Story: The Glove, IV [Obsoleted]

(Part I , III , V)


Steffan was a Master. He was utterly shocked. No one ever went directly from Apprentice to Master in the Pipers Guild. It had only happened twice before, once with great success and once with great infamy. The infamy lived on in a louder fashion than the success had. A master! It was unbelievable. His mind wandered randomly as he stood woodenly holding the scroll. Finally, his mother emerged from the crowd and took him by the hand, and then led him away.

Two hours later, the newly appointed Master Steffan had eaten some hearty soup and was looking at the still unbroken seal on the scroll. His mother and father had steadfastly refused to break the seal for him and now it sat on the table, being significant without any effort. The Great Seal of the Pipers Guild was a simple hexagon, a regular six-sided shape impressed upon the wax that sealed the scroll. Once opened it could never be remade, and a tiny piece of his past would be lost forever.

Steffan took a thousand holopics of the scroll from all angles and then took up the scroll and held it for a few moments. He had no idea how to open a seal. Could it damage the scroll in the process?

"Son. You will eventually read it. Just go to it." Steffan's father sketched a motion for how to open the seal and Steffan copied it imperfectly. Unrolling the scroll he was confused by his instructions.


'Master Steffan,

In the event of your reading these instructions we must assume you have passed your test, and with such acclaim that you have acceded to the rank of Master. Congratulations.

As you are aware, it is almost unprecedented for someone to do what you will have done. From the earliest you have been thought to possess the most unusual of high potential and monitored with great interest. We have need of a talented person, for the world is an unusual place, as it has ever been, and circumstances require an unusual person for an unusual mission.

For a time now we have been concerned at the growing imbalance between the societies of the two great cities of Troos. We have become ever more distant from our scientific brothers in Edin and have decided to send an emissary, a new ambassador to investigate frictions that have recently arisen. You are that ambassador, Master Steffan. We require no spying from you, and the authorities of Edin are completely aware of your purpose. We ask you to journey to Edin, to commune with its peoples, and determine the problem we can not perceive.

Should you accept this mission, and we hope you will, present yourself at the Pipers Council on the third day after your successful test.

Fare well in the meantime.
Octavius, Laird of Burgh.'





Octavius! Steffan had been approached by the Laird of the Pipers, the hereditary guardian of the city, and now he had to decide his course of action. What would he do in three days? Whatever it was, he was sure that the next three days would be an agony of waiting.

Steffan began to wait, and think, and wait some more.


To be continued...

Boxes and boxes and even more boxes

My things have been moved and I am no longer even technically a resident of Aberystwyth. It feels funny to move. It always does. As people we define ourselves rather bizarrely by where we live, our jobs and our families, but not often by who we are and how we behave. Hence when we move we are essentially chipping off a chunk of identity and replacing it with our new environment. As a result, and if that is true for you, then moving is of course a traumatic experience!

Let's accept the above as a hypothesis, for now, and that it applies to me or someone else sitting in a house with too many boxes and not enough room for all their books. Hovering around that person you can imagine all the mental boxes strewn around as they try to work out who on Earth they are at the moment. Change throws people for loops. Fortunately my existence is more defined by actions than locations but still it's a strange experience to go through.

Despite all the moving it actually feels like life is quite good at the moment. Sure, I'm unemployed and there are no signs of jobs at the moment, but there are no loose ends flapping and hopes for the future. Huzzah and hail fellow, well met. Sometime soon I will really have to write about 'Joe Versus The Volcano'. It's a hard one to think about, a film that got ripped up in one of our Film Bin discussions despite my loving it, and a fascinating screen poem in many ways. I suspect that there won't ever be a harder piece to write.

