yesterday

That was weird. After dinner we got home and laid down on the bed and fell asleep for five hours. Then we brushed our teeth and went to bed.

Quote from dinner: "They were trying to decide on the endpoint for a drinking contest. Let's drink until we can't integrate or differentiate simple functions, one of them said. Nah, said the other, let's drink until we can't stand up."

damn, that was good falafel

You should all be aware that the best falafel there is comes from the Leena's van on the Hillman side of the parking lot between Hillman and the Carnegie. Don't try to eat them over your lap or anything else that you don't care to hose down, though: they are juicy. That is part of their superiority. It also involves the use of pickles, bits of lemon peel, and of course non-puckish falafel.

(I wish I remembered the falafel guy's name (no, Leena is his daughter). I wish I were better at remembering to remember people's names.)

declare victory and let wc -l sort it out

I think today I was less productive than my cough, but yesterday I was more.

Also, sometimes I wish, though not with overwhelming intensity, that English were like Russian in having not only "but" and "and", but also a conjunction somewhere in the middle.

Ursula Le Guin, _The Other Wind_

This is her new Earthsea novel. It continues the revisionist project that _Tehanu_ started, but I found it less preachy. It's really very clever in its finding cracks in the world that the trilogy set forth, and placing things of importance within them -- think of it like Tim Powers.

This book is a close companion to _The Farthest Shore_; they're both about death, and the denial of death. _TOW_ digs deeper into the background, how death works in Earthsea, and why. We meet Ged again, but spend more time with the king, with Tenar, and with a village sorcerer in whose dreams the wall of stones is crumbling.

Her technique is impeccable. Well, not quite impeccable; the unfolding of the situation was driven a bit much by opportune recollection of old folk tales, hyperinformative old folk tales.
But the prose is beautiful, precise, and unobtrusive, and the slipping from head to head within an omniscient POV is as graceful as I've ever seen.

The Summoner is the speaker for wizardry and against death, and I'm not satisfied with the words the author puts in his mouth; I'm not convinced she's inhabited the character. For him to say he brought a dead man back "because he had the power to do it" smells to me of authorial meddling; in fact the entire death and revival seems gratuitous, or at least confusing.

I should reread _TFS_ now to compare the workings of death and magic, and maybe I should try rereading the entire series in reverse order.
I don't have a copy of _Tales_, though.

( here be SPOILERS )