Sid is Alive

As the death toll rose, I took time this morning to read the London coverage on CNN.com in detail.

It appears the man whose friends were searching for him <http://flickr.com/photos/grabby/24464269/in/pool-bomb/> was among those killed. I believe he must have been Jamie Gordon, 30, who worked for City Asset Management. The poster from his friends made it all real to me. The omoiyari moment.

Today I scrolled through the complete list of victims <http://www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/2005/london.bombing/victims.html> looking at all the faces, reading the circumstances that led them to be riding train or bus at the wrong moment.

Work, meetings, home after a night shift. The minute of every life set theirs on the path to harm. In one case a man died on a bus after being evacuated from a train station.

Turning the other cheek
I've heard it said we misunderstand the message of "turn the other cheek." It has been diluted in the translation. The original message was not suggesting that once a cheek was slapped the other was to be offered in docile compliance.

The other cheek was to be offered fiercely and with defiance.

It's certainly a new kind of battle for Westerners, the battle of everyday routine. But going on is definace. Performing the minute is rebellion. It reminds me of that moment in Les Misérables http://www.lesmis.com/ when "Do You Hear the People Sing" is performed and gradually more and more voices join the chorus. We're not afraid is the new song of angry men.
I think We're not Afraid! <http://www.werenotafraid.com/> has it right.

This picture on Flickr <http://flickr.com/photos/grabby/24464269/in/pool-bomb/> literally put the face on yesterday's tragedy.

We saw many like it after 9-11, and when I pulled up the Flickr pool photos it was seeing the poster put up by those seeking a lost friend that brought tears to my eyes.

I love London. I love its culture and even its sprawl. Riding the underground was one of the coolest mass transit experiences I've ever had.

While I was there last year, news reports covered complaints by commuters about crowding and headaches, but with day passes and the efficiency it seemed fabulous to me. Even when a line of people toppled over on one of the escalators, which operate on a frightening incline, an operative was on hand immediately to stop it and offer assistance.

And we were whisked all over the city from King's Cross.

Ironicially I was in Dublin when the Madrid explosions occurred and watched interviews with underground personnel about their security measures.

Looking into the missing gentleman's smiling face, captured hours before the tragedy in a happier moment, I feel tears well in my eyes.

He makes it real, a guy with his tie tugged down after work. Jesus, he's me

I’ve wondered how long it would take me to actually shift my reading habits from books to a handheld device, fully believing the transition would come, not just for me but ultimately for the masses.

When I’ve talked about that notion with friends and acquaintances I’ve often heard: “I like a book to hold,” as an argument that it won’t happen. As Christine often points out to me on various issues: “It’s not about you.”

Indeed the transition is about those who grow up glued to the web and the gatling gun of hypertext, and those who already have their whole world on their cell phone.

Eyes trained not on the page but the screen will adopt etext over printed matter, and as for the rest of us wed to the notion of holding a printed tome we’ll adapt or die off just like the dinosaurs.

iPod strikes again
But I mentioned I’ve started to change. I’m by no means an early adopter. People with a lot of PDAs have probably experienced this for years, but I never bothered to get one.

It’s my iPod again, and the wealth of turn of the century etexts out there that have captured the imagination of my 2005 self.

A paper book that helped
A few years ago, when I first discovered Project Gutenberg <http://www.gutenberg.org/>, I tried reading Edgar Rice Burroughs’ The Monster Men online. Didn’t work. Kept getting distracted from the computer screen and I finally reverted to a paperback.

Now, after enjoying a host of other great things about my iPod, through the virtue of iPod and iTunes: Missing Manual <http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0596006586/qid=1119186197/sr=8-2/ref=pd_bbs_2/104-6910621-4464736?v=glance&s=books&n=507846>, I sit in my living room, or more importantly in waiting rooms and other boring places, spinning the wheel to scroll up a column of back-lit text. The Missing Manual pointed me to the program "iPod library" that will convert .pdfs, .lit files and of course plain text files into chunks iPod’s “Notes” feature can accommodate.

Got through the first three novellas about ghost buster John Silence that way, and a story about The Thinking Machine by Jacques Futrel. Working on The Beetle by Richard Marsh now.

I have a paperback novel with a bookmark in it on my coffee table that I’m working on, but I sense something is changing.The bookmark is moving slowly through the book's thickness. My eyes may fail or the newness may ware off, but I’m not sure. I sense one of those moments has occurred. You know, I may have just left the chrysalis and the pupa stage behind.

More texts
I dumped a couple of things not quite adaptable to iPod onto my laptop including

F., an unproduced screenplay <http://www.wga.org/WrittenBy/0603/f.html> by Howard A. Rodman about the pulp villain Fantômas and a couple of other bad guys, well worth reading.

Now the laptop is crowding the paperback more often than not on the coffee table. The cats like that. It stays warm.

Those of you who’ve been reading things on PDAs for years know what I’m talking about, but I’m basically a new convert, and I wonder if the iPod’s market penetration is a herald of more change.

Check out my stories in html for your handheld devices:

Good Kids <http://www.gdarkness.com/goodkid.html>

The Handbook <http://www.plotswithguns.com/HANDBOOK.htm>

It's early to talk about it much, but I've been working on some radio drama scripts. It's been a bit exhilarating, bouncing between adaptations of some of my own stories and adaptations of classic horror and mystery tales.

It forces me into literary analysis I haven't tackled in a while. Deciphering meaning and nuance in classics is both compelling and challenging.

Some of it's required a bit of pop culture archaeology. It's what anyone working on an English thesis could tell you. But who knew? When Le Fanu was writing "Green Tea," reports were out that a group of Canadian nuns were o.d.ing on the stuff and it was producing anxiety and frayed nerves.

Perhaps most exciting and challenging is crafting exposition into dialog-driven scenes. I've sporadically listened to radio drama, OTR these days, for ages. Never knew I was studying for something I would actually get to work on.

My biggest hope is that the excitement is waking the muses. I work best when I'm driven.

I'm loving the Opera 8 voice capabilities. I've been playing with it between projects and I believe it's going to work out as an asset in multi-tasking.

I've been letting it read articles to me while I do other things so far, and I've plugged in a few customizations.

Really handy.

I was browsing through the bookstore the other morning and pleasantly discovered Hot Blood: Deadly After Dark is out in a new edition. It features one of my wilder tales.

I dropped a note to Jeff Gelb, letting him know I'd moved since last we were in contact. He sent me back a contributor's copy and also, most pleasantly, my share of the advance .

E-book
Turns out we've been out of touch for a while. I was also happy to discover a few pennies for an e-book version of DAD (<http://www.ereader.com/product/detail/1424>). Who knew?

Stuff from inside my head is still rattling around all over the place.