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Below are the most recent 25 friends' journal entries.
- Stuff. (I think this really says it all. There are so many things in my house that don't fit in a category but that I really collect. I sort of collect everything. Unless it's made of plastic – I don't collect much of that. And I suppose I have a 'mostly older than 100 years' theme.) But ok. More specifically:
- Books:
- Old books printed locally by two publishers (c 1800-1840)
- Other books printed locally, e.g., cookbooks, old magazines and newspapers, etc.
- Trashy romances (well, I get rid of >half, so maybe I'm not "collecting" these per se, but I do have all but one Heyer)
- BIBFH hard-boiled detective / noir books
- Nancy Drew books (ok, haven't looked for more for years)
- Kids books (need to start in on this again)
- Old (100+yr) medical texts
- Old (ditto) herbal texts
- Old (ditto) materia medica
- Old (...) pharmacopoeias
- Old (...) dispensatories
- Old (...) "domestic physician" books
- Old (...) eclectics texts (physician/medicine again)
- Old (...) botany texts (not so many of these)
- More in the same vein as the above
- Herbal / alternative medicine books (modern, but I haven't bought any in 15 yrs so they're none of them really recent)
- 'Literature' (said with a snooty British-ish accent)
- Art books (only a dozen or two)
- Music books (ditto)
- Some mysteries (Ngaio Marsh, Georgette Heyer, Sayers, some of Dick Francis, Anne Perry, Sue Grafton)
- Victorian literature with cool covers (the "books by the yard" concept, to pretty up my livingroom, but only rarely to read ... tacky, eh what?)
- Other "books by the yard" – a leatherbound encyclopedia; "classics of medicine" leatherbound series
- Probably more books. Can't ever have too many books.
- Musical instruments (cello, guitars, flutes, fiddle, banjo, maybe more)
- Tools. (How can one not collect tools? Or is having a full tool cupboard just a practicality, and not a collection? I do like the really old stuff with the age-patina'd wood from the flea market)
- Post cards and journals and memorabilia from my home town (which is tiny – these aren't so easy to find as you might think)
- Persian carpets (does four make a collection?)
- Stuffed animals
- Essential oils
- Herbal extracts (again with the practical issue – does the fact that I'm an herbalist mean that my 200+/- extracts aren't really a 'collection'?)
- Shot glasses. But only if I think they look really cool.
- Salt and pepper shakers. Again, I have to think they look cool.
- Art work by local artists. (Well, my mom and one former student, so far.)
- CDs from musicians I've heard live (generally purchased at the concert)
- DVDs from local filmmakers (haven't gotten very far on this, yet; got three+ filmmakers in this tiny town)
- Antique bottles of medicine / herbal extracts
- Old wooden bureaus. (Where else am I going to put all this stuff??)
- Old trunks and chests (ditto).
