Tightrope Walker

Well, Sherlock's second season has with maddening desultoriness finally wended its way across the ocean. Could it have taken longer? I've been pacing like Penelope waiting for Odysseus to get off his ass and show up to set things right.

And what did we get for our patient waiting? Before all else, "A Scandal in Belgravia" is an edifice of cleverness. An edifice made from clever bricks derived from clever straw that was gathered by artificially intelligent harvesters and stored in silos of towering smartassery. The cleverness is nonstop. Now, when the word "nonstop" is used in current entertainment, it usually means that one suspense/chase sequence follows quickly on another, in a routine and expected fashion. In "Scandal," clever things are flung at you so quickly you barely have time to duck before three more are winging toward your head. Thank god there was such a long hiatus between seasons, and that there are only three episodes in each. Because this couldn't be written in the week and a half that an American network television schedule tends to allow. Mind you, you could, potentially, write a fascinating script in that time, layered with character and buzzing with electric dialogue -- but you can't plot the Allied invasion in a week and a half, and that's what this is. (And if someone who knows better tries to tell me that it was written in a week and a half, I'll put my fingers in my ears and say la la la, because my entire understanding of reality would be up-ended.)

( Let's peel apart the cleverness! )

Just back from the House series wrap party at one of my favorite places in Los Angeles, the art deco Cicada Club and Restaurant. Built by a wealthy haberdasher (!) in 1928, the building’s a gem of deco splendor, and once a week you can enjoy dinner and dancing to a vintage jazz band.

Tonight, though, it was host to all things House. I kept getting tapped on the shoulder by people I know, dressed, as the invitation said, “to the nines.” My favorite story of the night came from -- well, I suppose I shouldn’t tell you, since I don’t have permission, but my informant said that after the final bit of shooting and speeches on set, a phone rang. Thinking quickly, he said, “It’s Doris!” -- and got a laugh.

There were exchanges of gossip and intel, and the question always was, “What are you doing now?” This is staffing season for network television, so people are out making the rounds. It’s like musical chairs; when the shows staff up, you either have a place, or you don’t. With all the House folks let loose at once on an innocent city, the conversation runs toward, “Have you met on that show?” and “I hear So-and-So is difficult to work with.” Along, of course, with pictures of dogs and children and delectable gossip about mutual acquaintances shouted in one’s ear above the sound of the band. The television industry’s a community, like any small town.

Most parties with TV folks end by 11:00 or so, for we are a race of puritans who know the work starts early the next day. But this time people lingered. It was 1:30 before I drove home on this cool and misty night along surface streets, through Silver Lake, to the hills. Then, still in my long dress, I took my dogs for a walk.

Thanks to everyone for your help! estara managed to locate a page on Amazon UK that had one copy of the book listed. Once I fell into the ruts of bureaucratic routine, suddenly everything became easy, and it went from a belated Christmas present to a guaranteed Friday arrival.

I consider learning other methods of bookstore location as a bonus. And I return to Act 3 with a lighter heart.

I'm being driven mad. I'm trying to send a hardcover copy of Jo Walton's Among Others to a friend in England. I have tried Amazon and Amazon UK, and I've tried just putting the title into Google in the random hope that a physical bookstore that carries it will somehow pop up (none did). Nothing works, at least not if I want to send the book as a gift.

Apparently the only places that carry the hardcover just now are those associated sellers whose names come up when you click on Amazon's "available from these sellers" button. But if you choose one of them, there are no gift options -- and I'd like to enclose a note. And leave off the packing slip with the price, which always seems a bit awkward.

You'd think you could contact the seller to arrange that, wouldn't you? There's even a button for contacting the seller. I've sent a number of emails, and in one case, tracked a source down and left a phone message. Nothing.

I can't even send my own copy of the book, as mine's on Kindle. And my giftee doesn't have a Kindle or an iPad, before you suggest that.

I will take the energy of my frustration and put it into the script I'm writing. Let my producers beware.

I've been reading The Dressmaker of Khair Khana by Gayle Lemmon, a nonfiction book about a young Afghan woman who starts a dressmaking business under the Taliban. The story begins as the Taliban are rumored to be approaching Kabul; we meet Kamila as she's getting her diploma -- which is about to become a worthless piece of paper -- and stay with her through her new firsts. The first time she looks out a window and sees a woman beaten, knowing intervention would be pointless; the first time she must go to the market accompanied by her younger brother, navigating with difficulty in a chadri with a small, obstructed view of the world. When her parents are forced to leave the city, Kamila must find a way to support her sisters without leaving her home. Though she's never sewn in her life, she decides to start a dressmaking business -- a business that eventually takes over their house and provides a living for a number of families in the neighborhood.

