Teyrnon

These past couple of weeks I’ve read the first three volumes of The Collected Fantasies of Clark Ashton Smith published by Night Shade Books. I’m reading the Kindle editions. It’s a series of five books collecting the short stories of Clark Ashton Smith. I’ve never really heretofore gotten into his work much. I’d been given the unwieldy impression by various people that his writing was as turgid and overly florid as H.P. Lovecraft’s writing tended to be. Three volumes into the set and I’ve found that impression to be largely incorrect. Make no mistake however Smith’s prose is quite purple. Vermillion, chartreuse, saffron, and tyrian as well; the man had a proclivity for multitudinous use of obscure color words. Smith’s prose is more enjoyable than Lovecraft’s. There’s a degree of lyricism and poetry in his words that I’ve found in neither Lovecraft nor Robert E. Howard. This is probably owing to Smith’s view of himself as more a poet and an artist than a writer. I’m inclined to agree; the man truly was a poet. The vocabulary in the stories I’ve read so far has managed to send me scurrying to Google no less than once per story. Wiktionary seems to be the best reference for obscure vocabulary currently. It’s been a while since I’ve had this much fun reading fiction. I’m going to have to add words like mephitic and ultramundane to my own vocabulary henceforward. Not that I’d ever had much opportunity to make use of ultramundane. As a word, it’s horribly outdated despite its peculiar charm. Extraterrestrial is the word we moderns would use in its place.

The stories in these books range in genre a ways. Horror, fantasy, and science fiction are well represented. A few of them even feature space travel with references to aether as the medium to be found in deep space. I’m sure this is no surprise to you; we are talking about stories written in the 1920s and 1930s. I’m not sure quite when the final nail was applied to the coffin of the luminiferous aether. I gather it was probably during the 1950s when the space program started to gain ground. At any rate, I digress. A few of his stories fall solidly in the territory of the conte cruel. Some of those were rather chilling. His horror qua horror with supernatural beasties and such I don’t find particularly scary. The stories evocative of wonderment and the adventure of discovery I particularly enjoyed though a few of those were obviously intended to invoke a sense of cosmic horror. Cosmic horror doesn’t do much for me. I’m not discomfited or perturbed by the notion that humanity is naught but a heap of maggots crawling around and around on an insignificant ball of mud in a vast, unknowable, and ultimately uncaring cosmos. This maggot would rather concern itself with figuring out how to evolve into a dragon and take to the stars.

Just thought I'd make a quick post here to let everyone know I'm still around. Things are mostly okay. I'm dealing with high blood pressure and hopefully a medication that actually works can be found soon. It's always been on the high side but for the last year or two it's been excessively so.

I've been debating whether to do holiday cards this year. I'm thinking that if I do I won't be buying any new cards this year. Instead I'm going to round up all the left over cards from past years and use those. Get those out of the way for a fresher start to 2013. I think I've got five or six boxes with just three or four cards in them. Should be enough.

I've been reading the Vorkosigan books by Lois McMaster Bujold in a rather haphazard order as I can lay hands on them. I don't know why I've never bothered to read them before now.

I'm seriously considering getting a Kindle Fire this year. I want one mostly for the access to magazines that the publishers have decided must only be available for tablet devices rather than e-ink devices. I think it's stupid personally, but what can you do? I'd also like one for the other features too. I've been wanting something like this since forever but have heretofore refrained because the options either didn't impress me or had aspects that I found repulsive.

It looks to be a nice Saturday and here I sit waiting for a few phone calls. The oven is finally fixed so I'm thinking about celebrating by baking something. Will have to figure out what I have the ingredients to make. At any rate that's one less repair to worry about.

Ended up having to change the front locks. The door knob came mysteriously unlocked again the other evening. This has happened a couple times previously over these last few months. Always the door knob, the deadbolt thankfully stays locked every time. Someone it seems enjoys messing with locks late at night. The new locks are bump resistant so we'll see how that goes. I've heard of similar incidents from folks around the neighborhood. In particular someone opened my brother's basement door. As far as we can tell nothing was taken, the door was just unlocked and pushed open. That was back in November I think. He has since boarded the door over from the inside and stuck a table in front of it.

