogie...pop. Like soda.

It's a weird name.

In this particular case, he floats the the surface of Touka Miyashita, a highschool girl, who does not and never will know of Boogiepop's existance, and all the time she looses to him. As if adolescance isn't hard enough.

I first encountered this in anime form. We were sending the DVDs back to head office in an overstock recall, and I thought 'why not?' and grabbed them. Good call on my part. While the production was lackluster, the storytelling was incredible. Each episode was from the point of view of a different character, detailing an incident that was important to them. Some of the episodes overlapped, and some just passed each other by, so that three episodes later I finally understood what the two seconds of random stranger screaming on a corner actually meant. The story was a jigsaw puzzle to piece together for yourself, and by the end, I had the larger picture. Most of it, anyway. It was different, and challenging, and my god I loved it.

I've been waiting for the novels to be translated ever since then, because there were points I wasn't sure about that I wanted clarified, so I ate this book as soon as I saw it. (And also because I was still on a junk book kick.)

The anime, as it turns out, was following the same storytelling method as the book - each chapter is from a different character's point of view, and not necessarily following them through the same time period. Again, this was occasionally confusing, but the challenge of teasing out the chronology of the narrative was intriguing. It didn't turn me off, it made me work harder.

The writing style/translation was plain and simple, neither a work of art or something to be mocked. Although I would like to state that 'gotten' is not a word. Dammit. Unfortunately, for a book in which there are several POVs, and each of them key, there was no discernable difference in voice between them, something which felt like an enormous wasted opportunity.

One day, I will figure out why japanese school kids are forced to save the world so much.

Did I get the rest of the larger picture? Yes, and no. Turns out, this is one of many novels.

Verdict: Although it isn't the greatest of art works, it will offer any writer an interesting study on storytelling, and what you can get away with not saying. For everyone else, well, you probably already know if anime/manga type works are your thing.

Oh. My. God.

Vampire Hunter D vol 3: Demon Deathchase - by Hideyuki Kikuchi, translated by Kevin Leahy Don't worry, that's not D on the cover; he's too cool to wear something like that. You probably know the drill by now; wobbly writing + wobbly translation = awesomeness. There is a special genius to these books. They have 'it', that infectious creative flare that blinds me to all the other flaws. Some of the time. That flare can't be faked, you either have it, or you don't. This particular volume was the basis of the movie Bloodlust, where I first met D. (I thought he had no personality then too.) It was interesting noting the differences between the two, and there were a lot. For example, in the book Leila, current female lead, is much the same as every other female lead so far. She's beeeeautiful, she's turrrf, she's full of sass and attituded and she don't take no crap from nobody, except D, because she can't help but fall madly in love with him at first sight. She's also in continual danger of sexual horrors, except this time, such threat doesn't come from whatever monsters they may be facing, but from her brothers. I kinda choked when this came out. The Marcus clan consists of four brothers and Leila. One night, they all decided to rape her. I have no idea why. I don't know many brothers who find the idea of boning their sisters appealing, so to find four such people in the one family is a bit high. Nevertheless, they do this. Instead of, I don't know, LEAVING THEM, she stays, and they go around hunting vampires with a happy family dynamic that is not the least bit messed up, and she can't have been that scarred from the ordeal. Fine, maybe it was a one off, only not. They jump her every single time they need to give Grove, who has mad super powers, a seizure. And she still sticks around. They say they need her: why exactly? If it's arousal, wouldn't any woman do? Why don't they just give him handjob? So, yes. Insert a fair amount of disbelief and disgust. This guy does NOT know how to write women, and I worry for those in his life. In the movie, all that has been taken out, and Leila is a more solid and structured character. Who hides her love well. I actually found this very hard to get past. The rest of the book receeds behind that ridiculous bit of characterisation, if that's what it was. The heart of the story is a vampire and a human woman have fallen in love, and are making an escape to a fabled starport, where they hope to find a ship still functioning, and make for the stars. D and the Marcus clan are hunting them due to a comission from the girl's father, although they're not exactly for working together. Thrown into this mix are a few demons of Barborois, who are all for killing everyone, and there you have the essence of the story: everyone fights everyone else. This felt like the weakest of the three I've read, even taking into consideration that the last one was full of fog that I never saw through. Here, it was all just one excuse for a supposedly jaw-dropping fight after another, over and over. By now, I'm well aware of exactly how cool D is, and I really don't need it demonstrated this often. At least in the last there was something of an interesting dynamic between characters. I did prefer the ending in the book over the movie. Much sadder, with much less hope, but it felt right. And to finish on a random tangent, at some point one of the Marcus brothers and Mayerling, the vampire, have a show down in an ant nest. These ants (at least, I thought of them as ants) were especially savage flesh eaters, who would strip your bones before you knew it. But they were called 'mints'. I couldn't help seeing the two of them covered by minties and screaming. Verdict: One day, he'll have a female lead that isn't a mere device for getting his joneses on.