- Spice racks (thritto)
- handbags
- shoes & boots
- hats
- scarves
- perfume
- jewelry
- nail polish
- eye shadow
- lip stuff
- dolls
- pigs, mice, dragons
- cups & bowls
- baskets
- baking pans
- cookie cutters
- obsolete personal technology
- robots
- kinetic toys
- musical instruments
- jigsaw puzzles
- mysteries I like
- books by people I know
- back issues of Piecework magazine
- costume books (history of, construction techniques)
- poetry
- comix
- books in Latin
- DVDs: SF & mystery, musicals, Keanu
- nature photographs
- family photographs
- correspondence
- yarn
- needlework tools
- sewing machines
- looms
- wire, beads, raw materials (feathers, shells)
- metal-working tools
- LJ friends
| Monday, July 7th, 2008 | ||
|
rivka |
11:03a | 20/20 hindsight. In retrospect, I didn't have very strong pregnancy symptoms with my miscarried pregnancy. At the time I certainly felt tired and nauseated, but there's just no comparison to the way the first trimester is beating me down this time around. It's not totally intolerable, and in fact I actually find the symptoms reassuring. I need all the evidence of pregnancy that I can get. But... it's the difference between having to be careful about what I eat and sometimes being unable to eat; between often feeling tired and often needing a nap to get through the day; between outgrowing my regular bras and outgrowing my maternity bras. (ZOMG I have outgrown my maternity bras and I'm only just entering the ninth week.) I produced pregnancy hormones last time - enough to make a placenta, even though it had nothing to support. My pregnancy symptoms were real. But they were a shadow of what I'm experiencing now that I'm churning out enough hormones to support an inch-long fetus. |
|
james_nicoll |
10:23a | Because LJ always needs another badly thought-out poll I like to know which editor(s) is(are) responsible for the books that I read. I know a lot of people don't care one way or the other and the Best Editor Hugo suggests to me that there's split between people that read the magazines, whose editors can be well known to the readers, and people who just read books, whose editors are often not even mentioned on the copyright page. I therefore wonder if keeping track of editors is habit I picked up as a teenager while reading the magazines. Do I need to define "personal golden age"? Poll #1219185 Open to: All, results viewable to: All Does reading SF in magazine for shape how you see editos?
View Answers I read SF magazines in my personal golden age and I keep track of who edits SF books I did not read SF magazines in my personal golden age and I keep track of who edits SF books I read SF magazines in my personal golden age and I do not keep track of who edits SF books I did not read SF magazines in my personal golden age and I do not keep track of who edits SF books |
|
james_nicoll |
9:47a | The Ways of Authors are Mysterious As I mentioned before, Lynn Johnston explained that Liz's failure to visit her grandfather was due to Johnston's time management issues: You're absolutely right. Elizabeth should have gone to visit her grandfather when she picked April up from his apartment. Trouble is...I have a limited time left here and every strip, now, is a statement that leads to the August 30th conclusion!! If I had sent her to visit gramps, it would have required perhaps 3 strips total to resolve interaction between them: the wedding, her work, his health, the dress and so on. Everything has a repercussion. - I have less than 30 seconds a day to lead you through the labyrinth of these characters' lives. So. I hoped you would suppose she did visit and was just unable to see him at this time! I was wrong. It was an omission! I'm grateful for those who read between the lines and know that there is something going on in everyone's life, and I can't show it all! This makes her decision to spend twelve strips of her precious limited supply for reruns an interesting one. |
|
betonica |
9:00a | Collections What do you collect? ![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} porcinea and serenejournal posted what they collect, and being the packrat that I am, I have to follow suit.What am I leaving off? (Don't nobody insist that I list the yogurt containers. They're plastic. And get used. They don't count.) What do you collect? |
| dorktowerfeed | 12:54p | Dork Tower for 07 Jul 2008 Dork Tower by John KovalicCurrent Comic Please support John by buying his stuff at your favorite game or comic shop. Alternatively you can shop online at Warehouse 23. DT syndication services provided by John 'FuzzFace' McMahon fuzzface00@livejournal.com http://fuzzface00.livejournal.com/ http://www.io.com/~fuzzface/dt/dt.xml Last Build Date: Mon, 07 Jul 2008 07:00:00 UTC-0500 |
|
scottedelman |
