1. Perhaps spurred on by the presence of David Lynch repeat offender Michael J. Anderson as the manager of the carnival, the fifth episode of Carnivale is like some bizarre inversion of Ray Bradbury's Something Wicked This Way Comes, where the carnie workers and sideshow freaks are the good guys we're rooting for and are frightened for as the carnival's audience in the damned town of Babylon trudge in to take in the sights and sounds. The silver miners of Babylon, the spectators, are the monster of the piece, a many-headed monster like the one-hundred-childrened Leviathan in Grant Morrison's revamp of Klarion, the Witch-Boy. The silver-miners are the threat, crowding in to destroy the cooch dancers when their lust is pushed too far. And certainly there's been references to Bradbury's novel in earlier episodes -- when the carnival reinvents itself, briefly, as a biblical endeavour, Felix pretends to be a reformed lightning-rod salesman, which evokes the novel's opening scene. And the novel has its creature of light and creature of dark, like the show does - the novel's boys, born one minute on either side of midnight on Halloween.
2. Klarion actually shows up, sumptuously painted, in this month's issue of Robin. I don't normally read the Boy Wonder's solo adventures but I'm a sucker for Frazer Irving's artwork and for Klarion, in his morally questionable adolescence and stark refusal to bend before his puritannical upbringing when he could be having fun. The adventure was, on the whole, a bit light but it manages to both evoke Klarion's childish wonder and his rather bleaker streak of opportunism.
3. Reading China Mieville's Looking for Jake, which is well done so far. Some of the stories are more workmanlike in their strengths but others, like the Borges-derived The Tain is both creepy and illuminating.
4. Met up with Christian at Dolce Vita and drank hot chocolate while writing for two and a half hours. I actually churned out quite a lot of prose, the start of a story, but I'm not sure if it'll remain trapped in the mire of the notebook or if I'll do something with it. Quite a lot of sentences that I liked, though, so I'll probably cannibalize it at the very least and use them in other things. Quite a good description of an orca, I think. Ruby Room showed up in the middle of it but I didn't quite have the opportunity to explore her character much. Maybe I'll send her off on her own adventure so that she has some, ah, room to breathe. Afterward Christian introduced me to the Bloc Party's music and I tracked a couple tracks down for the iPod.