[& elsewhere: Cecily Kane on Catherine F. King's "The Ninety-Ninth Bride."]
Wednesday, December 31, 2014
Monday, December 22, 2014
A New SFF Award (plan for)
Super quickly, this is how it'll work:
1) 100 or so Big Name Authors automatically entered
2) Everybody else self-nominates (indie authorship fine, & assumed to make up the bulk of entrants)
3) Entrants also act as slushpile readers: everyone who self-nominates is committed to reading & rating three books (& their own eligibility depends on delivering those ratings, except in the case of the BNAs)
4) Books are assigned randomly (& I think anonymously), & each book gets read twice
5) Certain administrative & audit procedures (waves hands arcanely)
6) The ratings generate a shortlist
7) Perhaps a panel of great judges picks the winner from the shortlist
8) Glory!
9) Interesting to see whether / which of the Big Name Authors flourish
10) The glory of the award comes because of its wide participation, BTW, not its huge purse
So lots of implementation nitty-gritty necessary, but that's the outline anyway.
No time to actually try to make this happen now! Or to give a detailed rationale. But putting it out there. Maybe one day? What do you think?
PS:
Would it gain traction? Would the shortlist be way too long? Is three books the right number? (Remember, we need some spare capacity to read those 100 or so BNAs. Maybe there should just be 10 BNAs). What's the risk that people just rate their two assigned books without actually reading them? (Perhaps the rating system involves five drop-down categories, three of which pertain to whether the book makes the shortlist, and the other two have a sort of checksum-esque function: qualities that people who have read the book are much more likely to agree on than people who haven't; if there's no match the slushpile judges don't automatically lose their eligibility, but the book does get reassigned to a third reader, and then its rating will be the mean (or hell, maybe the square? Should we do squares?) of the two rating sets that most closely resemble each other). What kind of systemic biases are we likely to encounter? (Could there be an algorithmic counterweighting to existing visibility biases?) What do we call it? Should the statue be the sploodgy head of a racist or not? What would actually be involved in step (6) -- just "the highest wins," or might we get a more interesting shortlist if we allow really divisive books? Is there a risk everyone rates really low, because they think they might stand a better chance of winning? Are there nudges & prompts we can use to minimize the "wasted" reading of books whose authors vanish into the ether & never deliver their own ratings? Could we use a credit system instead so you could read lots & lots in one year & be eligible for several years? Could there be an iterative, weighted aspect to it e.g. if an author who has historically tended to rate low suddenly rates something really high one year, it "counts" for more than if they were consistently positive about everything? Should the entry criterion be say "slushpile judge c.200,000 words each" rather than "slushpile judge three books each"? Should we get rid of that word "slushpile" because it has the wrong connotations? Would it be a better / more interestingly risky idea to have prizes not for "best book" but "[probably complimentary but ambiguous adjective] book"? What about other categories of prizes that are a bit more like the Oscars, and/or start to edge into crowdsourced literary criticism, e.g. "Best Character," "Best Twist," "Best Relationship Between Two Characters," "Best Non-Romantic Non-Nemesis Relationship Between Two Characters," "Best Cinematography," "Best Subversion of Well-Known Trope," "Best Non-Subversion of Well-Known Trope," "Most Cri," "Best Book With Really Objectionable Politics That Is Somehow Really Good Anyway," "Best Moral Complexity," "Best Texture Impervious to Commodification," "Spookiest Scene," "Good Sex Awards," "Best Page," "Actual LOL," "Best Attempt to Decisively Destroy Some Trope or Subgenre That Will Probably Just Revivify It," etc.? Who would be good to partner with -- maybe an established award like the Clarke or the Kitschies, as an extra category? Or maybe some kind of indie authorship hub? Or a con that isn't yet associated with an award? Could there somehow be a cash prize? What are we all going to wear?
1) 100 or so Big Name Authors automatically entered
2) Everybody else self-nominates (indie authorship fine, & assumed to make up the bulk of entrants)
3) Entrants also act as slushpile readers: everyone who self-nominates is committed to reading & rating three books (& their own eligibility depends on delivering those ratings, except in the case of the BNAs)
4) Books are assigned randomly (& I think anonymously), & each book gets read twice
5) Certain administrative & audit procedures (waves hands arcanely)
6) The ratings generate a shortlist
7) Perhaps a panel of great judges picks the winner from the shortlist
8) Glory!
9) Interesting to see whether / which of the Big Name Authors flourish
10) The glory of the award comes because of its wide participation, BTW, not its huge purse
So lots of implementation nitty-gritty necessary, but that's the outline anyway.
