(flash movie)
...have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don't search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.
From that Rilke guy, of whom I really ought to read more than pithy quotes sometime.
The point is, to live everything!
And, either related or ironically or both, here we have one of those Classic Second Life Snapshots:
That's me and v good photographer friend Calli (who actually took the picture, and who for that matter pointed me toward the Rilke words) flying in a seed pod vehicle what was a present from v good artist friend Rezago, over some islands full of castles and gazebos and meditation spots and so on mostly built by v good fashion designer friend Shen, and Calli, and sundry other creative types. (I'm hoping to add some code to the seedpod script to make it drift about with the SL wind, as a real seedpod would.)
Worth watching: Here Comes Another Bubble v1.1, by The Richter Scales.
Funny HTML thing that only works in some browsers (from Paul Ferguson).
Readers report in! Enter location:
You can't light a room with a metaphor.
Level 2 of the Gnomish Mines
New improved ichor - now 30% less fetid!
See of course the related chess variant.
Let's see. I also finished and reviewed (for Amazon; must add to Book Notes) a book:
Haldeman is strongest in his novels and his non-fictional essays, and in the occasional shorter story that really Hits It. The stories in this volume aren't the ones that really Hit It. They're perfectly passable, but not much more than that.
The two novelettes are too long for the ideas they contain (or in some sense too short; "You Can Never Go Back" is more powerful embedded within "The Forever War" than it is on its own here), and the short stories are nothing to write home about. The poetry would probably not have been published if it hadn't had Haldeman's name on it, and his description of how he came to write it is much more interesting and evocative than the verses themselves. (Caveat: I have a very high bar for poetry for some reason; maybe you'll love these, I dunno.)
In general the mini-essays between the stories are the best part of this book, but they're such a small part that they aren't enough to redeem it from the category of the relatively uninteresting. If you read it you probably won't regret it afterwards, but there are better things (many by the same author) to spend your time on.
I always sound so stuffed-shirt in reviews. *8)
