Liz · Williams: · journal

In response to a question about radio schedules, I'm putting this as an admin post.

Our pagan oriented radio show, the Witching Hour, goes out at:

Tuesday 20.00 GMT live (except when we get bumped forward by the live broadcast from the town council!)

Friday 14.00 (repeat)

Sunday 20.00 (repeat)

Trevor's edition of Glastonbury Today (heavily Blues based!) goes out at 12.00 GMT on Thursdays.

For any new people who are interested in checking out the shop's pagan blog, it is here:

http://witchcraft-shop.livejournal.com/

The traffic isn't as heavy as this one, but we do have some interesting discussions.

We went again tonight. Regular readers of witchcraft_shop will know that today was the day that Lily dragged a wheelie chair twice around the shop. Once we get to dog training, however, it's like she's been replaced with another dog. She sits, lies, and walks to heel, generating cries of 'ooh, isn't she a little star!' from the training team. In the intervals, while other dogs bark their heads off or head for the door, Lily lies down quietly.

Since I am used to having the problem ones, this is something of a novelty.

Perhaps Lily the Artist is her own evil twin?

Dear Artist Friends,

It has gladdened my little dog heart to see how much support there has been for my artistic endeavours. Already I feel less alone and am planning a truly major work, although I might have to wait until I am bigger and can break into the large white box where they keep the food.

And yet I can rely on no assistance here. For some reason, the Philistine who lives here laughed like a drain when she read your moving posts, which I found very unfeeling and just goes to show how little she understands a true aesthetic sensibility. But with your help I think I can find the strength to go on.

Lilypup, Artist

On the landing this morning, a profound installation making evocative use of organic and inorganic materials, plus a wide sense of dynamic spatial awareness. I have utilised found objects, deemed to be 'garbage' by the mundane world, in an attempt to demonstrate the inherent futility of existence and the interpretation of canine agency within it.

I have decided not to take heed of my critics' uncomprehending words ("That was my sponge! And what the hell happened to this loo roll??") , or their pathetic failure to understand my genius. Clearly post modernism is beyond them, but I am an Artist, and must endure.

Lily

We obviously don't celebrate Independence Day, but we did celebrate Gauntlet Day, i.e. the 2nd anniversary of the Gauntlet shopping arcade in Glastonbury. The radio station did a roadshow, and singer Tasmin Archer very kindly donated her time to the Make a Wish Foundation, which raises money for sick children.

Archer did an impressive set and turned out to be a very nice person: she made a point of coming over and speaking to Lily, who now Wuvs her. I must look out more of her work.

...to all my American friends. To us, this has been D's birthday and Gauntlet Day (the 2nd anniversary of Glastonbury's classy shopping arcade), but I'm aare of its wider significance, so have a good one!

We went to the Crickley Hill archaeological dig's annual reunion dinner yesterday evening, catching up with people I haven't seen for 20 years. It was a bit like a school reunion, only better, as these were people I actually liked.

We had a talk on the dig by Phil Dixon, who was the site director. The dig ended 15 years ago, but with two million finds, it's still being written up. Archaeology takes a long time! Odd to think that all the little fragments of pot that I spent carefully categorising in the finds hut on wet afternoons are still being catalogued at Nottingham University.

The dig started in 1969, when archaeology was a very different animal. Phil fondly remembers a large chunk of rock dropping off the side of a cutting onto the unsuspecting head of a digger. This was in the days before health and safety kicked in, so he was not wearing a hard hat, but a straw boater, in, Phil said, an attempt to lend some class to the proceedings. The rock laid him out but didn't actually kill him and he appears to have taken it in his stride (this was also in the days before we were so litigious).

The thing that most intrigued me was a stray comment about one of the younger guys who was there last night. His grandfather (I think) was a dry stone waller (Crickley is at the edge of the limestone Cotswold scarp) and remembered being told by his great great uncle about the 'people who lived in the little thatched cottages on top of Crickley, in the days before the Romans came.' This story was told to the grand-dad around the 1900s, way before archaeologists had any idea that the hill fort had housed roundhouse settlements, so it seems to be a folk memory. It gave me a very odd feeling to look at the young man across the bar, 2 miles from Crickley, and think that his ancestors might have lived in the area for over 2000 years. The occupation of the hill fort itself goes back by about 4500 years.

This from steepholm, who has greatly brightened a somewhat trying afternoon:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rWbqqPV1-pE

Despite a long train ride and being late, I got to Imperial late in the morning for this very interesting one day conference for SF writers and physicists, organised by the university (I will name names if this is OK - let me know!). Writers included Geoff Ryman, Paul McAuley, Stephen Baxter, Al Reynolds, Pat Cadigan, Ken McLeod and various folk from LJ, who can out themselves if they wish. We were given a series of lectures on cosmology, the solar system, a day in the life of an astronomer and other subjects.

I must apologise to people for having to keep running out and making phone calls. This was extremely rude but unavoidable. It was, however, great to see everyone and I'm only sorry that I had to skip the evening meal.

There seems to be a trend this year of putting scientists together with writers (obviously, several writers are scientists), starting at London SF film festival and going forward into the autumn when I've been asked to do an event with my writing team person at Manchester, for Geoff's anthology. As a writer who has a sort-of science background (philosophy of science and AI), but who is lamentably aware of their ignorance in many fields, I find all this very interesting.

Also you have to like a place which has big instructions in all the lifts telling you not to get in them alongside canisters of liquid nitrogen. Cue image of frozen author toppling forward and shattering on Imperial's floor.

