Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    

Christy - Only when they mess with the classics. There can only be
one! Ye ken?  ;>
  

    
Hmmm... at the moment, I've totally forgotten that piece.  I guess I
have a reading assignment.
  

    
Gee, Rocky, what are *you* reading?  ;-)  I'm over halfway through
"Dragonfly in Amber" myself.

Margret--get well soon!  I'm sending good thoughts your way!
  

    

Mary - Hehe..I'm halfway through "Drums of Autumn," and verra badly in
need of a good night's rest, aye?  *grin*
  

    
Look! I have a computer again!

Er.
  

    

Yipee! 

Give us this day our daily blog.  ;)

 
  

    
Lol Rocky. I second the prayer.
  

    
Welcome back Neil.
btw.. I'm almost through The Annals of Klepsis...
odd book....
  

    
Hooray, Neil! Good to have you back :)

Margaret: Good wishes on the surgery, and a very speedy recovery! I
know it isn't a fun process :(

I've been lately occupied with integrating the new member of our
household: Tak, the Hideous New Girl. So named for the reaction the
other cats had to her, when we brought this tiny, ferocious and utterly
Hideous kitten home two weeks ago. She has since won them over through
a combination of cuteness, persistence, and sheer kittenish force. Her
Hideousness' most fond activity is chasing the older cats through the
house and "beating up" on them. That they allow this, I can only
ascribe to their growing fondness of them, as I can't imagine they are
unaware that their size is at least 3 times her own. Someday I will get
a picture of her chasing our largest cat (he weighs 22.4lbs) through
the house as if he's got the devil on his tail.

Observe Her Hideousness for yourself: 
<a
href="http://www.fullriotpussycat.org/pics/kitties/tak/";>http://www.fullriotpussycat.org/pics/kitties/tak/</a>

And that is pretty much what I have been up to, aside from social
outings. Tak is a very demanding gal, but always so difficult to
resist!
  

    
Well, har. Sorry about that folks. Didn't realize it would do that.

*sighs, goes back to the docs*
  

    
Meg -- what a cute hideous kitten.

Up early. This is what happens when you get use to getting up on UK
time and then come back.
  

    <scribbled by dfowlkes>
  

    
Neil--Welcome back! Did you get to see anything good at the Fringe? 
I'm assuming this wasn't your first time there.  I've always wanted to
go......

Must go buy Lotto ticket  ;-)

Meg--what a perfectly adorable Hideous New Girl.  My next cats will be
grey, and female.  That's if I don't go off cats altogether under the
influence of the Evil Twosome who run my house.  No more males. 
<<shudder>>

Yay!  Neil Gaiman Meet-up Day!  What a lovely excuse to levy new
troops, er, I mean draf...no, no, no, brainwash....um, *recruit*
...yes, yes that's the word I wanted...recruit new souls....that is,
people into the Unusual Suspects.  The more Unusual, the better, I say.

Bwahahahaha

Mary (still reading Dragonfly in Amber)
  

    
Neil - Thank you!! :) Congrats on the Hugo nomination. I'll have my
fingers crossed for you!

Mary - Thank you! She is perfectly lovely :) Our other three cats are
all males, and they are absolute darlings - terribly affectionate! Your
Evil Twosome are not indicative of the gender/species, fortunately. 

We could have a Meet-Up in the Bay Area, this weekend perhaps? How
many folks are going to be in the South Bay for the SciFi WorldCon this
weekend? I know of several great places for food near the convention
center ...
  

    
Mary -- Nothing. Nada. Zilch. Anything I wanted to see was on when I
was. And while I had a magic card to get me into anything free, it only
sort of worked for sold out things, and would not have got me into
JERRY SPRINGER: THE OPERA, which was completely sold out unless you
actually were Jerry Springer....
  

    
Yikes, there are eight gajillion posts since I had time to read last. First,
old response: Christy, the Harpo Marx and the haywains pseud is almost
certainly a John M. Ford line.  So many things are, and some that aren't,
should be.

Second: Good Mistress Mousey Accost, aka squeaks, is a GODDESS.  My post
office box was full of stripey goodness today!!

Third: if anybody's hosting a Worldcon get-together (or if anybody wants to
hang out with this Lioness), please drop me a line at elise@lioness.net.
(My WELL address is chock full o' spam, or was last I checked, alas. I
better reforward it, though, I guess.)
  

    <scribbled by dfowlkes Tue 3 Jul 12 10:14>
  

    
Neil:  A tidbit on Jerry Springer (because you did not get tickets for
the Opera and because I did not confess the last time he was mentioned
here):  Circa 1980 I campaigned for him in the democratic
gubernatorial primary (OH).  I thought he would make an effective
governor.  My  sister laughed and laughed when i told her.  Didn't I
hear that he had written a check (cheque) to a prostitute, the check
bounced, his wife found out and she told the press?  I admitted to
being naive- I never knew that hookers accepted anything but cash!
 (I continued to believe he was the best choice...).
To the Leos in the group: (Erynn, Elise (?)) happy belated
birthdays!(not to go against Miss Mousey's un- thing.  But she is not
here!)
  

