Keeping track of ideas...

Near the end of the sixth season of the LJ Idol competition, I became aware of the occurrence of tidbits of story ideas floating through my consciousness, except I guess it would be fairer to say "I recognized story ideas in the course of everyday life." Even better, I started to keep rough notes of the ideas.

For example, in looking over my notes there is one titled "Modern Illiteracy," based on having watched Rembrandt's J'Accuse, a 2008 Dutch documentary by Peter Greenaway that purports to demonstrate how Rembrandt's famous painting The Night Watch is really an indictment of murder against the people who appear in the painting, written in a language of images that was readily comprehended by people of the day, but which is all but lost to us now owing to our near-universal visual illiteracy.

My notes, jotted after seeing the documentary:

A. As we now turn ever-increasingly away from printed words to audiovisual images (e.g., YouTube, etc.), do we risk the same change in reverse? What nuances of print will be be lost in the shift (back) to images? Will future literacy be tied more to an ability to create visual content than written content?
B. Compare/contrast our predicament (digitization of information—especially written, but graphics as well—and how its loss is threatened by the loss of the technical means to display it) with the thesis put forth in the Rembrandt documentary. Idea: In a world where few care to learn to read words, some non-lethal disaster makes it impossible to access digital data. No video. No pictures. No computers. (No typewriters?) What happens?

Other notes are a lot shorter. The other day, after spending some time reading my mother's notes and assignments for her college short-story-writing class, it occurred to me the woman was obsessed with marriage—which really didn't cause me to raise my eyebrows—and not just marriage, but marriage to the right "sort" of person. That did give me pause. Here are my notes for an idea titled "The Right Blood":

She didn't do it to me. Why?

There is a limit to terseness, however. The other day, I watched a documentary on the phenomenon of "overturn" lakes in Africa, so named because every so often, they erupt like huge soda bottles. Carbon dioxide (and other gases) apparently seep into these lakes from below, where they are held in solution by water pressure. Left undisrupted, the lakes attain a state of equilibrium and everything remains hunky-dory. Agitate the water enough, however—as happened at Lake Nyos in Cameroun in 1986 when landslide debris slid to the bottom of the lake—and you get what happens when you shake a bottle of soda and then open the bottle. Fish die, shores are defoliated, and the released carbon dioxide forms a suffocating cloud that killed about 1800 people as a result of the eruption at Lake Nyos.

Two nights ago, I was lying in bed when I had what was probably a great idea on the subject, but the next day, my notes on the subject "Overturn" consisted of the following:

Whoosh!

Regrettably, this terse summary meant nothing to me.

Ah, well. You can't win them all, but you gotta keep trying!

Cheers...

I had been looking for this...

It's one thing to be told that the Soviets had given their rocket test range the name of a village located some distance away from the range's location, quite another to find evidence.

A long time ago, I acquired a "surplus" map of a rather large chunk of the Soviet Union. It had been published by the Aeronautical Chart Service of the US Air Force in August 1949. What intrigued me about the map was the medium on which it had been printed: silk. Just the sort of lightweight item that wouldn't slow a man down in the event he found himself on foot, deep in Soviet territory after having bailed out of his B-52.

The territory shown on the map includes a part of interest to me in Kazakhstan.


I've edited the image to show the Tyura-Tam railroad station, in the lower left-hand corner of the image, and the thriving metropolis of Baikonur, in the upper right-hand corner of the image.

Fortunately, the map never had to be used.

This would have been an interesting addition to my presentation at last October's ATA Conference, but such is life.

Cheers...

UPDATE: In his comment, LJ friend grosh makes the good point that, at the time the map was printed by the USAF, there was no rocket test range near Tyura-Tam. As has been noted previously in this journal, the official founding of what has become Baikonur took place on June 2, 1955, and the closed military town that was built had no actual public name to speak of. Soon, however, the settlement that grew up near Tyura-Tam began to unofficially be known as Zarya (Dawn).

On January 28, 1958—shortly after Sputnik was launched—the village was officially named Leninskiy (adjectival form of the name Lenin). Three years later, the announcement of the launch of Yuri Gagarin on April 12, 1961 identified the launch site as the 'Baikonur cosmodrome.'

In 1966, the village was reclassified as a city and renamed Leninsk. The city was renamed Baikonur in 1995.

Blasphemy though it may be to say...

...but Rum, Sodomy, and the Lash isn't a half bad album to translate to!

(I wonder, when does the Super Bowl start? ;^)

Cheers...