Shelf of Abandoned Books Revisited

A long, long time ago, I wrote up a list of abandoned books on my bedside bookshelf. I had a growing pile of stuff "I was reading" and the Lovely Bride got me bookshelf to reduce the clutter. Now I have a bookshelf of stuff I've been meaning to get back to AND a pile of books by the bedside.

But over a dozen years later, what IS on the bookshelf? Why are they still there? Where did they come from? Why did I stop reading them?

Here's the current list (not counting RPG books, which drift in and out much faster).

The Riverside Shakespeare - This one is always on my shelf, though it did not get a mention last time on my write-up. Purchased for a college class back in the 70s, it is a heavy volume of onion-skin paper, and is my go-to for Shakespeare references. Last went to it for the origin of "Too Soon The Lightning".

The Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver -  This replaced The Poisonwood Bible as the Kingsolver I keep on the shelf (the PB went to the Lovely Bride's sister). Dealing with pre-war Mexican art and politics, it should be a book I'm reading. It isn't.

The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell-  A tough read, an underground classic in SF, ignored by a lot of fans despite its SFian tropes (rockets! cybernetics! first contact!). It contains two narratives - one of the preparation to get there, and one, where the sole surviving member of the team (a priest) comes back broken and in disgrace. Oddly, I set it aside right after the first crewman dies on planet, and never came back.

Prologue to War - 1805-1812 by Bradford Perkins - Mostly first person accounts of the War of 1812 (which is one more area of history I pay attention to). Has a complete signature of the book missing, and remains on the shelf as a reminder to me to find another copy.

Alpha Beta by John Man - A short book on the history of the alphabet. I love the subject, but never deeply engaged with it.

Littlest Shoggoth by STAN! - This is from the illustrious STAN! It is not abandoned, it merely found this place to rest of the moment. Check it out here.

Shakespeare of London by Machette Chute - A thick paperback that I tend to bring with me on long trips or going to Ashland Oregon, then ignoring for a while and bringing it back. When I'm reading it, I find it interesting, but then it slides down to be my third-choice book.

Brotherhood of the Road by Michael Chabon - Historic swashbuckling adventure novel from the author who did Wonder Boys and The Sitka Detective Agency. Two Jewish bandits from different backgrounds act as bodyguards for the outcast heir to the Khazar throne. Set it down over a discussion about elephants and left it there. Strong Fafhrd and Grey Mouser overtones.

This Side of Paradise/ The Beautiful and the Damned by F Scott Fitzgerald. Picked it up in the wake of The Great Gatsby. Found it to be a bit more of a challenge.

Anything Goes by Luc McGee
Only Yesterday by Fredereick Lewis Allen
Babbits & Bohemians by Elizabeth Stevenson
1920: the Year of Six Presidents by David Pietrusza
Time Capsule - 1923, 1925 from Time Magazine
American Shelter by Lester Walker
The Twenties - Fords, Flappers, & Fanatics edited by George E. Mowry
- This entire collection is part of my "Appendix N for the 1920s". Books I use when I'm thinking about Call of Cthulhu campaigns. Of the lot, Only Yesterday is by far the best, and highly recommended, while the Year of Six Presidents is a bit of a letdown, not the least of which because one of the presidents involved (Teddy Roosevelt) died in 1919. American Shelter is a collection of house plans, which includes the eras I'm looking at, and the Time Capsules are summaries of those years from Time Magazine.Most recent addition is the Fords, Flappers, and Fanatics, a collection of first-person reports presented to me by a friend who knows I collect this stuff (Thanks, Steve!)

MFA vs NYC, edited by Chad Harbach. This is an interesting one. Chad Harbach wrote an essay in which he separates American Literary Tradition into an academic (Masters of Fine Arts) and a commercial (based out of New York City publishing) camps. An interesting idea, and he collected a bunch of other essays discussing it. Purchased the book at a Writer's Conference here in Seattle, but have not finished it (stopped early at the essay describing the first Writer's Retreats as CIA conspiracies).

Nostromo by Joseph Conrad - The oldest book in my shelf of abandonables. I've been reading it for 20 years, yet I don't think I've gotten past the fourth chapter. Have taken it on numerous trips, including to Europe, with no success. Picked it up shortly after the BBC adaptation of the book in 1996, and now cannot remember how THAT ended either. Part of my challenge is that the book is filled with informative footnotes/end notes, which I am continually referring to, which breaks up any head of steam I've made.

The Water Knife by  Paolo Bacigalupi - The Windup Girl was an awesome book, and I recommend it. I am waiting to be in so good and hopeful a mood that I feel like I need a depressing environmental disaster (in this case the death of the Colorado River) to bring me back to earth.

American Visions by Robert Hughes - Another regular on my shelf - actually finished but remains as a reference (most often in connection with the art of the 20s (like the Appendix N books above)). By the guy that wrote The Farthest Shore about the founding of Australia. This one is a history of American art.

1493 by Charles C Mann - Picked it up at a Half-Price on a whim. Deals with the Columbian Exchange (all the species that jumped continents after the opening of the New World). Deals with Pacific Trade as well. Got two chapters in, questioned a statement presented as fact, and put it down.

Vanished Kingdoms by Norman Davies - By the author of Europe (Another comprehensive doorstop of a book that I have yet to finish, having bailed around the time of Carthage), this book I saw in a British edition when I was in Paris (at Shakespeare's), but did not purchase, thinking I could get it in the states. Discovered I was wrong. The LB ordered it from Amazon.UK. It talks about the plasticity of nations, and how they tend to ebb, flow, and disappear entirely. Stuff you don't think about like the Two Burgundies, now buried under a sediment of France, Germany, and the Low Countries. Interesting presentation with an anecdote, a meaty chunk of history, and a personal travelogue. Stopped around the disintegration of the former Soviet Union.

The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, Volume 1 by Fernand Braudel - This would be my desert island book (with its Volume 2, which I also have downstairs). A fan recommended it when I was on vacation in Ashland, and I found both copies at a used bookstore there. Braudel starts with the question "why did Spain, which owned half the world, go broke?" In the process, Braudel encompasses the entire Mediterranean as a series of small seas guided by the same overarching forces. Sort of like reading Harry Seldon's papers on his galactic empire in the Foundation series. Whenever I engage with it, I feel richer. And yet, it remains unfinished. I guess I need a desert island.

The Ghost Pirates and Other Stories by William Hope Hodgson. - A friend recommended the author, and I picked it up at Half-Price. Hodgson is a very, very slow burn. His Ghost Pirates is a tale of a sailing ship where people die in gruesome fashions, and after the initial shock, the crewmen return to (almost) normal. Still have to finish that one.

The Illiad by Homer - A friend was getting rid of his, and I picked it up. Read it in bits and pieces.

Songs of the Dying Earth edited by GRR Martin and Gardner Dozois - I came late to Jack Vance's Dying Earth series and enjoyed it, and Martin/Dozois's heavy collection of short stories is an apt paean to the earlier material. The fact that Vance's stories had three different types (more traditional-but -still weird Turjan stories), more humorous Cugel and all-powerful but generally useless Rhialto. The short stories, from a variety of talented authors, also run the gammut. Bogged down in the middle of a Tanith Lee story, to my surprise, and have yet to pick it back up.

