I am using Hallowe’en as an excuse for a few more spiderweb shots, and in the next few cobweb posts, what you’ll be seeing is spider silk as a delivery system for close-ups of drops of water. I had a luxury of choice on these, good light and good conditions, and all the time in the world to contort myself around fences and other such obstructions. That I ended up uploading less than a hundred good shots is something of a miracle.
Here’s one… enjoy, and happy Friday!
Sherlock has begun airing on PBS and, like practically everyone else whose opinion I’ve heard, I loved it. I thought Martin Freeman and Benedict Cumberbatch were brilliant, I liked the script, and everything else I could squee about would be so very spoilery. I cannot wait for the next one.
Before SHERLOCK, Masterpiece aired S2 of Wallander, featuring little Kenny Branagh in the title role–remember when he was just that Henry Five guy?–as a deeply emo Swedish detective. These mysteries may not have the crackling struck-by-lightning appeal of Sherlock, but they’re good stories, well directed, with intrusive-but-nifty camera work and a stunning color palette. They offer a bit of a peek into another society (as filtered through British TV) and have good casts and solid enough mysteries.
There are many inappropriate humor moments to be had on this show, though. Wallander himself is precisely the sort of basket case that brings out a certain heartlessness in me. There’s been lots of Pause and Heckle: “Dude, if you’re so busy being upset that you don’t pay your bills, don’t go crying to me, in the dark, when the power company cuts off your juice. And, man, could you have said something dumber and more hurtful to your daughter? Hey, bummed out guy, why the uber-peppy ringtone?”
Seriously, the guy needs a nanny.
Wallander’s excuse might be that he appears to be the only competent cop in his particular unit: the others, as far as I can tell, have taken a full course of Useless Pills and a precautionary run of Huh? Boosters. They don’t help when he’s in danger, they barely blink when he goes all “Hey! People are dying, OMG, I’m so upset!” No, they shrug, dump unwanted boxes in his office and order pizza. No wonder he’s stressed out!
(Wallander’s obvious slash interest, as played by Richard McCabe, is Competent and Cares, but he’s a forensics guy, and thus his reach is limited.)
Humor aside, I definitely want to see the first season of this.
My review of Marie Brennan’s A Star Shall Fall is up at Tor.com; Marie, you might remember, also did a Journey interview here a while back.
In related news, my Quantum Leap rewatch on “Another Mother” is also up at Tor.com.
The past couple of days it has been pouring rain in torrents, very chilly and dark, the kind of rain where you might as well be swimming, and so I sensibly spent most of yesterday indoors, working either at my desk or reading by the fire.
This hibernation weather that tends to trigger nesting urges, so on the weekend I bought a new set of very soft cotton sheets and a microfleece blanket.
I’ve been looking through my cobweb photos from Burnaby Lake, all of which, incidentally, are spider free. It’s all threads and plants and water drops. There were so many I had to divide the upload into two batches, one of fragments and close-ups, another of whole webs, like this one.
A web, I can’t help noticing, is work. It’s a finished thing, purchased with life and effort. The orb weavers eat their webs each night and spin them anew in the early hours of the day, I’ve read. And I’ve been thinking about that as I look at the pictures, and simultaneously work through a bit of teaching work. I am in the early stages of Creating Universes, Building Worlds, which is the first UCLA class I ever developed. It’s a short fiction workshop, all SF/F/H, and the thing that stands out about my current group is how well read they are. I’ve had classes that know from Asimov and Bradbury, Herbert and Rowlings… and almost nobody else. But this month I’m hearing them talk about Marion Zimmer Bradley and Kelley Eskridge, too, Octavia Butler and Charlie Stoss and Elizabeth Bear, people from all over the genre map. It’s exciting; I can’t wait to see what they come up with as their stories develop.
In the winter–which means January–I am teaching Novel II again and come spring it’ll be Novel III, the latter for the first time. My mind is full of teacher stuff for all three courses: interesting challenges for the Creating Universes folks, what do I want to do better with the Novel II class (last time I taught it was my first, so there’s lots thought and feedback and potential tweaking), and how do I want to structure Novel III?
I work on one class, set up another plan a third. Different cycles, no web-eating, less easily quantified results, but it’s perhaps not a wholly unrelated process.
Happy Monday, everyone! If you are looking for a distraction, consider heading over to Favorite Thing Ever, where I am all abwee with love for Neal Stephenson’s eco-thriller Zodiac
Kelly tells you about the delightful The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagun.
photo by Kristy Boyce
The Color of Paradox
The Cage