Ooh, Mu

I finally poured the first mold for the Imperial Highway. Didn't take any pictures -- there's thousands of pictures of people's two-part molds out there already. I still have no idea how well it will cast up. I suspect it will be rather thick. Alternate plan is to cast Hydrocal and try pulling sheet styrene over it with TechShop's vacuum former.

The weather is (temporarily) warming, if wet, and I have (sort of) heat in the apartment now. Between that and moving the start of my day an hour later, I seem to be doing a little better. Still was a bit of a push to pour two sides of a two-part mold in one evening after work.



The Tomb Raider story is stalled. I recently read an extremely entertaining loosely-linked set of Tomb Raider fanfics which bring a lot more real-world history and religion in, with a decidedly European sensibility, and also placed a bit more realistically in some of the (many) real-world trouble spots. And I'm humbled. For all that I'm cramming on history right now (mostly ancient world) I am not and will never be one of those people who can extemporize at length about hoplite formations or the political use of ostracism in classical Athens.

Of course this is a road that can be followed too far. No-one "reads" Umberto Eco...they struggle through him with a terrible awareness they are missing half of the references and allusions. And I'd rather not be one of that kind of writer, either. I'd prefer a shared illusion; the reader thinks I know something about the Great Siege of Malta, and after reading my story they feel that they, too, have learned something about that test run to what would the last great sea battles between galleys as the Ottoman Empire clashed with a variegated and oft-feuding coalition of nominally Christian nations for control of the Mediterranean.

And, yeah, as much as I've been trying to learn something about Assyrians, Babylonians, Hittites and Kushites and early Judea and of course mighty (but often fractured) Egypt, I think I'm just as likely to be focusing the final chapters of the fic on more recent history; specifically, the tattered and contradictory set of tales told of Atlantis, Lemuria and Mu.

Oh, yes, but once you start looking into them, you realize the wealth of imagination that has crufted around those words arose from many threads going in all directions. It isn't all just Plato. You dig at all and you are looking at Blavatsky and the Theosophists, and relative late-comers like Von Daniken who synthesize that with concepts Howard Phillips Lovecraft and his friends were selling for a nickel a word, and characters like Augustus le Plongeon or Ettiene Brassard, and before you know it you've got links to Young-Earth Creationists, Zorastorianism, and once again our old buddy Hermes Trismagestis.

Which is exactly what I was talking about above. Name-drop the Dialogues, and a little Solon of Athens, on the way to Atlantis and that's fine. But start talking about Ignatious Donnely or worse yet, Francisco López de Gómara, and you are rapidly approaching the point where your reader gives up in befuddlement.

(A note. I spend way too long when I write fiction, so when I blog I don't generally bother with spell-check on any of the names I drop).



I'm working a day job now, and it is only tangentially involved with sound. But lest you feel (as I'm starting to feel) as if this blog will never be about theatrical sound again, I do have a couple shows coming up in this new year.