The Chomsky Reader by Noam Chomsky - Like his counter-intuitive analysis and incendiary wordplay, but read it when I am over-anxious and need to sleep.

The Castle Explorer's Guide by Frank Bottomley - Inherited it from someone. It is just there from some point where I needed to reference a castle mentioned in another book, and never left.

In the Beginning by Allister McGrath - Book on the writing of the King James version of the Bible. Never begun.

Fevre Dream by George R R Martin - Picked up from a friend. Vampires and riverboats. About five chapters in, set it aside for other works, have not yet come back. Actually one of the more recent additions to the shelf. Mighty fine writing, just have not yet returned.

The Sea and Civilization by Lincoln Paine - An overview of history with the sea. Got it after a glowing recommendation in the Seattle Times. Should be like the Branaul but is not. Part of my trouble is that Paine briefly glances off a subject before plowing onto the next one (wait, this one-paragraph discussion of pre-Columbian West Coast sea peoples - please tell me more!). So I usually get two pages before pulling out the iPad to access the Wikipedia.

The Maltese Falcon by Dashiel Hammet. - Recently watched both the 1931 and 1941 movie versions (which rate their own discussion). Tried to round out the trifecta by reading the original text again. Can't do it without hearing Bogart's voice.

Will any of these be finished? Will they still be her in 13 years? Come back 2031 and find out!

More later,

Book: Men Between the Wars

Why yes, they do dig up a body.

The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club by Dorothy L. Sayers, 1987 Perennial Library edition, Harper & Row, originally published 1928

Provenance: A long plane flight is, even under the best circumstances, a trial. Having re-enjoyed Murder Must Advertise, I brought along Unpleasantness along with some Nero Wolfe short stories on a recent trip to London, but the Nero Wolfe did not hold my attention nearly as well on the long passage over the Canadian Shield. On the flight back, I cracked open the Sayers, and then finished it up after my return when I was too exhausted to do anything else but have a lie down.

The Review: I've mentioned the Raymond Chandler/Dorothy Sayers split before, but I I think the American detective writer in Simple Art of Murder has missed his mark. He goes after Sayers and the rest of her British ilk for plots that have to work like clockwork, as dependable as the old-time British Rail time-tables, and stretch the incredulous. American detective fiction, of the Hammet/Chandler ilk, are heavy on accidental discoveries, mooks with guns, professional detectives, and babes with shady histories.

But there's another thing as well. The Chandler/Hammett branch of the genre is extremely light on protagonist background and motivation. Their leads are vessels that one can pour oneself into to. Sam Spade works as a the Hammett-described blonde devil and equally well as moivi-version Humphrey Bogart. The Thin Man describes the victim, not the detective. The Continental Op stories don't even give the detective a name. This isn't a universal trait of American Mysteries (Rex Stout comes immediately to mind, and Chandler probably would not approve either of Wolfe and Goodwin's eternal bro-mance, either), but it is a component part.

Sayers, instead, is writing stories of which the murder is a central but supporting component. It follows the tropes, but it also provides a doorway into what Sayers wants to explore. Murder Must Advertise is very much about modern business, promotion and the professional class. Gawdy Night takes us into a woman's college. And with the Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club, we are dealing with the plight of the postwar male - the effects of the Great War and the community of club life.

The Unpleasantness of the title is the death of old General Fentiman, found propped up in his favorite chair at the club on Remembrance Day (Veteran's day to us Yanks). Fentiman has two grandsons, the Colonel and the Major, both veterans of the Great War, who stand to get a piece of his inheritance. However, the same morning, the General's estranged sister pops off from pneumonia. She has a lot of money, which would go to the General if he was still alive (and therefore to the grandkids on HIS death) or to a distant relative if the General had predeceased her. So the initial mystery is - when did the General really die? Before or after his sister?

That is the (relatively bloodless) mystery that Lord Peter Wimsey is tasked with. And Sayers uses the case to wander through the wreckage of maleness in the wake of the war. There are those physically affected by the conflict  (mentions of "Tin-tummy" Challoner), those who seem unchanged (The bluff, hale Captain), and those who have been mentally and emotionally shattered (the Major, nerves wrecked). Sayers takes us into Major Fentemin's household, where his wife works and he feels worthless, and lashes out. Whimsey forgives Major Fentiman his faults, but I don't think Sayers does.

Wimsey himself served as an officer in the war, and it left him with a bellyfull of sadness and a strong sense of responsibility, both for the men who served and the cause of justice. He's not a hero of the hard-boiled type, balancing virtue with paycheck, but a dilettante pushing his way forward through a puzzle, trying to find the right response that fits both the facts and propriety.

The mystery unwinds with red herrings and secrets popping up, but it starts wrapping up with a good chunk of text still in the reader's right hand. So things don't wrap up as tightly as one would suspect at first blush. Instead an entirely new, related mystery evolves out of the first, with some of the same players, but some new characters that have been kept at the fringes for the initial part of the book. And again, male roles are examined in the expectations of the "modern" men and how they interact with their changed world.

The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club sits on one cliff of a great chasm between it and the Americanized detective story. Wimsey is has more personality that the hard-boiled cousins, and greater interaction as well, and Sayers digs in deeper as well, dealing with the challenges of men in society once the guns are silenced.

More later,

Theatre: Putting on the Ritz

Hershey Felder as Irving Berlin, Music and lyrics by Irving Berlin, Book by Hershey Felder. Seattle Rep through 3/18.

One of the advantages of season tickets (I may have mentioned before) is that it will get you to things that you might otherwise pass on. I mean, you've already paid for the seat, and even if the concept seems like something you would not normally be interested in (One guy with a piano talking and singing Irving Berlin songs?), you might as well show up.

And in this case, you'd be glad you did.

This was an incredible performance, a real highlight of the season. Mr. Felder combines engaging storytelling with his brilliant work on the keys (I was fortunate to get a good view of his hands dancing at the the piano). He has the ability to play complex music and lock the audience into his words at the same time (a talent which he describes as "schizophrenic" is the after-show Q&A - if he offers that session, stay for it). And he embodies the character and brings it to life.

The set-up is basic - Irving Berlin, over a hundred years old and bitter about being passed by on the public stage, looks back at Christmas time on his life. Linear history. Family fleeing Russia for New York City. Job as singing waiter, translating into composer. No formal training, can't read music, just narrates his songs to assistants. Big success. Heartbreak in the loss of his first wife and his son. Becomes the songwriter of the middle of the American Century. Fading with the advent of Rock and Roll and Elvis (though I would pedantically add that the transistor freeing radio from the front parlor had a bit to do with the popularity of both).

But this is a memoir, not an autobiography, so I will park my fact-checker at the door. Berlin was incredibly prolific, so there are a lot of songs you recognize. The themes that swirl around Berlin are both a key eye towards the popular pulse of public, and that all his songs are written with someone in mind. They may go out there, and be attached to a particular singer or movie or play, but the are very personal to their creator. But the emotion that creates them is not always shared with the listener, as they are changed and re-purposed as they move through the population.

Should this be considered a play, or a performance? Doesn't matter. The music is brilliant. The stories are brilliant. Hershey Felder is brilliant. This is one worth seeing, even if you don't have season tickets.

