Patrick

A lesson in a line

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Read­ing in bed last night, I came across this gem:

It is always a temp­ta­tion to say that such feel­ings are inde­scrib­able, though they sel­dom are.
— Gene Wolfe, The Sword of the Lic­tor (vol. III in the Book of the New Sun tetral­o­gy), chap­ter XXII: “The Skirts of the Mountain” 

In a sin­gle line the author evis­cer­at­ed a fair­ly com­mon trope in SF/F writ­ing. Now and for­ev­er after, when I read a sen­tence stat­ing that X was inde­scrib­able or refer­ring to an inde­scrib­able colour or an inde­scrib­able feel­ing, I’m going to won­der: Is it real­ly inde­scrib­able, though, or is the author sim­ply not inter­est­ed enough to describe it to me?

I’ve tak­en the les­son to heart, though: from here on out I’ll be doing my best to excise inde­scrib­able from my own lexicon.

Series: Gene Wolfe

The entire series: The Gold­en Sen­tence; A les­son in a line; Inde­scrib­able; My head­’s swim­ming now; The Island of Dr. Death.

Candid portraits

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Kathleen.
Kath­leen.

After a love­ly Christ­mas Moroc­can sup­per, we sat around the liv­ing room at Tara’s place.

Jen.
Jen.

I got out my cam­era and snapped some candids.

Caryl & Marc.
Caryl & Marc.

I real­ly like my 50mm lens.

No man is an island

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No man is an island entire of itself; every man is a piece of the con­ti­nent, a part of the main; if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promon­to­ry were, as well as any man­ner of thy friends or of thine own were; any man’s death dimin­ish­es me, because I am involved in mankind. And there­fore nev­er send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee. 

–John Donne

Judo: shiai and book

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I went into the city this past week­end to ref­er­ee at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Man­i­to­ba’s annu­al shi­ai 1. Con­sid­er­ing I had­n’t ref­er­eed since the begin­ning of April, I feel I did fair­ly well. I got a com­pli­ment on the way out for catch­ing a cou­ple of “false attack” penal­ties — appar­ent­ly they get missed fair­ly fre­quent­ly — so I felt pret­ty good about that.

Next day, on the way out of town, I stopped in at McNal­ly Robin­son, one of my favourite book­stores, and end­ed up find­ing The Way of Judo on the shelf. It’s a biog­ra­phy of Jig­oro Kano, aka Kano-sen­sei, the founder of Judo. I waf­fled for a moment, but only for a moment; then I picked it up. I haven’t start­ed it yet, but I’m look­ing for­ward to it, for sure.

  1. Tour­na­ment or con­test, in Japan­ese. (Judo ter­mi­nol­o­gy is gen­er­al­ly giv­en in Japan­ese.) ↩