7:59a | A Killer Collector I dreamt this morning that I had wandered into a huge auditorium in which all the chairs were arranged in a circle, planetarium style. In the center of the room, Steven Spielberg and George Lucas were sitting in a circular pit, which, at the proper time, would be covered by a dome, onto which at the right time they'd project one of their favorite films.  They said they were going to screen Lassiter, a title which in the dream meant nothing to me, but which upon waking I see is a 1984 movie starring Tom Selleck. I've never seen it, but based on reading about it, I can't imagine it being anyone's favorite film. In the dream, however, that's exactly what Spielberg and Lucas were going to show us, only they never explained why, and I never questioned their choice.A handsome man was sitting on the lip of the pit, dangling his feet. As I looked at him, I somehow knew he was an actor, but I couldn't quite recognize him, perhaps because his features kept morphing. "You're George Peppard, aren't you?" I asked, but as soon as I did, his face changed, and he shook his head. "Oh, I see, you're Dirk Benedict," I said, and for a moment he was, but then that face, too, was gone. Then I saw that he was really Mark Hamill. This time, when I called him out, the face remained, and he sighed, shrugged with "you got me" body language, and asked me "What do you want to know?" in a suffering tone, as if he was weary of public interactions. When I told him that I didn't need anything from him, he seemed surprised. But then, as eerie music welled up in the background, I told him, in a threatening tone of voice, that I wanted him to give me one fact that no one else knew, and as I started walking closer, he screamed and fell to the ground, because it suddenly became apparent that in the dream I was a collector, though not of books or DVDs or autographs, but of information that could be mine alone, and that once I got that one never-before-shared fact from him, he would have to die, so that he could never give it away to anyone else. And then I woke and scribbled this all down. I sense a story seed in the concept of such a collector ... |
|
jmhm |
7:35a | is anyone else just the tiniest bit tired of getting played? from the Wall Street Journal Obama Faces Resistance From Top Supporters of Clinton alrighty, then. Since I'm reasonably certain that this sort of thing is helping to perpetuate the unpleasantness and encourage provocative behavior amongst the less reflective of us, and even more certain that's precisely what it's intended to do, let's (god, I know, this is _really_ kinky) apply a little critical thought to this, shall we? ( yeesh. ) |
|
feorag |
11:19a | What I did at the weekend (before last) My pictures of the Berlin Pride march, featuring lots and lots of nuns and Bavarian Mr. Leather. |
| Sunday, July 6th, 2008 | ||
|
gadarene |
10:01p | Bookish About six years ago, I read one of the most fascinating articles The Atlantic Monthly ever published, "1491," by Charles C. Mann. It delves into the geography, history, agricultural and civil engineering, megalopoleis and architecture, politics, religion, linguistics, and society of the Americas up until the time of the European incursion in a way that little resembles the short shrift Mesoamerican culture usually got in most of our high school and even postsecondary history classes. I remember my book-learning, and can vouch for the common attitude Mann mentions in his article: As late as 1987 American History: A Survey, a standard high school textbook by three well-known historians, described the Americas before Columbus as "empty of mankind and its works." The story of Europeans in the New World, the book explained, "is the story of the creation of a civilization where none existed." The article linked to above is just a taste of what became Mann's landmark book, 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus, published a few years later (2005), and which I'm just catching up to.  Really engrossing. Just the sections on the staggering scope of the public works projects of the Americans (the Great Plains created, burned, and tended for millennia, landscaped to be a buffalo farm; the "pristine" Amazon rain forest itself as a man-made artifact) are intriguing enough, but the book goes into far more, with great depth and fascination. So glad I finally tracked it down. *****In other reading, I'm about 150 pages into Jane Eyre, which is the farthest I've ever gotten. Saturday Worked at the library today, proofreading a religious thriller, and during breaks started reading Murder at the Sleepy Lagoon by Eduardo Obregón Pagán, which I ended up borrowing.  |
|
janni |