More later,

Book: Existential Horror

Annihilation by Jeff Vandermeer  Farrar, Straus and Giroux (a division of McMillan) c 2014

Provenance (where I got that book): Elliot Bay Book Company, sometime last year. I really miss the old location near Pioneer Square, so I don't make the new place up on Cap Hill a destination trip, but if I am up there, I drop in, find something interesting, and then buy horribly expensive and bad-for-you ice cream at the nearby Molly Moon's. In this case, the something interesting was this book, in the SF section but presented in a more literary format. I mean, look at the cover. Dominated by the title, tan, heavier stock, embossing, big block letters, the strange alien GREEN plant thing is only really noticeable after you realize you've been looking at the big block letters for fifteen seconds already.

Despite its look (and its text-heavy, bright green back cover), the novel came home and sat on my shelf of abandoned books (more on that somtime later) for a while, until the Lovely B and I went to the movies, where a trailer for the film of the same name (and same concept, but different resolution, I understand). And I said, Yeah, I have that at home. So I took it down and read it.

Review: Annihilation is a very good book about the eradication of self and identity. It has that mounting horror of slowly being swallowed by python, and being conscious of it the entire time. Deep and descriptive, yet enigmatic and questioning, It is one of those book that you realize quite early on will not end well, but you are still drawn through it. From the first line you know that something is off, and as things progress, they will get worse.

Here's the precis: Our protagonist is a member of an all-female team assigned to investigate an anomaly. This anomaly is Area X, a shimmering curtain along a tidal zone, in which the life has ... mutated? transformed? been replaced by? integrated with? ...  alien life. Previous teams into the zone have not come back, save for the protagonist's husband's, and they were deeply altered.

And the send of self-destruction comes from before they even move into the Area X. The team members are not known by name, only by position  - psychologist, surveyor, anthropologist  (our protagonist is the biologist). None get capital letters to their titles. They have old weapons and strange devices on their belts. Only the surveyor gets an assault rifle. Their training was odd and off-base for the mission. Information has been withheld. Hypnotism was involved. Even before they saw the strange plants and creatures of Area X, the erosion of who they were had begun.

And it accelerates quickly. An underground complex that the protagonist cannot help but describe as a tower shows the their reality is quickly shedding its skin around them, leaving behind structures that may be flesh or only the memory of flesh. The sense of creeping dread, slowly swallowing them but not to the point of creating despair, is evident in the pages and masterfully pulled off. It is the calm analysis of the dying which underlies the otherworldly nature of Area X with its vibrant, unexplained alien life. Is what is there being eliminated, or transformed? Does that apply to the protagonist as well?

Annihilation is extremely well-written, evocative, and downright creepy. Not, there are not happy endings, or even much in the way of explanations. No one pops out and says "Well, you see, it is all because of this." And that's OK, but much of the trip of internal, as are the changes. There are two more books in the series, but I don't feel overwhelmed to get to them immediately. The book ends with enough for me to think about, and that's OK.

More later,

Theatre: Yah Hey Dere

Ibsen in Chicago by David Grimm, Directed by Braden Abraham, 2 Feb -4 March, 2018, Seattle Rep.

Plays about plays. There are a lot of them. Actors like portraying actors, playwrights like writing about what they know, and audiences seem unbelievably tolerant of them. Noises Off, Inspecting Carol,  The Beard of Avon, The African Company Presents King Richard III. Heck, add the players in Hamlet and the amateurs in Midsummer's Night Dream. The players love to talk about the art. Everyone loves a actor.

And so here. Ibsen in Chicago deals with a tiny amateur group putting together a performance of Ghosts, a banned play by Norwegian playwright. Henrik Ibsen. I have never read a lot of, nor expressed a great interest in reading a lot of, Ibsen, and was surprised to learn that the Lovely Bride had a heavy Ibsen phase (before her Bertolt Brecht phase - who knew?). Ghosts itself was a rather dour creation of a syphilitic son returning to the family manse to uncover all sorts of family secrets. It helps if you know more about Ghosts at the outset, but the play fills in all the blanks for the Ibsen novice.

Banned in its native lands, the play was first performed in Chicago in 1882. That's where this  play comes in. An Ibsen-inspired bricklayer (Christopher McLinden, last seen in Charles III) puts together a rag-tag bunch of amateurs led by an aging grand dame of the Danish theatre (Kirsten Potter, Photograph 51). The team consists of an eager cobbler, a sphinx-like ingenue, a nefarious a-hole bitten by the acting bug, and a mousy prompter with a tendency to pull her own teeth out when under stress.

And the components are there - the romantic backstage triangle, the surprisingly good auditioner, the technical problems, the moral challenge of the script, and the problems with money. Add to that the change in theater itself, as the declamatory style gives way to Ibsen's more realistic approach. And the challenges of coming to a New World, while bringing along the challenges of the Old.

And they do it with gusto. This is not a farce (which some plays about plays tend towards). but rather has some depth to it. Kirsten Potter unleashes as an ACK-tor of the Carol Burnett vintage, but pivots nearly into vulnerability and personal insecurity. Allen Fitzpatrick as the nefarious Pekka is totally villainous, but wants to be part of the company. Hannah Rue as the self-contained, naturalistic Elsa feels the most real and grounded of the group, but she too carries her secrets (because what would an Ibsen play be without secrets?). In short, all are faking it until they make it, which may be the American Dream in a nutshell.

One gripe is the stage, which is a bit too large for the smaller Leo K theater. A two-level affair (which seems to be a thing this season), the upper gallery almost looms over the audience, and makes it difficult to track on actions happening on both levels at once. That aside, Ibsen purrs along neatly, the actors playing actors who are on an knife-edge between both New World and Old, and trapped mid-leap between traditional and modern theater.

More later,

The Political Desk Pop-Up Edition

Hey, wait a minute! It's not November! It's not even close! What's the deal?

Well, for some parts of the Seattle area, we're looking into the teeth of a small election next Tuesday (Feb 13). You may have gotten ballots. You may have already forgotten about them. The great bulk of them, such as the ones in Panther Lake neighborhood of Kent, are about paying for the schools.

Here's how things break down, currently. The bulk of school funding (about 68%) comes from the State Government, and yes, you're going to see property taxes go up this year as they come to terms with the fact that it is in our constitution that we educate our kids (who knew?). This is isn't about that. And 12% or so comes from the Feds, and the way things are going there, we'll get a nice note saying that the money was used instead to build ten feet of wall in Texas. The remaining 20% is funded locally, which is ALSO a property tax, to keep stuff going. And these taxes are to replace existing levies from 2014 which are expiring.

Why have the vote now? I suppose it is because the budgets were not in place last November (too soon) and by this coming November it would be too late. So we have a February ballot drop, when everyone would rather just kick back and watch Olympic Curling. Such are the nature of civic duties.

I've got a note here that says that if both measures are approved, we will see a reduction in local school tax rates, though not from the state school tax rates. I don't know - I don't have enough of a handle on the data, but I am a fan of educated kids, so here's my recommendation.  If you live in Kent, vote YES on Proposition 1, Replacement of Expiring Educations Programs and Operation Levy. Then TURN THE BALLOT OVER and also vote YES on Proposition No. 2, Levy for Capital Improvements for Safety, Security, Instruction, Classroom and Support Services and Technology.

If you're not in our little pocket of heaven, you're on your own, but I think that smart kids and adequately funded schools is a good goal.

