The 4:00am perspective

Migraine at 4:00am changes your perspective on ... everything. The world seems to change shape and color; nothing looks the same. It can be very surreal indeed, and the strangest thoughts flitter through your malfunctioning brain. I don't often write poetry these days (used to!) but this came to me:

Hmm. That's not bad. I also popped it onto facebook...

Note to self: write more poetry. Not necessarily after migraine.

Apologies to any who might be following this blog: we took a few weeks out in October for a long-awaited and much-needed vacation. A lot less has been posted here lately than would normally have been, since you tend to arrive home late, tired out and just wanting an easy meal and an hour or two's drool in front of the tv.  (And I still have to sort the photos from that vacation!)

But one at least I'd like to share here:

The lens flare is gorgeous in this ... and the shot was captured after the lens was thoroughly cleaned. I love the colors this flare has adopted. (Am signing off on any images I upload to facebook every time I remember to, since I was told facebook can actually heist your pictures for their own use. O...kay. If they're going to do that, let's make sure there's a credit on the pictures, right? Right.)

The Eternal Tourist

Sailing to Byzantium by Robert Silverberg

Some novellas deserve to be full novels, and Sailing to Byzantium is one of them. Robert Silverberg wrote this cross-genre jewel -- a mix of SF, fantasy, time travel, romance and mystery -- in 1984 and, deservedly, it won the Nebula Award. The real mystery is why it hasn’t been filmed, because it has the makings of a gloriously visual movie, especially in this age of CG effects.  

The other mystery is why Silverberg took an immense story which touches on so many subjects, and invested only a novella’s length in it. The plot is simple enough, but the world he explores in a scant 40k words remains arresting over 30 years since the Nebula was awarded.

In the fiftieth century, the world as we know it is gone (no surprise there), and the homogenized descendents of humanity are a comparative handful of functional immortals: physically perfect, they are masters of a magical technology which enables them to live as what one can only term ‘eternal tourists,‘ forever traveling from one fantastic city to another. The rub is this: every city is a recreation of one of history’s great metropolises, raised from dust by legions of machines, permitted to exist for a short time then demolished, no doubt to be cannibalized for the materials to build another. All the great cities of history are being recreated, five at a time (the limit is firmly imposed, no reason given), and the immortal citizens of the fiftieth century simply travel, party, enjoy, socialize, and generally have a great time among the grandeur and the teeming populations of ‘temporaries,’ who appear to be androids whisked into existence to complete the illusion of Alexandria, or Chang-An, or Constantinople itself.

Only a tiny percentage of the human population don’t enjoy the eternal lifestyle. One in a thousand, or perhaps ten thousand, still grow old. After an extended youth, when the aging comes on them, they age rapidly. Such is Gioia, the lovely young thing with whom Charles Phillips falls in love. And Charles himself is the other, and even rarer, anomaly. He’s a ‘visitor’ in the future: synthetic body and mind, machine-designed and built to bring the past to vibrant life for the entertainment (and perhaps the education) of the citizens, who -- by our standards -- often seem callow, and occasionally even moronic.

Charles isn’t the only visitor, but there’s barely a handful like him, constructs drawn from whatever century. Being synthetic, he’s a misfit, greater than the ‘temporaries’ but lesser than the citizens. Gioia is drawn to him as like is drawn to like: she also is a misfit, doomed to age with an incurable genetic condition. When the rapid aging begins she flees, and as Charles literally pursues her around the world, city to city, he discovers what he is. Not a twentieth century man at all; not even a naturally-born human … something more, he decides, not less. Being synthetic, he is as timeless as the physically perfect (and intellectually somewhat dense) citizens; but what of Gioia, who is aging alarmingly. What can be done for her, amid this kaleidoscope of incredible technology?

The prose is stylish and rich and the world building tantalizing. If Sailing to Byzantium were double or triple the length, properly fleshed out and with the panoply of amazing concepts fully explored, it would make a novel today’s reader would deem awesome. At 40k words, it seems oddly abbreviated, in places thin to the point of anorexia. Silverberg has remarked on how the novella is a format he likes a great deal, and he clearly had a fine time here. But the material demanded, and deserved more.

Nebula Award notwithstanding, and as much as I adore Robert Silverberg, I want to give Sailing four stars rather than five, because it surely needed more growth, more investment, just more, to work truly brilliantly. It might have read better in 1984. Current readers -- in this age of hundred-episode sagas on tv and book series running many thousands of pages -- are seldom satisfied when thematic material is underdone. Sailing has a ‘rare’ quality, perfect on the outside but a tad too pink in the middle to suit all tastes. Which isn’t to say I don’t love this story -- I do! But my imagination runs away on flights of creative fantasy, filling in the blanks and building the sumptuous, thick novel I wish Robert Silverberg has written.

Virus: 7, Jen: 0

The post title really does tell all. Turns out, I have plenty of immunity to the local strains of virus, but when a bug comes in from overseas ... wham! No immunity whatsoever. Have been laid low for a few days with a very nasty "stomach wog," as we'd say here. Call it what you will, the effects are the same. Am just beginning to lurch back to my feet, so ...

It's this time of year in South Australia:

Springtime -- October -- and the hills dress up yellow and purple with two kinds of weed. The brilliant yellow is Cape Daisy, aka Cape weed, Cape dandelion, Cape marigold etc.  -- native to Natal and Lesotho, in South Africa. The purple is "Salvation Jane," native to England, which we were told very recently is utterly toxic to livestock, since it produces a neurotoxin when eaten by mammals. Hmm. Here, we see paddocks of cattle grazing happily and safely in the midst of this biohazard, so ... go figure. It's either a neruotoxin or ... it ain't. And I have no answer for you today. Must look into this.

At any rate, the landscape is very beautiful, a mix of green and gold and purple. These shots were taken on the road to Rapid Bay. We're enjoying traveling around the local region with Anna, who's here from the US east coast, for a few weeks' vacation downunder. Aha! That's how the salien strain of virus got in, right? Right!

If life gives you lemons --

Lemon butter, to an old family recipe off the interwebs...

1 cup of lemon juice

1 cup of raw sugar

2 large free range eggs, plus

2 extra yolks (keep the whites for meringue)

100g of unsalted butter (err on the side of generosity)

Cut the butter into cubes and microwave for 3 seconds in a ramekin, to melt it. Add it to the sugar, in a big mixing bowl, and beat the mix with electric beaters for about a minute. Add the eggs and yolks, and beat for for another minute. Add in the lemon juice and stir through the mixture -- at this point, it'll look "curdled," as the cold lemon juice actually solidifies the butter. Don't worry; it'll melt back in when it's on the heat.

Add the mixture to a saucepan on a low heat and stir constantly, juuuust till you see the first bubbles. Pour the lemon butter into sterilized mason jars and refrigerate.

Serve with cookies, on toast or crumpets, add to waffles and pancakes. Make pastry shells, fill them with the lemon butter and top with meringues. Yum!

A kilo of lemon butter and a dozen tarts. Nice!