Vampire Hunter D Vol 2: Raiser of Gales - by Hideyuki Kikuchi, translated by Keven Leahy



HE CAN SEE YOU.

Look, this book sucks. It's badly written, and not particularly well translated, and I totally utterly love it. Some shit is so bad it's brilliant. I know it isn't good for me, just like chocolate, but do you think I can stop?

In this book, strange things are happening in the frontier village of Tepes. Ten years ago, children vanished up by a ruined castle, and returned a week later with no memory of where they had been or what had happened to them. Now, vampires plague the village (which is to be expected when reading a book about a vampire hunter), only these vampires can move about in daylight.

Shock! Horror!

I have no idea why it's called 'Raiser of Gales'. As much as that is a great title, it has bugger all to do with anything. It rains a bit, but not because anyone made it rain.

D wanders in, and takes the job. There's a pretty girl involved who (to me) is a right irritating brat, but never the less has this astonishing power to, OMG!, make D at loss for words. 'cause she's pretty. And terrible intelligent. And pretty. She (as with all female leads in these books) is in constant peril of being raped (because all males apart from D are rapists at heart), and is regularly taken advantage of by her foster father. I'm not sure whether or not this is rape, because apparently despite hating it, she can't help but be terrible aroused. I call BULLSHIT. This relationship also does not fuck her up, which I find hard to believe. Her greatest act of rebellion, when being confronted by all these sexual predators, is to stick out her tongue, which must mean something quite different in this world, as it is often more than enough to drive the person having the tongue stuck out at into a VIOLENT RAGE OF INDIGNATION. Seriously. Racial slurs don't have the same affect.

This girl, Lina, is one of those children who went missing, and is of course the key to everything.

Beyond that...this is one hell of a muddled story. It shambles around like a sad lost little zombie, not entirely sure of where it's going but finding some monsters to fight along the way anyway. I believe the end message is that these failed experimental vampires that walk in day were supposed to be a way of saying that even the Nobility knew they were dying out, and were trying to further themselves, but to create a new perfect race of human-vampire hybrids with all the strengths of both and none of the weaknesses, to make everyone happy, because vampires are essentially nice people.

I call BULLSHIT.

It's never really clear who was responsible for what. There are too many mysterious shadows that whisper little secrets but never reveal their identity, so I'm not sure who's what.

Everyone takes the hue of paraffin again, which instead of making me think 'pale', makes me think 'lamp', which isn't a great look. D is gorgeous this, gorgeous that, so pretty that all these red-blooded hetrosexual rapist men want to get in his pants too. In fact, at one point, a band of brigands are frozen at the sight of this "gorgeous God of Death", which had me in tears.

Thankfully, everyone dies. Except D. Because, you know, he's too cool to die.

I will say this; the illustrations are beautiful. Yoshitaka Amano is a striking artist, and his pictures are eye catching, not in the standard anime way. He'll be at Worldcon in Japan, which may or may not have been a deciding factor on my attending.

Verdict: THE SHIT IS BANANAS. AND BANANAS ARE DAAAAAMN GOOD.

The Boats of the "Glen Carrig" and Other Nautical Adventures: The Collected Fiction of William Hope Hodgson



Don't ask how long it's been since I read this. I'm terrible. I know.

The collection opens with Hodgson's title novel, The Boats of the "Glen Carrig", which I can only descibe as an odd, quirky, fabulous and strangley pointless affair. The Glen Carrig met some bad luck, and now what remains of the crew and passengers are gathered on two life boats, having finally sighted land of some description. They row and row and row upriver, and find nothing but mud, more mud, some more mud, and strange cabbage trees. At night, strange wailing/sobbing/growling surrounds them.