More later,

DOW Breaks 24,000!

My, THAT was fast.

But not unexpected. The recent wild flight of the stocks, propelled by a tax cut aimed at the wealthy that would drive the deficit up for everyone else, sailed to new heights, the moved almost directly into a "correction" where it has been shedding all those gains almost as fast as it got them.

When it started, folks pointed at a report that unemployment was lower than expected as an instigator. In other words, more people had jobs, which one would think was a good thing. In financial circles, people with jobs mean that people can get more for their work, and that costs companies more. So good job news is bad news for the stock market. Similarly, paying your people more creates concern from the stockholders that too much money is being used on the stakeholders. Now, if people have more employment, there are already dire mutterings of "inflation", held in check these many decades through keeping wages contained, will suddenly spring forth, resulting in hire prices for consumers (because, the basic tenant of economic news is always "It is bad for you."

All this is true, but a bigger contributor is that sudden pulses in corporate financials are a large-scale version of "If You Give a Mouse a Cookie". A break for companies creates expectations, and those expectations pick up speed over time, and last shorter amounts of time. A financial windfall showed up last month, the market went crazy, and the current administration claimed credit. Now comes the accounting, the market is going crazy, and the current administration is talking about a military parade.

What happens next? I can honestly say I have no clue. If this is truly about the market getting back to normal it will settle after a few more big swings, then return to a slow growth, pretending nothing happened like an addict intent on "maintaining". OR, the serious weaknesses of the current boom, further undercut by recent decisions at a national level, start a slowdown and slump as other investments outstrip the traditional markets.

I have no clue. But then, I don't think anyone else has a clue, either.

More later,

The Return of No Quarter! Part IX from Outer Space!

I gotta tell you, folks, we're in the dregs, now. The idea that national parks/monuments/seashores/ street corners would make good coins was all very well and good  at the start, but when every state has to come up with one? Yeah, we're taking blind swings here. This year, it is pretty obvious that they're reaching, as every National Thingummy is far from the rest of its state.

To make matters worse, these are probably the collectively blandest versions of coins I have ever seen. It the worst collection of rocks, water, trees, and the occasional bird available, and will be forgotten in the time that it takes to put them into a soda machine pay slot. I will try to be brief this year, but man, it feels like the guys at the mint are just phoning it in.

As always, we go with a letter grade on these babies. None really rate the worst, but man, there is temptation.

Way Cool =A
Not Bad = B
Kinda Lame (also known as Meh) = C
Very Lame = D
So Fake, Sen, Nunes of California put out a memo supporting these = E

What's up first?

Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore -  Michigan

Many, many years ago, the Lovely Bride and I went to Australia, and visited a site called the Remarkable Rocks on Kangaroo Island. And the name of both the rocks and the island where so on the nose that we have since decided that by the time we reached Australia, the Europeans had run out of interesting names. ("Those rocks are remarkable!" "Crikey! That's good name for them!").

Little did we realize that we had run out of useful names long before them, as the coin, which is a Pictured Rock from the Pictured Rock National Lakeshore, with a tree growing out of it. Actually I think this particular rock, located so far away from the rest of Michigan that it should be on the Wisconsin quarter, is called Chapel Rock because ... I dunno, they pulled the name out of a bag (or maybe the whole in the arch looks a stained glass window after the Blitz. 

Ratings: D (Lame)

Apostle Islands National Lakeshore - Wisconsin

I mentioned that the Pictured Rocks could be practically been part of the Wisconsin? With just a little bit of effort, the Apostle Islands could have been on a Canadian Loonie. No even on the continental part of the US, the Apostle Islands are, of course, islands off the northern coast of Wisconsin (no, you never though of Wisconsin having a northern coast. I know). This is at the very tip of the cowlick that is the top of Wisconsin, on the shores of Lake Superior and I would say, is not a great tourist draw.

However, they did put a kayaker on the coin, which is nice, though in this case the paddler is actually from Green Bay, and trying to get to his seats at the Packer home opener before the freeze sets in.

Ratings: D (Lame)

Voyageurs National Park - Minnesota


Voyageurs! What a cool name! I'm not talking about the cheesy 80's time-travelling TV show, but rather about French-Canadian fur trappers who sailed the Great Lakes and actually had mostly good relationships with the people already living here. You'd think you might get a shot of the plunky traders, their canoes heavily laden with furs for the long trip back to Montreal.

Nope. Rocks, water, trees. Oh, a big shot of loon right in the front, set up like a duck decoy. Like they just WANT the Canadians to walk in. Look! We have the coinage already set up for you!

Like the other two quarters so far, we are looking at a park that is at the furthest northern fringes of its state, but oddly, has no snow. Voyageurs is located near International Falls, the self-described "icebox of the nation". But no, we insist on showing liquid water.

Ratings: D (Meh).

Cumberland Island National Seashore - Georgia.

Well, thank the Lord that we have escaped all the rocks and trees of the far north for this one. I mean, seriously putting the Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota quarters together? What did you expect? And despite the name confusion with the Cumberland Gap (Kentucky, two years back), we have a seashore that people in Georgia may have actually been to (though that's because it is practically in Florida).

We don't have rocks and trees, but we do have a lot of water, a lot of reeds, and a bird. Birds, I think, are easy for these coins, since there is a chance they may still be seen in those locals, and they work cheaper than mammals (who unionized back in '06). This particular bird is a snowy egret. 

A snowy egret. The coins previous were all in the furthest north, and this one gets the first off-hand mention of snow. Still, it is a nice portrayal of a snowy egret, and doesn't look as much like a duck decoy.

Ratings: B (And I'm rounding up here).

Block Island National Wildlife Refuge - Rhode Island

Following the pattern so far, Block Island is about as far away as you can be from Rhode Island while still BEING part of Rhode Island. It is about 12 miles off-shore in the Atlantic Ocean. The island islands itself has a pretty interesting and storied past, but for the coin we get a majestic night heron flying over the water and coast, with a tiny lighthouse in the background. 

Its not a bad design, though the side-view of the heron doesn't compare with the display of the egret down in Georgia, and there is an attempt to say that people once inhabited this area, but still, it just doesn't do a lot for me.

Ratings: C (Meh)

Next year? We leave the continent entirely for Guam and the Mariana Islands. Oh, and Texas, Massachusetts, and Idaho. With all that diversity, let's mix it up a bit, people!

More later,

Play: Trains of Thought

Two Trains Running by August Wilson, Directed by Juliette Carrillo, Seattle Rep through 11 Feb.

I think I have seen more plays by August Wilson than by any other playwright with the exception of Shakespeare. With Two Trains Running, I have now seen nine of his ten-play Pittsburgh Cycle. And my relationship with his work has always been complicated. There are works that I've found engaging, and others that lead me to question what he's really up to.

A good reason for my engagement with Wilson is simple happenstance - I was born in Pittsburgh (as was Mr. Wilson), I spent a lot of time in the Midwest (which was a stopover region for him) and ended up in Seattle (where he passed on a dozen years back). The bulk of his plays in the Pittsburgh Cycle are set in the Hill District of Pittsburgh, a strong African-American community done in by change and urban renewal (much of the land was grabbed for the Civic Arena (now also gone)), and when I lived in Pgh there were a lot of decaying buildings surrounding empty lots of rubble, where the Urban rolled through but the Renewal had not arrived. I recognized the streets and the people in his work, and the vibe of the eras we covered.

