“I know that I have died before-once in November.”*
And here we are, All Saints' Day. Or el Día de los Muertos. Choose your poison. For me, it is the first day of winter. Or, if you live in Alabama, the first day of the rainy season. And yet, it did not rain. Mostly sunny, are our high was 55F, after an overnight low of 31F. No more open windows late into the evening.
I somehow slept from 11 p.m. until almost 7 a.m. without even getting up to piss. I never do this. It might have been my body dealing with the flu vaccine. But it left me disoriented. I managed to edit what I wrote yesterday and begin the next "Interlude," but nothing to write home about. Oh, every two or three chapters in The Night Watchers there's an "interlude," which jumps back a decade or two or three, which I have found gives the novel a dimension it desperately needed, but was missing. I am aiming for an 80k-word manuscript.
Today, I talked with Mike P. and then to folks at the Peabody Museum at Yale, and they've generously extended my loan on the holotype of Ectenosauus tlemonectes by another six months, as Mike and I want to conduct a 3D surface scan of the specimen for three-dimensional morphometric data collection and illustration, and also to CT scan the braincase elements in order to collect data on the vascularization and bony labyrinth of the neurocanium. Among other things, this work should allow us to produce a virtually reassembled/rearticulated image of the specimen's entirely disarticulated skull. This work should yield a second, shorter paper on the specimen. It's a far more technical sort of paleontology than I have ever done.
Last night, to celebrate Halloween Kathryn and I watched It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown (1966), followed by Francis Ford Coppala's superb Bram Stoker's Dracula (1992). I call it superb, because Gary Oldman, Anthony Hopkins, Tom Waits, and Sadie Frost, along with the art direction, costuming, special effects, makeup effects, music, and cinematography are more than enough to compensate for Keanu Reeves' bizarre performace and Winona Ryder's very uneven one. Truly, if I could ask one question of Coppola is would be, man, what the fuck were you thinking, casting Keanu Reeves as Jonathan Harker?
I may actually try to work on The Night Watchers tonight, after Kathryn goes to bed.
Please visit the Dreaming Squid Sundries shop. Treat yourself to something cool.
* Anne Sexton
Later Tater Bugs,
Aunt Beast
8:56 a.m.
I somehow slept from 11 p.m. until almost 7 a.m. without even getting up to piss. I never do this. It might have been my body dealing with the flu vaccine. But it left me disoriented. I managed to edit what I wrote yesterday and begin the next "Interlude," but nothing to write home about. Oh, every two or three chapters in The Night Watchers there's an "interlude," which jumps back a decade or two or three, which I have found gives the novel a dimension it desperately needed, but was missing. I am aiming for an 80k-word manuscript.
Today, I talked with Mike P. and then to folks at the Peabody Museum at Yale, and they've generously extended my loan on the holotype of Ectenosauus tlemonectes by another six months, as Mike and I want to conduct a 3D surface scan of the specimen for three-dimensional morphometric data collection and illustration, and also to CT scan the braincase elements in order to collect data on the vascularization and bony labyrinth of the neurocanium. Among other things, this work should allow us to produce a virtually reassembled/rearticulated image of the specimen's entirely disarticulated skull. This work should yield a second, shorter paper on the specimen. It's a far more technical sort of paleontology than I have ever done.
Last night, to celebrate Halloween Kathryn and I watched It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown (1966), followed by Francis Ford Coppala's superb Bram Stoker's Dracula (1992). I call it superb, because Gary Oldman, Anthony Hopkins, Tom Waits, and Sadie Frost, along with the art direction, costuming, special effects, makeup effects, music, and cinematography are more than enough to compensate for Keanu Reeves' bizarre performace and Winona Ryder's very uneven one. Truly, if I could ask one question of Coppola is would be, man, what the fuck were you thinking, casting Keanu Reeves as Jonathan Harker?
I may actually try to work on The Night Watchers tonight, after Kathryn goes to bed.
Please visit the Dreaming Squid Sundries shop. Treat yourself to something cool.
* Anne Sexton
Later Tater Bugs,
Aunt Beast
8:56 a.m.