wintermute.com.au

Travel Log II

05January2011 [personal]
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• In Salisbury to catch up with cousins, and for a little downtime to get myself into the idea of establishing a routine. My time here is all reading and writing and wandering around the old city.
• Loved Iain M Banks’ Inversions (amazon), but I recall trying to read it years ago and not really getting it; at the time, I’d not read any of his other novels, and was trying to read it as fantasy, but it actually should be read as science fiction, and is dependent on the context provided by having read some of his other Culture novels; without that context it’s fairly average, but with the context it’s great — a very unusual way of reading
• Margaret Atwood’s Year of the Flood (amazon) is shaping up to be the book Oryx and Crake (amazon) should have been; Oryx and Crake was great post-apocalyptic fiction, but really poor science fiction, and because much of the story centered around a scientist, was let down by a terrible grasp of science; Atwood is best when dealing with the human and societal implications of a scenario though (hence why, I imagine, she prefers to call her work simply speculative fiction), and at a third of the way through Year of the Flood, the scientific references cause me to cringe but don’t have any great bearing on the book itself, which is driven by some great characters instead
• Picked up some new music before leaving home, including albums containing the three songs of The Factual Opinion’s Top 10 of 2010 that I didn’t have (The National’s High Violet (iTunes/amazon), Sleigh Bells’ Treats (iTunes/amazon), LCD Soundsystem’s This Is Happening (iTunes/amazon); also grabbed Marty Brown’s (of TFO) 100 strong 2010 mixtape; the albums are all excellent additions to the collection; the mixtape I’m only part-way through yet, but it’s interesting to say the least; The Factual Opinion is well worth tracking for their reviews and commentary on popular culture
• Also bought the soundtrack to The Fountain (iTunes/amazon), and have listened to it repeatedly; it’s an absolutely beautiful symphony, and as evocative as the film
• The weather here is odd, with light snowfall even on relatively warm days, the snow melting as it hits the ground; the sun is equally strange, showing up for only a few hours a day, so by late evening my body is telling me it’s bedtime; have not really suffered from jetlag though, nor found the cold too troublesome
• Started thinking about the book again yesterday, with some time set aside over the next few days for “research”, aiming to develop some context for the story’s 19th century setting, which is still fairly undefined in my head; I still catch myself with surprise when I realise I’m actually writing this thing…

This is wintermute.com.au, by Peter M Howard, film and web geek.

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