Marie Brennan's Blog, page 143

A Year in Pictures – Highgate East in Ivy

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This is from the eastern portion of Highgate Cemetery . . . which is ostensibly the less overgrown part of the site. And indeed, there are large portions of East that are perfectly well maintained — but get off the main paths, and you soon find yourself in a wonderland of headstones and ivy.

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A Year in Pictures – Zakopane Jesus

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I had to resist the urge to title this one “Bored Jesus Is Bored.” Apparently this sculptural motif is actually called “Contemplative Christ,” but man, he just looks tired and disappointed to me. Anyway, this is one of the graves in Peksow Brzyzek in Zakopane, and as you can see, it isn’t your standard Western headstone. (Also, I am exceedingly fond of the moss.)

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We All Fall Down

After the Napa quake a little while ago, I found myself curious. I’ve known for a while that the Hayward Fault in the East Bay stands a decent chance of tearing loose in a big way. If I’m still here when that happens, how bad will it be? What will it feel like for me, on the other side of the Bay? How will that compare to what I felt during the Napa quake? (How frightened am I likely to be?)

If reading about destruction from earthquakes is likely to upset you, don’t go behind the cut.

My curiosity led me to the Mercalli scale, which I hadn’t heard of before. The Richter scale is the one everybody knows; it’s a fairly precise measurement of how much energy was released during a quake. But a 6.0 quake feels very different when you’re sitting on top of the epicenter vs. when you’re fifty miles away. The Mercalli scale is a much more subjective assessment of how bad the shaking is in a given location, and as such, there’s no single number for a particular event. It depends on where you are. Nor does it even vary regularly with distance from the epicenter: local geological conditions can mean that a spot quite nearby suffers less shaking than one much further away.

According to a map I found, my town was roughly at a 4 during the Napa quake. That sounds about right: some people woke up, some didn’t. There was some alarming rattling going on. But nothing broke, and I didn’t hear about any damage to buildings locally.

Okay. So what about the Hayward Fault?

Here’s your answer. Or rather, your answers: there are seven scenarios modeled there, varying in magnitude and epicenter, including one worst-case scenario where Hayward going also sets off the Rodgers Creek Fault to the north. (Fortunately, this one is much less likely.) The animation shows the Mercalli rating in each location via spreading waves of color.

Watching the videos is morbidly fascinating. The Peninsula gets off fairly lightly: in most scenarios the effect where I live doesn’t rise above a 6, and even in the worst case it’s maybe a 7. And a lot depends on where the epicenter is, but not necessarily in the ways you’d expect. San Jose actually fares better when the epicenter is nearby in Fremont than when it’s way off in San Pablo Bay — I presume because the effect proceeds along the line of the fault, which sends most of the energy away from San Jose if the epicenter is nearby. More distant epicenters are worse for Silicon Valley. But really, I’m less worried about them . . . because oh, Jesus, Oakland.

Take another look at the Mercalli scale. Pay attention to the colors. See those videos? See the spreading wave of blood red, shading into black? Those are the levels rated as Intense, Extreme, and Catastrophic. That’s the top of the scale. The worst of it never stays in one place for more than a second or so, but even a second will be enough to wreak enormous amounts of destruction. Yeah, sure, California is prepared for earthquakes — up to a point. Not everything has been retrofitted. And, like the levees in New Orleans, there’s a limit to how much our engineering can take before being overwhelmed. The Oakland Hills are screwed in pretty much any scenario: all those expensive houses are going to come tumbling down. Downtown Oakland will not fare well even under lesser stress. This is not idle rubbernecking for me; I have friends who live there. And even without that personal element, we’re looking at a devastating loss of property and life.

There are some things that can be done. Apart from the building codes that require certain standards on new construction and retrofitting on at least some old construction, there are also early-warning sensors that can help: they don’t give much advance notice, but even one second can be enough time for train drivers to hit the brakes, for safety switches to flip on gas lines so we don’t have uncontrollable fires in the aftermath. Mind you, we’d have to actually install systems like that before they could be useful to us. Which costs money, and that’s a hard political hurdle to clear — even though we know what the consequences will be if we don’t.

Any way you slice it, it’s gonna be bad. The most comfort I can take is in knowing that if I’m at home when it goes off, I’ll be safe compared to the East Bay.

Originally published at Swan Tower. You can comment here or there.

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A Year in Pictures – Circle of Lebanon

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This is one of the more famous bits of Highgate: the “Circle of Lebanon,” so named for the Cedar of Lebanon that stands atop the central part. It’s at the upper end of the “Egyptian Avenue,” and together those two areas form a rather spectacular display of Victorian funerary extravagance.

