"Tea, though ridiculed by those who are naturally coarse in their nervous sensibilities ... will always be the favourite beverage of the intellectual." - Thomas De Quincey

I'm a bit excited to find that Project Gutenberg has the De Quincey essay, Murder, Considered As One of the Fine Arts, available for free and easy download.

Being the dorkosaurus that I am, Gutenberg serves as a treasure-trove of the esoteric, like Jean-Henri Fabre's pioneering works on entomology such as Social Life in the Insect World. There's also assorted varieties of crack pottery dealing with Atlantis, including the Theosophical variant (compiled by the author in a trance-like state as he read the Elder Scrolls written on a super-physical material beyond time and space) The Story of Atlantis and the Lost Lemuria. That one even comes with maps!

Hope the food coma is going well.

I played A Touch of Evil last night at CodyCon. It’s a fun game, reminiscent of “Talisman”, but with an early 18th century flavor. A supernatural evil is loose in the village of Shadowbrook, and it’s up to the players to stop it. Each player takes on the role of an investigator who has different perks and abilities. Game play can be competitive or collaborative, and the object is to travel around the board picking up various resources to build up strength and learn the town elders’ secrets before confronting the monster in its lair.





There’s a nice narrative quality to the game, giving the impression of a “Sleepy Hollow” style story unfolding as you travel around the board. Plus there’re chips and cards and tokens and dice and minis and, yeah, it’s geeky as all hell.



We had eight players, and our villain was the werewolf. (Our story wound up being something like this -- the village midwife was not what she appeared to be and was in fact the werewolf who was under the control of the evil lord of the manor.) Our group size was something of a burden, as it would take close to an hour for everyone to go. Optimal size would probably be about four players. We started out as competitive, which led to some great fuck-over-the-other-player moments, and a few players got transformed into werewolves, which was fun, but after three hours we all wanted to go home and started helping each other out a bit. By then practically all of the town elders had either been knocked out of play or joined the villain, so things were getting desperate in Shadowbrook.






Design-wise the game was nice, although hand-drawn illustrations beat dressed up and tweaked drama-camp model photography any day of the week. Also, the game soundtrack was a wee bit silly. But these things are pretty minor (especially when off set by cool minis!), so if any of this at all sounds appealing to you, than you might want to check the game out.

I’ve been swamped lately with stuff for BCS and I lost nine days to a nasty cold, but I heard a few days ago that Space and Time magazine is buying my short story “Ebb.” Which is awesome.

This one has a long and tortured history, which may be why I feel relieved as much as jubilant. It’s a damn good story, if I do say so myself–not brilliant but definitely quite good. It’s one of my odd hybrids of fantasy and real science–a fantasy setting built around 100% accurate science, but with pre-tech characters who don’t understand that science and therefore don’t expound about it. It’s also one of my most literary pieces, with an unreliable narrator. Several pro editors loved it but had the ending go completely over their heads, and several amateur editors had the science in the setting go completely over theirs (cf. my rant on SF/F writers and editors not knowing basic science).

So I’m glad the story has found a home, and I’m delighted that it will be in Space and Time. They’re getting lots of buzz lately in the indie press world, including a story nominated for the WSFA Small Press Award this past fall. I met their publisher Hildy Silverman at Capclave and enjoyed talking to her. They’re specifically interested in subgenre hybrid stories and this one clearly fits the bill.

So maybe this was kharma? Maybe it was a good story finally winning out on its own merits? Maybe it was the right story at the right place at the right time? Who knows. Selling stories is such an inscrutable process, as I’m seeing again from the other side editing BCS. Ours is not to question why, as the poet laureate said. Meanwhile I think I will buy myself a subscription to Space and Time and see what else has caught their eye.

This past Sunday I (and a pair of peripatetic companions) went on another graveyard stroll. We went this time to Cypress Hill in Brooklyn - final resting place of Jackie Robinson, Mae West, and the Collyer brothers among others. It was a cold, windy November day, the ground muddy still from all the rain the day before.

It was a different trip than Green-wood.

For one thing, Cypress Hills is a lot more of an urban cemetery with an expressway cutting through it and the elevated train along one edge. However, there are a few hills in it, and from the top of one of them the view is spectacular. On one side stands the skyscraper wall of Manhattan rising above the trees. On the other is Brooklyn, stretching far into the distance until it ends in the harbor.

It felt simultaneously congested, crowded, remote, and empty. I could hear the train squealing by on the tracks, and there were footprints everywhere along with junk like balloons and dolls left at graves. But then, beyond all that there was the horizon, and the fact that no matter how many people live in New York it still remains this tiny corner of the world where the Hudson River empties into the sea.