They find a derelict ship, and use it as a base while they look for water. During this time, they're attacked by some meaty demon slug thing, and angry cabbage trees. It doesn't take long for them to decide they were better off being lost at sea, and make moves to remedy the situation.

The cabbage trees and meat slug are never mentioned again, and absolutely no explanation is given of them.

Once back at sea, the real meat of the story begins, with a storm sweeping one of the boats into the sinister Sargasso Sea, a region of ocean that Hodgson makes good use of, and demonises most brilliantly. The rest of the novel involves the seamen finding a small island amid the giant banks of weed, and how they deal with the terrible creatures that assail them, and their efforts to gain a larger boat, and find civilisation again, if ever.

At first, this was quite hard to read, as Hodgson uses a very old fashioned vernacular, possibly even so when it was first published. Not so much the words that have fallen from popularity, but basic sentence structure. He did things with his narrator's voice that resulted in me reading more than a few lines several times before figuring out what was being said. It took approximately three, four chapters before I became accustomed to this. Interestingly enough, the rest of his stories were far more accessible.

He also, for chapters at a time, gets distracted by technicalities. For example, at some point, the seamen go about building a giant bow and arrow (look, just go with me on this), and he does spend a whole chapter carefully details exactly how this was accomplished. If ever I'm stuck on a dead island with only bits of ships for company, at least I'll know how to build a giant bow and arrow. Just in case.

There's also exactly zero characterisation. Well, that's not entirely true. There are a couple of lines that hint at it. All the seamen remain nameless, being 'the big sailor', or 'the boson', for the whole book. Unless they have no identifiying features whatsoever, at which point they're given single sylabell names so that when they die, the reader is aware of exactly who did the dying. At one point, the boson gives the narrator a pat on the shoulder, because he was brooding on a cliff top about being stuck in the middle of a weed-strangled ocean on a dead island, and that right there is the height of characterisation. Silverberg wasn't entirely wrong, however, because anything more than that would have got in the way of the nasty squid monsters/exploding mushrooms/angry crabs/derelict ships/etc.

Their final escape from the Sargossa is sadly anticlimactic, but the narrator gets to keep the boson, whom he was quite clearly in love with, calling him the greatest of men every other paragraph.

Don't get me wrong, I had fun with this.

Following the novel was a collection of further short stories Hodgson wrote based around the Sargossa Sea. Given they all involve ships becoming trapped in the weed and being unable to escape, with the passengers unable to leave the ship lest they be eaten, these stories tend to be very lonely, hopeless affairs, full of menace and threat. Although all people stranded in such situations appear to show a great degree of resourcefulness, their every action is nevertheless overshadowed with futility. These are not stories that uplift the spirit.

I would like to take a moment to recommend everyone read one specific short story, being From the Tideless Sea Part 2: More News from the Homebird, a very creepy and unsettling story. Read it, and then ask yourself, 'are crabs scary?' Aye! They are! Ye who doubted my giant crabs, repent! Repent!

I wasn't sure how much further I wanted to continue, having been throughly mired by the Sargossa Sea, so thankfully the next section was entirely different. The exploits of Captain Gault were, and possibly will always remain, my favourite of Hodgson's work. A series of short stories detailing the adventures of Captain Gault, one of the greatest smugglers of all time. He makes Han Solo look like a rank amateur. All his schemes involve a great deal at stake, and the authorities, who have never actually caught him, desperate to finally nail him. And yet, despite their greatest efforts, Gault always prevails. And he always, always, always lets the authorities, specifically the one main officer he has managed to hoodwink, know exactly how easily they were fooled, because he's an arrogant smug smarmy bastard like that, and I absolutely totally developed a crush on him. If you read these stories, you'll start crushing on him too.

(That said, the last story involved him fighting Nazis, which was....odd. They were the nicest Nazis I've met in fiction.)

These were followed by the not quite as exciting adventures of Captain Jat, who I didn't really like, and his sidekick Pibby Tawles, the ship boy. Desert islands populated by mutant animal savages and buried treasure, oh my! Not quite as much love for Jat as, when it comes down to it, he was an idiot. Stealth does not involve yelling in outrage. Pibby, cunning little rat, I had plenty of time for.

Lastly, two stories of Dot-and-Carry Cargunka, who was much like Gault, a terribly amusing character. Born lame, he runs his own ship, and takes the position of cook so he doesn't have to pay anyone else to do it. He has quite the love for Lord Byron, and fancies that the two of them are kindred spirits, in more ways than one. That said, as amusing as Cargunka was, the stories themselves didn't grab me. Unfortunatly, it's been so long since I read them, that I'm not sure I can remember why.