And that all said, I found Two Trains Running to be one of Wilson's better works, with roles that get under the skin of the African American experience, not preaching but rather exposing a variety of black viewpoints to a greater world. While set in a Hill District soon to be overtaken by said Urban Renewal in 1969, and mentioning Malcolm X, it a non-political story about people and their wants and sense of worth.

The play is broad, with a bunch of things going on in once at the fading restaurant on Wylie Avenue.  Owner Memphis Lee (Eugene Lee) is looking to sell to the city, but only if he gets what he thinks is a fair price. Sterling (Carlton Byrd) is just out of prison and trying to find a job. The mentally challenged Hambone (Frank Riley III) just wants his payment (a ham) for a job done nine years ago for a firm across the street. Memphis Lee's friendly rival, West (a wondrously reptilian William Hall Jr.) is a funeral director handling a major celebrity death. Add to this number-runner Wolf (Reginald Andre Jackson) and corner-table wiseman Holloway (David Emerson Toney) and you have a rich collection of inhabitants, all with their own clear needs.

And yet there is a void at the center, in the presence of the recalcitrant Risa (Nicole Lewis), who is the waitress. Ordered about by a clueless Memphis Lee, patronized by  Wolf, romanced by an idealizing Sterling, she holds her secrets with the scars along her legs (no, you don't notice them until they are pointed out). All the characters get monologues and stories (indeed, there is an August Wilson monologue contest), but she does not. She never takes her place fully, though the others speak of equality and relationships.

Wilson tosses a half-dozen balls in the air, and wraps them in a wreath of nature voices. Lines are repeated, expanded, harked back to dozens of times, so by the end of the first act you get a feeling of who these people are. Wilson does a fantastic job slowly drawing everyone out, and the actors, all excellent in their roles, slowly delineate the dances as they advance.

There are a couple things that move through Wilson's cycle. One is the threat of violence - there are numerous guns and crimes that are presented, and at one point an army tin of gasoline as people talk about arson. It is a component of the Pittsburgh Cycle, sometimes seized upon, sometime left in the background, but always present.

Also, there is a mystic element to the plays, of belief and sometimes superstition. In Two Trains, this is in part shown by the funeral of Prophet, whose mobs of believers tax West's soul, and in the unseen presence of Aunt Ester, incredibly old at this point, who offers advice to those who seek her out and follow her orders. The reaction of the characters to both Ester and the Prophet- belief, disbelief, unbelief, and changing belief, creates their own line through the end.

In the end, it is a question of man's worth - measured by money, a woman's love, or even a ham, that the play ultimately centers on. And it is a bout opportunities - making them and taking them. This solid core that Wilson builds upon to create an involved, intriguing, engaging play. One of his best, and I can safely say that as someone who has seen almost them all.

More later,

Happy Holidays from Grubb Street

More later,

Things I am Proud Of

So I bared my soul last time with a project that I never completed. On the flip side, what am I particularly proud of?

I'm proud of most of the stuff I've working on over the years. However, what makes me smile are not particularly big things. It is the small tweaks, tight mechanics, and cool explanations that I've discovered over the years. Here are a few of them:

The Universal Table (Marvel Super Heroes) - I've talked about this before, and recognized its origins in the CRTs (Combat Results Tables) of earlier wargames. But the way it fits together, the way it works, the sheer .. universality of it all, still makes me happy. It is a table that carries a lot of load, and I was very happy with it.

The Nine Hells and, more importantly, why they descend (Manual of the Planes) - Here was my problem in MotP - the layers of the Outer Planes are supposedly limitless, infinite in all directions. So how do we create a typical Dante-esque hell where you keep climbing down to get to the nastiest layers?. My answer was that all the gates INTO a layer of the Hells were on the tops of mountains, and those OUT of a layer were in the valleys. That way, you are always descending. I was pretty darn smug about this one at the time.

A d8+d12 random monster table. (Monster Manual II) - I was reading the new edition of the DMG the other day (as one does) and noticed that some of the random monster tables were with 1d8 and d12. I did this in MMII, back in the day when monsters had rarity levels. The d8+d12 produces a bell curve with a large flat space on the top. The Common monsters would be found on the top of that plateau. The Uncommons were found on the sloping sides, the Rares further away from that, and the Very Rares were at the 2 and 20 levels, with about a 1% chance of each. So you could have a random monster table where demons were not as common as orcs

Those are the ones that make me smile. There are a lot of others - Phlogiston and the Crystal Spheres from Spelljammer.  Karma as a spendable experience point system in Marvel. Making Ashnod (Brother's War) and Varesh Ossa (Nightfall) female characters. Cheeeese. The Great Stone Men from Neither Man nor Beast. A good chunk of the Modrons. Tinker gnomes of Dragonlance. The names of the Asura  in Eye of the North (which sound like sound effects from Mad magazine). But those top three make me particularly happy.

More later, 

Bases Loaded

Is it all right to feel bad about an assignment that is 33 years late?

John (Sacnoth) Rateliff has been clearing out his files, and has come across a number of old artifacts of the middle age of TSR (the 80's). Among these artifacts is a page from a 1984 catalog, describing various upcoming products. most of which never saw the light of day. And one of them was Bases Loaded, a Gangbusters adventure by yours truly. A project that was never finished, and hardly begun, and I still feel bad about it.

For those of you not of venerable age, Gangbusters was a boxed RPG, originally based on Bloody Twenties by Rick Krebs who sold it to TSR, where it was expanded/revised by Mark Acres. The default setting of this 1920s Mobsters and G-Men game was Lakefront City, an ersatz Chicago. And the local ball team was going to be the Mudcats (which was a variant on my phone number at the time). The project got approved with a bare-bones pitch - The Black Sox scandal, where players fixed the 1919 World Series.

One challenge in all this, I knew very little ABOUT the Black Sox scandal. And my resources were fairly limited to be able to find out (no Internet in the modern sense, nothing much at the local library, the movie version, Eight Men Out,  would show up in 1988).  It landed on my desk in the schedule with me having done precious little research, and I scrambled to little effect - I had a murder early in the mix as a way to get the players involved (a catcher who would no go in with the others), but I bogged down in research on details, building my own league in the process. But it didn't really hang together, and the deadline loomed and I had precious little to show for it.

And then, the specter of defeat moved on from me. Bases Loaded (and more of the other games on this list) was cancelled as TSR decided to concentrate on other games (like, um Dragonlance and Marvel Super Heroes). I was spared, but to be honest, the onus of defeat, or not delivering the product (and not having much of a plan on how to deliver it) has continued to haunt me to this day.

Maybe that's why I am tolerant of Kickstarters with good intentions but overdue delivery dates. To these people I say - it is OK, but show us you're working on it.

But that's not all the sad nostalgia that this particular catalog page brings me.

One of the projects listed was Tin Man, by TSR Staff (which means they had not assigned it to anyone). It was one of my pitches as well. Originally in the pitch called Operation: Tin Man, it was going to be a hacker adventure. The description is horribly bollixed up in the catalog, but the idea was that the agents were going to be at JPL when the first pictures came back from a martian lander. The first pictures from Mars comes back, and there, on the Mons Olympus, is a banner stating "Surrender Dorothy."