9:57p | Everyone should spend a day hanging with the polar bears and feeding the giraffes once in a while ![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/syndicated.gif){kind=small} yanewyork on why YA is taking off now, and on how today's YA is different from 1980s YA.Why do we need dice? I don't need them to play make-believe! ... You just roll dice because you can't think of anything good to make up! (The best thing about Darth and the Droids is how it shows that Jar Jar is the only Phantom Menance character who truly makes sense.) Sometimes our community rocks, part 1. Sometimes our community rocks, part 2. lnhammer has lured me into the black hole that is TV Tropes. Which points out all manner of useful truths about storytelling, including how like most weapons, a love story can be deadly in the wrong hands, not to mention the dangers of wasting a perfectly good plot.And if I'm not on as much as usual, it'll because I'm off revising the RetGone portion of my novel. |
| Monday, July 7th, 2008 | ||
|
splodgenoodles |
1:29p | What with pushing the squares around a bit to see if I can get things to fit more nicely, I've come up against a tricky little dilemma. There are certain things I've often told myself I could do, and if I would just do them, things might be a lot better. It's then kind of disappointing to realise that this isn't necessarily so. If anything, it makes the limits of my world more visible. This is, of course, also the advantage of both procrastination and being messy and disorganised: you can tell yourself that these are the problems and once these are solved, you'll be right. But in fact, once these are solved you are left in a place much less exciting than the one you've been telling yourself was hiding under the rubble. ~~~ But yes, seeing how things really are does give you a choice about what to do next. ~~~ I should probably add that no, I'm not sitting here in a wailing, miserable heap. This is a problem I've been aware of for a while now and I'm actually kind of glad I'm tackling it. Even though I'm not quite sure what to do next. |
| Sunday, July 6th, 2008 | ||
|
porcinea |
8:53p | Now it's Istanbul, not Constantinople. I have just booked a cruise with my mother. And her church group*. To go to Greece & Turkey. Following the steps of Paul's 2nd & 3rd missions. Istanbul: Hagia Sophia. !!! Unfortunately, this means all non-family-related travel is off, for the rest of the year. See what I did there? +-+-+- *So many Christians? They had to get a bigger boat. |
|
ellen_kushner |
8:16p | Maine We found internet in a restaurant in the fogbound fishing village at the end of Deer Isle, where we are eating the world's largest (and best) strawberry shortcake . . . and Delia says I should post this, from a letter to my family, because she's tired of being the one who always writes the travelogues. As she has set herself the rather tiring task of revising 2 chapters/day of THE MAGIC MIRROR OF THE MERMAID QUEEN, I will oblige: After a flurry of packing & leaving, we are now blissfully settled in E's house, on a wide place in the road between Blue Hill and Deer Isle. Picked up the rental car at the Bangor Airport - and guess what? *Another* damn' SUV! All they had, no lie. At least this one's small-ish. It is also seductively evil: it is quite comfortable, holds a lot of stuff, and the view's divine. Oh, dear. Maybe I will be able to exchange it for the requested compact before we head down to Boston . . . . Last night we went to the Fireworks in Stonington, a fishing town at the end of Deer Isle. Excellent fireworks, and I had some local blueberry pie, and hope to have more in the coming days. On the way here we passed the stony field that Robert McCloskey used for BLUEBERRIES FOR SAL. After the fireworks we came home to our own private show: the back yard, a big field sloping down to pine trees and the sea beyond them, was pitch black, and full of fireflies. No moon, and a salt-shaker-full of stars above us. The fireflies are slightly larger than the stars, and greenish if you chance to see them up close. But from a distance - in our case, the porch which runs along the back of the house - it was hard to tell one from the other - as if the stars had come down and were dancing in the field - trying to attract a mate and make more stars? Who knows? Woken this morning by a bumblebee that had somehow gotten trapped in our bedroom against the window and was making a noise like a lawnmower, wanting out . . . . The air here is very clear - a relief after the humid haze of NYC, so sharp it almost feels like a miracle - and it's downright cold at night. I now perfectly understand why people used to abandon the city entirely to come here for the summer. I would. My new Mac is so ultra-cool that it does not even have the capacity for landline connection - so look not to hear from me until the next dire need for shortcake . . . . Hope you had a fiery & glorious Fourth! |
