Saturday 22 September 2007

Reminder: A BOOK WRITER SPEAKS

K.A. Bedford (Modem Noise) FAQ
"11. What's it like seeing your book in print? Must be awesome! It is! The first time I saw ORBITAL BURN as a physical, finished object, at Torcon 3 (the 2003 Worldcon), I was also fried out of my mind with epic jetlag and fatigue and, it also being my first overseas trip, and my first Worldcon, crazy nervous energy" …

Having a book published doesn't "fix" anything in your life. During the long years in which you struggle to get a book published, you imagine that having your book published will change everything. Life will be better. Your problems will be over. This is not so. What happens is you change problems …
(www.kabedford.com) Book links: Orbital Burn; Eclipse; Hydrogen Steel

Friday 21 September 2007

Living without memory

The situations that the different people described are in are disturbing and distressing, but what extraordinary things they are capable of, and what strange aspects of knowledge, consciousness and how humans (& perhaps other animals) function their capacities throw some illumination onto.

Sometimes I feel that what I'm aware of as “self” is like a little sailboat scudding along over sunlit wavetops on a wafer-thin surface — a bit like a scale diagram of the biosphere in relation to the size of the earth — while all kinds of life and currents are going on unseen beneath.

A Neurologist’s Notebook

The Abyss

Music and amnesia.
by Oliver Sacks, The New Yorker, September 24, 2007

www.newyorker.com/ reporting/ 2007/ 09/ 24/ 070924fa_fact_sacks?currentPage=1
Clive Wearing now has “a memory span of only seconds – the most devastating case of amnesia ever recorded. New events and experiences were effaced almost instantly … he did not seem to be able to retain any impression of anything for more than a blink. Indeed, if he did blink, his eyelids parted to reveal a new scene. The view before the blink was utterly forgotten …
In addition to this inability to preserve new memories, Clive had a retrograde amnesia, a deletion of virtually his entire past.”

Tuesday 11 September 2007

Some Online September 11th sites

Trade Center Memorial Foundation: www.buildthememorial.org
Voices of Sept 11 family Web site: www.911livingmemorial.org
Sept 11 digital archive: www.911digitalarchive.org
New York State 9/11 archives: www.nyshrab.org/ wtc/ s_wtc_projects.shtml

Saturday 8 September 2007

Images from Burning Man 2007

A gallery of pictures from the playa, called NoSuchImages – burningman2007

On the Playa