No time to actually try to make this happen now! Or to give a detailed rationale. But putting it out there. Maybe one day? What do you think?
PS:
Would it gain traction? Would the shortlist be way too long? Is three books the right number? (Remember, we need some spare capacity to read those 100 or so BNAs. Maybe there should just be 10 BNAs). What's the risk that people just rate their two assigned books without actually reading them? (Perhaps the rating system involves five drop-down categories, three of which pertain to whether the book makes the shortlist, and the other two have a sort of checksum-esque function: qualities that people who have read the book are much more likely to agree on than people who haven't; if there's no match the slushpile judges don't automatically lose their eligibility, but the book does get reassigned to a third reader, and then its rating will be the mean (or hell, maybe the square? Should we do squares?) of the two rating sets that most closely resemble each other). What kind of systemic biases are we likely to encounter? (Could there be an algorithmic counterweighting to existing visibility biases?) What do we call it? Should the statue be the sploodgy head of a racist or not? What would actually be involved in step (6) -- just "the highest wins," or might we get a more interesting shortlist if we allow really divisive books? Is there a risk everyone rates really low, because they think they might stand a better chance of winning? Are there nudges & prompts we can use to minimize the "wasted" reading of books whose authors vanish into the ether & never deliver their own ratings? Could we use a credit system instead so you could read lots & lots in one year & be eligible for several years? Could there be an iterative, weighted aspect to it e.g. if an author who has historically tended to rate low suddenly rates something really high one year, it "counts" for more than if they were consistently positive about everything? Should the entry criterion be say "slushpile judge c.200,000 words each" rather than "slushpile judge three books each"? Should we get rid of that word "slushpile" because it has the wrong connotations? Would it be a better / more interestingly risky idea to have prizes not for "best book" but "[probably complimentary but ambiguous adjective] book"? What about other categories of prizes that are a bit more like the Oscars, and/or start to edge into crowdsourced literary criticism, e.g. "Best Character," "Best Twist," "Best Relationship Between Two Characters," "Best Non-Romantic Non-Nemesis Relationship Between Two Characters," "Best Cinematography," "Best Subversion of Well-Known Trope," "Best Non-Subversion of Well-Known Trope," "Most Cri," "Best Book With Really Objectionable Politics That Is Somehow Really Good Anyway," "Best Moral Complexity," "Best Texture Impervious to Commodification," "Spookiest Scene," "Good Sex Awards," "Best Page," "Actual LOL," "Best Attempt to Decisively Destroy Some Trope or Subgenre That Will Probably Just Revivify It," etc.? Who would be good to partner with -- maybe an established award like the Clarke or the Kitschies, as an extra category? Or maybe some kind of indie authorship hub? Or a con that isn't yet associated with an award? Could there somehow be a cash prize? What are we all going to wear?
Thursday, December 18, 2014
Tea & Jeopardy
"Little chickens, would you be able to sing 'Everything You Know is Wrong' by Weird Al Yankovich? Then Momo can see how clever you are, and we can record it for Frances, as I understand it's one of her favourite songs."
Tea and Jeopardy Advent Calendar Day 17.
Tea and Jeopardy Advent Calendar Day 17.
Wednesday, December 10, 2014
November: A Few Links
Formal Announcement of Intention to Neglect.
4) Have you noticed that Nina Allan is posting story-by-story responses to The Mammoth Book of SF Stories by Women ed. Alex Daly MacFarlane? Twitter has weaned itself off Jonathan McCalmont so fingers crossed for the ascendancy of "the long tweet" over at Ruthless Culture. & Amal El-Mohtar has started a weekly review of short fiction, Rich and Strange. So yeah, we can't all blog at once, can we?
5) And by now there is more than enough nonsense on this blog already to keep you pickled in nonsense at least until I return. E.g.:
Reviews:
Reviews (originally published in Interzone) of anthologies including 21st Century Science Fiction and Fearsome Journeys: The New Solaris Book of Fantasy.
Jeff Vandermeer's Annihilation (on SF Signal).
Waaay too long review of Cory Doctorow's Pirate Cinema. The last bits try to make a connection between a certain kind of idealised copyright and the reputation currency Whuffie from Down & Out in the Magic Kingdom.
& OK it's still not quite finished, but long review of my namesake Jo Walton's Among Others, which ruminates on immersiveness, words & worlds.
&/or use the label: reviews.
