seersucker

Amitav Ghosh read at Kepler's tonight. Sea of Poppies sounds like a swashbuckling, and literary, adventure. The excerpts that he read were intriguing. But what really, really delighted me was when he started discussing the permeability and elasticity of English in the 19th century. He told us that "seersucker" comes from a Hindi word, "sirsakar," which comes from the Persian "shiroshakar".

And because I am an absolute geek about etymology, this made me very happy.

spiders, gravestones, and the inevitable pizza

On Saturday, I went with three extremely wonderful people (Dana, Emily, and Lauren) to see Neil Gaiman read from The Graveyard Book in Palo Alto. It felt strange, but good, to sit in a theater with about 600 people of all sorts--old and young, alone and in big, cheerful groups-- who were all there to listen to someone read them a story. Everyone leaned forward in their chairs, laughed at the funny bits, and held their breaths at others, and listened as Neil told us about a young boy named Bod who dances with the ghosts and the living, and sees the first of the winter snow. It was a magical kind of thing, the sort that I wish could happen more often.

There's a video of the reading here, though it's more fun to start with the first chapter (we got the fifth, "Danse Macabre"). We also got an interlude, which is called "The Convocation," one of my favorite words. It makes me think of witches and crows, for no good reason, really (I think the proper words are, "coven" or "congeries" and "murder," respectively). And then, as an extra treat, we got some bits from Henry Selick's film of Coraline, and "Blueberry Girl."

The stage was full of gravestones, and Neil had a leather armchair with a funny looking lamp and a fake crow. There was also a spider that drifted down from the rafters and almost landed on a small boy's head.

Before the reading, we had pizza. Not ordinarily something to be boasting about, though I love pizza madly, but this was a delectable pie that introduced me to the thrilling combination of ricotta and lemon zest. Fluffy cream cut with bright yellow sourness. Not something you'd expect on pizza with all the fixings, but astonishingly delicious. Pizza Chicago.

It was a good evening all round, but the very best part was standing around in our little foursome, talking about Clarion friends and writing and books, and enjoying each other's company.

Oh. Have also discovered that Saint-Saens's Danse Macabre is even more infectious than usual when played on a banjo. It sounds mad and a little funny, and it begs you to get up and dance.

bits and bobs

Stephen Fry has a blog, let us celebrate.

He has also started writing a column for my favourite paper of the moment, The Guardian. To be completely clear, The Guardian of the UK, not the Guardian of San Francisco which is generally painful to read. The UK Guardian is wonderful; how can you not like a paper that sets forth its editorial code in the language of souls and morals?

"A newspaper's primary office is the gathering of news. At the peril of its soul it must see that the supply is not tainted."

Today I signed up for NaNoWriMo, which is simultaneously a Very Cool Thing and one of the worst acronyms ever. It stands for National Novel Writing Month and designates the time between the 1st and 30th of November for writing 50,000 words of a novel. 50,000 words is quite a short novel, but a very respectable output of words in one month. I suppose NaNoWriMo is easier to say than N.N.W.M, but it sounds like it should be the name of some unused Star Wars character.

Writing 1,700 words or so per day is certainly something you can do while immobile.

I've been tinkering around with writing over the past few days. It's odd and slightly uncomfortable, rather like a pair of shoes you haven't bothered wearing for a while. I've ended up with bits and pieces of things, all fragments that might put up with further exploration.