I'm out of practice writing up books. Sorry this sucks so much.

I can't help thinking of Hodgson as being like Lovecraft Lite, with Seawater, an impression that I know is soley based upon the Sargossa stories. In actual fact, Hodgson is a much better writer than Lovecraft (don't hit me), and has a greater repertoire in his stories. The lack of characterisation in his Sargossa stories he more than makes up for with his various captains, and he uses his personal knowledge of the sea and sailing well.

I love me some weird shit. I love me some Age of Sailing. And I love me some captains. I'd recommend you get this collection even if you only read the Gault stories.

Verdict: Salty sea dogs! Nyaaaaaaaaar! This be bootay, aye! Not everyone's cup of tea, but if so inclined, well worth it.

Metal Rooster: an Orderly Thing of Beauty

Feb 8, 1921 to Jan 27, 1922
Feb 5, 1981 to Jan 24, 1982

Rooster is often seen as the original strong silent type, not unlike the Humphrey Bogart and Greto Garbo prototypes.

Heh. Hehehehe.

Most people consider them quite eccentric. Sad to say, relationships with other people are often strained.

I know. What can I say? I'm an arsehole, and an eccentric one at that.

They are quite moody and can be too outspoken.

Moody, yes. Don't know about outspoken. Possibly only in the written word. You know, with shift work being the way it is, there are days I realise I haven't said anything to anyone other than to ask a supervisor to delete something.

Although, there has been mention of a Tessmonster of late, who is apparently quite fierce and kind of scary.

They are often self-centered, but can be quite brave when the situation calls for it.

Yes! Self-centered! Braveness depends on situation! I shall certainly fight to the death for that red bean bun!

On the other hand, Rooster People are quite talented and capable. They are always devoted to their work and have a reputation for being the hardest of workers.

Yeah. For the wrong reasons, unfortunately. I go hard at work, so that I can a) say I'm better than all these other people doing the same job, and b) possibly get a pat on the head. Competitive. King of the castle.

Rooster People are deep thinkers and are pioneers in spirit.

HAAAAAAAAAHAHAHAHAHAHA! Whatever.

They can experience the greatest of joy in complete solitude. Even though often alone, they rarely experience loneliness. Instead, they enjoy their own company and feel solitude helps them in their quest after knowledge.

I don't know about my 'quest for knowledge'. I just don't like people. That includes you. You suck. And you smell like beans. You're adopted, and now I'm sending you to go live with your robot foster family.

(Mostly, I'm just hiding.)

Shark-tail Soup and fortune cookies are among the keys to good health.

I'm not sure what this has to do with anything. While shark fin soup is most scrumptious, it's also expensive.

Sometimes this one walks around with its head in the cumulus clouds, higher than the stars.

It's called daydreaming. It's called continual internal escapism, with a side order of idealism. (Have I not told you that despite my short stature, I am a great towering intellect?)

You see, this rooster struts around with peacock feathers and they never ever ruffle.

Wrong. My feathers ruffle very easily. It's their nature state.

So much arrogance can make it hard to get along with others, especially when the Rooster is also intolerant of those who are less talented and a bit slower than normal.

Yep. It ain't attractive, but I'm aware it's there, and try to smother it. Although I tell people I'm a nasty person, I'd like to try and be a nice one.

On the other hand, the Metal Rooster is extraordinarily talented. Of all twelve Zodiac signs, this one is probably the most high-minded of them all, with a very clean line of thought.

AAAAAAAAAAAAHAHAHAHAHHAAAAAAAAAAA!!!!!!!!! HAHAHAHAHAHAAAAAAA!!!!! AAAAHahahahahaaaa...hahaaaa....ha...aaah.

Clean line of thought my arse. For that matter, I'm not entirely sure what 'high-minded' actually means.

The Metal Roosters can distinguish right from wrong very clearly and it doesn't matter which direction they pursue, they always wind up going the right way. If they confront a maze, or big problem, they will immediately see a solution because of their analytical, logical way of thinking.

Well, that's a giant pile of horse shit, that is. Right and wrong are rarely so clean cut, and if I always wind up going the right way, then why don't I own a castle in the mountains with a bat cave and all the space I could possibly want for my books? I'm a 24 year old with a useless university degree doing data entry, I don't own a car, and I still live with my parents.

