Communion Of Dreams

I’m not quite sure what to make of this new comic I stumbled upon via MeFi, but at least the start of the thing is rather interesting. Kind of a Zombie Western thing going, about a fellow who decides that he doesn’t really want to be dead. That this decision comes following his funeral is a bit of a problem for the local townsfolk . . .

Anyway, start with The Decision, and go from there. The Table of Contents lists six episodes so far.

Enjoy. Or not. Your decision.

Jim Downey

(Cross posted to UTI.)

And, actually, sometimes even people who say so are selling something.

Eh?

A friend sent me a link to this blog post, in reaction to my recent funk.  From the post:

I called up Rae and complained. She snorted and said, “Join the club”. She was not unsympathetic, but merely voicing the truth: to be an artist means you are going to suffer. Why? Because to create takes time, and we want it now. Pulling those ideas down out of the ether or out of the universe or wherever the hell they come from is so damn time-consuming. And we want– no we expect the idea now.

Amen.  That may be part of my current funk - the expectation that now that my care-giving role is over, I should be able to recover and just start being the brilliant and creative person I know I really am.

Ah, well.  Good insight.

Oh, and good art.  Take it from someone who owned and operated an art gallery for 8 years: this is good art, and the prices are quite reasonable.

Jim Downey

(Hat tip to ML.  And if you didn’t recognize the quote used in the title, shame on you.  It’s from this.)

That was the iconic photo taken during the Apollo 8 mission, widely considered to be one of the most beautiful, and touching, images ever. This video, titled “Cities at Night”, has something of that quality:

It is a series of images taken from the ISS, using an improvised barn-door tracking system to stabilize their digital cameras relative to the speed of the station, allowing for images good to a resolution of about 60 meters. And it had a similar effect on me from watching it as seeing “Earthrise” did for the first time (I remember that, back in 1968), even with my poor monitor and via YouTube.

Light pollution is a problem, as I have mention previously. But it is hard to look at these images and not be struck with just how beautiful even the evidence of our sprawl and overpopulation can be. And seeing our city lights from 200 miles up is inspirational, a glimpse in how we can indeed someday transcend our problems and limitations. We need not be Earthbound, not now, not for the future.

Jim Downey

(Via MeFi.)

[This post contains mild spoilers about Communion of Dreams, particularly chapter 5.]

As I’ve been doing some conservation work this morning, I’ve been listening again to the audio version of Communion, done by Scot Wilcox of OwnMade AudioBooks, and discussed previously. I just enjoy hearing his interpretation.

Anyway, at the end of chapter five, as the first team of researchers is about halfway to Titan to investigate the alien artifact which has been discovered there, the protagonist has an odd dream which is described in some detail. In the dream Jon (the protagonist) crosses a bridge, and there’s lots of symbolism which is important for how the rest of the book unfolds. For this reason, I worked fairly hard to get the description just right. Scot’s reading of the passage is great, and really brought that scene to life for me.

Which is fairly easy, because it is based on a real scene - a real bridge: this bridge on the campus of the University of Iowa, which I crossed often while in graduate school at the Iowa Center for the Book. And the fun thing about that bridge - which I used for my own purposes in the description in the novel - is that because of the way it is built, it has a kind of spring to it as you walk across.

I enjoy knowing from whence artists and authors draw their inspiration and imagery, and thought I would share this on the off chance that someone else might be curious . (If anyone has better images of the bridge, feel free to post them/a link in comments - those were the best I could find with a quick search, but they are very dated.)

Jim Downey

OK, I’m a little less than halfway through the audio files that I’ve written about recently. Listening to the production is really compelling for me, perhaps moreso than it will be for most people, meaning that I get little else done when the thing is on.

Any good artist brings their own interpretation and understanding to their material, whether it is visual, performance, or written. That’s what Scot Wilcox has done with Communion of Dreams. His performance of the text adds something, even for me - and I have been listening to those voices in my head for well-on a decade now. I think that you will also find that it brings another layer to the book, and I would like to encourage all those who have already read the book to download the audio files (they should be available on my site later today). Naturally enough, there will be plenty of people who are introduced to Communion of Dreams by the audio book first, and I think that’s great - feel free to burn copies of the discs to share (it takes 12 CDs). Or if you want to pass along the MP3 files, that’s fine too (just be warned that the files are very large - it took us overnight to upload them to my host.) Scot has explicitly given me permission to share the performance freely.

So, check the site, tell your friends.

Jim Downey

I’m also interested in human culture, what we do, where we have been, what we have left behind. Ruins are windows into human histories, they tell tales of the past through the architecture and things left behind. Memories are inscribed on the walls and in the discarded objects; the silent rooms and dust covered furniture recall moments when these places were occupied. Ruins are the containers of events played out, still vibrant and surprisingly alive with the memories of the past. These places are true living museums, preserving the past in its unpolished and raw form. The aging surfaces bear the etched marks of former times.