It's an interesting book in all the ways you might imagine; the things that people living under a tyranny can do to help each other, or not; the braveries and the turnings-away; the small dignities and the things that must be let go. The ways that human beings are always more than the sum of their society's rules. The view from the ground when the shelling started.

All that aside, however, I was struck by how much it reminded me of a certain type of science fiction story -- and particularly, of "The Screwfly Solution" by James Tiptree. "Screwfly" is the story of a biological instinct gone wrong. Gradually, in a wave starting out in the tropics, the urge to mate is replaced in human males with an urge to kill. Women (and, of course, some men) begin being violently murdered. No one knows what's happening or why, though all sorts of useless committees meet and the outbreak of "femicide" is deplored. One of the viewpoint characters, a male scientist, returns from an extended stay in the tropics to find a United States that is quietly, eerily different. The hotel he's in seems normal, but when he goes outside he sees that it's mostly men on the street. There's a small group of young women in baggy clothing, subdued and walking quickly; the only lone woman nearby struggles to catch up to them, though she doesn't seem to know them; and wordlessly, they accept her.

At the end, one of the few remaining women realizes the human race has been "treated" by aliens, as we might treat a colony of pests. A simple biological fix to interfere with our reproductive cycle, and the species will end itself, leaving the world untouched and available.

The concept itself is mechanical; the glory is in the execution. The quotation at the beginning of the story is from Schopenhauer: "All man's religion and metaphysics is the language of his glands." The tyranny of instinct (specifically, sexual instinct) and our enslavement to it is one of Tiptree's themes ("A Momentary Taste of Being," "Your Haploid Heart," "Love Is The Plan, The Plan Is Death," "And I Awoke and Found Me Here On the Cold Hill's Side") and she delineates with painful clarity how beautiful, how compelling, instinct seems when we succumb to it. "Painful" clarity because she was clearly not someone who privileged the "natural" or took refuge in the idea that instinct was given us by a merciful God to show us the path. On the contrary, God's will may just be the pretty embroidery we create around what we're already drawn to do by our self-interested DNA. She ran a cold-eyed, investigative stare over the whole process, with a logic that leaves you more uncomfortable when you finish one of her stories than when you picked it up.*

In "The Screwfly Solution," new religions spring up built around misogyny; women are the dirty, wrong, evil part of the human race that God wants gone. When a young soldier has this explained to him -- by the person who killed the woman who was with him -- he's deeply moved, and later says, "It's like he was my father; I can't explain it better than that." You have to think it must also feel right and good when the female preying mantis snaps the head off her mate -- that if mantises were intelligent, that would probably be a sacred moment. Because if something feels deeply meaningful, it must be deeply meaningful, right? Ha, ha, human race. Not in Tiptreeland.

(By the way, one of Tiptree's other major themes is the need for kindness. Of course there's a need for it, in the universe as she presents it. Whenever I re-read her, I'm struck by how the two authors I consider most insightful are so completely different. Surely I can't think both Tiptree and Austen are right about the world? And yet I do.)

But back to Khair Khana. I wasn't reminded of "Screwfly" simply from the Taliban's misogyny. It was the transformation of the familiar world -- the same sort of thing that gives, say, zombie movies their power. The idea that you could be walking peacefully down the street in front of your house, and suddenly a group of apparently normal people will rush toward you and try to chomp out your intestines -- or rush toward you with nightsticks and begin shouting abuse because you spoke too loudly or your clothes rustled when you walked. (Indeed, this was one of the hallmarks of the Taliban's religious police-- they were unpredictable. It wasn't enough to wear a chadri or be accompanied by a male relative or refrain from addressing men. There was no moment of safety.)

When Kamila walks the streets of Kabul, she wears baggy clothes under her chadri. She goes carefully. She makes sure to have her younger brother with her when she can, and to have a story ready. To take the back streets. To not engage notice.

It's a new world. And it happened quickly. Just like in zombie movies.

I remember when "Screwfly Solution" was published, and the author was accused of being a paranoid feminist with an ax to grind. I thought, "You're missing the point of the story! It's not a prediction. It's not about villains, either." And it's still not a prediction, but I never thought that a couple of decades later I'd find eerie similarities. That damned Tiptree was just too good in working out details.