And I haven't finished writing a book. Any book.

Through their perseverance, any hurricane becomes an orderly thing of beauty, just like that!

Okay. So it took me an hour to tidy my desk. Behold!



An orderly thing of beauty!





You don't believe me, do you? Look closely at those pictures. Notice something? Like, the surface of the desk is actually visible?

When it's time for romance, the male Metal Rooster has no trouble at all, love just abounds; the female has a tendency to keep to herself, making connections less freely, but lastingly when they happen.

Uh huh.

As [not many] young girls do, I went through an astronomy phase. Space was great, space was awesome, it was all happening out there. I read up all the over-simplified and not actually true information on black holes and red giants, and felt terribly claustrophobic pondering the fact that I'd never get off this little rock called Earth.

Then, I found out the universe was expanding, and everything was going further away.

That crushed me, as only 8 year old girls can be crushed. Eventually, there would be no more stars in the sky. (As I hadn't thought it through properly, and while the universe may be expanding, the galaxy isn't.)

Then I grew out of astronomy, and moved on to horses and dolphins, as a great many young girls do.

Now I'm a big girl. Possibly I'm even a woman. When I walk home in the middle of the night, the street lights, building lights, house lights, car lights, drown the stars, and I can barely see any in the sky. They don't have to run away, we're pushing them out of the night all on our own.

And this crushes me, as only a 24 year old girl/woman can be crushed.

Mountains and Molehills

It isn't eventful here on Planet Tessa at the moment, thus 'breaking news' isn't going to be riveting, must-read blogging.

It involves getting more excited about my payslip than my pay.



My last payslip stated my annual salary was 29somethingK. Now it's Officially More Than That. Sorry for harping on about it so much, but there's just something absurd and amusing about pay raises getting thrown at my lap for no effort on my part. It's just data entry! Admittedly, ridiculously complicated data entry that does take months of training, but data entry is data entry. $17 an hour instead of $14.

You know in my last job, I was getting $20 an hour. And 6 hours a week. Ha! No amount of money would make me go back to retail! NEVER! (Except, you know, if there's no alternative. Or it's a bookshop.)

Afternoon Delight

See, this is the part I lurv about ordering items from far away. It means coming home to a surprise package on the bed. It's a mini-birthday! Except without cake, and no one is giving me presents, I paid for them myself, which makes it a pretty sad present.



These I ordered about mid-February, from the Small Beer Press sale. I shouldn't have, but with on $7us for air mail, golly gosh, I'd have found something to buy anyway. Unfortunately, their sale was so popular that they ran out of books, and had to wait for restocks before shipping mine. Congratulations on a sale that works, I say. I schnaffled Kalpa Imperial (which has been on my wishlist for who knows how long), and Trampoline. Due the fact that I'm not going through a reading phase right now, they have been consigned to the shelf, where they shall sit for an unknown amount of time. Looking at me.

Haha!

At last! Amazon has paid attention to all those "I own it" boxes I ticked, and has stopped trying to sell Lone Wolf and Cub to me. It was all, "Oh, you have vol 15? Well, how about 7? No, what about 23? You own that to? Well, how about-" and so on.

The Insecurities of a Mongrel

Around pay day I like to treat myself to some munchies. Specifically, I wander into Melbourne Central and get myself a red bean bun, and some honey dew milk tea with pearls. And as I'm wandering around with my milk tea and my bun, I can't help thinking that I'm a poser. I'm not real Chinese. I'm just faking it. All the true Orients are laughing at me, toddling along with nothing but an Australian accent in my mouth, and some Cantonese picked up from watching too many kung fu films. (Because being able to yell "NO SHADOW KICK!" is essential to international communication.)

I'm willing to bet your standard totally completely NOT Chinese person doesn't have any of these hang ups over food.

Weeeeeeeeeeeeeee!

I felt great the past two weeks. Migraines aside, everything was chocolate cake. Nothing was hard, nothing was upsetting, there were no triggers, and nothing was triggered. The easiest indicator that I'm doing better than okay is I think about sunshine a lot. Strange, but true, and really nice.

I realised this might have been because I was getting enough sleep. Two weeks of afternoon shifts, two weeks of getting up in my own time. Brilliance. But then, haha, yesterday and today I had a quick change over. That means starting at 3pm, then then next day starting at 9am, and then today starting at 7am.