There is a layered meaning in these places, random pieces of a historic and social puzzle are clumped together, confused by years of decay. These ruins are an archaeology of our culture, they reveal unexpected artifacts of a past that seem distant and foreign. Archived in these ruins can be found the collective memories of a changed culture, the forgotten pieces of the past being preserved as if in a time capsule. Modern ruins exist in the fringe landscapes of our cities, places that were once hardwired to the center of the social and industrial infrastructure, place once the cutting edge of technology and manufacturing, now they have become faded shadows hidden behind cyclone fences on the outskirts, along old canals and abandon rail lines. They map an old system of industrial landscapes now encroached upon by office parks, expanding suburban sprawl and shopping malls.

That’s from the intro on Shaun O’Boyle’s site Modern Ruins, containing his photographic essays from numerous locations. Working primarily in black & white, his images capture the stark beauty of decay. It’s worth spending some time to explore his work.

I got directed to O’Boyle’s site via a thread on MeFi about his recent photos from the Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral. That set mostly covers artifacts from the Apollo Program era there at the KSC, but has other images from the NASA manned space program as well. I love this stuff, always have - and O’Boyle brings a nice artistic sensibility to capturing the images of these artifacts. The image of the Saturn V F-1 engines at the bottom of this page is one of the most iconic images from the early space era. When my finances are a little more stable I will have to order a couple of his prints to have, just for inspiration.

Arthur C. Clarke’s notion of “industrial archeology” has long intrigued me, and was one of the primary reasons that I included the character of Arthur Bailey in Communion of Dreams. Reading through O’Boyle’s writings about his interest in ruins, I can easily see him being just this kind of character - someone who brings a unique perspective on the subject of how our artifacts tell the story of our culture. Very interesting stuff.

Jim Downey

I have my doubts:

The canned cheeseburger - fast food in the wilderness.

The canned cheeseburger is sold under one of Katadyn’s best known brands, Trekking-Mahlzeiten, a subsidiary company that develops specialist ready-meals for the outdoor, expedition and extreme athlete markets.

The high tech hamburger has been developed for trekkers and the non-traditional metal wrapping reflects the Trekking-Mahlzeiten company ethos that its speciality meals should be easy to prepare and require only water to do so - simply throw the can into a water container over a fire, give it a minute or two, fish it out, open the lid, and eat. With a shelf life of twelve months without requiring refrigeration, the lightweight snack is the ideal fast food treat for the wilderness.

Hmm. Seems that it has been done before, as art. Oh, here’s pix of the real thing and someone eating it.

Ain’t technology grand?

Jim Downey

Via MeFi.

What do you visualize when I say “Hobbit”?

How about “Blade Runner”?

Chances are, in both cases you had a mix of images you thought of. But I would wager that you had at least one architectural image both times: of a ‘Hobbit Hole’ and of the Tyrell Corporation’s vast pyramid. In both cases the iconic images help to anchor us in an alternate reality, whether it is Tolkien’s Middle Earth or Ridley Scott’s dystopian LA of 2019. (I’m sorry to say I don’t remember how much description of architecture Philip K. Dick had in his novel from whence Blade Runner is drawn - mea culpa.)

Odd or (paleo-) futuristic architecture has been a common device to help create a sense of setting for SF and fantasy just about forever. Descriptions in text, or images used in movies, quickly communicate that the setting is something different than our everyday world. And even before you get into a book or movie this works. With a movie poster or a book cover the visual image of architecture can instantly convey something about content to the viewer, and when it is well done it both informs and intrigues, and can come to symbolize or summarize the entire story the director or author wishes to tell.

I use architecture this way in Communion of Dreams. There are descriptions of how the US Settlement Authority offices reflect the passive defenses of the chaos following the fire-flu, of how they also incorporate some elements of the new building technologies from space colonization. There are descriptions of the colonies themselves, and of the space stations (both old and new), not to mention Darnell Sidwell’s Buckminster Fuller style dome habitat. There are even descriptions of how homes have evolved somewhat, adapting to a more communal style and drawing on the resources of huge numbers of abandoned buildings.

But the book opens with a small research facility in the ‘buffalo commons‘ out on the Great Plains prairie. I don’t give a lot of description of the station in the book (perhaps that’s something I should change . . . hmm), but envision it as a small, modular unit which could be relocated easily if necessary. Perhaps something like this. Or this. Or even this.

Those are all from a Wired column by Rob Beschizza titled “Small and Fabulous: Modular Living as it Should Be.” (Via BoingBoing.) I can’t say that I would really want to live in any of the dozen designs profiled in the article - but I am a spoiled American in an 1883 Victorian home with about a dozen rooms. Realistically, most of the world lives in much smaller spaces. And when you start considering the cost of transporting materials and managing environmental controls in space, then some fairly radical changes will be necessary.

Architecture, like any art, is a reflection of the society which produces it. Of course, until an architectural style is widely adopted it cannot be said that it is representative of society. As interesting as the various modular homes in the Wired article are, I cannot imagine that they will become emblematic of our society anytime soon. But because of that, they’d be perfect for use in, say, a film adaptation of Communion of Dreams. I wonder what Peter Jackson will be up to once he is done overseeing the production of The Hobbit in 2011 . . .

Jim Downey

*This post previously ran at UTI last year. And while some of the personal details mentioned in it have changed - I did indeed keep that promise to tweak my manuscript, obviously, and things have continued to progress with my MIL - the sentiment is the same.