<shifts the mental boxes about a bit>

Aha! The upcoming plans for the Quirky Muffin are actually exciting. I will break into book reviews more than at present, shifting away from movies once 'Joe Versus The Volcano' is done, and really plug into the prose portal that formed the essential Oliver. It should be fun, and it is quite scary but a project already begun. There are two stories I want to push along as well, 'Oneiromancy' and 'The Disappearance', both of which will hopefully conclude before the next phase of 'Triangles' and the resurrection of 'The Glove'. 'The Glove' is hard as there's no immediate plot to hang onto, although there is a plan now. World building is actually quite hard, which is obvious in retrospect. I might even write about music a little, which is normally a bogie subject.

O.

The Rush Job

The clock is ticking and the world continues to turn and the deadline isn't mysteriously moving further ahead in time; It is sitting there malevolently, waggling its eyebrows and pulling faces as you struggle the choices available to you. Do you organise your day, sacrifice a few things and make a good job of your assigned project? Do you you postpone it to another day and hope for the best? Or do you do what I'm doing right now, and commit to 'The Rush Job'?

In the vast majority of cases, the rushed job is a bad idea from beginning to end. There is only one exception, one case where bashing out a project in quick fashion and with no planning can ever work and even then only sporadically. That exception is in the case of a creative work, which I pretentiously class this current piece of prose as. In the arena of writing, a well crystallised piece of rushed work can far surmount the product of a more leisurely and organised session of applied mentality and leave something so spontaneous and wonderful on the page that you can only feel glad that it happened. Of course this isn't an example of that, but instead the tortured and rushed ramblings of a dehydrated and rambling mind.

<Clompie waves an alarm clock and cackles>

'Why is this a rushed job?', you might ask, if you could be bothered. Well, moving day is upon me and all my things must depart from Aberystwyth for yet another laboured van ride cross country to who knows where, to yet another stopping point on the grand travelling itinerary of life. Moving is such fun. Will I forget to leave my keys this time? Will giant robots stomp on the house before I've gotten out, making me culpable on damaged house inventory items? Will we actually get more use out of the spare towels? Where will all the pillows go?

All these questions and more shall be answered, or simply ignored in the midst of all the other trivialities. Moving is not fun, but really tiresome, and the required cleaning is even worse. But it is at least another technicality done with and council tax will no longer be required for the place.

You see, as a rushed job this blog wasn't so bad and at least the next one will be the next part of one of the stories currently on the go. It's actually harder to write one of these regular entries than the stories, as they're quite fun to just bash out and make up on the fly, while this type of blog really requires the ability to top and tail with some aplomb, and in this case quickly, as it was of course 'The Rush Job'.

O.

PS I shudder at the very thought of Council Tax. (Shudder shudder).

Story: Oneiromancy, I

(Part O , II)

There were dreams and then there were Dreams. The man had been having the latter sort for most of his life and he was sick of them. They danced around in his head, lingered menacingly and never meant anything. Flame figures danced in the arms of icy partners and giant pillows roamed the land seeking mountains to bed down on. People spoke to him of total nonsense and animals recited poetry of the finest meter. It was perplexing and often nearly drove him insane.

Sometimes he thought that he was already insane. The thought was a consolation on cold stormy nights when sleep was something best left undone. This wasn't one of those nights, and he knew that if he didn't sleep tonight that he would probably collapse the next day. Sleep would have to happen. The bottle of dream-preventing sleeping pills sat on the small corner shelf of his bedroom, as it always did, and he didn't take one, as he always didn't. Never again. Addiction had been terrible, and the bottle stood as a reminder to be vigilant.

The man brushed his teeth, splashed his face, donned his pyjamas and dropped onto the mattress on the floor. The lamp turned off and darkness prevailed. Sleep followed swiftly, as is tended to, and then after a few moments there were Dreams.

A woman with short blonde hair was looking at him. An owl wearing a tiny blue fez stood on her shoulder. She was speaking but he couldn't hear anything, and a wall of fire was sweeping in from the right of his vision. Now the owl was trying to speak to him too, and it occurred to him that this dream wasn't anywhere near as weird as his usual nightmares. He looked down involuntarily and saw he was standing on nothing but an intangible path of light. The woman was on the path too, a few steps away, but he couldn't get any closer no matter how he tried.