And from there it would become a search to find out who hacked into the supposedly-secure JPL feed, and what else these hackers found. This was in 1983. The year the term "Cyberpunk" was coined. The year after Blade Runner came out. The year before Neuromancer showed up. Years before the Secret Service turned up on Steve Jackson's doorstep wanting to know about the Legion of Doom. It would have been ahead of its time, and concentrated on the "real world" work as opposed to sleuthing through the matrix. Alas, that one was never officially assigned, and nothing ever existed but the pitch. Unlike Bases Loaded, which I still feel bad about.

Sigh. More later,

Play: The Center Does Not Hold

The Humans by Stephen Karam Directed by Joe Mantello, Seattle Rep through 17 December 2017.

Thanksgiving on Grubb Street has for many years been a "Waifs and Orphans" affair, a term I picked up from Zeb Cook, who did something similar in Lake Geneva eons ago. The Waifs and Orphans Feast was set up for people who can't get back to their families elsewhere for the holidays, but has since turned into an event where friends come in from out of town to join friends in a fine meal. I brine a bird, the lovely bride would supervise the kitchen and dining room, and friends bring sides, deserts, and wine. It's pretty good, and I may have mentioned it before.

So imagine my delight at getting the passive/aggressive thrills of internal family feuding found within a  Thanksgiving with The Humans. yay.

Here's the basic info: On Thanksgiving, Erik (Richard Thomas) and Deirdre (Pamela Reed) are visiting daughter Brigid (Daisy Eagan) in her new, two-level basement apartment in New York's Chinatown, where she lives with her organized boyfriend Richard (Luis Vega). Erik and Deirdre brought with them Erik's mother, Momo (Lauren Klein) who is confined to a wheelchair and suffering from dementia. Also attending is other daughter Aimee (Therese Plaehn), who has broken up with her girlfriend, is losing her job, and has a major medical conditions.

Indeed, medical conditions tend to dominate the table talk, which fits in with a lot of American Family Gatherings these days. Erik's got a bad back, Momo slips in and out of lucidity, Richard has suffered from depression, Deirdre is fighting her weight. Aimee is facing major surgery, which she tells her sister but never gets around to telling her parents. It feels like the characters live in a domain where they can survive, but not thrive. Maybe, but I'm not sure if that's the point of the play.

And the apartment is a precarious place itself, in a quasi-gentrifying chunk of New York's Chinatown, in the flood zone of the rising sea, balanced precariously on a hostile future. The unseen upstairs neighbor drops - things- (which sound like battleship anchors) on the floor above, the washing machine churns loudly, the lights flicker and go out. It is a haunted house of an apartment, its inhabitants reduced to cave-dwelling. But I'm not sure that's the point, either.

I'm not sure what the point is, honestly. I've seen some comments talking about the death of Middle Class as a subject of the play, but I'm not entirely sure about that, either. Perhaps if you think about it as individuals who have been clawing upwards who suddenly realize they are slipping back, losing ground, and finally realize that they are not even going to be able to maintain their previous status and lives. Maybe. It's not clear.

Even the title is a bit of a wash for me. Erik dreams of monsters, and Richard talks about how from a monster's point of view, humans are the monsters. But these humans are not monsters - their crimes are pretty petty for the punishments the universe doles out to them. And the monsters that the humans are facing - death, dementia, pain, poverty, the upstairs neighbors, don't seem to be fearing them at all. So I am hard-pressed to tell you what the play is ABOUT. (OK, it's about 90 minutes long, without an intermission. Bah-DUM-bah).

Parts of the dialogue are witty, poignent, and natural, but they don't seem to support a central cause. The actors are excellent (Thomas, Reed and Klein in particular), but seem a little lost on the stage. The set itself feels like a gimmick for the play, the two-tiered stage allowing characters to move easily out of reach of the others and back again. One thing I've noted about these "Put the characters in the room and don't let anyone leave" type of plays is the No One Ever Leaves - they head for the door, but never seem to reach it. The Humans does not do that, but it feels like we're left with characters hanging out, waiting for someone to re-enter.

So that's where I am. The Tony-Award winner is sort of the thematic tent-pole for the season, which talks about Real, Messy, Human, as bywords for promoting the season. And for this they're right. The Humans is human and very messy and real. But it also doesn't seem to have a center.

More later,

DOW Breaks 24,000!, No, wait, 25,000! No, wait ...

Last month or so has been interesting. The stock market was rising and falling slowly. but in the general rising, then all of s sudden everything took off, with one hundred, two hundred, and three hundred point days. It surged forward with a vibrancy of speculation that almost would lead one to think that a tax bill aimed at putting as much money into the hands of corporations and the wealthy was surging through government, with conservatives, who usually were concerned about increasing the national debt, cheering it on.

And yeah, this is exactly what's happening - the Republican-controlled Congress gleefully abandoned its post, not only declaring that deficits don't matter, but running up the tab on the current one by 1.5 trillion bucks. The Senate voted on its version of the plundering of the treasury in the dead of night, after Friday, on a bill marked up with pen scrawls that they would not let anyone read. The same people who cringed in fright at anything like a minimum wage gleefully shoving money down the pants of the wealthiest members of our society like a frat boy at his first strip club. 

This was such a heady feeling that even news that one of the President's men has turned state's evidence and making clear his dealings with the Russians could only knock off a few hundred points. And indeed, with the deed finally done, the wish list shoved through Congress, they really don't need him at all anymore.

The House and Senate bills were different in many awful ways, and in the week following they discovered they botched the job,but  there is enough pain for the bulk of Americans. The retail apocalypse is still hollowing out the malls, student loans threaten to be the next housing bubble, Medicare and Social Security are on the chopping block to pay for this boondoggle, the rich get richer, and the poor get ... children.

But the end result for a big kick in the pants for the economy, with much of the results unforeseen and still unfolding. Some companies used the humongous windfall to actually raise pay and give bonuses to employees. Some used the money to lay off people, close stores and reorg. Some actually did both. But all this movement of capital and investment creates friction, a heat created from money being shoved from one side of the table to another. And that's what the DOW is giving us right now, a rise of temperature from money being moved from one set of pockets to another.

Wall Street has no longer been connected with Main Street for years now. Now it feels that it has lost full contact with the rest of the universe as well. There are those calling for a "correction", and while the signs are there, it should be another couple thousand before it all hits the fan.

More later,

The Reading

So, how did it go? Very well, thank you.

Earlier this week, we had a reading for "Human Resources", a play I wrote.  Here's the backstory:

This play had its start in a class at the Seattle Rep. We were supposed to end the semester by presenting a short scene. I wrote one about layoffs. It was well-received. Our class stayed together and formed a writing group, meeting once a month up on Queen Anne Hill at the home of one of our group. We would read scenes. We would start plays, change plays, create scenes out of order, retrench, rewrite, revise. And of the bunch, I finished first, and my question was: What now?

I started looking around for a venue to read the play. Not perform, but just let it out into the wild and solicit comment and feedback. There are a number of small groups through-out Seattle (a theatre-heavy town, thank goodness), and I checked out the Seattle Playwrights Salon at the Conservatory, the WARP group at the Armory, and the Seattle Playwrights Studio at the Burien Actors Theatre. At the last they were looking for someone to read one of their plays. I had said I had one and they scheduled me for the first Monday in December.