Jim D.

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This has been a hell of a day. Not as bad as some, perhaps, but as far as routine days go, not the sort you want to pop up often in the queue. It started with my mother-in-law being ill. Now, most adults know how a young child (either their own or one they’ve babysat) can be when sick. Think intestinal bug. Think explosive diarrhea, of the toxic/caustic variety. Poor kid doesn’t understand what’s going on, or how to best cope with their misbehaving body (if they are capable of that on their own yet). Then picture that not in a toddler, but in a 95-pound woman well into dementia before the effects of dehydration and fever kick in. Took my wife and I two full hours to get her and the bedroom cleaned up.

And then I was on deadline to write my final column for my newspaper. Yeah, my *final* column. My decision, and if I want to go back the paper will be glad to have me. But because of the demands of care-giving, I could not adequately keep up with the art scene in my community (what I wrote about - weird to see that in the past tense). And I was feeling a little burned out with it as well. But still, closing off that particular chapter of my life was somewhat poignant.

So it’s been a day. Which is all just prelude to explaining that one of the refuges I seek after such a day is one of my “regulars”. Typically, it’s Twain, likely his Roughing It, which I have long considered some of his best and funniest work. But tonight, I turn to another old friend I never met: Carl Sagan, particularly his book Pale Blue Dot.

I’ve said before that I’m not a scientist. Which is perhaps why I don’t have some of the same quibbles that many scientists have with Sagan. But I really respect someone who can take scientific research and knowledge and present it in a form an intelligent layperson can understand. Stephen Jay Gould could do that for me. PZ Myers does it for me. So does Carl Zimmer. I could name others, but these are people I respect. In that same way, I really respected Carl Sagan, who I knew more as an author than as the host of of the PBS series, most of which I missed in its initial broadcast. Sagan helped introduce me to whole areas of science I had never considered before, and his considerable human decency in his atheism helped me understand that my own misgivings about religion were not an indication that I was lacking in morals or ethics.

So it was that when I started to write my first novel, Communion of Dreams (unpublished - yeah, yeah, I know I need to finish tweaking the mss and send it out again), I set most of the action on Saturn’s moon Titan, as a tribute to Sagan. Sagan had formulated a theory as to the nature of Titan’s atmosphere (that it contained a complex hydrocarbon he called “tholin”) which accounted for the rusty-orange coloration of the moon. His theories were pretty well borne out by the Huygens probe, by the way, though he didn’t live long enough to know this.

So tonight, on the tenth anniversary of his death, on a day when I’ve been through my own trials, I will nonetheless raise a glass, and drink a wee dram of good scotch to the memory of Carl Sagan. And I’ll promise myself, and his memory, that I’ll get that manuscript tweaked and published, if for no other reason than to honor him.

Here’s to Carl: Sorry you had to leave so soon.

Jim Downey

Multiple friends sent me notes about the auction of J.K. Rowling’s Tales of Beedle the Bard, which sold at auction yesterday for almost $4 million, proceeds of which are going to charity. This was undoubtedly because the book touches on a number of my interests and profession - if you haven’t seen the thing yet, it is worth looking at. Rowling created seven copies of the book, writing and illustrating the text herself.

Unfortunately, but not terribly surprisingly, I have yet to find any mention of who did the binding work, or created the silver bosses and clasp used. The artisans who executed this work did a fine job, based on what I’ve been able to tell from the images available, and it would be nice to see at least some acknowledgment of them.

There is already some discussion of the “value” of the book, as an artifact, due to the price it sold for. And that is understandable, since $4 million is a chunk of change, and most authors, artists and artisans will never see their work command such a price. I have been involved in many projects of this nature, creating custom bindings of personal texts, or very limited editions, or a commemorative binding. And never has my work commanded more than a few hundred dollars. I’d be willing to bet the same was the case with the remuneration paid to the artisans who did the binding for these seven copies of Beedle. And certainly J.K. Rowling doesn’t command millions for her calligraphy or illustration work, as nice as it is.

So, why the price? Reports indicate that it was expected that the book would auction for something on the order of $100,000. What caused the book to sell for 40 times that amount?

Well, it is likely that it was a unique combination of events. Most of all, J.K. Rowling’s reputation meant that the sale would attract attention. No doubt Amazon.com (and Jeff Bezos) felt that the purchase would be well worth it, just in terms of the free publicity and good will that it would generate for the company. And the money was going to charity, so that doesn’t hurt. Chances are, if someone who owns one of the other six copies of this book were to put it up for sale privately, it would not attract that kind of money - not at this time, anyway. In another generation or two, it is likely that whenever one of these books is sold it’ll fetch quite a high price.

Because that is how these things work. Initially, there is surprise - but over the long term the thing which will be remembered is that the first book sold for millions. With only seven original copies, each one will be seen as precious - purely because one already sold at auction for millions. Whether she meant to do so or not, J. K. Rowling has just made the other owners of these books (or at least their heirs) wealthy. I hope they each get a decent insurance policy and a fireproof safe.

Jim Downey