Giants stalked by in the darkness beyond the effect of the Light Road, carrying kippers instead of swords and swinging legs in uncoordinated fashions. Stars twinkled underfoot. The blonde woman was stamping her foot on the Road. Finally she pulled a piece of paper out of a previously absent bag and scribbled on it with a pen she took behind her ear. The Light Road dissipated suddenly and the man fell into a hideous and evil darkness, and then his regular Dreams began. Despite what was about to happen, the man relaxed at the relative normality as the elephants thundered across a plain and then turned into planets made of cheese, pulling the stars with trunks made into rings.

The man slept on, twitching and shuddering occasionally.


There shall be more...

On writing job applications

I am currently in the throes of writing statements for job applications and that is one of the most infuriating things you can do. There is no disguising the fact that job applications are hard to write. It doesn't matter what kind of job you're applying for, for there will always be that hesitation about what is best to write. It's the same quandary that I would imagine pursues people in writing personal ads or online dating profiles. What on Earth should go in and what should be left out?

The other danger of doing job applications is the danger of success. You would think that failure would be the danger but failure imposes no immediate change in your circumstances while success usually makes every difference in the world! Failure by unconscious attempt is clearly just a version of stalling so as not to take the risk in changing things. It's very easy to be afraid of change, as millions of people around the world will tell you. As someone applying for academic jobs in Mathematics the pressure on a supporting statement can be quite overwhelming. For all but the most entry-level jobs you end up writing something closer in length to a short story than a letter and it becomes ever more important to justify and back up everything you try to communicate.

So, as this statement continues to dribble out and become ever more restructured and out of shape, this blog is gushing in a far more consistent manner. Practically everything is easier than writing a statement/letter for a job application. Sometimes I wonder if it's worthwhile! This coming week will see harder things though as I have to move out of my place in Aberystwyth and churn the wheel on the latest draft of my paper, which has again been delayed due to circumstance and family holidays which simply had to happen. Writing the paper has proven to be far harder than I ever supposed it could be, as the economy of language demanded by custom and tradition requires discipline of the first order. That discipline, combined with my current extreme fatigue, is making it hard.

I will miss Aberystwyth. There's a chance I could return at some point but that beautiful town is the nicest place to live I've ever experienced. It's a perfect compromise between town and country, and one that a rural bumpkin would think very unlikely to ever beat. Being by the sea is one of the nicest things in the world. Failure always imposes change, but slowly and painfully, unlike success. If then there's no difference between success and failure, why not go for success?

O.

Movie: 'The Private Life Of Sherlock Holmes' (1970)

The legendary director Billy Wilder had quite the checkered career. In between classics such as 'Stalag 17', 'Sunset Boulevard', 'Double Indemnity', 'Some Like It Hot', 'The Apartment' and 'The Fortune Cookie' he made many movies you might not have heard of. Some of those movies are too heavily rooted in their timeframe ('Kiss Me Stupid', which is also quite weird), while others are rather misconceived in their origins (again 'Kiss Me Stupid', as well as 'Irma La Douce'). Quite often he pushed the boundaries of crumbling censorship to the detriment of his own films, but 'The Private Life Of Sherlock Holmes' falls into a funny little category of its own.

'Holmes' was intended to be a roadshow movie, a mammoth epic that would tour the country, showing with an intermission, and comprising four independent but inter-related episodes in the career of Sherlock Holmes that would otherwise not have been revealed. This would have been a capper on Billy Wilder's career as his twilight approached, but instead fate intervened and the cinema roadshow died a death, leading instead to a theatrical release. The movie was mauled in theatrical editing, losing two of its stories, and resulting in two tonally disparate cases that make up a minimal version of the film. The other two cases are apparently and unfortunately lost to posterity.