Other SFF:
Underappreciated Authors: a short piece sort-of-in-defence-of continuing to underappreciate them.
Storytelling & Sludge. I think progressive & radical stories are harder to tell than conservative & reactionary ones. (& it's easy to convince ourselves we're telling them when we're not).
Kicking Asphalt & Taking Names: some thoughts on urban fantasy, names, & Tom Pollock's Parva "Pen" Khan. (w/ links to other blog posts about names in SFF).
The SF of gamification (a list). Economic speculative fiction (another list).
Some made-up drones.
Social media:
Thoughts lightly touching algorithmic curation, & what it's like following thousands of people on Twitter: Why I Am So Uncool, by me Nietzsche.
Also a thought experiment about crowdfunding, online collaboration, and the future of the book. (Imagine the "spine" as an n-dimensional virtual object, the "binding" as an intricate system of nested pledges of finance, labour and consumption ...)
A wee thought occasioned by the rise of Glass & other wearables. Always lurking, always performing: is there an equivalent in SF literature (or any culture) of .@?
Other:
I am still trying to work out, for myself at least, this: what is money? Old blog post about imagining money without numbers, among other things.
& for other round-ups & links lists, try the executive summaries.
It may be a little while before I get back to any serious blogging (I am spending November to February sharpening my face). But in the meanwhile:
1) I have a longish review of Peter F. Hamilton's Geordie procedural space opera Great North Road in Foundation #118. Haven't seen that issue yet but it's a large & interesting contents page.
(BTW meant to say in review that it says on the stargate stop on Market Street that the last stargate is 11:28 but actually the last one is 10:54. Don't stand there in the rain).
2) I've written a novelette tie-in for the alt history near future cyberpunk board game Tokyo Yakuza. It's not out just yet, but you can follow Godan Takami on Twitter for news of the series: I think I'm about #27ish or so. (And there will be other short fiction before long. Working title, "Actually, It's About Ethics In Grand Juryism.")
3) Look at Darius Kazemi's semi-random scratching OCR appeasement bot! Reverse OCR.
4) Have you noticed that Nina Allan is posting story-by-story responses to The Mammoth Book of SF Stories by Women ed. Alex Daly MacFarlane? Twitter has weaned itself off Jonathan McCalmont so fingers crossed for the ascendancy of "the long tweet" over at Ruthless Culture. & Amal El-Mohtar has started a weekly review of short fiction, Rich and Strange. So yeah, we can't all blog at once, can we?
5) And by now there is more than enough nonsense on this blog already to keep you pickled in nonsense at least until I return. E.g.:
Reviews:
Reviews (originally published in Interzone) of anthologies including 21st Century Science Fiction and Fearsome Journeys: The New Solaris Book of Fantasy.
Jeff Vandermeer's Annihilation (on SF Signal).
Waaay too long review of Cory Doctorow's Pirate Cinema. The last bits try to make a connection between a certain kind of idealised copyright and the reputation currency Whuffie from Down & Out in the Magic Kingdom.
& OK it's still not quite finished, but long review of my namesake Jo Walton's Among Others, which ruminates on immersiveness, words & worlds.
&/or use the label: reviews.
Other SFF:
Underappreciated Authors: a short piece sort-of-in-defence-of continuing to underappreciate them.
Storytelling & Sludge. I think progressive & radical stories are harder to tell than conservative & reactionary ones. (& it's easy to convince ourselves we're telling them when we're not).
Kicking Asphalt & Taking Names: some thoughts on urban fantasy, names, & Tom Pollock's Parva "Pen" Khan. (w/ links to other blog posts about names in SFF).
The SF of gamification (a list). Economic speculative fiction (another list).
Some made-up drones.
Social media:
Thoughts lightly touching algorithmic curation, & what it's like following thousands of people on Twitter: Why I Am So Uncool, by me Nietzsche.
Also a thought experiment about crowdfunding, online collaboration, and the future of the book. (Imagine the "spine" as an n-dimensional virtual object, the "binding" as an intricate system of nested pledges of finance, labour and consumption ...)
A wee thought occasioned by the rise of Glass & other wearables. Always lurking, always performing: is there an equivalent in SF literature (or any culture) of .@?
Other:
I am still trying to work out, for myself at least, this: what is money? Old blog post about imagining money without numbers, among other things.
& for other round-ups & links lists, try the executive summaries.
Sunday, December 7, 2014
Thursday, November 20, 2014
From "The Reduced Racine Yakuza Co."
A sword embeds in a slot machine, which starts to pay out everything.