So: The Dressmaker of Khair Khana. I'd feel better if it were science fiction.



* And if you find this view of life as disquieting as I do, you may also enjoy this story by Seth Fried.

(Long post warning: we’ll get to some Dr. Who eventually, but bear with me. This is the way I watch television.)

There’s an old Hitchcock anecdote about the difference between suspense and surprise. If a bus suddenly blows up, that’s a surprise. If you see a man get on a bus with a box, and you know there’s a bomb in that box, and you ride along for a little while watching all the ordinary people sitting on the bus and standing in the aisles, not knowing they’re about to be blown to smithereens… that’s suspense.

Another way to describe it is “open” or “closed.” If you’re playing a storyline open, the audience sees and understands everything that’s happening. If you’re playing it closed, the audience doesn’t know a character is even in danger till you pull back the curtain and they gasp.

( The Moment, Etc. and Too Many Footnotes )

Reviewing, once as delicate and artistic a form as the short story, has come upon degenerate times. I was sadly disillusioned the last time I was in New York, when I searched for reviews of a play whose wit I’d enjoyed, and found several reviewers who didn’t simply disagree with me – that would have been interesting – but who truly didn’t seem to grasp what was going on in the most elementary way. Partly, of course, this is due to the great drawing-in of newspapers and financing. Critics are no longer classically educated men of letters who are played by George Sanders, but busy people with day jobs who get tossed an assignment from their friend with a website.

I’m not sure what excuse the New York Times has, however. For a review whose breathtaking irrelevancy will send blood pressures soaring, let’s chew on the following:

http://tv.nytimes.com/2011/04/15/arts/television/game-of-thrones-begins-sunday-on-hbo-review.html

Where to begin? Let’s pass over the reviewer’s confusion about climates different from our own. She makes her allegiances clear: contemporary gangsters are worthy of writing about. Real-life history, worthy. Fantasy? Genre? Goodness, that made-up stuff? “Cheap.” And those who create it are “cheaters.”

Well, no one has to like every genre of literature. The problem comes when somebody who hates a genre decides to tell you what’s wrong with a single work. C.S. Lewis said this pretty well, and it’s worth quoting:

“It is very dangerous to write about a kind [of literature] you hate. Hatred obscures all distinctions. I don’t like detective stories and therefore all detective stories look much alike to me: if I wrote about them I should therefore infallibly write drivel. Criticism of kinds, as distinct from criticism of works, cannot of course be avoided…but it should not masquerade as criticism of individual works. Many reviews are useless because, while purporting to condemn the book, they only reveal the reviewer’s dislike of the kind of which it belongs.

Let bad tragedies be censured by those who love tragedy, and bad detective stories by those who love the detective story. Then we shall learn their real faults. Otherwise we shall find epics blamed for not being novels, farces for not being high comedies, novels by James for lacking the swift action of Smollett. Who wants to hear a particular claret abused by a fanatical teetotaler, or a particular woman by a confirmed misogynist?”

None of this has stopped Ginia Bellafante from sharing her resentment that HBO has chosen to waste her time by airing this terrible fantasy work, terrible apparently because it is a fantasy. The most bizarre paragraph in the entire review, however, begins here:

“The true perversion, though, is the sense you get that all of this illicitness has been tossed in as a little something for the ladies, out of a justifiable fear, perhaps, that no woman alive would watch otherwise.”

What? What? She’s suggesting that the only reason the characters have sex is to get female viewers? So… men hate sex? There was no sex in the books? What? She goes on to try and cover her bases:

“While I do not doubt that there are women in the world who read books like Mr. Martin’s…”

Yes, somewhere on the Earth, in some neglected and lonely corner, there may be two or three women who read such books. Unlikely though it seems.

“…I can honestly say that I have never met a single woman who has stood up in indignation at her book club and refused to read the latest from Lorrie Moore unless everyone agreed to “The Hobbit” first.”

Someone else will have to untangle this. It’s nice that we’re getting it straight what women read, though, right? In those chick book clubs?

“Game of Thrones is boy fiction patronizingly turned out to reach the population’s other half.”

I’m thinking now of all the female authors who’ve been waiting to get out of the “women’s literature” ghetto and into the simple designation of “literature.” Who are tired of being fenced off and told their work is for certain readers only. Fortunately we’ve got the New York Times here to draw those lines more sharply.

