Energumene

The last couple of days have been pretty damn crazy. I've been spending what some people (er, my publisher?) might consider way too much time following the Iranian situation online and, when possible, checking in with my two Persian friends here who are plugged into info from friends and family. Enough has been said about it all elsewhere, but just--damn. Gives me chills. I hope for the best for the greens.

On a more self-centered front, I had a really great five minutes just now. I finally finished a (way overdue, as usual) manuscript on Forensic Anthropology, a topic with which I am utterly in love, maggots and all. It was fun to write and much, much more fun to email to my editor. Just as I was tidying up my desk, removing the stacks of forensics research and preparing to gird my loins for the next project, Zach came strolling in to give me the news from his office (on the other side of the wall from mine).

We had learned that next month Icelandair is launching a nonstop from Seattle to Reykjavik, and we had talked about going to Iceland for a week to take advantage of it. Zach's big news was that he had just come from the Icelandair site, where he had scored tix for us for July 25-August 1. He has also promised to arrange the rental car. What a guy! I am indeed the luckiest of women. 

So within five minutes I had turned in a piece of work that I've been working long days to finish, then found out that I'm going to Iceland in little more than a month. At least now I have good motivation to get some work done before then. 

Whee!

We have an enormous black cottonwood tree in front of our house. This is not a tree that should be on a residential urban property. This is a tree that should stand in all its glory in a river bottom in Utah.

Your cottonwood is not a well-domesticated tree. It is messy. Starting in about April each year, it sheds, in this order:

1. small, amber-colored sticky things, the split coverings of leaves or seed pods or something, that adhere to your shoes, your tires, your cat, and everything that touches them, and get tracked into the house for several weeks

2. lint, fuzz, fluff, cotton--whatever you want to call it, it is the stuff that hangs in bunches from pods high in the tree and then floats through the air in vast quantities, this way and that as the wind takes it, for several weeks

3. dried sticklike pods, empty of their fluff

Nor is that all. In the fall Old Man Cotton sheds truckload after truckload of leaves. The tree is more than 100 feet tall and thickly branched and vastly productive of leaves. The raking goes on for weeks.

And then there are the sticks. Cottonwood wood is brittle and breaks easily. Twigs, sticks, branches--sometimes quite large ones--rain down frequently and unpredictably from the heights.

On the positive side, the tree stands between the afternoon summer sun and the corner of the house that holds my office and our bedroom. Its welcome shade saves us a fortune in AC bills. The tree is home to raccoons, squirrels, and lots of birds whose antics entertain me (and Xerxes). And it fills much of the view from the front window of my office; without it I would see the far less appealing house across the street.

It is difficult to love Old Man Cotton in the middle of cotton-shedding season. Which is now.  All up and down our street, drifts of white are piling up on people's doorsteps and windshields. The sides of the street look as though a snowplow has recently passed. The tree is so big that it is a nuisance over a wide area. I half expect to look outside some night and see a mob of angry neighbors brandishing torches and pitchforks, shouting, "Kill the tree!"

And yet . . . just now I was out walking Xerxes in the back yard. The sun had come out, and he lay down on the grass to bask, and I lay down, too, and looked up. So much cotton was drifting through the air, from just above my face to as high as I could see, lit by the sun against a blue sky, that I felt as though I were inside a freshly shaken snow globe. Or in the southern ocean on that magical night one hears about on nature shows, when the full moon inspires all the jellyfish or corals or something to spawn at once, and the camera pans up from the depths toward the moonlit surface through a sea thick with floating, er, ocean creature sex stuff. (Okay, it's been a while since I saw that documentary, and the details are as fuzzy as every single plant in my garden, now thickly coated with the cottonwood's sheddings.)

Two days ago the Oregonian had an article about how fluff from cottonwood trees had clogged the air intakes of the high-tech cars on Portland's new west side rail, several times bringing the commuter trains to a halt. We live on the east side, far from there, but I wouldn't be surprised if some of our tree's lint had managed to get there.

I just saw on the morning news crawl that J.G. Ballard has died. A sad loss to speculative fiction and to the world of words. I've read and liked (or loved, or been baffled by, or been challenged by) many of his works over the years, but what stands out most clearly in memory is the sense of wonder and dread and possibility I felt when first reading books like The Drowned World and Vermilion Sands way, way back in the day. 

Thanks and goodbye.

Just finished this fourth volume in the Night Watch series. I posted it at goodreads.com and am copying that post here:

Last Watch would be fairly confusing to anyone who hadn't read Night Watch, Day Watch, and Twilight Watch. Even though I've read and enjoyed the whole series, I had some trouble remembering who was who among the minor characters; details of what happened in the earlier books, often mentioned in this one, were also a bit fuzzy. Still, I enjoyed this a lot. The protagonist, Higher Light One Anton Gorodetsky, remains a fresh, wry, and occasionally surprising voice, and the intersections of the magical and real worlds continue to be weird, clever, and often violent or amusing. I found this story sketchier but also more poignant than the earlier episodes in Anton's career; there are echoes of Arthurian (or Merlinian) legend and The Tempest woven throughout. Overall, not as strong as the first two entries in the series, when Lukyanenko's world-building was new and startling, but satisyfing.

To those who know the Night Watch series only through Timur Bekmambetov's sensational films, the original story line of the books is different from that of the movies and is worth exploring. But the films are dazzling, and I adore them. 

Fantasy vs. SF? Near the end of Last Watch, in a conversation between two of nonhuman characters about the future of the world, Lukyanenko--who has published lots of both sf and fantasy--tosses off a few observations about the two genres. One character speculates about the appeal of fantasy worlds, magic, etc. to human readers. It's a brief interchange, not a dissertation, but readers and writers of both genres may find it entertaining.

ZOMG.

Luckiest Scrabble game ever last night. Early on I drew the tiles for three seven-letter words in a row. "Striver," "daemons," and "unheated" (the last built around an "e" from an earlier play).

Usually Zach and I are evenly matched. I have a slight vocabulary edge and typically make one or two seven-letter words in the course of a game. (I don't remember getting three before, and certainly never consecutively. Nice fluke.) But he is a superior strategist and will often cannily block future plays or cut off building spots while I am fooling around trying to make fancy words. Being an accountant, he not only keeps score for each game but has also kept all the score sheets. Our scores for each game are generally close, and at last tabulation our lifetime win/loss records were very close as well. But last night I kicked his ass! I had great tiles and he had suckish ones, mostly vowels (at one point he expressed the wish that we were playing in Hawaiian or some other vowel-intensive language).

Xerxes joined in the game, hopping onto the tabletop and trying to move our tiles for us until he got bored, curled up in the top of the Scrabble box, and fell asleep. 

I went to bed all exhilarated, tingling with good fortune and victory, and promptly had the most mundane dream of my life. I dreamed that I cut and filed my fingernails, all ten of them, in excruciating detail, right down to brushing the filed-off nail dust from my black jeans. Sadly, when I woke up I was as much in need of a manicure as when I went to sleep. Slightly more so, given the minute growth of the nails during the night. Perhaps the endless tedium of the dream was my conscience paying me back for being a bit too gloaty over my triumphs with the tiles.