It was a strange place to be.

Once, when I was eleven, I was attempting to get air off a graded curb at the bottom of a steep hill on my wee department store BMX bike when I lost control and took a header into a fire hydrant. At least, that’s the event I’ve reconstructed from the fragments I actually remember from that afternoon, which include sitting covered in blood on the side of the road wondering what the hell I was doing there, getting asked a barrage of worried questions by my father, sitting in the backseat of his car wondering how I had got there, then the same barrage of questions from a doctor.

The whole experience was dreamlike and actually kind of wonderful. I was pretty damn frightened of death when I was eleven—I had a cousin who died in a motorcycle accident around then—and was generally a scrawny wuss terrified of pain. But neither pain nor fear comes into the memory at all. I was just sort of awed, wondering where my mind had been, where I had been, in those black spaces I couldn’t remember. It was like I had traveled through time.

I was probably reading Madeline L’Engle and CS Lewis and Jules Verne in those days, watching Back to the Future over and over on VHS like it was my job.

The other night, under dubious circumstances which shall not be discussed, I slammed my head quite forcefully against against a telephone pole and collapsed in the street. Or at least so I have been told, by bystanders who actually witnessed the event. All I remember is sitting up from the street mumbling, “I’m fine, I’m fine.”

Didn’t go to the doctor this time. Should have, maybe. Stubborn.

It’s a fascinating thing, though, the fragility of consciousness. Being a sheltered, coddled, writerly recluse like I am, I probably don’t get enough reminders of it. I’ve been reading up on shamanism lately—on the magical origins of culture. Back then, it was exactly this sort of experience that might have been interpreted as a call to the shamanic vocation: a death or seeming death, followed by a return to life.

Not that I experienced any spirit visions while I was under. At least, not that I can remember. But that’s the point: I don’t know what happened during those blank spaces. Maybe I dreamed. Maybe I saw god. Apparently, during some of the time following my encounter with the fire hydrant, I actually appeared awake and alert, answering questions, moving under my own power. Was that really me? Or was it just my body, walking and talking without me in it?

Fun to think about.

"For those who are willing to make an effort, great miracles and wonderful treasures are in store." - Isaac Bashevis Singer

There is something to admire in women who can apply all their make-up during a subway ride. To be packed in tight and still able to apply foundation, eye shadow, blush, and curl one’s eyelashes takes a certain skill. It’s a startling feat to witness: today’s professional, emerging out of the chrysalis of the morning commuter. Right before your very eyes!

I remember when my commute was significantly longer (in time, but strangely not really in distance) this one young woman spent the whole ride south of 8th street doing her make-up. You could tell it was part of an ingrained routine. "After 8th street, apply make-up." There was a tourist family on the train with us, and the mother of the group stared at this woman in rapt fascination. She finally said to her: “I can’t believe you can do all that on the subway.” The young woman was changing her shoes at the time and answered very pleasantly: “I’ve done it so many times, I hardly notice anymore."


Last week, there was this one woman on the train. She was squat-sitting atop her purse right in the middle of the floor with a plastic bag at her feet, pulling out lipsticks and creams and eyeliner like she might have been a Neolithic shaman getting ready for ritual. Every time the train stopped and more passengers got on, people would crowd closer to her, but she made no show of noticing them. She kept the mirror in one hand, the tube of make-up in the other, and simply shifted herself across the floor. She finished her procedures, packed up her stuff, switched jackets with one she had in her bag, and left the train two stations later.

But of course the prize goes to the eyelash curler. You thought I was kidding, but no, this one time I saw a woman curl her eyelashes on the train -- using one of those things - right after she had spent some time putting on her make-up. There were four of us, myself, another guy, and two women seated near her, who were watching this procedure. The woman held that thing up to her eyes as the train rocked her back and forth slightly. It was enough to make you squint in discomfort. But she was impassive, like a statue. The funny thing was the guy beside her trying to ignore her and pretend she wasn’t doing anything.

I’ve seen that woman since then on the train. She’s never applied make-up or curled her eyelashes in front of us again. I imagine that one time, she must have been going in for a job interview after a late night. She was under pressure, but cool, absolutely confident in her skills. I like to imagine she got the job, and no one she works with knows what she looked like minutes before her interview.

I should add, that only once have I ever seen a man apply make-up on the train. It was a very hurried affair of foundation application while standing and holding on to the overhead bar. However, afterwards, I will say that his face did glow.