And I didn't do so well. Nor do I entirely understand WHY I had a quick changeover, considering I start nightshift on the weekend.

What's even more confusing is I don't understand why I didn't notice this when I got my roster, think 'wow, that's going to make you cry', and then, oh, I don't know, SWAP OUT OF IT.

TESSA! YOU MAKE NO SENSE! WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU?!

("I'm sorry! I'm tired! Everything is funny right now!")


My Art Suffers For Me!

Since the migraine-asaurus paid me a visit, I haven't written. It made me a bit leery of all computers actually, and although I know it isn't entirely true, I can't help connecting writing with intense pain. Even now I keep taking little 30 second breaks to go and, I don't know, look at the wall. Just in case the migraine-asaurus is watching.



And thus ends this not-news bulletin from Planet Tessa. Rock the kazbar.

Sir Tessa: Hey World.
World: You! Off! Fuck! Intervention order says you can't come near me, especially not after that hedgehog incident!
Sir Tessa: Yeeeah. That was pretty funny.
World: Yeah! Only, NOT. What do you want anyway?
Sir Tessa: Despite the fact that I've been messy in the head recently, I feel I should acknowledge that you haven't been mean to me.
World: That would be because I have an intervention order telling you to sod off.
Sir Tessa: Sorry about that.
World: Ha.
Sir Tessa: You really are a nice place to live.
World: ...
Sir Tessa: That's all. I'll be going now.

I worked the phrase 'giant space sphincter' into my story.

There is nothing left for me to achieve today. I may as well go to bed.

THE MYSTERIOUS FLAME OF QUEEN LOANA - Umberto Eco, translated by Geoffrey Brock



I wish I could say I liked this book, and thus have some sort of claim to literary taste. But it frustrated the bejeezes out of me, so I can't.

I started reading it at about 1am, when I was in one of my more distraught frames of mind, and it was wonderful. Yambo wakes up in hospital, and although he can remember such things as toothpaste, how to use a fork, the works of Shakespeare, he has no memory of himself. His memories of the world remain, but nothing of his life. Although it is never said, hints throughout the book lead me to assume he had a stroke. It is beautifully done, a lovely blend of familiarity, curiosity, and yet being entirely adrift in a world that knows him, but which he doesn't remember. There is no threat in this unknown world, no fear, menace or danger, and with the guiding hand of his wife, Yambo comes to one mundane little delight after another. These ordinary things that he now, as an adult, experiences for the first time. The joy he experiences from discovering how it feels to clean his tongue with a toothbrush is one of my favourite scenes in the book.

But it isn't enough for him to pick up his life, he needs to rediscover who he is, was, might be. And so his wife sends him to his childhood home in Solara, so that he might go through all the detritus of his past. And so begins the seccond section of the book.

It is this second section that had me gnashing my teeth. While the first section swept me off my feet and left me feeling calm and excited at the same time, the section left me nothing but bloody impatient. Yambo spends his time eating salads, and rummaging through the boxes in the attic of the estate. It is his 'paper memory', all the books he read as a child, his school work and badly written poems. I felt I should have enjoyed this section, as discovering what makes a person who they are is something of an obsession of mine.

But.

There was no coherance. Yambo goes through his paper memory as we all do, picking up whatever catches our eye, again, and again without creating a structure. It was infuriating. Fog is a theme prevalent throughout the book, and this felt like reading in fog, with a whole lot of not going anywhere involved. I tried to approach it from another direction, and stead of learning about Yambo, learning about some of the recent history of Italy, but that too failed. Now I am possibly more ignorant of Italy than ever, as I have some pieces of a jigsaw, although possible not from the same puzzle. I gained no knowledge, only a deeper understanding of my ignorance.

It reminded me of year 12 specialist maths. It was like trying to understand physics all over again. I never did get the hang of physics.

Thankfully, he goes and gives himself another stroke, and so begins the third section

Here, in that fleeting second of brain spasm, Yambo remembers everything. All the questions he discovered in the first and second sections are answered, and my flagging interest picked up, but only so much. The fog finds its source. And Lila just explodes on the scene; she who was his childhood crush, one of those crushes that follows you for life, that you end up comparing every partner to, she, introduced TWO THIRDS of the way into the book just takes over. It stops being about Yambo finding himself, and is entirely about him trying to find her.

