Chimera Song Mosaic
Friday, July 29, 2005
I can't seem to fix this white space problem. I don't know why my posts are way down here.
Well, I have three things to say: A Year of Wonders: A Novel of the Plague was very good, if not for the disorienting ending; The Lovely Bones was so good I read it in a day (and night)--it's unlike anything I have read before, naive, I guess, but not inauthentically so, and without sappiness or unearned sentimentality it had me crying through the whole thing (crying!), or it could have been just me since reading lots of novels tends to depress me; The Buddah of Suburbia is a prurient HOOT!
But mostly I haven't been able to tear myself away from an old computer game that I play on my old computer (both about five years of age) called Gabriel Knight 3: Blood of the Sacred, Blood of the Damned. It's one of those where your character talks to people, walks around, and investigates things and solves puzzles. It also has vampires, or it will, when I get to them. It's set in Rennes le Chateau, France, and it deals with the Knights Templar and the Holy Grail; it's some kind of actual mystery. The thing I love about the Gabriel Knight series is that they are set in actual locations, so when Lance and I played the second one way back in college, we got to see some parts of Munich that we were later pleased to discover in person actually existed. I don't know how to explain the thrill of having laid down memories of a place one hasn't yet traveled to, to have intimate, first-person visual experiences in such a place and then to make good on them with a real-life visit. It's sort of like the experience of seeing something like the Statue of Liberty only to recognize it from stored pictures. There's a bit of disappointment in the nothingnewness of it. On the other hand, what comfort in familiarity. I knew the exterior. Now, if I had only gone inside I would have laid down more perspectives of it.
last night in the game I snuck into all the other characters' hotel rooms, which was such a voyeuristic pleasure. I had been looking at the outside of the doors for hours of game play, and now to go inside them was delightful! They each had different toiletries by their bathroom sinks, for example.