Yes, thinks Eitsu, this is something special. She senses motion behind the curtains and leaps off the edge of the stage, slipping down her smartglasses, firing up her combat augs for the first time in ages. An AR tag tells her:
Oh well. The huge armored arm surges. Metal groans, wood splinters, and the hill in the centre of the casino buckles and cants more steeply.
A snippet from a novelette I recently wrote as a rickety strut to the Tokyo Yakuza boardgame. (I should mention that there is currently a Kickstarter).
Yes, thinks Eitsu, this is something special. She senses motion behind the curtains and leaps off the edge of the stage, slipping down her smartglasses, firing up her combat augs for the first time in ages. An AR tag tells her:
Please wait. Installing vital cyberware updates. Do not shut down or reboot.
Oh well. The huge armored arm surges. Metal groans, wood splinters, and the hill in the centre of the casino buckles and cants more steeply.
§
A snippet from a novelette I recently wrote as a rickety strut to the Tokyo Yakuza boardgame. (I should mention that there is currently a Kickstarter).
Thursday, October 23, 2014
Hypothesis Thursdays: Own Up
Because meaning is generated relationally, and every text conditions every other text, no writer is responsible solely for the meaning of their own writing, but every writer is instead responsible for the meaning of it all.
Friday, October 17, 2014
Hypothesis Thursdays: Reasons not to Publish
If you are straight, cis, white, male, financially comfortable, middle or upper class, and you are a cornucopia of physical and mental abilities for coping with what life throws at you, and if you support diversity in fiction, you should, all other things being equal, publish no fiction of your own.
Bonus hypothesis: if you match aspects of this description, but not others, then to the extent that you support diversity in fiction within the categories which you do match, you should, all other things being equal, publish no fiction of your own.
Bonus hypothesis: if you match aspects of this description, but not others, then to the extent that you support diversity in fiction within the categories which you do match, you should, all other things being equal, publish no fiction of your own.
Wednesday, October 15, 2014
New Genre Wednesdays: Slumberstream
I'll call today's genre "slumberstream." It takes some explaining.
I think it's Fredric Jameson who makes the ingenious link between SF storytelling and the idea that, when somebody describes this dream they had, it's incredibly boring. The work of telling a story is always the work of masking some dream, of telling it so that it's listenable.
(Or, you could say, so that it's relatable).
And perhaps there's a relationship between such story-work and what Freud called dream-work, the process of disguising repressed desires, of distorting them into legitimate ingredients for the dream narrative. Perhaps story-work takes over where dream-work leaves off, allowing a kind of dreaming to spill out of mouths into society.
But anyway, who sleeps nowadays lol? Sleeping is over. Nobody has been able to find anybody who still sleeps in any of these febrile and alert interlacing circles -- hammering and effete with their morning Fair Trade, their mid-morning artisan slow roast, their pre-lunch-just-one-moist-fingertip-out-the-emergency-speed-wrap (alternatively: "meth hath murdered sleep") -- that we call Twitter, Ello, the village, the economy.
Nobody can sleep so nobody can dream. Which implies a more modest mode of creation -- a step back in the value chain, if you like -- not the work of disguising a kernel of dream for the sake of the social, but rather, the work of disguising the deranged fantasies and ruminations of the small hours, of disguising the confused and lapsing consciousness of the pre-dawn, as a kernel of dream.
Back when your friends dreamed, you resented them for telling you their dreams. But there was always another kind of resentment too, and with the distractions removed now, it's become more clear what that was all along. You resented them for telling you dreams which, you suspected, weren't truly dreams.
This is the resentment toward the conscious will which is always mixed with the dream. The suspicion of a thinker and storyteller who overlaps with a dreamer, of a responsible agent portraying themself as a passive visionary. At its most extreme pitch, the resentment becomes a hysterical witch-hunt for agency, a murderous rage toward the figure who claims the full status of dream for their mere daydream.
So that's this Wednesday's genre. Stay up all night, think some weird stuff, and convince someone it was a dream.
Really this Wednesday's genre is all an excuse to tell you about my "dream"!
First, my "dream" was very much pre-alpha, a sort of proof-of-concept thing with hardly any content. It was kind of like a Tony Hawk game but in a muted early modern European landscape. It seemed to go on for hours.
