The Sunday Poem: Jungle Book part VI

 Posted by (Visited 10881 times)  The Sunday Poem
Dec 042005
 

VI.
The Forest

The trees stand apart from each other,
afraid to come too close,
trunks worn smooth by the streams of wolves coursing past them
and the scratching deer.

Smooth columns: this is a cathedral of trees,
a place of arches and infinite doorways
formed by branches curving silently into the air.

Stained stars hang from the vaulted boughs:
flowers of wax,
candles burning with inner light,
exuding scents and marble incense.

A place of worship where hapless trees are choked
with glacial trailing patience
until the massed weight of coils makes arches creak
in the spring rains, when elephants bellow.

Then the bough breaks
and the sound of one tree falling
reverberates like bells and bells and belltowers.

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Memorial (guitar piece)

 Posted by (Visited 4929 times)  Music
Dec 042005
 

I’ve always felt bad that the only version of “Memorial” that was on the site was the godawful MIDI. It was at the wrong tempo, it sounded terrible, and it lacked all the lilt that the piece ought to have.

But now I have this nifty new WordPress plugin that will embed this Flash music player in this post. So you can hear a quickie take on “Memorial” the way it’s supposed to sound. Sorta, since it’s not all that nice a recording.
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Eight, Sixteen, Twenty-Two

 Posted by (Visited 5755 times)  Writing
Dec 032005
 

I remember the soft scent of asparagus, and pulling the stalks from the ground, one by one, tender roots giving way as the soil crumbled off, cold and gritty. My back ached, and my knees ached, and the sun was hot, but what did I care? I was only eight, and pulling asparagus for dinner was a thing to do with other eight-year-olds on Montague farm. Every once in a while we’d stop and chase each other through long rows of sweet corn. The tall stalks would slap our faces, and as we played peek-a-boo between the green shucks and sprays of yellow cornsilk, the voices of our elders rang out across the fields calling us home.

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Minor site update

 Posted by (Visited 4526 times)  Game talk
Dec 032005
 

An interview of me that Masaya Matsuura did about six months ago that I happened to remember and find. This was for the Japanese Playstation magazine HyperPS2. You can read it here, and it’s now linked on the Interviews and Panels page.

Also, I just realized that all the academic papers that used to be on the site vanished when we yanked the Books section. A few of those were actually cited in a few places, so I suspect I should maybe put them back up, even though I am quite sure that none of you are interested at all in essays on Shakespeare’s Winter’s Tale or the short stories of Bharati Mukherjee.

Is there an intermediate gamer?

 Posted by (Visited 6586 times)  Game talk
Dec 012005
 

BBC News | At-a-glance | State of Play has a bunch of neat stats about the UK gamer — nice job, Alice! I love the graphs.

The thing that always jumps out at me about these is that once you include “light” games, puzzle games, etc, the overwhelming majority of folks consider themselves gamers.

And the secondary thought that there’s a really big gap between the extravaganzas like most blockbuster PC and console games, with their complexity, their millions spent on presentation, their demand of dedicated hardware, and so on — and the light casual games, which are derisively referred to as “minigames” by the more hardcore.

Where’s the on-ramp? Where are the games that are intermediate in difficulty, in complexity, in demands on reflexes? As people age, the trend for their play right now seems to be out of the typical blockbuster market, which is equivalent in so many ways to the summer movie blockbuster market.

For that matter, why aren’t there more games that are like winter movies: artistically demanding, but perhaps not blockbusters; labors of love, intended for prestige?

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