    <scribbled by dfowlkes Tue 3 Jul 12 10:14>
  

    
Email from Christy Smith:

Neil -- Welcome home!  Strange how your computers have been making
themselves scarce whenever you've had to travel lately.  You were without
one in New York, too.  Maybe they took to heart (disk?) my admonishment
to you to get some sleep, and decided to hold you to it.  (And maybe you
should print out your Fermata script before you head to California, just
in case....)

>I still haven't subscribed.  I know I ought to, but magazines I
subscribe to stack up, and get put in piles of
magazines-that-are-subscribed-to and sometimes feel vaguely like a duty
to read.

LOL!  I'm going to show that entry to my mom and say, "See?  It isn't
just me!"  :D

Glen -- I hope it's actually in the American version.  I realized, after
I posted, that I had read the English paperback of Smoke.

Meg -- Welcome back!  And I wanna play with your kitty-cat!  She sure is
patient with the paparazzi, isn't she?  ;)

I've bookmarked your cat page so I can look at your other cats sometime.  
:)

Mary -- That's gotta be the easiest brainwashing job in the world.  Just
give 'em a book and let the work speak for itself.  :)

Elise -- Welcome back, and thanks.  And, apparently, happy belated
birthday!

Dan F. -- The cover photo was pretty good, but the one I could not take
my eyes off of for several minutes was the picture of him with Gene, on
the "interview excerpts" page.  (And I wasn't looking at Gene!)  Woww.  
Just when I think the guy can't impress me any more, he does.  <shakes
head> Wow!

And welcome back to Patricia, too.

Christy, who just thinks Neil's muse is weird.  In a good way.


...Upon seeing new journal entry:


Neil again -- Ohh, I don't like reading that at all.  You go to England 
during an outbreak of Legionnaires' Disease (a serious form of pneumonia) 
and come back with a chest infection and a cough?  Dear me.  Neil, take 
care of yourself, and get that great doctor-who-makes-house-calls over 
there if you start getting chills or a fever or anything.  Promise you 
won't run yourself into the ground... OK?  And feel better soon.  <hug>

And oh my gosh, Happy Birthday to Maddy!!!  :D  How cool that you made it 
home in time!
  

    <scribbled by dfowlkes>
  

    
Christy -- he's already put me on serious antibiotics, along with the
kind of cough syrup that means I can neither think straight nor operate
heavy machinery...

Good idea about the Fermata script. I think I'll e-mail it to me as
well.

Patricia -- Many governors have been much worse than Jerry Springer...
  

    

Ok folks, I think y'all will have interesting input on this, so I pose to
you a question.
I am currently on a poetry memorization project. Most of my life I've wanted
to have more memorized and so I am finally working on it.

The excuse is a character I'm playing in an RPG. He's partially based on the
quote "When you meet a master swordsman, show him your sword/Do not show
your poem to any but a poet."

Currently I'm working on re-memorizing "The Second Coming" and memorizing
for the first time "The Grey Monk" (Blake) and "The Hollow Men" (Eliot). 
And pieces of "Hyperion" (Keats).
After that I'm looking at Poe's The Bells, more Keats, and some Haiku.

My question, then- anyone have any suggestions? I'm afraid sestinas are 
out of character. 
  

    
When my dad was in school, they had to memorize *lots* of stuff (he
graduated in 1940)  So he & my Aunt Lulee were like a Poe revue.  Daddy
had all of The Raven, and Aunt Lulee had Annabel Lee.  He also had The
Highwayman, and a rather amusing little ditty called Albert & the Lion
(does anyone know this one?  Very funny, comes from the English music
hall tradition, written in dialect--it's available on the
web....someplace).  I learned quite a bit of these just from hearing
them as a child.  What I enjoyed hearing then, and can still remember
now, are poems with  story.  (Not that all poems don't have a
story--but narrative poetry).

Other than that, I would think---Donne, and definitely some of
Shakespeare's sonnets.  Byron, perhaps?  She Walks in Beauty is lovely.
 Ooooo, and Kipling's just fun to say.  Or Tolkien--some of the poetry
in LoTR is sort of fun (says the woman who *sang along* in the movie
theatre with Bilbo--"The road goes ever on and on....." and can still
do much of the song of Durin at the drop of a hat)

I shall shut up now, as I am thinking of a couple dozen poems that I
should like to have from memory myself, and I've entirely too much on
my plate as it is.

Good luck, though.  Let us know what you decide.

Mary (off to finish the last 10 pages of Dragonfly, so she can start
Voyager)
  

    
Ooops, almost forgot--Happy Birthday, Maddy!

And I find it seriously amusing that the 4 people signed up for the
meet-up in Chicago are the 4 members of the Unusual Suspects.