Iceland 2022, Day 0: Recovery Day in Reykjavik

Monday, 25 July 2022

A good night’s sleep

https://norse-mythology.org/symbols/svefnthorn/Norse Sleep Rune

As I’ve aged I find that I fare less well on less sleep; or perhaps, I never fared well on less sleep, but when young was too inexperienced to notice my own deficits. Regardless, I scheduled my trip to have a ‘recovery day,’ so that I wouldn’t be dragging on the first day of the tour. Additional benefits are decreased stress — I was unconcerned the cascading delays of the day before would cause any disruption in my schedule – and a chance to wander about Reykjavik.

Iceland 2022, Travel Day: The Yellow Duffle

Saturday-Sunday, 23-24 July 2022

I have been looking forward to the Iceland trip for quite a long time. It had initially been scheduled for the Summer of 2021, but Covid concerns derailed that. The trip is under the auspices of ILSG –The Institute of Lake Superior Geology – which is a regional association of geologists, both professional and academic. I became acquainted with the group via the Geological Society of Minnesota, and went on an ILSG field trip to the big island of Hawai’i in the winter of 2020, just prior to the advent of Covid. It was a great trip, 11 days with about a dozen folks, and toured the five extant volcanoes of the island, including a helicopter trip to the suburb once known as”Royal Gardens,” now better known as a lava field of black basalt. It was a great trip, and although I am introverted, I very much enjoyed the trip and the people. That the people who led the Hawaii trip were also leading the longer and rougher Iceland trip, was a significant inducement.

Yosemite Trip, June 2022

Monday, 13 & 20 June 2022

I had a wonderful time in Yosemite. Five days, each of which ended in pleasant exhaustion. Some beautiful hikes; and none that I regret. More detail below.

Snow Creek
Lower Gaylor Lake
Polydome area
Three moraines in the Valley
May Lake towards Glen Aulin; and Lukens lake

Spring 2022 Reading Projects

Friday 22 April 2022

Reading Projects as of Spring 2020:
Survey of English-language Essays, with CT
‘Best of’ Essays – with a focus on the Craft of Writing, with KC
Project 3: Otherlands – Lyrical Science, with CS
Project 4: Smellosophy – Neuroscience, with RB

w/CS: Otherlands: A Journey Through Earth’s Extinct Worlds, Thomas Halliday- Introduction

Tuesday 15 March 2022

LATER: This is the best science book I have ever read; I have a 20+ page document of notes on both the content and the lyrical writing. I regret that I had not systematically started keeping notes in this blog at the point we were reading this.

This morning CS and I meet to begin our discussion of the book Otherlands, by Thomas Halliday. Halliday is a paleontologist and evolutionary biologist who investigates long-term patterns in the fossil record; he appears to be quite young, but has already won a raft of awards for his scientific work as well as one or two awards for his writing. A riffle through the book leaves me with high expectations. I note with approval that it has about fifty pages of notes, all pointing to various scholarly articles and books. The front matter includes an abbreviated chart of geolgical eras (mostly the Phanerozoic eon, presumably indicating the time-span covered in the book); I do like it that the book works backward in time rather than oldest first.

EP #2: Best Am. Essays of 2020 – First look…

Wednesday 9 March 2022

It’s a cold day, in the teens, with a some faint wisps of cirrus clouds in a whitish blue sky. As the temperatures have fallen over the past few days, puddles have solidified, breeding long spear-like ice crystals. There are ice crystals in the sky as well — they make up the Cirrus clouds and distinguish them from most other types of clouds which are made of water droplets. Cirrus clouds occur during fair weather, which this is; they sometimes herald warm fronts, but not this time.

I have just come from my weekly meeting with CT, where we discussed essays. We have finished the Oxford Book of Essays, and embarked on a new book: The Best American Essays, 2020. After the Oxford book, whose most recent essay was authored in 1984, we wanted to get a sense of the state of the art. For this session, we read the Foreward, Introduction, and first three essays of BAE2020.

EP #1*: Ten Favorites from The Oxford Book of Essays**

February 27, 2022

Favorites:
The Haunted Mind, Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1835
The Acorn-Gatherer, Richard Jefferies, 1884
Cordova, Arthur Symons, 1898
A Clergyman, Sir Max Beerbohm, 1918
The Death of the Moth, Virginia Woolf, 1925
Insouciance, 1928, D H Lawrence
The Toy Farm, J. B. Priestly, 1927
The Snout, Loren Eisley, 1957
The Crisp at the Crossroads, Reyner Banham, 1970
La Paz, Jan Morris, 1963

Things I learned from the 2021 Loft Essay course

16 August 2021

Things to pay attention to:

Telling details: One telling detail is preferable to many details
Embodiment. Emotions and actions work best when embodied: gaze, gesture, posture, proprioception, proxemics
Scenes. Scenes should vary in length, and be interleaved with summaries. This gives rhythm and weighting. Think of a scene as a spotlight.
Language: avoid ‘to be’s. Avoid “is” “are” “have” etc. and limit use of adjectives.
“To be” is the weakest verb. Not “He is tall” but “He smacked his head on the door frame”
Language: avoid distancing: Avoid habitually using filtering/distancing language such as “I noticed,” “I heard,” “I saw,”
(That said, sometimes you may want to use it to distance yourself, as when you are uncomfortable and don’t want to be in it.)
Language: avoid adverbs. Use actions and embodiment rather than adverbs:
“Yeah,” she said, stroking his bare arm, “that’s what I heard.” vs. “Yeah,” she said gently, “that’s what I heard.”
Support reader inference. There is something about readers being able to figure something out on their own that is very rewarding.
Revising Tricks: Print it out in a different font. Read it out loud and notice where you stumble, speed up, lag, etc. Replace “to be’s”

What I’ve Learned from Critiquing SF&F

Wednesday, 21 July 2021

These are observations on what works, from critiques I made during my Summer 2021 Worldbuilding Course

Essays: G. K. Chesterton: family & sociability

Thursday 6 July 2021

I also read CK Chesterton’s essay on the family as an institution. I’d dipped into it before, but read it all the way through and now have my own copy of the book to mark up. He has some funny and acute observations:

The man who lives in a small community lives in a much larger world. He knows much more of the fierce varieties and uncompromising divergences of men. The reason is obvious. In large community we can choose our companions. In a small community, our companions are chosen for us.
GK Chesterton, In Defense of Sanity – On Certain Modern Writers, p 10-11

Essays: On first reading G K Chesterton

29 June 2021

Well, it is not my first reading. Long ago, and once or twice since, I’ve read a short story of his in an anthology of fantasy and science fiction. But I had set out to read stories, not Chesterton, and while the story was curious enough to make me remember the author’s name, it did not cause me to seek him out.