Walter Jon Williams's Blog, page 20

The Beginning of History

Ħaġar Qim

So now we get to the chief reason I wanted to go to Malta in the first place: to view the gigantic stone monuments found on the island.

There is nothing like them anywhere else. They were built out of the local limestone roughly 3500-2500 BCE— before the Pyramids, before Stonehenge. They are right smack at the beginning of history. Until the recent discovery of Göbekli Tepe in Turkey, these were believed to be the oldest freestanding monuments in the world.

I have a deep fa...

Innovator

A monument to the inventor of the minidress.

Co-Cathedral

A sight of St. John’s cathedral in Valetta is enough to sear the eyes right out of your skull. The style adopted for the interior was Go-For-Baroque, with enough gold, marble, and brilliant color to rival a fever dream of John of Patmos (as opposed to John the Baptist, for whom the cathedral is actually named).

St. John’s is also a co-cathedral, which was a new term for me. When Valetta was built in the late 1500s along with its new cathedral, Malta already had a cathedral in Mdina, t...

Behind the Walls

Superyacht Bastion

First, an update. Kathy’s finally come home after 13 days in COVID jail in a hotel room in Malta. And I’ve got a cold, which tests insist isn’t COVID, so two cheers for me.

But enough of the depressing stuff. Let’s talk about the good things.

We spent a few days on Malta before Kathy fell ill, and we had a chance to scout around. Valetta is a walled city, with a profusion of gates, bastions, and forts made of pale limestone that turns gold in the setting sun. ...

Well Damn

The world has lost Tina Turner. She had a career that lasted over 50 years and even in the new millennium she was still one of the hardest-working acts in the business. (She danced for how many hours? And in those heels?)

Here she is at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1989, doing an unrehearsed version of “River Deep, Mountain High” with some unexpected faces in her backup band.

And here’s a bonus video of Tina singing with a lifelong pal.

Okay, so now Youtube isn’t al...

Worst. Trip. Ever.

After 24 hours in planes and airports I’ve returned from the Med, jetlagged, miserable, in considerable pain, and without Kathy. This trip sucked.

Bad luck struck on my first day in Valetta, when I tripped on a marble stair and seriously damaged my right knee. The heavy frames on my sunglasses blocked my view of my own feet, and I didn’t realize the stairway had an extra step right under my feet. I landed heavily on my right foot, and the shock went to my knee. The rest of the day I wa...

Cast Ashore

So after 30 hours in airports and aircrafts, we finally washed up on the shores of Malta.  

Here is a photo of Valetta Harbor at night, taken from our hotel.

Valetta was named after Jean Parisot de la Valette, Grand Master of the Knights of St. John, who defended the island during the Ottoman siege. Valette is probably more famous as a reputed ancestor of my character Drake Maijstral. 

Royalty

Tapisserie de Bayeux – Scène 55 : le duc Guillaume se fait reconnaître.

There’s an indescribable something about being stuck somewhere, waiting for the plane to arrive, and having nothing to watch but a horror film which I thought at first was Invasion of the Frog-Faced Chinless People, but which turned out to be the coronation of Charles III of the United Kingdom.

I am not by any stretch a monarchist, but I watched in the same spirit with which I always watch the peculiar ceremonies of...

Malta Bound

In just a few hours we’re going to be flying off for another archaeo-maritime adventure. After something like 20 hours in planes and airports, we’ll arrive on the island republic of Malta. After a couple days to recover from jet lag, we’ll be getting on a smallish boat to visit Tangier and circumnavigate Sicily.

As with our trip to the Greek islands last year, this trip is organized by the American Institute of Archaeology, so we’ll have our own archaeologist to show us around, from ...

Quenelles!

So the other night I had some friends over for a Spring Feast. Starters were cappelletti stuffed with chicken, cheese, and herbs, served with a lemon-cream sauce and asparagus. Chief protein was sous vide leg of lamb, served with a chickpea salad with vegetables, herbs, and mint.

Dessert we never got to. Too full even to think about it.

In making the cappelletti I ran out of pasta before I ran out of the stuffing, so a few nights later I decided to make a meal of the leftovers. ...