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A Year in Pictures – Zakopane Cross

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This is the third of the spectacular cemeteries I’ve been to. It’s the Peksow Brzyzek in Zakopane, Poland, a place which introduced me to a wild array of funerary monuments of a very different sort from the codified Victorian catalogue of motifs. (Among other things, many of the Peksow Brzyzek markers are vastly more recent.) It was actually difficult to photograph the place well, since everything is crammed together cheek-by-jowl, but you’ll see more of it as the month wears on. This height of this cross is not an artifact of the angle; it towered over everything around it except the trees, and gave those a run for their money. Those beads are a rosary necklace, if you need a comparison for scale.

Also, here again we have a splendid example of what Lightroom can do for you. The cross was rather backlit, but fiddling with the settings allowed me to bring out the carving on the front, which was otherwise lost in shadow.

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A Year in Pictures – Brompton Cross in Ferns

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Parts of Brompton Cemetery are nearly as overgrown as Highgate, but in a different way: fewer trees, more ferns. (And a wall that bids fair to win the award for Most Ivy Per Square Inch, which you will see later.) There were seas of underbrush to the sides of the main path, with headstones and crosses poking up, and some of the ferns orange with the season. I do not know if there are plans to try and clear the cemetery grounds and restore them to a more manicured state.

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A Tale of Two Leicas

It turns out that the reason I could only get the Leica V-Lux 4 from Austria was because they’ve discontinued it. And the reason they’ve discontinued it is because . . . there’s a new one out as of about, oh, yesterday.

On the left, my Leica V-Lux 2: not sure how old it is, but given that I’ve had it since 2011 and it was a hand-me-down from my mother who used it for some amount of time before that, let’s go with “elderly (in camera years)” and leave it at that. On the right, the V-Lux Typ 114, which is O_O shall we say a little bit larger.

I’m okay with this. I just didn’t realize how much larger it would be. Still nothing compared to my father’s setup, but his rig — body and lens — weighs about four pounds, which is way more than I ever want to carry around myself. This should be fine. I’m going to sit down with the instruction manual and learn how it works, including both the stuff the V-Lux 2 couldn’t do and the stuff the V-Lux 2 could do but I never actually learned it, and then I’m going to find an excuse to go photograph something dark just so I can cackle at what it’s like to have an up-to-date sensor that isn’t borderline at ISO 400 and useless above that.

Best thing? I called the Leica store in San Francisco yesterday to ask when the Typ 114 was going to be released, and the guy told me they’d arrived that morning. I thought about going to the city to pick it up, but it turned out that shipping would cost less than parking, would require zero effort on my part, and would have the camera to me today — way sooner than I could have gotten up there to claim it in person. Laziness for the win!

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Stories, stories, everywhere

A number of these things have been piling up:

“Daughter of Necessity” is live at Tor.com today! Some of you heard me read this at FOGcon this past spring; well, now it’s out in the world. With fabulous art by Ashley MacKenzie — seriously, it is gorgeous and amazingly appropriate to the story and not a spoiler. Which is a remarkable balance to strike.
I just got my contributor copies for Zombies: More Recent Dead , which includes a reprint of “What Still Abides.” (Shhhh, don’t tell Paula Guran that I used to refer to that as my Anglo-Saxon vampire story. It’s as much a zombie story as it is a vampire story, which is to say it isn’t really either, but you can read it both ways depending on the angle you tilt your head at.)
The anthology made from the first four issues of Mythic Delirium‘s online reboot won’t be out until November, but it’s gotten a starred review from Publishers Weekly, with a specific shout-out to my story “The Wives of Paris.”

(Now I feel like there ought to be five things. But at the rate I do (or don’t do) short fiction-related stuff these days, that would mean delaying even longer, which is silly.)

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A Year in Pictures – Moss-Covered Urn

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October will be a themed month, sort of — the theme is “October-ish stuff,” which is to say autumn color, cemeteries, and bones. (Only two photos of bones, if you’re put off by that sort of thing.)

To start us off, I have one of my favorite photos from my 2013 trip to England and France. This is a funerary urn in Highgate Cemetery, covered in a velvet layer of moss. I know all the growth on and around the monuments in Highgate is not good for them, and people are working to restore the ones that have been badly damaged . . . but of course the partially ruined state of the place constitutes a large part of its aesthetic appeal.

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A Year in Pictures – Bright Blue Beetles

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Today we are kicking it old-school, not just with another print scan, but with a photo from my oldest album. I thought I wasn’t interested in photography until I went to Costa Rica; then I realized I just needed to be in a place worth taking pictures of.

Or at least presented with beetles worth taking pictures of.

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