Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

From the Quotation of the day mailing list, 2005-06-11:

"The audience and the director, it's an S&M relationship, and the audience is the M. It's exciting!" -- Quentin Tarantino, writer and director, in an article published in the October 20, 2003 issue of The New Yorker.

[This is similar to something I've said for years about the relationship between performer and audience, at least for live performance, except that there are elements of both roles simultaneously for the performer.]

From the Quotation of the day mailing list, 2005-06-11:

"The audience and the director, it's an S&M relationship, and the audience is the M. It's exciting!" -- Quentin Tarantino, writer and director, in an article published in the October 20, 2003 issue of The New Yorker.

[This is similar to something I've said for years about the relationship between performer and audience, at least for live performance, except that there are elements of both roles simultaneously for the performer.]

"A great deal of science fiction is about what the field's insiders often call 'sense of wonder,' a quality not entirely unrelated to the good old Romantic Sublime. Many of the genre's classics are in essence carefully-tuned machines designed to attract readers whose primary conscious loyalty is to rationalism, and lead them by a series of plausible contrivances to a sudden crescendo of mystical awe. This is an important part of SF from Olaf Stapledon to William Gibson and beyond. Lifelong readers of the genre are pushovers for this trick, so much so that we routinely forgive a multitude of sins: scientistic handwaving, tenuous logic, and the constant sensation of the authors elbow in our ribs." -- Patrick Nielsen Hayden, 2006-02-16

I should be asleep. I was tired. I took the latest sleepy-pill prescribed. I got into bed. I closed my eyes. I may have slipped back and forth 'twixt sleep and wake a couple of times ...

But then the muse stalked into my bedroom and slapped me. Now I've got this really cool idea in my head that combines two forms I'm not good at, and I'm going to have to get a handle on the whole fugue thing and get better at estampies because this is one of those ideas that'll keep distracting me at inconvenient times until I've acquired the skills to pull it off, however many weeks or years that is.

(I've had a painting in my head for decades -- I think two muses got their lists mixed up one day -- I don't paint. Acquiring that skill at the level needed for this painting, starting from zero ... doesn't seem likely unless I completely change my ideas of what I want to do and how I spend my time. But the painting wants to be painted and even though it got stuck in the wrong brain by mistake it has haunted me since the early 1980s (or was it the late 1970s?) I keep hoping I can exorcise it if I can describe it well enough to a painter and get them excited about the idea of painting it. I think this musical idea is another one of those, except that it's at least in the right medium for me and I know where to start, so it shouldn't haunt me as long as that painting.)

"Snakes Fugue. Why did it have to be snakes fugue?" Fugues intimidate me. Oh, fun to listen to, yah, but ... Well, time to get over that. I got me some learnin' to do.

... uh, except that the plan had been to go to sleep now.

I drew this a couple of weeks ago, inspired by an entry in synger's journal about religious symbols, but it felt a little early to post it here right then. My little attempt at drawing a Christmas card using GIMP.

From the Quotation of the day mailing list, 2005-11-16:

"There are no vital and significant forms of art; there is only art, and precious little of that. The growth of populations has in no way increased the amount; it has merely increased the adeptness with which substitutes can be produced and packaged." -- Raymond Chandler, writer, in the essay The Simple Art Of Murder.

An oddly appropriate image for today, somehow...

I'm working on a poem. I know exactly how I want it to start. But that sets up a really difficult metrical pattern to make the other phrases I've got in mind fit into.

Oh, I'll solve this, I will; it's just going to take a lot longer and won't be one of those "flows out of my fingers effortlessly" poems ... and be a nagging distraction creeping around the edges of my brain as I try to do other things in the meantime.

Whoops! Speaking of nagging distractions, I just remembered some email I meant to send earlier in the day...