What is Chaz doing?
Nov. 20th, 2008 02:41 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
desperanceWorking, somewhat: very aware of receded deadlines, laughing hollowly at the notion of ever catching up. It's like a bank account in overdraft, where you'd been steadily paying it off month by month and then suddenly had to plunge again unexpectedly, and now it's all back up to its limits of indebtedness: that same sense of hope disappointed, steady progress revealed to be futile in the hands of fate. (I have one of those aforementioned accounts - well, actually I have several, but one specifically - where that exact thing happened yesterday, which is why the comparison arose.)
Still, it ain't all grim focus and weary plodging, tho' quite a lot of it is.
I went to a public lecture last night, just to give the brain a bit of fodder: how spatial memory works, in the brain. Maybe. A bit. (Did you know the hippocampus is so named because from one particular angle it looks a little like the curves of a seahorse? Yay. I have two seahorses in my head, left and right. Take them both away, and I will be bewildered and amnesiac for ever; take just one, and I'll probably get by just fine.)
Off to another tonight, also. Probably on stars, compasses and clocks ("Longitude", basically), because all these things are fascinating and I know so little; though it clashes, alas, with another by my friend Andrew Morley on street jewellery, otherwise known to you as enamel advertising signs. I like to support my friends, and Andrew is fascinating on the subject; but he lives just around the corner and his house is full of the stuff, so I should probably, shall probably go to the other.
In the post today, copies of Douglas Smith's Impossibilia, because I wrote the introduction (favourite bits: "Literature has always been the most scrupulous, the most specifically demanding of the arts. It calls for a marriage of style and content that can be neither forced nor arranged but has to be striven for, sweated over, cultivated like something as precious and rare as it is obdurate and slippery - and that's for starters, that's before it'll get into bed with you" and "science fiction is never really about the rocketships, any more than crime fiction is about the clues; a true story is neither a manual nor a crossword-puzzle"), and the copy of Nature with my story in. One of the drawbacks to discovering that it was in fact published four months ago: I now no longer have a story at Nature! I must write another story! With science in it! Eek...
Still, it ain't all grim focus and weary plodging, tho' quite a lot of it is.
I went to a public lecture last night, just to give the brain a bit of fodder: how spatial memory works, in the brain. Maybe. A bit. (Did you know the hippocampus is so named because from one particular angle it looks a little like the curves of a seahorse? Yay. I have two seahorses in my head, left and right. Take them both away, and I will be bewildered and amnesiac for ever; take just one, and I'll probably get by just fine.)
Off to another tonight, also. Probably on stars, compasses and clocks ("Longitude", basically), because all these things are fascinating and I know so little; though it clashes, alas, with another by my friend Andrew Morley on street jewellery, otherwise known to you as enamel advertising signs. I like to support my friends, and Andrew is fascinating on the subject; but he lives just around the corner and his house is full of the stuff, so I should probably, shall probably go to the other.
In the post today, copies of Douglas Smith's Impossibilia, because I wrote the introduction (favourite bits: "Literature has always been the most scrupulous, the most specifically demanding of the arts. It calls for a marriage of style and content that can be neither forced nor arranged but has to be striven for, sweated over, cultivated like something as precious and rare as it is obdurate and slippery - and that's for starters, that's before it'll get into bed with you" and "science fiction is never really about the rocketships, any more than crime fiction is about the clues; a true story is neither a manual nor a crossword-puzzle"), and the copy of Nature with my story in. One of the drawbacks to discovering that it was in fact published four months ago: I now no longer have a story at Nature! I must write another story! With science in it! Eek...