Sotto Voce.

Dear Mr. President:

In Washington, the bullies set the terms of the debate. There are only two ways to deal with bullies: kick their asses in public, or humiliate them in public.

Please pick one and do it, so that you can get back to doing what the people sent you to Washington to do.

This compromise schtick is getting really old.

Sincerely,
Paul Lagasse

PS — While you’re at it, please replace Rep. Pelosi and Sen. Reid with people who have backbones.

Music has always been an important creative tool for my writing. I am a film score buff; I love to annoy Mrs. Sotto Voce, when we’re watching movies on TV, by playing “Name That Composer” — how quickly into the opening credits can I identify who wrote the score? (I don’t play for movies for which I already know the answer; that would be cheating).

I co-opt film scores as background music for scenes and sometimes whole stories of my own. And in turn, listening to those scores helps me to slide quickly into the mental mindset to write. The “score” for my novel Seeing Through Clouds was that of the movie Country; James Horner’s playful Sneakers score captured the feel of my novella Invasion of the Orb Men; and I’ve lost count of how many epic space operas I plotted, as a teenager, to Horner’s verdant Star Trek scores.

I rely on music (not always film scores) for my nonfiction work too: my MA thesis was done to the music of Steve Roach and Dead Can Dance; my perpetual work-in-progress memoir of Lord Thomson is fueled by the many (non-Bond) scores of His Magisterial Awesomeness, John Barry; and my freelance writing requires me to cocoon myself in the insulating warmth of the streaming audio of RadioIO, SomaFM, and Coolstreams.

But I am working on a new SF short story/novellette, and I have been hampered by the lack of a soundtrack for it. After flailing around for a while auditioning various scores and composers, I discussed it with Mrs. Sotto Voce. She knows the short story’s themes and suggested Michael Nyman’s perfection for Andrew Niccol’s SF masterpiece, Gattaca.

Yep, that’s it. The themes of the movie are similar enough to the themes of my story — an individual out of place; a society in which a smooth, stylish coating of order and rationality deflects people’s gaze from its underlying violence. And Nyman’s score has phrases of such poignancy and passion that there’s no way that you can — well, that I can — ever get through the end of the movie with dry eyes.

That last bit is a vital necessity for my short story. My crit group has pointed out, and rightly so, that the writer’s voice (both mine and the narrator’s) is too cold and emotionally distant for the overt and covert tensions that drive the story. Listening to Nyman would melt that frigidity like turning a blowtorch on a popsicle. And that’s so what this story needs. It needs to boil.

Thanks, Mrs. Sotto Voce. And thanks in advance, Mr. Nyman. The score hasn’t been released (legally) for download, but I have a CD on the way. And my writing will be all the better for it. In the meantime, I should go watch the movie again. Any excuse.

Yesterday was a stunningly beautiful day, cool and crisp, the kind you get when a distantly passing hurricane blows away the late summer heaviness and reveals nature’s underlying moderation. Windows open, fresh air, optimism. I’ve always loved the Fall, and never blamed it for school starting during it.

Last night the moon was bright and clear, and not too far away Jupiter was radiant. I pulled out my telescope and gear, opened up the back window, and gazed at it for a long time. The sounds, the smells of night haven’t changed in 20+ years; I still belong there. It was wonderful to see the Big Planet again, stripes and four moons and all. The sky was boiling with heat waves, but there were a few seconds of relative peace every now and then as a breeze would smooth it out. And then, suddenly just above (in reality, of course, “below” since it’s a Newtonian reflector) Jupiter and off to the side with the three moons, what appeared to be another moon, moving outward. It got a little brighter and lasted long enough for me to think, “satellite? Right position, but way too slow for a low-earth orbit. Distant plane? Maybe, but it doesn’t move like one, and where’s the blinking lights?” and then it went dark. I caught one last glow a little further on and then it was gone. A meteor, coming in almost head-on. If I hadn’t been looking at that very narrow arc of sky at that very moment, I wouldn’t have seen it — and it’s quite likely that no one else did either.

The night sky still has the power to amaze me, to awe me. Every moment is unique, and yet I’m looking at the same things that Galileo saw and Kepler (one of my heroes) imagined. Watching Jupiter slowly track across the scope’s field, revealing the tremendous yet stately rotation of this planet under my feet — carrying me along with it carefully, tenderly, swaddling me in a thin-yet-robust blanket of air — created anew the old shifts in perspective, the different pace and wider view that observational astronomy always offers. No wonder I love it.

I packed up the telescope and went to bed determined to keep doing The Big Thing — with my latest SF novella, with my writing in general, and with my life. I owe that little meteor nothing less.