I suspect there’s a lot of indignation out there over this review; the average “reader rating” is 1.5. (Averaged from 48 ratings. I suspect there’d be a lot more, but if you go to the site and click on “Rate It,” a helpful message will tell you “Could not submit your rating. Please try again later.” It’s said this for the past 24 hours at least, and none of the reader comments have been posted at all.)

Game of Thrones airs tomorrow night. Since the Times has not seen fit to post what are no doubt quite a few comments, but are happy to leave this pointless review up for people who may be thinking about watching, I decided to post where I can, in my small way. I suspect Bellafante will assume the negativity to her review comes from those silly fanboys in their parents’ basements – because, let’s stick with the stereotypes – so I want to make it clear that I have no stake in this. I don’t know Mr. Martin and I haven’t read his books, though I’ve heard they’re well-characterized and interesting. What I am is a NY Times paid subscriber who turned to a review hoping to get some idea of whether the series lives up to the hype. I sure didn’t get that information here.

I've been promising myself for ages that I'd update here, and that I'd start posting on any damn subject I liked. Home vegetable gardens, the heroism of ordinary people faced by extraordinary circumstances, why television makes no sense, books that drive me crazy but I love anyway. I could create a tag just for "domestic pleasures," and tell you about the last fruit on my blood orange tree or the tao of dogs. What it was like standing outside my front door last night, looking up through layers of distance: branches of white pear blossoms, a semi-circle of tall pines towering above, wispy streaks of cloud floating above that, and a ceiling of dark sky and stars arching over all.

But first, let's talk about one of the great shared frustrations of modern life: customer service, or the lack of it. We no longer live in small villages, where everybody knew who to trust and who did shoddy work. We only have behemoth companies who've laid off everybody who's not actually in sales. But we do have the Internet, dammit. So for the sake of humanity itself, I'm going to post below today's actual letter to AT&T.

If you don't feel like reading someone else's customer service horror story, don't bother. For one thing, it's not the worst customer service experience I've ever had -- that was and probably always will be Time Warner Cable, who offered a special hell that went on for days, cost me a thousand dollars, and involved accusing me of lying when I said their guy hadn't shown up.

Still, when your phone company is actually unreachable by phone, that's pretty special. When it's unreachable by phone and Internet, and you have to go back to the old-fashioned method of the postal service and a letter, I say: well done, AT&T. You have earned today's star.

Anyone like to tell me about their experiences with other phone companies? Recommendations? Feel free to share in the comments.

------------------------

( letter to AT&T )

I can hear surf all day long.

As those who've been reading my Twitter feed know, I am here.

Also here. And here.

I've come to an isolated spot in northern Michigan to see some of that fall color LA has so little of, and to work on... you thought I'd say "my novel," didn't you? It seems I'll be working on two pilots and a draft of my Torchwood script. (Torchwood, by the way, is a many-splendored place of wonder and delight. You know how great you think a place must be, and then you experience it and are disillusioned? This is the opposite of that.)

The woman next to me when I flew into Chicago told me that if there wasn't enough fall color yet, I should drive up to St. Ignace ("if you're not afraid of bridges"). I said that when you tell people in LA that you're going to northern Michigan -- "They ask why?" she filled in, and smiled; "In Chicago, they know. They just say, 'How wonderful for you, where are you going?'"

I drove up here past farms with signs that offer apples and cherry pie; up two-lane roads that span hills with barns and meadows; through tunnels of trees. I have made the acquaintance of pigs and slender, back-faced, black-legged sheep who press soft mouths against your palm for a handful of corn. Today I made my way down the bluff outside my cottage, following a dozen narrow, leaf-filled switchback trails that surely could only be descended by agile children or small deer. I brought my cell phone in case I ended up halfway down the cliff with a broken leg. At the bottom I came out onto a beach where two lonely Adirondack chairs sat in the sand, and there was nothing but empty space as far north and south as the eye could see -- no people, only wind-compressed pines, sand, stones, and cliff. And a hawk overhead.

I grew up near the ocean, and have often foolishly regretted that swimming water only comes in two kinds: salt and chlorine. Then, about a year ago, I saw a photograph of a window looking out on a meadow with trees, and water in the distance: Lake Michigan. And I thought, "Here are all the things I want in proximity! Trees, grass, and a sea that looks like the ocean, but is actually a lake with fresh water!" ("It was an epiphany," nodded the woman going to Chicago; "I get it.")