| Monday, July 7th, 2008 | ||
|
annafdd |
12:53a | Who by fire To those few on my flist who still don't know the news - Tom Disch committed suicide on the 4th of July. I had stopped reading his LJ about three years ago, because I wanted to keep his memory apart from the anger and pain of his last years. Nobody seems surprised, but I am surprised at how stricken I am. Suicide is the worst death, death by utter horror and desperation. |
| Sunday, July 6th, 2008 | ||
|
porcinea |
2:56p | Collections. I've always blanked on this question, "So, what do you collect?" I like carousel horses, and nutcrackers, and think both of those are fine examples of collectibles of the sort I might, were I to. But let's get real -- I own exactly one carousel horse. And no nutcrackers. So not happening. So, what *do* I collect? As I recently confessed on ![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/community.gif){kind=small} newyorkers, handbags, for one. Or, you know, dozens. I do prune them. But the earliest is from 1979, and I do buy 2-3 bags a year. You do the math.Shoes, ditto. Were it not for a) the Cat Pee Incident of ... hm, 1998? and b) the sprog (pregnancy relaxes your foot bones), I'd still need the wall o' shoe shelving the boy built for me when I first moved in. Heck, even with those decimating events, I'd need that wall if it weren't for my foot/hip issues. (No whining! Back on point.) Only a dozen or so pairs. Maybe 2. But not more than 3 dozen pairs. So I walked around the house and did a wee inventory of the sort of things that I obviously collect -- defined as, I already have more items than any sane person would consider reasonable or necessary, *and* I would cheerfully welcome additional inputs to the collection (and indeed have no compunction about buying). Edit: tea towels, CDs by street musicians, typewriters, fountain pens. charlottezweb tells me I must add "chairs".What do you collect? |
|
skzbrust |
4:24p | Jhegaala - Spoilers Another place to talk about the book. (Originally posted at Words Words Words by skzb. Please leave any comments there.) |
|
skzbrust |
4:24p | Jhegaala - No Spoilers A place to talk about the book. (Originally posted at Words Words Words by skzb. Please leave any comments there.) |
|
womzilla |
6:11p | Crap: Tom Disch is dead According to ellen_datlow and lizhand (the latter on theinferior4), Thomas M. Disch (tomsdisch) is dead by his own devising as of sometime this week. (Ellen said July 4; the Wikipedia, with no citation, says July 2.) Patrick has more, including a terrific summary of Disch's overall position in science fiction: the concluding lines of his 1965 SF novel The Genocides, a book wedged forever up the nose of overweening skiffy can-do-ism Disch was up the nose of science fiction his entire life. Anyone who read Disch's LJ over the past two years could not be surprised by this. For that matter, anyone who read much of his work before that would be hard-pressed to be surprised. Which doesn't mean I'm going to miss him any less. (Updated to add:) Unsurprisingly, Disch's final LJ post is now turning into a wake. There has been only one stupid troll so far. There are, of course, also remembrances of him on the posts linked to above. Current Mood: shocked and not shocked Current Music: "No One Lives Forever", Oingo Boingo |
|
mjlayman |
6:05p | Live Long and Marry This is a fannish effort to stop the resolution trying to ban gay marriage in California. People post offers and others bid (rules are in the userinfo). Here's the LJ community and I am out of my mind and offered to make a custom necklace. |
|
rivka |
5:53p | I swear that soon I will post something more substantive than "conversations with my daughter." But I couldn't pass this one up. Alex: Can I do this? Me: I'm going to say... no. Alex: I think I can do it. (pause...) Mr. Obama says, "yes we can." |
|
charlieallery |
10:30p | Thanks from Clarion West If appears that just 48 hours after the thefts from the Clarion West workshop, sufficient money has been collected to replace the stolen laptops. The donations and expressions of support are much appreciated by the administrators and students and, if the donations come to more than the total required, the excess will be returned proportionately. Thanks to everyone who responded. :) |
|
mjlayman |
5:22p | Nudity in DC! My gosh! How could anybody come to DC when there's so much nudity here! Or so thinks Texas GOP delegate Robert Hurt. He was not able to convince the party to add his plank of forbidding nude statues to the platform, but he thinks "You don't have nude art on your front porch," and I think we should help him out with that. It's overcast and humid here, I'd be happy with some rain. The cats are asleep and I may be soon, too. |
