Funny not having a book this year and even odder having made a conscious decision not to bring one. I wonder how this will affect my writing of the festival…
The drive has been quite fine, good music but dull dull visions out the window, a flat land with nothing meaningful to look at. We stopped in at Parkes on the way and I stood in front of the dish thinking “it’s the dish’ but also reading up about quasars and thinking ‘heh, radio-loud quasars, that’s what Matt did his PhD on… that means they’re the sort of quasar Parkes can hear…’ and reading the descriptions of the frequency of neutral atomic hydrogen and how it alters depending on what it encounters out there in space and wondering about that.
How magical that these are things Matt does now and how sad for him that it has become figures on a page and hard calculations that are just boring transforms now that no longer hold the thrill that this idea holds for me now.
I think anything can become work… I think that’s part of my issue with writing as a job rather than editing. Even the trivial writing I do with FTR has meant less poetry.