haraggan

August in Edinburgh means (usually) nice weather and the Edinburgh Festival, the largest arts and culture festival anywhere in the world. The Festival runs through the entire month of August and is actually several separate festivals rolled into one. There's the International Festival, which started it all and is mostly classical music, ballet, opera, and visual arts; the Film Festival; the Book Festival; the Jazz Festival, the Politics Festival (symposia and speakers and so on); the Edinburgh Military Tattoo (a strange sort of performance by martching bands from all over the Commonwealth at the Edinburgh Castle) and the Fringe Festival, which is the biggie, and consists of thousands of acts from all over the world - theatre, musicals, comedy, dance, performance art, and just about anything else you can name (for instance, there's an outdoor exhibition of environmentally themed photography in the Royal Botanical Gardens inspired by Bob Dylan's classic song "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall" that I've got to see).

As usual, we went through the various catalogues and found more stuff than we can possibly afford or find time for, so we've had to pick and choose. We missed our first event, on Saturday, because we couldn't get a friggin' cab (we were running late and it was raining). Since it was the one we were most looking forward to - "Exits and Entrances," the new play by South African playwright Athol Fugard, which has already won some thirty awards - we got tickets to another performance. The next day we made it to our second play, "A Day in the Death of Joe Egg." I've seen this play, a black comedy about a couple with a desperately handicapped ten-year old child, before. It's a good play, but I wasn't very happy with that particular production. Well, that's the Festival for you. You never know what you're going to get, but most of the events are cheap and you move right on to the next one.

Which was last night's "Get Your War On," a kind of multimedia play based on the fabulous online political comic strip. It was great, and afterwards we hung around to high-five the performers before going for dinner. Today we're seeing another play - "The Master and Margarita" and tomorrow one more - "Waiting for Groucho." Next week we have two musicals and an opera and there's more to come after that. It gets kind of tiring, but it only happens once a year. During the Festival Edinburgh is overrun with tourists from all over the world. Now that we're locals we can complain about the tourists blocking the sidewalks, getting on buses without the correct change, and so on. My personal pet peeve is when they take photographs of the pipers and other street performers and don't give them any money.

Meanwhile, Oakley is continuing his culinary adventures. There's a shop in Fife (a nearby town) that sells feeders he'll reliably eat so, except for the inconvenience of having to get his food from another town, he's pretty much taken care of, although not without the occasional hiccup. A couple of weeks ago the shop was out of mice, so Kristi brought home a frozen chick (as in baby chicken). Compared to a mouse it was huge. Also very sad looking. Oakley looked as shocked as I was, but he ate it happily enough after a careful inspection. Since the chick was so large I skipped a feeding and then gave him two mice (once they were available again). He was happy with them, but we had a bit of a feeding adventure. When Oakley grabbed at the first mouse, he got a piece of the towel he uses as a blanket as well. Since snakes have very tiny, sharp, backward pointing teeth and no hands, we needed to disentangle the towel for him (there are generally no towels in a snake's natural habitat to get in the way). While I was doing this, Oakley grabbed a hold of my arm and squeezed. Once he was freed from the clutches of the towel (or vice versa), he decided not to let go of my arm.

Oakley is rather shy and picky when it comes to eating, and normally won't eat if he's being watched. He also usually won't take food if something interrupts his first attempt. But we had these mice which can't be refrozen, and he was hungry, so I tried again, and he took them, still wrapped around my arm. So not only did I get to watch Oakley eating, but I got to stand in for a tree, or whatever other bit of landscape he'd have ambushed his pray from in the wild. When he was done he settled down for an after-dinner nap, still holding onto my arm. Eventually I had to persuade him to get back under his blanket so that I could go on with my day.

Couldn't choose a new book to read, so I decided to go back to one of my all-time favourites, "Flanders" by Patricia Anthony. Please take a look - there's no book in the world I'll recommend more highly. It's a World War One novel, and more-established critics than me have proclaimed it to be the equal of "All Quiet on the Western Front." It's beautiful, harrowing, incredibly well-written, and utterly overpowering. I guess something has been telling me that I'm not crying enough, lately, because the first time I read this book I sobbed for hours. This book also has the distinction of effectively ending the author's career (so far). I sent Patricia Anthony a fan letter, after finding her email address online, when I finished it (I'm not a habitual writer of fan mail - in fact, the only other author I ever contacted like that was Athol Fugard) and we became online friends, so I learned about the marketing travesty that befell "Flanders." Because Patricia's previous books had been more-or-less science fiction, "Flanders" was marketed as SF, despite the fact that it isn't even close. It's a historical novel with a touch of magical realism and perhaps a bit of a ghost story. But some of you will know about the writing ghetto bind - once you're known as a science fiction writer, you can never break out of the dungeon, unless you are appointed "incredibly hip" like Jonathan Lethem or Haruki Murakami. Anyway, since "Flanders" was marketed as science fiction, nobody noticed it. And since it WASN'T science fiction, the majority of the few science fiction fans who bought it didn't like it, and Patricia hasn't been able to get a novel published since. So for God's sake, buy a copy, read it, and then tell everybody you know to do the same! I'll thank you, Patricia will thank you, and you'll thank yourself.