It has its moments. It is beautifully translated, so much so most of the time I forgot that it was a translation. The pictures provided add all sorts of layers and textures to the writing itself, and there are some lovely moments of revelation.

But ultimately, I felt like I was standing in fog. Frustrated and blind, and going absolutely nowhere.

Verdict: So, I think this one passed me by.

FITZPATRICK'S WAR - by THeodore Judson



OMGGREATESTBOOKEVAH!!!!

For those of you who possess the stamina, courage, will and fortitude to actually read and finish my book postings, you already know what this post will say. A good amount of brain frothing on my part, which will make up for the lack of coherance. You'll nod your head, and say, "Ah yes, Sir Tessa like that book so much she had its babies," and go about your business.

Coherance factor lowered by four morning shifts in a row. And a towel on my head. I just can't think with a towel on my head.

This book is an historical analysis of the memoirs of Sir Robert Mayfair Bruce, who lived through one of the bloodiest wars of history, which despite being victorian/colonial in mindset and steam-powered, is some centuries in the future.

It has footnotes. Therefore, it must rock the kazbar.

The footnotes play an important role in the story, as instead of being an interesting aside about the history of the world, they provide an excellent juxtaposition of Sir Robert's personal experiences and views, and that of what History Says Is True. As the memoir is first person from Robert's point of view, we cannot help but emphathise with him, and the myriad of predicaments he faces, which in turn gives the reader a strong bias. We're on his side already, which always makes it just a bit harder to admit any flaw or mistake in a protagonist. Fortunately, the historian doing the analysis sits side by side with us, and with his useful little footnotes (it is most certainly a he, as such an exercise is well beyond the capability of a mere woman) points out exactly where Robert is wrong, is lying, and is downright blasphemous and heretic and should have been impaled for even thinking such a thing.

As much as Mr Footnote was downright annoying in his inability to entertain a 'what if', he nevertheless provides a very good insight to the workings of society; regimented, conservative, narrow, rigid, and bigotted to the point of hilarity.

(It was in Mr Footnote's introduction to the piece that I realised where I'd gone wrong with a short story of mine, which also endeavoured to swim around in a colonising mindset, and all the discrimination that comes with it. When dealing with characters that are racist, religionist, sexist, and everything-that-isn't-them-ist, the trick is to hold no punches. Don't be afraid of offending the reader - go all the way, and make that mindset, in all its seriousness and well meaning ignorance, a total joke. It makes fun of itself without even trying. Not that I'm quite game to try such a thing yet. Possibly why I enjoy stories styled as such; the absurdity of it all is so ridiculous it makes me giggle.)

(I'm pretty sure giggling is frowned upon.)

Robert is one of Fitzpatrick the Younger's chosen friends, which in this case means not just being part of an elite clique at school, but being bribed and bought with easy passes in said school, then being showered in promotions to ensure he does in fact build this mildly illegal airbases in good time, and then further showered with medals and awards for saving said airbases from being blown up when the war started, and by then, he was so far in there was nothing else he could do but keep holding his tongue.

It isn't a nice war. It's the sort of war that, should I ever be in a position to rule the world via hostile take over, I'd hope to wage. Brutal. Nasty. Efficient. Over in the space of a few months. Although the war was just the beginning of Fitzpatrick's downfall. In the aftermath, he took his whole empire down with him. And Robert sat by, and held his tongue.

Although the book could be swamped with moral lessons, (and thanks to Robert's brilliant wife Charlotte, is to a degree), it has draws no conclusions. Although Robert is consumed by guilt regarding everything he did and didn't do, he's not a bad man. Nor, given his actions and decisions, is he a good man. He is just a man. I like to think he was a kind one.

The relationship between Charlotte and Robert, while utterly lovely to read, irked me. Just around the edges. It's just one of those personal 'meh!' reactions to books that portray women as being strange, mysterious, enchanting and controlling creatures which men completely fail to understand. And yet, it was a beautiful relationship, and as a pair they worked perfectly, in terms of their lives and for the story.

