Monthly Archives: May 2008

Primer

I just finished watching Primer online through the instant-view option at Netflix. I saw this film in a local theater about three years ago, when it played Portland briefly after making a splash at Sundance and winning some prizes. I was mightily impressed at the time and thought the movie would be worth seeing again someday.

It was. In fact, it looked and sounded better on my laptop than in the theater; it’s a movie with a very tight focus and is set almost entirely in close spaces, so it seems almost made for laptop viewing.

Highly recommended for anyone interested in successful first-time moviemaking (and some online interviews are available in which  writer/producer/director/cinematographer/composer/actor Shane Carruth talks about the process–oh, and his mom and dad did the catering). Also great for those interested in narrative complexity, time travel, or the morality of science. Don’t look for a tidy batch of exposition to explain the ending, but if you pay attention (as I was careful to do just now, seeing it for the second time) it comes together with a subtle but powerful wallop.

Morning discoveries

I went outside fairly early this morning to water the front garden. All of the plants and even trees needed it because of the sudden and severe heatwave that has afflicted the Pacific Northwest. After high temperatures that were well below seasonal averages for most of the past few months, we’ve had several consecutive days of record-setting highs. 95 on Friday–gah! Fortunately it is supposed to cool down tomorrow.

Two discoveries awaited me.

At the edge of our driveway I spotted one of the largest slugs I’ve seen in a long time, almost as long as my hand (fingers included) and robust, to boot. I find these guys fascinating; I watched it for a while and was happy to see that it was making its way at what might have been top slug speed off the concrete and toward the moist ground cover.

On one of the flagstone paths lay a small (significantly smaller than the slug) common mole, paws up, bearing no sign of violence or trauma, dead as a doornail. A lot of people despise these little insectivores. Perhaps, if I had a grass lawn, I wouldn’t be as fond of them as I am (a legacy of The Wind in the Willows?). But among our untidy masses of perennials and ground cover, the moles’ activities are neither unsightly nor irritating, and it’s fun to watch Xerxes stick his paw hopefully, but always in vain, down their holes when I take him out for walkies. Anyway, I buried the corpse at the side of the path, partly because it just seemed weird to see a mole aboveground and partly so that Xerxes won’t try to play with it later when we go out. Its fur, by the way, was astonishingly soft and silky–hence, I suppose, moleskin.

On another front, Zach has been in Italy since Wednesday morning and will return on the 29th. I am making good use of my precious solo time to get a lot of work done on the Human Evolution series. I’ve settled a number of organizational questions and have put together what I think is a first-class set of back matter (glossaries, time lines, “further reading” lists of good books and Web sites, etc.). These procrastinatory tactics aside, I am actually well into the writing, with every expectation of turning in the first two mss. by Zach’s return. Of course, I’m not doing much of anything but work, but that’s fine. It makes up for all the stretches of time when I do so little of it.

Read or Die

The past few weeks have been full of work.

I’ve been doing all the follow-up stuff (writing captions, reviewing page layouts, etc.) for the books I wrote from November through February. And then I’ve been writing the first book in my four-book series on human evolution; the series is now aimed at high-school age readers and called Origins. While writing, I realized with chagrin that I had been packing information that could be spread out over the entire series into volume one (which is “Earliest Ancestors to Australopithecines”). I took a few days away from writing to do a more detailed plan of the entire series–deciding, for example, in which volume I will put the various sidebars, including one I just wrote called “So You Want to Be a Fossil?” I also put together a Glossary that I can use in all four volumes. That should help me avoid unnecessary repetition.

But it hasn’t all been work. Oh, no. A well-meaning friend gave me a free month of Netflix. Actually, she’s my publisher, so she’ll have no one to blame but herself when I’m even later than usual on my current deadlines. It’s not so much the movies. I mean, it’s convenient to have movies come to your house and all, but what’s really fun–and a time suck–is watching the instant stuff on my laptop. Just yesterday I watched an anime I first saw a couple of years ago and have wanted to see again: “Read or Die” (the OVA, not the TV series, which I have not watched–but now I probably will). It’s no Miyazaki, but there are some things in it that I like a lot. And what a title.