The reality of 'Holmes' is that we see the bookends of a mammoth story that do not quite have the substance required to make a truly coherent movie. The first portion is effectively a sex farce while the second and longer portion is a kidnapping case that eventually morphs into an international espionage mystery. The unifying theme is the mystery or heartbreak that lurks in Sherlock's personality, that bleakness that motivates him in his lonely course of life, and which remains untouched since in his era no-one would dare to approach him on the topics of love and sex. Indeed, the farce of the first act is constructed entirely to force Watson to ask Holmes about his romantic past, which question is seemingly answered for the audience in the second portion by Holmes' heartbreak at being deceived by the beautiful German spy Gabrielle. Presumably these two points in the arc would have been complemented by events in the missing portions.

It should not be said that this is a bad film, though, as it is in no ways that. It is merely intangibly slight and bizarrely patched together in the middle so that we move from farce to irony over a small chasm. The acting is solid, especially Robert Stephens as Holmes himself, managing to pull off an aristocratic air as well as a cynicism and urbane worldliness that is not normally seen in portrayals of the Great Detective. Colin Blakely in contrast is almost ridiculously buffoonish to the point of caricature, partially defusing the dramatic bombs that could easily have detonated more effectively. This is surely one of the best Sherlock Holmes films made to date, that collection being replete with noble attempts that never quite seem to hit the mark. The problem with a Sherlock movie is that remaining close to the source material is more limiting than anyone can ever quite imagine; The movies which seem to succeed more take new turns and distance themselves while remaining true to the core of the character, as in 'The Seven-Per-Cent Solution' and 'Murder By Decree'.

Points of interest for this movie include the presence of Christopher Lee as Mycroft Holmes, the excellent score by Miklós Rózsa, some witty banter scripted expertly for Holmes, and that strange sense of melancholy that permeates the piece. It's not for nothing that this film is referred to often as inspiration for the modern day BBC series 'Sherlock' in the commentaries for those shows. It does have a similar air to it quite frequently.

This is a well motivated patchwork of a film, but one well worth viewing. It's my second favourite Sherlock film after the aforementioned 'Seven-Per-Cent Solution' and might one day become my favourite as tastes change over time. Of course the main crime here is that we will never see the full and coherent film, and that more than an hour of footage is lost forever. Perhaps it would have been a bloated mess, but just as equally it could have been the masterpiece that crowned the career of the late great Billy Wilder. At the very least it's better than 'Kiss Me Stupid', which I shall talk about quite soon.

O.

The Maze Analogy

There is a massive hedge maze at Longleat, one in which it is very easy to become incredibly lost in that bewildering catacomb of narrow passages, walled in by the tall leafy walls. This particular maze is of the variety that is full of loops and swirls instead of dead ends, and in truth did stump both me and my sister in our quest to find the centre. We made it to bridge five out of six and then had to abort after almost an hour and a half to make it to the safari bus. It was a heady mess. Maybe next time we'll crack it.

A maze is an analogy or perhaps an allegory for what we all go through in the course of things. We trundle down our little corridors of time, not knowing where we might end up and hoping that we can retrace our steps if anything goes too wrong. And then when things don't go as planned we have to go back to the last turn and go right instead of left or just give up in disgust. Life is a merry of miserable little maze and all we can do is navigate it with good grace or be lost in the frustration. It's the journey, not the destination!

This it the two hundredth edition of the Quirky Muffin and in many ways very little has changed in net terms since the first edition. There has been a job, and a holiday or two but at this moment everything is exactly the same except for being one year later. One could almost say that I've taken a turn around the maze and ended up once again where I started once before. Perhaps the world is a little older now, and I certainly am of course, but the one irrevocable and essential advantage of the passage of time is that we learn. Learning is all we have so we had best enjoy it. Isn't it lovely?

The one hundredth post was about interactive fiction and went out mid-February of this year. It is entirely possible that I haven't even thought about the legendary medium of the text adventure since that day, as I became utterly absorbed in the work I was doing at the time. Someday perhaps there will be more work to become absorbed in. Work is itself a little maze that sweeps us all into strange swirls and loops of activity that always leave us energised and deranged in equal measure. Did that make sense? No? Then it fits entirely in with the theme of the previous one hundred and ninety-nine Quirky Muffins.

O.