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I'd say: "I don't know why I'm so damn tired"...but the fact is, I do. I'm bleeding, heavily. I'm getting ready for a life-changing body alteration which will require me to be put out under general anaesthetic (which I hate, which scares me, which usually leaves me feeling depressed and beaten up, even without the scary wounds I'll be responsible for cleaning/changing every day once it's over with--hell, the last time I was in hospital I was having a damn baby, so "all" they had to give me was a spinal...but I still ended up crying and apologizing my way through the caesarian), then lay me up for a month at the least. I just wrote a book, and can look forward to editing it later this year/early next year. It's coming up to Christmas. All that.
OTOH, I took "History's Crust" out and looked at it for the first time in donkey's years, and it really is pretty damn good, if I dare say so mysel'. Scary Euwphaim Glouwer's hateful, prideful, raging classic witch-voice is a hell of a lot of fun to write in, and--as kelpqueen points out--I do have some free time right now, so...maybe that's thing next. It couldn't end up making me feel worse than I already do.;)
And I also want to talk about a Finnish horror film I saw called Sauna, which plays more than a bit as though someone re-made The Seventh Seal as an outright horror film (rather than an existentialist historical vision with stealth horror undertones, ie "so there's death, but maybe no God, except in our heads. Sleep well, y'all!"). But every time I think about it, I keep tripping across more and more stuff I'd want to discuss in detail, from the fascinatingly at-odds physicality of the main actor to the continuing themes of vision vs. short-sightedness (literal and not), the shared propensity of people in it to blind themselves literally and figuratively (there are two different points at which somebody tries to ward off incipient harm by clapping their hands over their eyes), the idea of "mud" being the detritus of life, or sin being literally manifested as black slime. Or whether or not the titular sauna is a little local god offering actual salvation/expiation through forcing people to look at their own forgotten actions or just a supernatural predator that's stumbled across a perfect way to entice its chosen food. "This is what peace does," the main character complains, exasperated, right at the beginning (when caught red-handed in the act of killing somebody over pretty much nothing)--it destroys the rules of engagement, even when there really weren't any to speak of to begin with.
(Did I mention it takes place in 1595, at the end of a twenty-five year war between Sweden and Russia for control of Finland that the main character's been fighting since he was sixteen? Or that most of the action involves trying to map out an adjusted border between these two territories which runs right through a swamp inhabited by people so downtrodden they can't even remember if they're Swedish, Russian or Finnish? Really, the only thing they're sure of is that you should stay the hell out of the sauna that stands just outside town, though they're afraid to say--or ask--why...not that that stops anybody. Because these are knights we're talkin' about, here.;))
Also: The main character's name is, I shit you not, Eirik Spore. Who travels around with his map-maker little brother, Knut (late of the university at Reykjavik), who's given shaven-headed, whippet-thin Eirik a pair of prototype glasses which make him look alternately gentle, ascetic and deadpan-thuggish; what quickly ensues is that now he can see clearly most of the time, it scares the crap out of him to know just how blind he actually is, at base. "Gone is my former certainty," Eirik tells Knut. "I was like a fish underwater; now I know nothing." Of course, it does allow him to refute things he doesn't want to acknowledge in a pretty cool way--as when Knut asks him if he can see the ghost of a girl they left locked in a cellar to starve to death following them (there, on the tree-line! No, there! Is that...a human being?), and he replies, snappishly: "You know I can't see that far!"
Since I myself am amazingly short-sighted (and need to get my prescription adjusted something awful, to boot), this is clearly my type of horror. But it needs a lot more thought than I'm qualified to give it, right at this moment.
OTOH, I took "History's Crust" out and looked at it for the first time in donkey's years, and it really is pretty damn good, if I dare say so mysel'. Scary Euwphaim Glouwer's hateful, prideful, raging classic witch-voice is a hell of a lot of fun to write in, and--as kelpqueen points out--I do have some free time right now, so...maybe that's thing next. It couldn't end up making me feel worse than I already do.;)
And I also want to talk about a Finnish horror film I saw called Sauna, which plays more than a bit as though someone re-made The Seventh Seal as an outright horror film (rather than an existentialist historical vision with stealth horror undertones, ie "so there's death, but maybe no God, except in our heads. Sleep well, y'all!"). But every time I think about it, I keep tripping across more and more stuff I'd want to discuss in detail, from the fascinatingly at-odds physicality of the main actor to the continuing themes of vision vs. short-sightedness (literal and not), the shared propensity of people in it to blind themselves literally and figuratively (there are two different points at which somebody tries to ward off incipient harm by clapping their hands over their eyes), the idea of "mud" being the detritus of life, or sin being literally manifested as black slime. Or whether or not the titular sauna is a little local god offering actual salvation/expiation through forcing people to look at their own forgotten actions or just a supernatural predator that's stumbled across a perfect way to entice its chosen food. "This is what peace does," the main character complains, exasperated, right at the beginning (when caught red-handed in the act of killing somebody over pretty much nothing)--it destroys the rules of engagement, even when there really weren't any to speak of to begin with.
(Did I mention it takes place in 1595, at the end of a twenty-five year war between Sweden and Russia for control of Finland that the main character's been fighting since he was sixteen? Or that most of the action involves trying to map out an adjusted border between these two territories which runs right through a swamp inhabited by people so downtrodden they can't even remember if they're Swedish, Russian or Finnish? Really, the only thing they're sure of is that you should stay the hell out of the sauna that stands just outside town, though they're afraid to say--or ask--why...not that that stops anybody. Because these are knights we're talkin' about, here.;))
Also: The main character's name is, I shit you not, Eirik Spore. Who travels around with his map-maker little brother, Knut (late of the university at Reykjavik), who's given shaven-headed, whippet-thin Eirik a pair of prototype glasses which make him look alternately gentle, ascetic and deadpan-thuggish; what quickly ensues is that now he can see clearly most of the time, it scares the crap out of him to know just how blind he actually is, at base. "Gone is my former certainty," Eirik tells Knut. "I was like a fish underwater; now I know nothing." Of course, it does allow him to refute things he doesn't want to acknowledge in a pretty cool way--as when Knut asks him if he can see the ghost of a girl they left locked in a cellar to starve to death following them (there, on the tree-line! No, there! Is that...a human being?), and he replies, snappishly: "You know I can't see that far!"
Since I myself am amazingly short-sighted (and need to get my prescription adjusted something awful, to boot), this is clearly my type of horror. But it needs a lot more thought than I'm qualified to give it, right at this moment.
