R. Harrison's Blog, page 38

January

William Carlos Williams

Again I reply to the triple winds

running chromatic fifths of derision

outside my window:

Play louder.

You will not succeed. I am

bound more to my sentences

the more you batter at me

to follow you.

And the wind,

as before, fingers perfectly

its derisive music.

 

Holidays

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

The holiest of all holidays are those

Kept by ourselves in silence and apart;

The secret anniversaries of the heart,

When the full river of feeling overflows;—

The happy days unclouded to their close;

The sudden joys that out of darkness start

As flames from ashes; swift desires that dart

Like swallows singing down each wind that blows!

White as the gleam of a receding sail,

White as a cloud that floats and fades in air,

White as the whitest lily on a stream,

These tender memories are;— a Fairy Tale

Of some enchanted land we know not where,

But lovely as a landscape in a dream.

Dartmoor Story.

This is the start of a story I’ve been working on that is set at a little farm near North Bovey. It’s set much later (1893) than my usual ones and has a strong science fiction backstory.

Uncle Sylvester Receives a Visitor.

It was nearly dark when the pony-trap carrying Elizabeth from the station at Moreton Hampstead finally arrived at the farm at Barnecourt. Venus, the evening star, shown brightly in the dull orange band of the western sky. She presaged a clear and starry night. Nobody noticed when she winked out and fell to Earth with a quick bright streak of light. George Trent, Dr. Standfast’s man-of-all-work, drove the trap to the front of a small farmhouse in the country not far from the isolated village of North Bovey on the outskirts of Dartmoor.

After stopping, he gently awakened his sleeping passenger, “Miss James? We’re here.”

Elizabeth James, a slight young woman, dark haired and pale, with the gentle slight cough of incipient consumption, stirred. Her parents had arranged for her to visit her uncle. He lived and practised in the country, and they all hoped that the fresh air would suit her lungs better than the stale smutty air of London. They had waved goodbye as she boarded a train in Paddington in the morning, her first step in the longest journey of her life. London, to Bristol, to Exeter, and then on the stopping train to the end of the line at Moreton Hampstead. There she was met by her uncle’s servant with a one-horse trap, and now, finally, she awoke in front of his house.

“We’re here?”

“Yes, Miss. Let me tie the horse and I’ll help you down.”

The clatter of their arrival brought Dr. Standfast to the door. Unusually tall, thin and surprisingly active for his sixty years, he shot out of the door and said, “Elizabeth! You’ve made it at last. How was your trip?”

Elizabeth replied, “Tiring.”

“I can see that, but are you feeling well. At least as well as can be?”

She gave a slight cough, and then said, “I think so.”

The cough made her uncle frown, “We’ll see what we can do about your cough.”

“If you can do anything, Uncle Standfast, it will be more than the doctors on Harley Street could.”

Her uncle walked to the trap and offered a hand to help her down, “You should call me Sylvester. Uncle Sylvester if you must. We’ll see, but I’m sure the fresh air and clean water of Dartmoor will help.”

How to get a good grade in my class.

The real world is sneaking in again. Oh well. Just finished a marathon of grading. Students might think my finals are hard. Grading 60 of them takes two days. My class was large enough that the university’s online grading system choked.

There is an extremely interesting correlation, and one that is very statistically significant. If you actually do the homework you tend to do well in class. This might not be causal, in that students who can’t do the homework can’t do the tests, but it is highly suggestive. Certainly a ‘head’s up’ would be that if you can’t do the homeworks then you probably should take some other class. Similarly if you’re too lazy to do the homework or it isn’t interesting to you, then maybe you shouldn’t be doing this.

We Wear the Mask

Paul Laurence Dunbar, 1872 – 1906

We wear the mask that grins and lies,

It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes,—

This debt we pay to human guile;

With torn and bleeding hearts we smile

And mouth with myriad subtleties,

Why should the world be over-wise,

In counting all our tears and sighs?

Nay, let them only see us, while

We wear the mask.

We smile, but oh great Christ, our cries

To thee from tortured souls arise.

We sing, but oh the clay is vile

Beneath our feet, and long the mile,

But let the world dream otherwise,

We wear the mask!

North Bovey.

Another travel post.

North Bovey is a small village in the Dartmoor national park. We hired a cottage there as a base of operations last summer. There’s a fancy high-class pub, the Ring of Bells, rated by Egon Ronay, but fortunately regular places are easy to reach either by walking or driving. (Since the roads are mostly one lane, even the A-roads, walking is a good idea). It is a fairly easy drive to the nearby town of  Mortenhampstead (M’hampstead on the street signs) where there are groceries (a co-op) and various diversions. The roads are tiny, even by English standards, so if you hire a car (and to be honest there’s no other way to get there), you do not want a big one.

The view from our bedroom.

M’hampstead from the footpath. It’s about a 2Km walk, and well worth it.

This goat skull, bolted to a tree and hidden from view, greets visitors.

Cosmopolite

Georgia Douglas Johnson, 1880 – 1966

Not wholly this or that,

But wrought

Of alien bloods am I,

A product of the interplay

Of traveled hearts.

Estranged, yet not estranged, I stand

All comprehending;

From my estate

I view earth’s frail dilemma;

Scion of fused strength am I,

All understanding,

Nor this nor that

Contains me.

More Birds.

Playing with my long (500mm) cheap mirror lens again. I set the shutter speed to 1/4000 (as fast as the Nikon will go) and let the auto-ISO handle the rest. It has a relatively fast f5.6 that cannot be changed.  The other caution to watch for is the T-mount. It can unscrew a little and loosen while the lens is on the camera if it isn’t in tight.  That will cause difficulty with focusing.

We have resident pelicans. They are supposed to be rare. Ours aren’t.

The herons perch on stumps out in our little branch of Lake Weiss.

The image quality isn’t perfect, but it could be a lot worse. Not sure how much is the lens and how much is the ISO/low light.

 

FrankenKitty 9 #wewriwar #amwriting

Frankenkitty
(Some assembly required)

Welcome to Weekend Writing Warriors.  This is a sample from my work in progress, “Frankenkitty”, and I hope you enjoy it.  It started out as a young-adult superhero book, and well, you’ll see. Last week, in the chapter, “The Gerbil from Hell,” the girls found a test subject. The trouble starts this week.

That evening, Jennifer persuaded her father to drop her off at Amber’s. She brought a cooled corpse, Bobby’s gerbil, fresh from the refrigerator. Mary was already there.

Amber said, “This is cray cray, you know.”

They followed the recipe from Dr. Frankenstein’s notes. The solution, a mixture of various things, was a viscous pink goo. Jennifer picked up ajar of it and said, “It doesn’t glow like the notes say; what did we do wrong?”

“We don’t have lightening,” Mary asked, “How can we finish the mixture?”

Amber smiled, then said, “Remember last year, when we built a coil?”

This is a work in progress. In other news, I’ve become a booktrope author, but more on that latter. It has meant a change in pen-name. The week before last week’s is here and you can read the whole last chapter if you’d rather.  I’ve added a sub-title “(some assembly required).”

I’m also looking for reviewers for my nearly ready book “The Curious Profession of Dr. Craven” It’s moved out of layout to final assembly. Although if you wait a few day’s (after the release)  I’ll have a rafflecopter where you can enter the review URL to win a prize.

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Altitude

Lola Ridge, 1873

I wonder

how it would be here with you,

where the wind

that has shaken off its dust in low valleys

touches one cleanly,

as with a new-washed hand,

and pain

is as the remote hunger of droning things,

and anger

but a little silence

sinking into the great silence.