October 31, 2002 – Halloween

Worse is better.

Tanjit. I wanted to get into the habit of writing journal entries that aren’t responses to other journal entries, but I read this bleat from Lileks and was desperate to post a link. It deals with several wonderful magical facets of music.

Anyvay. I spent most of last night watching a tape of Eddie Izzard, a transvestite British comedian who manages to weave a hilarious two-hour routine out of historical analysis. He even manages to pull in some religious history and make it funny (“For example, you couldn’t have the Spanish Inqusition in the Church of England. You just can’t have extreme viewpoints there. It’d be like, ‘Confess!’ ‘But it hurts!’ ‘Oh, I’m sorry; loosen it up a bit, will you?'”).

I suppose I was surprised at this because I’m used to modern stand-up comedy, which pretty much comes down to either: Isn’t modern city life funny? or Isn’t $#@%ing modern city life $#@%ing funny? And you take your pick of modern social issues: racism, crime, politics. But that’s all there is; we can’t make fun of life in the 1950’s, perhaps partially because people don’t know much about the 1950’s. There’s no context.

…And tanjit again. I’m ranting. I really didn’t want to rant.

I think I’ll stop now until I have something more constructive to write.

>Writing Thoughts

I wrote a bit last night. Nothing much, just for half an hour or so. But so far I’ve written almost two full pages, single-spaced, of the first bit in this serial story idea I’ve had. And that feels good. I’m writing again. And it’s decent prose, or at least, better prose than I’d feared it would be.

The title for either the series as a whole or this bit of it (I haven’t decided which yet) is Seeing Things Invisible, from a quote by Jonathan Swift: “Vision is the art of seeing things invisible.” It’s a good metaphor for the mindset of these characters, all politicians of various sorts. They see the things invisible every day.

This bit I’ve written is a simple introduction, a description of one character’s entrance to the city and introduction to his new home, as an Ambassador to the High Court of Suranta. The whole passage is dramatically uninteresting, as it’s all set-up with no purpose. I’m simply describing the carriage ride, his entrance to the house, and the servants. It’s a reasonable prologue to the main story, but that’s about all it’s worth.