And so the madness begins -

I was responsible for recruiting a group of actors. I chose as a lead an actress I had seen the previous month at the BAT. Two old friends with acting/stage experience. A co-worker. A young man I knew who was working at ArenaNet. These were my strolling players. We had a table read at a local restaurant the week before. Rust was shaken off, and the readers got a chance to work out bits of business in the play. We had dinner.

And we sent out invites. Members of my writers' group. Members of my gaming group. Co-workers (telling them that they were not in the play. Really). Friends of friends. I did not count the house, but I had a lot of people show up - on previous evenings the readers outnumbered the audience. We had about 20 folk show up that evening.

The SPS is based out of the Burien Actors Theatre, which is located in a community center in Burien, just north of the downtown district. We don't get the auditorium (young people were rehearsing a Christmas pageant), but rather one of the large utility rooms. A mixture of cushioned chairs and sofas for the audience. Readers in a semi-circle facing them, seated in folding chairs and with their scripts perched on their music stands.

And it went very well. My readers were excellent, and I thank Carol, Stan! Janna, Jorge, and Micheal for their help. The crowd failed to bolt at the intermission, and afterwards had a LOT of comments, so many that a lot of them got back to my afterwards by email. They disagreed with each other, revealed some things I was worried about, and made connections that I did not even see. I picked up a lot, and know I have a lot to do to bring this up. And when I got home the Lovely Bride and I went through the bulk of them.

The next step? A revision. Some of the comments can be addressed by a line or two, but the bulk of them involve fundamental changes, knocking out narrative walls and rewiring the plot. It should be interesting, and I learned a lot.

And I have a plan for the next stage of this adventure. More later,

Invitation to a Reading

So a while back I solicited in this space about readers for a play I've completed. Well, I've got them, and we're going to be reading next Monday, 4 December,  for the Seattle Playwrights Studio at the Burien Actors Theatre. Here are the details:

Human Resources

A Corporate Comedy by Jeff Grubb

Monday, 4 December, 2017

7 PM

Burien Actors Theatre

14501  4^th Ave SW, Burien, WA 98166

http://burienactorstheatre.org/

I have cast the five roles (four actors and someone to read the stage directions):

                Grace will be read by Carol Stanley

                Bob will be read by Stan! Brown

                Angela will be read by Janna Silverstein

                Peter will be read by Jorge Rodriquez
               Stage Directions will be read by Michael Yichao

              

I'll be the one hiding from everyone in the back.

If you are interested, you are more than welcome to come.  As I mentioned, this is a reader's theater, where my readers are sitting around reading the play through, and I get a chance to hear my words when they're NOT going on in my head.

More later,

Book: Welcome Back My Friends

The Show that Never Ends: The Rise and Fall of Prog Rock;  by David Wiegel, W.W.Norton & Company. (c) 2017

Provenance: I discovered this book through a review. In particular, THIS review, which was not so much about the book as about its subject matter and why that subject matter wasn't worth much in the first place. As a review of a review, I'd say it's not much of a review, but it was on a subject that was a part of my college years: Progressive Rock.

Review: I got into Prog Rock in the late 70s (don't judge) after my John Denver phase (I SAID don't judge). ELP and Yes and Peter Gabriel-era Genesis. Progressive Rock was loonnnng songs with involved, often opaque lyrics that disdained the prepackaged, 4/4, lovesong nature of radio pop. Emphasis on musical techniques, centered on the keyboards as opposed to the guitars, strong influence of classical music, leading edge on tech, displays of arcane knowledge, long percussion solos, bizarre time signatures, and a lot of noodly bits. A lot of these properties, interestingly enough, Prog Rock shared with Dungeons & Dragons, and there was great amounts of overlap in both the performers and the audience.

Weigel intros his book with a nostalgia cruise for Prog Boomers, identifying them as a quirky bunch of anoraks, like model train enthusiasts, but quickly comes to grips with where progressive came from, both from a tech end (the rise of the Moogs and other electronic devices) and the rebellion against the extant commercial pop world, supporting performance over packaging. He follows King Crimson and other early pioneers through the great domain and dominance of the progressive groups as they formed, splintered, and reformed again. He gets into odd trivia (Lemmy of Motorhead was a member of the Moorcock-inspired Hawkwind? I did not know that) and tries to show the forces working to create Progressive Rock - touring, the rise of arena shows, record labels willing to take risks and develop talent, new tech, and the music media. He tries to describe various pieces in detail, which works if you know the songs in question, but otherwise sends me to YouTube for reminders. (writing about music is akin to dancing about politics - a completely different mindset between the words).

Weigel covers the halcyon days of prog with an eye towards personalities and personal development and new ways of putting together music. Then, with the suddenness that it appeared, prog was declared a dinosaur - too expensive, too baroque, too engaged. Punk and Disco (yes, Disco) arose in response to the over-technical banks of keyboards. What was rebellion was itself rebelled against. The rock media turned, the labels looked elsewhere for cheaper acts and quicker turnarounds, and the prog groups faded or transformed, mammal like, into something that could survive the new era.

I liked to book. Weigel's style moves quickly, bouncing from a high-level overview to personal anecdotes and back again. He reminds me of early groups that I had not thought of (like Van der Graaf Generator) and later incarnations I should check out ( Porcupine Tree, Majesty). And a lot of a music of the era that I really liked (though truth to be told  I always found ELP's "Lucky Man" to be a bit twee). So yes, part of this is nostalgia and part is pure rediscovery. If you lived through the era, you should check it out.

More later,

Meanwhile, 99 years ago

In Flanders Fields

IN FLANDERS FIELDS the poppies blow
Between the crosses row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

By: Lieutenant Colonel John McCrae, MD (1872-1918)
Canadian Army

More later,

Cthulhu Lies Dreaming

Let's do some gaming stuff.

At the recent GameHole Con (Quick review - great convention in Madison, you should go), I ran a part of a Call of Cthulhu campaign I had done years ago. Then characters were all underclassmen at Miskatonic University in March of 1925, when, according to Lovecraft's original short story, The Call of Cthulhu, the Great Old One stirred in his sleep, disturbing the dreams of people throughout the world.

And for this I created some pregens, gave them backgrounds, and had them make a POW check. Those that succeeded got strange dreams. Then I asked them what their term project was in the class.  Here are the characters:

Frank Johnson was our athelete, a football hero playing with the Miskatonic Badgers.
Deborah Blaine was our "New Woman" journalist.
Virginia Frink was our science student - her parents disappeared at Devil's Reef, near Innsmouth
Skip Cavanaugh was our dilettante, changing majors six times in six semesters.
Jedediah Wright comes from a long lines of Congregationalist ministers. He is studying theology.
Samuel Whately is pre-med, and comes from a farming community in Vermont. He interns at St. Mary's in Arkham.

Some made their Power Check, some didn't, but it was an interesting writing challenge. Here are their dreams

Frank Johnson’s Dream

You are in the woods, a thick pine woods. It is a summer night, but a full moon provides ghostly illumination, and the stars twinkle overhead. Your path leads west, towards a clearing. As you approach, white flowers glow in the field below you glow like fireflies, and the stars are obscured by a mounting thunderhead. You watch its moon-limned edges grow on the horizon, until it looms over you.