Then in the morning there was a sort of theological interlude. I was probably thinking about dreaming and/or dreaming about thinking. I was piecing together a vision of how the mind couldn't possibly supervene on the brain in the way that is commonly claimed. For some reason the person I held responsible for the counterargument was Nina Allan, or at least, her blog. I have no idea why, maybe something to do with networks and spiders, but I'm sorry. My vision didn't adopt the normal form of dualist intuition, by which mental reality possesses certain features which can't be explained by anything in the brain (qualia or whatever). This was the reverse. I was convinced that the physical structure of the brain entailed features of mental reality much larger and more layered than anything we really experience. That was why the standard accounts couldn't possibly be true.
In my vision this conviction was mangled together with a sort of layered panpsychism, the sort where a single physical particle might be vibrating within the engines of multiple mental realities simultaneously, suggestive of Greg Egan's beautiful SF fairytale about consciousness "finding itself in the dust" or Jaron Lanier's reductio of zombie computational functionalism. But for some reason this panpsychism was only applicable bounded within a nutshell. Within the skull -- or perhaps, within the body -- we must accept that every possible conscious network which could be "read into" the matter there, no matter how weird the function you'd have to apply to the matter in order to find it, was in fact instantiated by that matter, and was in fact conscious, and all these translucent dimensionless consciousnesses were furled together within that matter.
This was possibly not true of the universe at large, and the reason for that had something to do with the geographical individuation of consciousnesses, a kind of mysterious law about how a conscious system must necessarily bud off into separate viewpoints when the matter which instantiates it is physically spread beyond a certain limit. Something to do with why I am here and you are there -- basically, for some reason, it would have been ridiculous, whereas the arbitrary privileging of the skull's trove was not.
I finished the altercation with a slightly sneering bon mot about how the pun of "be" and "bee" in Allan's work (please, none of this is true) might be sufficient for most folk to solve the mind-body problem, but some of us preferred to look further afield. Maybe this bit related to swarms and emergent complexity but really it just made no sense.
The whole time I considered myself awake, and knew I was in bed with the pillow folded around my head against the lamplight.
But what I really wanted to tell you about was the family of otters.
I wanted to tell you about the family of otters, and not just because they are cute and likely to be popular if I commend them to you. This was after the theological interlude described above, at a moment when I was even more awake. In fact I would say I was fully awake.
My eyes were open and I may have listened to and spoken what passes for intelligibly with another person in the room (I've forgotten now, but at the time I did know). Really, if it wasn't for the family of otters, I would definitely have been awake in every way. I could move my arms and legs and I was thinking about the day ahead.
It was these otters who slipped me a secret sign that in fact I could not possibly be called awake. If it wasn't for the otters I could never have known. Because they were there. They had no waking reason to be there but they were. But they were there as barely as possible, so perhaps I was as barely dreaming as it is possible to be. They were not there as language or imagery, but only as raw availability, as an unqualified and unstructured salience.
(I don't know, maybe I discovered a new collective noun, a relevance of dream otters. Maybe I discovered the true unit of measurement in which to plumb the depth of dreaming. It couldn't all be measured in that family of otters, obviously: but it rings true that the unit of measurement of depth of dreaming would change every time the amount increased).
Anyway.
Of course, the relevance of the family of otters quickly did become the language and image of a family of otters, rearing to go. But not quickly enough that I couldn't catch them the moment before they were either of those things.
I'm telling you, they were there.
I think it's Fredric Jameson who makes the ingenious link between SF storytelling and the idea that, when somebody describes this dream they had, it's incredibly boring. The work of telling a story is always the work of masking some dream, of telling it so that it's listenable.
(Or, you could say, so that it's relatable).
And perhaps there's a relationship between such story-work and what Freud called dream-work, the process of disguising repressed desires, of distorting them into legitimate ingredients for the dream narrative. Perhaps story-work takes over where dream-work leaves off, allowing a kind of dreaming to spill out of mouths into society.
But anyway, who sleeps nowadays lol? Sleeping is over. Nobody has been able to find anybody who still sleeps in any of these febrile and alert interlacing circles -- hammering and effete with their morning Fair Trade, their mid-morning artisan slow roast, their pre-lunch-just-one-moist-fingertip-out-the-emergency-speed-wrap (alternatively: "meth hath murdered sleep") -- that we call Twitter, Ello, the village, the economy.
Nobody can sleep so nobody can dream. Which implies a more modest mode of creation -- a step back in the value chain, if you like -- not the work of disguising a kernel of dream for the sake of the social, but rather, the work of disguising the deranged fantasies and ruminations of the small hours, of disguising the confused and lapsing consciousness of the pre-dawn, as a kernel of dream.
