Happy Media Consumer.

Spent a pleasantly lazy morning finishing American Gods. It's really quite excellent, if you like that sort of thing. It contains a lot of Neil Gaiman's usual tropes and ideas, but tied together more skillfully and handled with a much more polished and confident prose style than he's shown before. His plotting is excellent but almost a little too perfectly contrived; I find that he creates not so much plots but Inevitability Engines. As Chekhov (no, not the guy from Star Trek) once noted, "If in the first act you hang a pistol on the wall, then in the last act, it must be shot off. Otherwise, you do not hang it there." Gaiman spends a lot of energy hanging a hell of a lot of pistols on a hell of a lot of walls, and then meticulously firing each and every one. I derive a great deal of pleasure from watching his plots unfold exactly as they should, but I am distantly aware that there's something almost mechanical about it all.

Drove to Capitol Hill and ran into icprncs and our mutual friend Jeff, and got the chance to wish her a happy birthday. I'd come down to try to pick up a free pass to an advance screening of From Hell I read about in The Stranger, but the store that had them was all out. It was right next door to B+O Espresso, which I've never been to, and which wendolen has highly recommended to me, but I decided I'd rather wait and go there with her.

Thinking about coffee reminded me that I should stop by Aurafice and see if they ever got my e-mail about doing a horror reading this Halloween. They hadn't -- their e-mail's been down (which is kind of ironic for an Internet cafe). Paige was enthusiastic, though, and gave me her personal e-mail address to contact her about it directly, which I just did a few minutes ago. Hopefully I'll have details I can post here soon.

By this point it was time to go pick up wendolen and her co-worker, Andria, whom I've enjoyed talking to at the store but had never had a chance to actually spend time with before. We were off to dinner and then to meet retcon and treebyleaf at Cinerama to see 2001: A Space Odyssey. I've wanted to see this movie on the big screen for as long as I can remember and it was just as wonderful as I thought it would be.

It's interesting, but I always remembered the film as worthwhile, but slightly boring and badly paced. Clearly, I was too young to appreciate it when I first saw it. The pacing is indeed slow, but is deliberate and masterful. It's only playing at the Cinerama for a few more days; if you're reading this and you're in Seattle, go see it. You owe it to yourself.