I was too busy to come during the summer, so I decided to come for autumn, whether I was busy or not. So here I was today, balancing on a rock and dipping a hand in the lake; it felt good. ( I'd hoped to take off my sneakers and wade, but the line of sand ended in stones and shells, inhospitable to bare feet.) In the sand I found what looked like dog prints (possibly cat prints) -- and one set of paw prints that were considerably larger and deeply sunk, and that made me look nervously up and down the empty beach.

Eventually I climbed partway up the bluff and sat for a while thinking encouraging hot-bath messages at my thigh muscles, and enjoying a branch of red oak leaves against glittering gray waves.

So this is Michigan. The fireplace has fought me and in my two days here I've already taken one phone meeting and sent in work for two different projects. But the waves mean business on the beach below (though it's a lake! A lake, do you hear me?) -- and the busiest chipmunks in the world are outside my door. I am not in a mood to complain.

Spoilers ahoy.

This year I'll be a part-time consulting producer on House; which means I'll be writing one script and my general involvement will be lower. For years I've been putting off personal projects (like a stack of novels that are circling 'round in my head waiting for clearance to land), and there's only so long you can ignore that sort of thing before it drives you crazy. It's been hard to think of leaving House, though, and as you can see, I haven't quite succeeded; I just plain love the show. I mean, where else do they let you make up anagrams of your characters' names and create imaginary porn movies? Where they don't think you're nuts because you care about the dialogue? (Seriously, I've been on shows where, if you talk about dialogue having rhythm, they look at you as though you're speaking Esperanto. But here, if an actor says a line as "Brilliant idea," you can say, "I'd prefer it to just be 'brilliant,' because we want to match the two syllables of that to the two syllables of "Long shot" in the alternate version flash immediately after," everybody knows at once what you're talking about. There's no need to explain. And every single person on set is aiming for as close to perfection as they can get, in every area they're involved with.)

So I'm happy to still be in the sandbox, even if it's not full-time.

There's more reason to be happy right now, but it will require explanation for the uninitiated. When I began television writing, about twelve years ago, there were four acts in a network drama, with about five scenes per act. As for scenes, three pages was considered a good average length -- not too short or too long, though after an episode was shot the post-production editing cuts would tend to make things shorter.

Now, three pages probably seems incredibly brief to anyone not used to TV scripts. I've been given scripts from people trying to break in that have scenes five, six, or seven pages long. "That's not how long our scenes are," I told someone once about a Smallville script, and she said, shocked, "They're not?" She'd seen every episode; what the heck was I talking about?

The scenes you watch on TV feel longer. You see two characters at a birthday party and you come away with the sense you saw the entire event. You didn't. You saw the Impressionist painting version of the event, where a brushstroke here and there suggested the rest of the scene to your brain, and you filled it in. The viewer is always coming into scenes after they've already begun, and often cutting out long before they've finished. Three pages -- two to three minutes -- is actually long enough for the necessary information to be conveyed to the audience, most of the time.

But as I said, that was twelve years ago. At the second show I was on, the showrunner said, "We're a little unusual here; we have a fast rhythm, six scenes per act. Sometimes seven!" I look back on that innocent comment now and smile; every show after that one has raced faster and faster, with shorter and shorter scenes. In today's scriptwriting world, twelve scenes are sometimes stuffed into an act. Scenes can be half a page, one page... occasionally two, if it's a substantive discussion. After that, you're playing with fire if you go any longer. (Okay, if you absolutely must, you can get to two and a half without being staked out for fire ants, but you'd better keep that sort of indulgence to a minimum.)

Suppose you have a high-school character, Adam, who's revealing to his best friend, Zach, that he's gay. And an alien. And that his people want him to conquer the Earth with his super-powers. Also, he doesn't want to reveal to Zach that he's attracted to him, but Zach figures it out at the end of the conversation, and Adam's a little embarrassed. Here's the paradox faced by today's TV writer: you can't do a good job with that scene in two pages. But if you hand in three pages, you know how it'll go: "Are you INSANE? Don't you know the audience CAN'T HANDLE A SCENE MORE THAN TWO MINUTES LONG?" Because the default belief is that since the days of MTV videos, if there's any pause in the usual series of quick cuts, the viewers' placid, hypnotized looks will disappear and they'll panic and change the channel.