Back when your friends dreamed, you resented them for telling you their dreams. But there was always another kind of resentment too, and with the distractions removed now, it's become more clear what that was all along. You resented them for telling you dreams which, you suspected, weren't truly dreams.
This is the resentment toward the conscious will which is always mixed with the dream. The suspicion of a thinker and storyteller who overlaps with a dreamer, of a responsible agent portraying themself as a passive visionary. At its most extreme pitch, the resentment becomes a hysterical witch-hunt for agency, a murderous rage toward the figure who claims the full status of dream for their mere daydream.
So that's this Wednesday's genre. Stay up all night, think some weird stuff, and convince someone it was a dream.
Otter. Pic via @nelleficent
Really this Wednesday's genre is all an excuse to tell you about my "dream"!
First, my "dream" was very much pre-alpha, a sort of proof-of-concept thing with hardly any content. It was kind of like a Tony Hawk game but in a muted early modern European landscape. It seemed to go on for hours.
Then in the morning there was a sort of theological interlude. I was probably thinking about dreaming and/or dreaming about thinking. I was piecing together a vision of how the mind couldn't possibly supervene on the brain in the way that is commonly claimed. For some reason the person I held responsible for the counterargument was Nina Allan, or at least, her blog. I have no idea why, maybe something to do with networks and spiders, but I'm sorry. My vision didn't adopt the normal form of dualist intuition, by which mental reality possesses certain features which can't be explained by anything in the brain (qualia or whatever). This was the reverse. I was convinced that the physical structure of the brain entailed features of mental reality much larger and more layered than anything we really experience. That was why the standard accounts couldn't possibly be true.
In my vision this conviction was mangled together with a sort of layered panpsychism, the sort where a single physical particle might be vibrating within the engines of multiple mental realities simultaneously, suggestive of Greg Egan's beautiful SF fairytale about consciousness "finding itself in the dust" or Jaron Lanier's reductio of zombie computational functionalism. But for some reason this panpsychism was only applicable bounded within a nutshell. Within the skull -- or perhaps, within the body -- we must accept that every possible conscious network which could be "read into" the matter there, no matter how weird the function you'd have to apply to the matter in order to find it, was in fact instantiated by that matter, and was in fact conscious, and all these translucent dimensionless consciousnesses were furled together within that matter.
This was possibly not true of the universe at large, and the reason for that had something to do with the geographical individuation of consciousnesses, a kind of mysterious law about how a conscious system must necessarily bud off into separate viewpoints when the matter which instantiates it is physically spread beyond a certain limit. Something to do with why I am here and you are there -- basically, for some reason, it would have been ridiculous, whereas the arbitrary privileging of the skull's trove was not.
I finished the altercation with a slightly sneering bon mot about how the pun of "be" and "bee" in Allan's work (please, none of this is true) might be sufficient for most folk to solve the mind-body problem, but some of us preferred to look further afield. Maybe this bit related to swarms and emergent complexity but really it just made no sense.
The whole time I considered myself awake, and knew I was in bed with the pillow folded around my head against the lamplight.
But what I really wanted to tell you about was the family of otters.
I wanted to tell you about the family of otters, and not just because they are cute and likely to be popular if I commend them to you. This was after the theological interlude described above, at a moment when I was even more awake. In fact I would say I was fully awake.
My eyes were open and I may have listened to and spoken what passes for intelligibly with another person in the room (I've forgotten now, but at the time I did know). Really, if it wasn't for the family of otters, I would definitely have been awake in every way. I could move my arms and legs and I was thinking about the day ahead.
It was these otters who slipped me a secret sign that in fact I could not possibly be called awake. If it wasn't for the otters I could never have known. Because they were there. They had no waking reason to be there but they were. But they were there as barely as possible, so perhaps I was as barely dreaming as it is possible to be. They were not there as language or imagery, but only as raw availability, as an unqualified and unstructured salience.
(I don't know, maybe I discovered a new collective noun, a relevance of dream otters. Maybe I discovered the true unit of measurement in which to plumb the depth of dreaming. It couldn't all be measured in that family of otters, obviously: but it rings true that the unit of measurement of depth of dreaming would change every time the amount increased).
Anyway.
Of course, the relevance of the family of otters quickly did become the language and image of a family of otters, rearing to go. But not quickly enough that I couldn't catch them the moment before they were either of those things.
I'm telling you, they were there.
The most interesting things I've done and learned were things that happened in dreamland.
— ess bee fritz (@RandomAntics) October 16, 2014
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