In a concerted effort to improve my functionality as a shameless self-promoter, I am turning over a new leaf: telling people about things involving me before they happen.

I am going to be at Readercon next weekend (July 5th – 8th). That wouldn’t be anything new, except that for the first time I’ll be appearing in a non-fanboy capacity. No, seriously. It’s not like my name is going to show up on the participants list or anything, but I do get to take part in an Interfictions discussion panel AND an Interfictions fiction reading. Yeah. Crazy. I don’t quite know what to do with myself.

Matter of fact maybe you all can advise me. The people in charge tell me I can read anything I want that I think has interstitial qualities. Now, I’ve already given a reading of an “The Utter Proxmity of God” teaser, and sooner or later a much better-quality version of that teaser is going to show up on the Interfictions blog as part of a podcast series. I love reading aloud, and it seems a shame not to take this glorious opportunity to read something else, something new. But anything else I read will be an unpublished story…unless I read one of those two semipro things I sold ages ago and everybody forgot about. So do I just read “The Utter Proximity of God” again or what?

http://apnews.excite.com/article/20070621/D8PT6HR80.html

“Have you seen the Jack-in-the-Green?
With his long tail hanging down
He quietly sits under every tree —
in the folds of his velvet gown.
He drinks from the empty acorn cup
the dew that dawn sweetly bestows.
And taps his cane upon the ground —
signals the snowdrops it’s time to grow.”
–Ian Anderson, Jack-in-the-Green

My only real complaint about this article is why couldn’t they have found somebody to interview who wasn’t drinking a vodka and red bull? I would be drinking mead, if I had any mead. Or, you know, eating fly agaric and standing on my head, though that seems a lot less likely. I went hiking today. You wouldn’t believe how many great ideas I came up with out there. Maybe my quote of the day ought to be:

“Inspiration
Move me brightly
Light the song with scents and color
Hold away despair”
–Robert Hunter, Terrapin Station

Happy Solstice.

http://apnews.excite.com/article/20070614/D8POEMI81.html

Richard Klein, an anthropological science professor at Stanford University, called the findings interesting but lacking substance.
“The sample is too small to draw that conclusion,” Klein said. “I’m not against the idea, but there is no link between the burials and anything with human behavior. They’re far apart and come from different cultures.”

Who is Richard Klein kidding? Of course there was human sacrifice in prehistoric Europe! There was human sacrifice everywhere. There was human sacrifice in Renaissance Europe.

Sorry, Europe. Being the cradle of Western civilization does not give you a pass.

I love it here. You people who live in the city are missing it.

I’ve been looking for the history of this: a monolithic, ruinous stonework running alongside the horse trail through Chesterfield Gorge. USGS topographical maps surveyed in 1886 (see here, try the SW quadrant) shows an unpaved road following most of the length of the Westfield River, with even a couple of houses scattered along it. None of which are there now. Google Earth barely shows the road. So who knows what this thing is. It’s not a mill foundation, unless the river has been dammed and rerouted and the mill abandoned long enough to rot away utterly, leaving not even loam. Stranger things have happened, of course. It’s not the remains of a bridge either, because there’s no matching stonework on the far side. The best I can judge, this little linteled passageway was constructed purely for its future aesthetics as an overgrown ruin. Of course if I really cared, I could go digging through deeds at the hall of records and find the real answer. Note that I do not.

I hereby adopt the stonecut square as a personal seal of a par with the mossy skull, ouroboros, the stunted pine and the beat-up cane. I’m going to make a rubber cast of it and turn it into a stamp.