However, my favourite character was Winifred Pularski. A complete thug of a man with a metal arm and a natural aptitude for killing, Fitzpatrick allowed him into his inner circle purely to act as a body guard. Too simple and loyal to ever betray him. He's a murderous brute. And such a lovely gentle man. It sounds a cliche, the killer who is actually a kitten, but Pularski was wonderful. He loved to fish, but wouldn't use hooks because he didn't want to hurt the fish he caught. He'd stroke them, in love with them, before releasing them. He loved Robert because Robert didn't buy him, but was a true friend. In a world almost entirely developed, he longed to see a tiger. He'd protect Robert, and Robert's wife, yet still assassinate for Fitzpatrick. He was such a nice man. My favourite gentle murderer.

Alas. The footnotes need EDITING! And CHECKING! To ensure they fall on the right page, aren't riddled with spelling errors, and if they reference another footnote, check that footnote actually EXISTS. I never did find out what the 'not men' were.

I cried in this book. I did my school girl giggle. I fell in love, fell in hate, and had too much fun with footnotes. There were dirigibles! There were steam powered battle ships! It was great. You should have been there.

VERDICT: You want this book. No, really, you do. You like Victoriana, steampunk, secret societies, world wars, and the downfall of empires. The footnotes want you baby, they want you bad.

SADNESS

Today contained no triggers. Nothing. But I feel sad anyway.

Sadness is not depression. Depression is uglier. Sadness is softer.

But if I don't know what causes a mood, then I don't know what to do about it. I've sat and stewed for some hours now, and managed to figure out that I feel as though I've lost something. I couldn't tell you what.

Sadness is -

A wee little blue goblin with long droopy ears, soft little paws, and dry eyes that will never smile. She says not word.

- just sitting on my shoulder, patting my hair with her soft little paw. When I asked her why she was here, she just nodded, and pat pat pat.

SCHWING

Yesterday, I saw a naked man.

Naked men don't feature largely in my life, so there was a certain amount of snorting and giggling involved, being that I was on a train, and he was walking down the sidewalk of a street alongside the train tracks. He seemed quite happy, in that he was striding wide and swinging his arms with much gusto.

And then, because I've been in my job too long, I thought-

WILFUL AND OBSCENE EXPOSURE IN PUBLIC PLACE

-which is offence code 139somethingsomething, and proceeded to write the narrative:

BATAD RP obs u/k off walking easterly along street beside trainline b/w 4gb and 4mm. off obs to be totally naked. off n/k to rp. Nil other wit, nil susp. Nil further. Enq pending.

I probably should have actually reported it. There's a lot of elderly folk along that road. Wouldn't like to think any of them had a weak heart.

MOVE UNDER GROUND - NICK MAMATAS



I got this book.
Only, I didn't get it at all.

And thus I put off writing it up, for fear of making myself look foolish. Then I posted that ninja pic, and the whole foolish aspect seemed rather pointless.

R'lyeh has risen, Cthulhu is dreaming loudly, and all the world has gone to shit. Jack Kerouac, a writer with a loose grip, traipse about what is left of nonsense America looking for Neal Cassady, who may or may not have the fate of the whole world in his pocket. William S. Burroughs comes along for the ride.

That's what the book is, but I'm not sure I could tell you what it was about.

It's a little piece of brilliance, I know that much. That, is a voice. A well sculpted and consistant and unique voice that will hang around narrating your life if you let it. Without that voice, the story would just dribble away. The lines on the back say its bebop, jazz and the like. I liked it. At first, it seemed it was all telling, and then so much telling that I couldn't pause to take a breath and was drowning in this weird funky world, but by then it didn't matter. It had started, and wouldn't let me stop reading.

(I have occasionally been accused of keeping information from the reader. This book does that, and does it very well. After all, what is there that you can really be certain of when the Elder Gods come knocking?)

There were moments when it reached wonderful leverls of absurdity, with Jack throwing Bill at trains, Bill poking around the edges of an orgy, the little devil bugs screaming "Nooooooo!" as the bug spray of the end of the world hit them.

But I still didn't get it. I'd guess it is because I've never quite grasped what the bohemian/beatnik movement really meant. I've never quite been able define it to my satisfaction, and I probably never will, because I missed it entirely. As a result, I can see entire layers of cake that just passed me by.

Possibly I don't get America, either.

Cthulhu, however, I get. Got all that, and adored it. Throwing the map out the window was fantastic. The portray of actually walking through such an event was great, really great. Perhaps I'll be a mugwump when R'lyeh rises.

Verdict: Good book? Yes. Mildly obfusccated? Yes. Does it matter? Hell no.