Via cavalorn, this interesting find:

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2009/06/090615-stonehenge-tombs-crop-circles.html

I have decided to get Lily into training before she becomes something huge and unmanageable. Thus we headed out for Mark village hall this evening, fortifying ourselves in the White Horse beforehand, and did an hour of dog training.

Lily is the youngest. She was very well behaved, although she has a tendency to bark at random people (people in peculiar hats, people with the wrong sort of beard), in a pattern which is not yet obvious to me. However, she loves the trainer and got on well with the other dogs. She responded very well to the basic commands, as a reward was involved (hell, so do I).

The images of a young Iranian protester being shot are all over You Tube, so I won't give links. The Iranian protest seems increasingly to be becoming a female phenomenon: there was a good article by an Iranian journalist in the Independent the other day, describing how the regime has become systematically more repressive, with the re-emergence of the morality police, to the disgust of even devout people in her own neighbourhood. It is, she thinks, as a diversionary tactic to draw attention away from the Iranian government's disastrous economic policies.

What I have been thinking about, also, is the way that reporting affects how we see things. With regard to the actual footage, although they usually draw the line at live reporting, British TV seems to be far more graphic than the US news coverage. This is the impression I get - I'm not sure if it's accurate. The last time I saw the BBC news, on Wednesday, they showed piled corpses of women and kids in the Tamil region, after interviewing a govt official who denied point blank that anyone had died who wasn't a 'terrorist.' We are, these days, so shut away from death that I'm not really sure whether showing footage or not is, respectively, a good idea. Too much and you get inured to it (Neda's death was about as bad as anyone's sudden demise by gunshot, but although I am damn sorry for her and her family, I cannot say that it has profoundly affected me. My apologies if this sounds cold: I have to be honest here).

Too little, and one person's death can come as a hammer blow to a complete stranger - which may be a good thing, but violent death happens all over the world in so many contexts, including the West. But sometimes things are shown that iconise death, rather in the way that the single image of the child on fire came to iconise Vietnam (in this case, the girl is still alive). Had Neda been a young man, I wonder whether the reaction would have been the same: I suspect that it would not.

There's also an issue about viewing death as a sort of dare. A couple of years ago, a friend of mine who is a teacher discovered that some of the kids in his London school had been downloading footage of hostage beheadings and passing it round the school. This did actually cross a line with his fairly hard-boiled students, most of whom were about 13: it did shock them, whereas other pretty graphic stuff didn't. I suppose it's a fine line between fetishising death on the one hand, and becoming blase on the other.

Oh DEAR!

*

A couple go for a meal at a Chinese restaurant and order the 'Chicken Surprise',

The waiter brings the meal, served in a lidded cast iron pot.

Just as the wife is about to serve herself, the lid of the pot rises slightly and she briefly sees two beady little eyes looking around before the lid slams back down.

'Good Lord, did you see that?' she asks her husband. He hasn't, so she asks him to look in the pot. He reaches for it and again the lid rises, and he sees two little eyes looking around before it slams down.

Rather perturbed, he calls the waiter over, explains what is happening, and demands an explanation.

'Please sir,' says the waiter, 'what did you order?'

The husband replies, 'Chicken Surprise.'

'Ah! So sorry,' says the waiter, 'I bring you Peeking Duck!'

We made it up to Avebury in good time, and the weather held out. We found a parking spot without difficulty although there was a queue when we left, waiting to come into the car park. We also had a nice lunch in the Red Lion, which was quite quiet. So the only drawback was the absence of the people we were supposed to be handfasting: this arrangement dates back to April and we'd laid on staff. T had an email on Thursday to ask if we were still on and I replied with my mobile number, and asked for the handfastee's number. I didn't get a reply, and they didn't show up today, though we sat in the pub for 3 hours over lunch and coffee, nor did they call.

It has hacked me off, although Avebury is always pleasant - I will be working again tomorrow and have so little free time, that if it gets eaten up like this, it's really annoying.

The police were there in force, mainly for traffic although there was a plain clothes detective questioning the more obvious travellers. As he was wearing a suit and carrying a clipboard, he was the most conspicuous man for about 5 miles. Someone told me that one of the squad cars was the armed response unit, but I don't know whether this is true - seems like a lot of overkill for a fairly sedate pagan gathering. I understand there's a zero tolerance policy at the henge this summer, though.

I gather it has been raining in the US and I think the edge of the storms has made its way across the Pond as it has grown extremely dark here suddenly, after what has been a sunny day.

We had to see a supplier in Taunton this morning so went down to the Blue Ball for lunch, then a quick walk up on the scarp of the Quantocks. The verges are filed with bright pink foxgloves. When we got back, our co-gardeners were here and I have picked a bowl full of redcurrants, trying to beat the rain.

I'm delighted to note that fantasy writer Robin McKinley's* husband Peter (aka the Hon Peter Malcolm de Brissac Dickinson) has just been outed in the Queen's birthday honours list for an OBE for services to literature. Check out the following for Peter's thoughts on the deal and, uh, on pantyhose: http://robinmckinleysblog.com/2009/06/14/guest-post-by-the-hon-peter-malcolm-de-brissac-dickinson-frsl†-obe/

*She's footnote-tastic so as a tribute, I will be too, and note that McKinley's books were some of my favourites as a younger reader, especially THE BLUE SWORD and THE HERO AND THE CROWN.