One sign of living in the future is being able to watch live video from a NOAA deep sea expedition “along the Northeast U.S. Canyons and at Mytilus Seamount. Sandra would’ve loved this.
One year, nine months
As she herself put it, one of the few benefits of having terminal cancer for Jane Catherine Lotter was the chance to write her own obituary:
I was given the gift of life, and now I have to give it back. This is hard. But I was a lucky woman, who led a lucky existence, and for this I am grateful. I first got sick in January 2010. When the cancer recurred last year and was terminal, I decided to be joyful about having had a full life, rather than sad about having to die. Amazingly, this outlook worked for me
Which is one thing I wish we could’ve done when Sandra was dying. We did do something similar to what Jay Lake did recently, when he held his own wake, by doing a proper Sunday roast with the entire family before Sandra stopped her treatment, as a way to say goodbye to everyone so Sandra could withdraw from life and prepare for death.
These rituals, these ways to say goodbye and sum up your life, to mark the transition between living and preparing to die, are important. Sandra in the end died as good a death as she may have wished for, even if it came way too early for us, was such a bitter disappoint following on our dreams of giving her a more normal life again through the kidney transplant. Those last couple of weeks as she was slowly slipping towards death were both stressfull and yet incredibly peaceful. The worst had happened, we were as prepared as we could be and didn’t need to do anything anymore.
Almost two years on, some three weeks before the anniversary of our wedding, she’s still never far from my thoughts, still present in most everything I do. I don’t think that will ever change.
Fanboy mouth strikes again
Oh gods that’s what I would be doing:
I emailed Howard Chaykin a single sentence one time and he wrote a single sentence back correcting my grammar, and it was at that moment that I knew I had won the contest of who gets to have the best conversation with Howard Chaykin, because I would rather have that one sentence back and forth than any long conversation where I told him about how much I liked The Shadow and he pretended he cared and then maybe I brought up some random part of his career that I bet not a lot of people ask him about and oh aren’t I so clever that I asked the question that a lot of people don’t ask, unlike all those proles who bring up American Flagg, everybody talks about American Flagg, look at me how special it is that I know the name of the thing that is different from the other thing and now maybe I can be best friends with the comics artist or cup my hot mouth on him or just hold his head down in a bowl of warm sand or whatever, however that fantasy plays out.
Rappers delight
Did you know rappers are not just people singing hiphop, but can also refer to a traditional English dance originiating from the coal mining villages of Northumberland and Durham? The rappers in this case being flexible swords used in the dance? First described in 1715, it’s one of those dances that was slowly dying out until a group of students, under the leadership of Bill Cassie, a professor of mechanical engineering at King’s College in Newcastle decided to revive it for their rag week in 1949. Over sixty years later and the Newcastle Kingsmen are still going strong:
One of those things you just have to share with people when you stumble across it on Youtube…
The Magician’s Guild — Trudi Canavan
The Magician’s Guild
Trudi Canavan
465 pages
published in 2001
Trudi Canavan is an Austrialian fantasy writer who has been mostly writing epic fantasy trilogies and has become rather popular as a result. According to Wikipedia, her first series, The Black Magician Trilogy was ” the most successful debut fantasy series of the last 10 years”. The Magician’s Guildin the first book in that series as well as her debut novel, which I didn’t know when I picked it from the library to read. It was just that this was the only of her novels available that wasn’t part two or three of a trilogy when I decided to try and see if I would like her writing.
What also made me pick up this book in particular when skipping past seemingly similar fantasy books by other writers was the backcover blurb, which made it sounds like it was something more than the usual fantasy cliches in the usual medievaloid setting:
Each year the magicians of Imardin gather to purge the city streets of vagrants, urchins and miscreants. Masters of the disciplines of magic, they know nobody can oppose them. But their protective shield is not as impenetrable as they believe.