For those interested in a novel that takes a modern and rather off-kilter take on the Cthulhu Mythos I'll recommend giving Seamus Cooper's Mall of Cthulhu a read. It's a bit rocky at the beginning but improves as it progresses. I think the author was trying for humor but am not entirely sure. It was an amusing and quick read.

On the off chance anyone might be interested. As some may recall I made a post about considering going with something electronic to replace the latest paper notebook. I've been using hardbound blank books since the late 80s as a combination journal and notebooks. I have very nearly an entire shelf full of these that are filled with my scribblings. Unfortunately lately I've developed issues where handling paper makes me sick. It was the driving reason I started using ebooks and dedicated ebook readers about midway through the last year.

I still haven't gotten anything to use a PDA. The past month I've been considering the iPod Touch and it looks like a nice enough device. Not exactly impressed with it though. I've fiddled with one in a store recently and while it might be usable the on-screen keyboard seems rather awkward.

I'm thinking a small netbook would probably be the best thing at this point. An 8" model or something. I could even load it with a few of my favorite open source compilers and use the various utilities I've written over the years on it.

Anyone have any thoughts to add? I'm as undecided as ever.

Selling books is hard! I can find lots of places that'll do trades, where I give them my books and they give me other books. Trouble is I want to clear shelf space not change their contents. [sigh]

It's that time of year again. The air feels strangely damp and the temperatures from the beginning of the week vary from very warm to kind of chilly. One is never sure whether to flip the switch between the air conditioner and heater settings or to just suffer it out for the conditions to change. Though for me, I favor to air conditioner for getting some of the humidity out of the air.

The batteries for the UPS still haven't arrived. The power glitches weren't as bad this week as they were the previous week where some days the electricity seemed to go out for a few seconds every hour. I still don't trust running a computer without battery backup. I've lost more data to power outages and glitches this year than I have since 1994 or so when I got my first UPS. Fortunately I have my Compaq notebook for writing.

In my last post I asked for some reading recommendations and all I got were recommendations for Briggs and Hamilton books and maybe a sidewise recommendation for the Dresden Files books by Jim Butcher. Might be time I finally read some of those. Never have. Might be fun and lately I've been wanting to get into some stuff in the contemporary and urban fantasy vein. At the recommendation of an old acquaintance I recently read A Kiss of Shadows and while interesting I'm not sure I'd want to read the later books.

This week I've done a lot of stuff on the private wiki. I've been using it to gather my notes and thoughts for that game setting I've been building for the last decade and more with auld_hippie. As of last night I'm up to 120 articles. Not counting category pages, images, and the talk and user subpages I've been using for notes on the notes, so the speak.

Well, that's enough for now. Be well, folks.

Arthur C. Clarke passed away today at age 90. He along with E. Gary Gygax, who passed away earlier this month, was a significant influence on my childhood years. The first science fiction novels I really read were by Arthur C. Clarke.

I recently became aware that Franz Joseph's Starfleet Technical Manual had recently been reprinted. Apparently so for the 40th anniversary of Star Trek. Initially this struck me as strange since I'd heard long ago that Roddenberry had repudiated its canonicity around the time TNG was starting out, but I guess with the big anniversary everything Trek is getting reprinted. This was a book I first saw in the 80s but never got a copy myself. In the 90s I saw it again from the time usually in glass cases with price tags of $60 and up. Originally the Starfleet Technical Manual was published in 1975. It's a book I've heard about for several details. As I understand it, it was something of a bible for hardcore Trek fans in the 70s. It's also the basis for the license for Starfleet Battles and its spin-off games. I've never been a hardcore Star Trek fan but I've always been curious so when I learned it had been reprinted last September and saw that Amazon had it for $12.21 I decided now was the time to get it. It should be interesting to see. I'll probably post something more about it once I've had a good look at it.

Bye for now.