So how can you solve this problem? Easy. Have the scene begin in the locker room after gym -- let the boys talk as they get their stuff together and close their lockers. Then cut to outside the school, where they continue the conversation. Done! You've made it into two short scenes. "But, Doris," you say. "It's still really the same scene, isn't it? It's just the location that's changed." Yes! Because the people who enforce the two-page rule think that all the audience needs to keep them from turning the channel is to see the background change behind the actors.

Because that's really what keeps you glued to your set, isn't it?

Now, don't misunderstand me. I have nothing against quick cuts and lots of scenes and driving, intense rhythm that leaves you breathless. I'm only saying that different kinds of stories, and different kinds of scenes within stories, call for different treatment. Action sequences, suspense beats, comedy -- they all profit from speed. The occasional character moment needs, as they say, "air." It's trying to lay out all scenes by the same formula that gets you into trouble.

Here's another thing to know: the more someone understands a particular art form, the less they'll need arbitrary rules to determine whether a story or a scene is good. Still, the sense I've had from most shows is that the two-page rule is so chiseled into the robot brain chips of everyone in TV, it just can't be escaped. At this point it would simply never occur to me to turn in a scene longer than that. So when David Foster and I found ourselves with a three-and-a-half page scene at the center of our story, I assumed it was doomed. I thought hounds would be set loose to track us across the ice and return our bloody carcasses to the Tomb of Presumptuous Scriptwriters.

House -- Unreliable Narrator, esq. -- tells his therapist, Nolan (Andre Braugher), about his week. The episode as a whole has that basic short-scene rhythm, and we wanted it to be playful and to move quickly. Then in a pivotal scene, Nolan deliberately provokes him (usually a House trick), leading to a confrontation; House turns from walking out the door to returning, chastened, to join Nolan in a quest for the truth. In other words, at the story's heart was a three-and-a-half minute scene between two characters in one room. If you're used to plays, you're probably laughing at me now; how can I be excited by three-and-a-half minutes? How many great plays have spent two hours in the same room with a couple of characters? But this is television, where nobody lets you do this stuff. And to see two magnificent actors simply act, without any tricks or distractions.. well, that's as good as it's ever gonna get, for any writer. I can't tell you how privileged, and how sheerly happy it made me. Sometimes I wonder why I came to a town where the trees don't change color in the fall and the bike lanes are a recipe for death. This is why I came. This is why I put off the novels I've longed to write. This is why, although the industry drives me to at least one evening of insanity a year, where I break out the liquor and pace up and down muttering about how I could have stayed in New York and done computer support, I know I'm not leaving any time soon.

(I also can't tell you how trivializing it feels to go to Twitter in an excess of exuberance and say, "I wish I could tell you all why I'm so excited about this episode," and get negative remarks back about how much screen time someone's crystal ball says Wilson or Chase will or will not be getting, as though that were the only thing a writer could possibly be interested in. But I'll save my discussion of the shippification of television for another post. For now, though, no, Lucas was not my idea, so -- you know who you are -- you can stop sending me email.)

Meanwhile: the plan for the year is to write an episode of House, a pilot, a comic book, and a novel. I know that's on the crazy-ambitious side, but I'm firm believer in the idea that it's better to aim high and fall short. It'll be interesting to see what actually happens. I'm in the middle of working out the first episode of season seven right now, and I'm pretty excited about it.

It all comes down to love, and on that note, I'll leave you with an image. For night shooting, a director will sometimes use these gorgeous, crazy, giant floating lights -- twenty or thirty feet across, they hang in the night sky like minor zeppelin moons, each tethered to the earth by a central stalk, making the whole thing look like a glowing jellyfish far above your head. I love them at any time, but how much more on a night when you're going into the woods of Griffith Park to shoot a man with antlers and some forest nymphs dancing around a bonfire? You have to leave a van and make your way along a dirt path, tall trees on either side, and ahead, in a glade atop a promontory, obscured by pines, is an enormous floating (false) moon. It's like walking into a fantasy illustration, and there's no chance of getting lost. The real full moon is out as well, but on this night it seems subdued. And when you reach the bonfire, there are the magical woodland beings, costumed brilliantly, leading you to expect Shakespearean dialogue at any moment, or at least a merry forest song in Middle English. I think there's a fair chance I'll never see another night like this:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/doris_reads_a_lot/sets/72157623994537230/detail/