|
james_nicoll |
4:10p | Thomas M. Disch (1940 - 2008) The cause of death is reported to be suicide. Seen at nihilistic_kid's LJ, who learned it from Ellen Datlow's LJ. |
|
james_nicoll |
3:54p | Jumper (the movie) Well, that was a waste of lifespan. I went in with minimal expectations and it still failed to meet them. I am impressed at how the producers replaced a serviceable coming of age/revenge/more coming of age story with one where people for no particularly good reason are trying to kill the protagonist. Minor spoilers ( Read more... ) |
|
scottedelman |
3:58p | Thomas M. Disch 1940-2008  I've just learned that Thomas M. Disch, author, teacher, editor, and poet, has passed away. He is the second instructor I had at the Clarion Science-Fiction Writing Workshop to have died in the past few weeks, having been preceded by Algis Budrys. In addition to having both been teachers of mine, Tom and Ajay were bound together in another, far more intense way, as can be seen by the recent posting in which Tom wrote of Ajay, "I was certain I would beat him to the exit, but no I get to dance on his grave," an eerie sentiment to reread in light of this new context.I can no longer remember when I read my first Disch, but I can very much remember when I read my favorite Disch. It was in the pages of Terry Carr's 1967 Ace Books anthology New Worlds of Fantasy, which reprinted "The Squirrel Cage." The story begins: The terrifying thing—if that's what I mean—I'm not sure that "terrifying" is the right word—is that I'm free to write down anything I like but that no matter what I do write down it will make no difference—to me, to you, to whomever differences are made. But then what is meant by "a difference?" Is there ever really such a thing as change? We learn that our narrator is locked in a small, windowless room. He has no memory of how he got there or why he is there. Perhaps he volunteered for an experiment. Perhaps he's the sole survivor of the human race, Perhaps he's being studied by aliens. All he knows is that time is passing while the only things he has with which to entertain himself are the copies of the New York Times which keep showing up in the room. And a typewriter, with no platen. He cannot see the results of his typing, and so he imagines that his words appear outside his room, perhaps like a news ticker in lights scrolling across the side of a building as crowds watch. We experience his despair as one day blends into another, and he struggles to stay sane and survive. The story ends with: "Terrifying?" I was only 12 when I read this story, and it made an immediate existential impact on me. It apparently had the same affect on many others. When I went to Clarion in 1979, primarily because I wanted to be taught by Tom, I started to tell him how much a certain story had moved me. He instantly knew which story I'd meant. People were always coming up to him to tell him how much that particular story had changed their lives, including one woman who had memorized the entire tale. I never went quite that far, but Tom did change my life. While at Clarion, he told me things which had they been said by anyone else, I might not have heard. But getting critiqued by Tom was like getting hit by a 2"-by-4". He got my full attention. I left my one-on-one with Tom stunned, but as soon that critical concussion wore off, I put what he taught me into practice. I loved his short stories such as "Descending" and "The Roaches, and his novels such as Camp Concentration and On Wings of Song, and ... well ... I wouldn't be who I am today without both them and him. When I first read though The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, one of the entries I immediately paged to was Tom's. There I came across the following words written by John Clute: Because of his intellectual audacity, the chillingly distant mannerism of his narrative art, the austerity of the pleasures he affords, and the fine cruelty of his wit, Thomas M. Disch has been perhaps the most respected, least trusted, most envied and least read of all modern first-rank SF writers. And though that sort of description might put off those of you who dream of bestsellerdom, when I read those words, I immediately thought, if anyone could ever honestly describe my work in that way, I would be happy. It would be enough. I have no idea what Tom thought of that write-up, but I hope that he, too, was pleased. And now he's suddenly gone, with a new novel just out, and having blogged as tomsdisch just a few days ago. I'm stunned, and saddened, and not sure what else to say, other than to repeat these words from "The Squirrel Cage":"All right, Disch, you can go now." |
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