Walter Jon Williams's Blog, page 8

Packed

Among all the outstanding works I saw at the Corning Museum, this was one of the most impressive. Outwardly a modest genre painting, this turns out not to be a painting at all, but a mosaic— a micromosaic, to be specific.

The picture is made up of thousands of tiny glass rods bundled together and standing on end. There are 1400 rods per square inch, all assembled by hand. (Some works had as many as 5000)

Were I condemned to make a work like this, I’d be raving mad within a day.

Up the Pole

So here I am in Cambridge in 1987, punting along behind the Cambridge Backs. I hadn’t punted in 12 years, but my skills (such as they were) came back quickly enough, and I hardly collided with anything at all. It was nice the the river had a gravel bottom, unlike the muck at the bottom of the Isis in Oxford, and so the river never tried to snatch the pole out of my hands.

On this trip I taught Melinda Snodgrass to punt, and she soon was poling along like a pro. We were on our way to t...

Elevator Games

Another Banksy rat, this one found in the elevator of the Fenimore Museum.

I admit I don’t know what the hell is going on here, The rat seems to have a cassette recorder strapped to his chest, and his face is— exploding?— undergoing transformation? His paintbrush(?) also seems to have suffered.

Your guess is as good as mine.

Wave Action

This is a photograph of the 2012 solar eclipse in the South Pacific. We were on a ship a couple days’ voyage north of New Zealand, and it was following the track of totality across the water.

Unfortunately the sea wasn’t completely still. I had set the camera for a long exposure, the ship rolled, and I ended up with this photo of a mostly-eclipsed sun doing a mad dance across the sky.

I managed some more successful photos which I posted elsewhere.

On the Table

Some of you should recognize this. It’s at the Corning Museum of Glass.

I’d ask something like “what is this?”, but it would open the doors to floods of Cyrillic spam, so it’ll have to remain a mental exercise.

The answer later.

Age of Wonders

It’s the Tower of Pyrex! At the Corning Museum.

Shoveling It

In my last post, I mentioned that much of my life consists of dealing with bullshit, stuff that matters so little that there’s no sense of challenge or accomplishment in coping with it.

Let’s take last week as an example.

Firstly there was a cold snap, that climaxed on a full-on winter storm that knocked out the power and drenched the tree limbs in many inches of heavy, wet snow. We have three large elm trees on our property, and four big limbs came down, one hitting a corner of th...

Love in the Wainscot

I’ve posted only a few times in the last months, which is an indication of how exciting my life has become. I bounce between two poles, Pain and Duty, and I don’t much care to write about either. Pain is always there, and Duty isn’t even interesting— it’s mostly being obliged to do stuff that doesn’t matter, that will be forgotten in days or weeks or months. The tasks are meaningless, which means there’s no sense of accomplishment on completion, just a sense that I’ve dug my way a little...

No Accident

The Accidental War, the first book of the latest Praxis trilogy, is on sale through November 18 at Amazon for a mere $1.99. So far as I can see, the other online vendors have matched this price, so you can get it from your favorite online source.

For those of you unfamiliar with the series, here’s a brief recap:

Blending fast-paced military science fiction and space opera, the first volume in a dynamic trilogy from the New York Times bestselling author of The Praxis, set in the unive...

Palomar

This is the mirror blank for the Hale Telescope at Mt Palomar. It doesn’t look like a mirror because it hasn’t been silvered and polished.

This 5-meter, 36-ton disk was cast at the Corning Glass Works in 1934, and is made of their brand-new miracle glass, Pyrex. The hot glass caused part of the frame so soften, with parts of it floating up into the hot Pyrex, and the mirror was cracked and ruined.

A second minor was successfully cast and is still in use at Mt. Palomar. This first mir...