Then the thunderhead turns, and you see two huge yellow eyes emerging from the mass, and you know the towering creature is no cloud. It screams and you scream and you are awake.

Please make a SAN check.

Deborah Blaine’s Dream

You are at a trendy party, mingling with guests in tux and tails, or sequined gowns. There are waiter carrying trays of champagne and appetizers, and no one seems to care about Prohibition. There is jazz music playing in the distant in an odd minor key. You walk towards people and they turn away from you, some in disinterest, some in fear. You are concerned and try to join small groups that break up as soon as you arrive, and soon you are moving quickly from person to person, only to find the other guests flee from you. Something is wrong with your face.  

You reach a mirror and recoil in horror at yourself. Your face has melted, the skin gathered in on itself to form long, looping tendrils around you nose and mouth. You try to scream, but you cannot – the tendrils themselves coil of their own volition. You reach out to the mirror and your reflection touches you as well, but it reaches through the mirror and grasps you by the wrist, seeking to pull you inside. You awaken in a cold sweat.

Please make a SAN Check

Virginia Frink’s Dream

You are in an old house. Belonging to your parents? You are not quite sure. It’s night, and the ocean thunders outside, and you know without looking that the house is up on a cliff (your parents’ house was nowhere near the shore). There are shouts outside, but you know (someone warned you?) not to look out the windows. The sound of the surf grows louder, and with it the groaning of ancient timbers under sail, and the shouts grow louder as well.

You finally look out the window to see a great sailing ship breaking up on the rocks. The crew is abandoning it, and other dark figures are swarming over it like ants, killing the seamen they encounter and shredding the sails. Behind the wrecked ship is a great wave rising out of the ocean, a single pinnacle of water streaming off all sides.

Then the wave parts and reveals the tip of a huge leathery wing, the ocean itself draining off its flesh. The creature it belongs to, some massive dragon, turns towards you and you sudden awaken.

Please Make a SAN check.

Skip Cavanaugh’s Dream

You dream of a strange, burning city. Even on fire, its buildings seem to flicker and fade into and out of phase with the world, and twist inwards on themselves in patterns that seem to make sense but deny all reality. The buildings are huge, built by ancient giants, and you see people like ants trying to scale them, climbing up their burning sides to avoid the waters below.

Waters. Yes. You are now waist-deep in thick, salty waters. The tide is coming in. No. The city itself is sinking, and the ocean is coming in. You try to run to one of the towering, flaming structures, but you are trapped in mud. Not mud. You are ensnared by tentacles, looping round your legs like strong ropes, holding you in place and dragging you beneath the surface. You open your mouth to scream and salt water pours into your throat.

Please make a SAN check.

Jedidiah Wright’s Dream

You are in a church. Anglican, you would guess, from the amount of decoration and stained glass, and the smell of incense and heavily oiled wooden pews. There are parishioners in the benches, but you have a hard time focusing on them. They seem to fade in and out like ghosts. The stained glass seems to shimmer as well, and its scenes are aquatic in nature – coral, tropical fish, and octopi.

The minister is your father, or your grandfather, with a full white beard and wild white hair, gesticulating and shouting loudly. His words are unclear, but it is a hellfire speech. As you walk up the aisle, you see that he is bleeding from the eyes, the blood running down into his beard. And then you realize it is not a beard at all, but rather a nest of snakes, coiling and coiling like tendrils round his saw-toothed, lamprey-like mouth.

You awaken with a start. Please make a SAN check.

Samuel Whately’s Dream

You are in the morgue in the basement of St. Mary’s. It doesn’t look like the morgue you know, but you are sure of it. Instead of a small room with a bank of drawers holding the deceased you are in a great marble-shod palace, the biers of the dead laid out with military precision in all directions, each body covers in a translucent white sheet. Somewhere, far in the distance, a gong sounds.

The gong sounds again, and the cadavers begin to stir. The gossamer sheets slide from them and you see they are monstrosities, partially unmade through partial autopsies and botched studies. Great surgical wounds crisscross their forms, the skin pulling away from the stitches to reveal the oozing muscles beneath, the organs straining to escape. You run, but there is no place to run, the dead are everywhere.

You awaken in your bed, breathing hard. You catch your breath, and hear you roommate snoring across the room. In the distance you hear the university bell tower. Then the arms of the dead things reach up from beneath your bed and seize you dragging you down beneath the floorboards to join them. You awaken again, but are unsure if you are truly awake.

Please make a SAN check.


More later,

The Political Desk - The Dust Settles

So, how did things go?

Those not residing in the Evergreen State may be surprised to discover that we DON'T always know how elections are resolved the night of, or even the morning after. This is because we are all mail-in ballots, and the postmark on the ballot needs to be by election day. So stuff shows up late. Meanwhile, the AMOUNT of votes (even in the reduced circumstances of an off-year election) from Seattle makes for slow counting as well. Short version: the numbers will flux, and the nature of the flux tends towards urban, Democrat, and progressive voters.

Still, this year there have been some major blowouts where it is safe to say, regardless of what rally may await in the uncounted votes, someone (or something) has succeeded)

Advisory Votes 16, 17, and 18,  All REPEALED by 57%, 65% and 62% respectively. Pity that, as advisory votes, they don't really count, but this should give fodder to anti-tax crowd to intimidate officials who believe we should pay for what we get.

King County Proposition No. 1 Levy Lid Lift for Veterans, Seniors, and Vulnerable Populations, which does matter more - APPROVED (66%)

King County Executive - Dow Constantine (75%).

King County Sheriff - Mitzi Johanknecht (52%).

Court of Appeals, Division No.1, District no. 1 - Michael S. Spearman (74%), despite a lot of promotion for his opponent.


Port of Seattle Commissioner  Position No. 1 - John Creighton (51%). This might be the one to flip on later ballots, but it is unlikely. [[Note from Five Days Later: Of course I was wrong, for the very reasons that I noted earlier - younger and more progressive voters voted late. At this point, the percentages have neatly reversed themselves and Ryan Calkins now has 52% of the vote]]
Port of Seattle Commissioner Position No. 3 - Stephanie Bowman (67%).

Port of Seattle Commission Position No. 4 - Peter Steinbrueck (63%).

Mayor, City of Kent - Dana Ralph (52%)

Kent Council Position No. 2 - Satwinder Kaur (54%).

Kent Council Position No 4 - Toni Trouter (67%).

Kent Council Position No. 6 - Brenda Fincher (72%). Ms. Fincher's opponent is notorious for saying in his voter's guide that he didn't really want the job, anyway. And yet there are a lot of other results that at this level of landslide this year.

Kent School District No, 415 - Denise Daniels (53%).


Soos Creek Water and Sewer District Commissioner Position No. 2 - Alan Eades (53%).
Public Hospital District No. 1, Commissioner District No 1  - Erin Aboudara (67%)


And some other things:

Mayor of Seattle - Jenny Durkan (61%). Actually the only one I am sad to see, but even so I think a competent candidate won the position.
State Senate, 45th District Manka Dhingra (55%). The Democrats have retaken the State Senate by a slender margin. Now comes the time when feet are held to the fire and results are demanded.

And with that, the Political Desk shuts down for the winter. It will be back, of course, but I'm going off to write other things for a while.

More later,