Remember these? Recently they have been reprinted. I saw a bunch in a bookstore two months ago.

I wrote this year’s annual Christmas letter in the format of a CYOA book (actually more like a printed copy of Colossal Cave). After reading it, my friend Doug (of the CPH Gaming Collective) pointed me towards a *great* article on the narrative structure of the CYOA books.

The conclusion of the article discusses one very interesting CYOA ending in a specific book – Inside UFO 54-40. The winning ending is unique in that it is disconnected from the narrative graph. There is no series of choices you can make to get to that ending. You can only “win” by “cheating”.

In the story, your concord flight is interrupted when you are beamed aboard a nearby spacecraft trolling the universe for intelligent life. Once aboard you discover your new captors, the U-TY, are interested in keeping you around only to the extent that you can help them find Ultima, the ‘planet of paradise’. The planet’s location is cloaked in mystery and you are only told that it’s a place that cannot be reached ‘by making a choice or following directions’. However this is all foreshadowing for when the reader finally becomes frustrated in the apparently impossible quest and begins flipping through the book hunting for that ending. In fact not choosing is the only way to reach Ultima.

This ending was not just an easter egg for the obsessive reader who didn’t mind skimming every page looking for telltale words. Instead it’s hard to miss in even a casual riffling. A two-page illustration showing what could only be paradise (or perhaps a theme park) leaps out as the only spread in the book without any text. Flipping to the page before brings you to 101, where you discover that your curiosity has been rewarded. You have found the planet, not by following the constraints of the system, but by going outside of them – a fitting moral to the story and an encouraging reminder that any game should be a starting point for the imagination, not the end.

This is a beautiful gem. By far the most interesting ending in any CYOA book, it is significant exactly because it recants the basis of the whole medium! Free will triumphs over destiny. And yet, at the same time, you are still choosing your own adventure. This is, in my opinion, the greatest achievement in the genre.

It’s unusual too – for one of the most fascinating example of an element of a medium to be so deliciously self-annihilating. I can’t really think of another case where it happens.

Courtesy of Vibhu

Holographic Storage

Longmont (CO) – Having shipped an apparently small number of holographic storage systems in late 2006 and in the first days of 2007, Inphase today said that it has signed Germany-based DSM as original equipment manufacturer (OEM) of its Tapestry drives.

They’ve achieved a data density of 512 Gb/in^2, roughly double that of perpendicular hard drives. Their first product uses 300 GB disks (looks like a DVD), proof of concept has been demonstrated up to 1.2 TB.

Flash Memory 32 GB Solid State Disk

Seoul (Korea) – Samsung said that it has begun sampling of 50 nm NAND flash memory chips that are required to build the long announced 32 GB 2.5″ solid state disk (SSD). The flash drive is expected to replace traditional hard drives in higher end notebooks and offer significant advantages in data transfer rates as well as power consumption.

They are claiming 57 MB/s read, 32 MB/s write.

- – -

Do you remember when a million was a large number? Last time I can remember thinking that was in 1991.

Intel has built a prototype of a processor with 80 cores that can perform a trillion floating-point operations per second.

CEO Paul Otellini held up a silicon wafer with the prototype chips before several thousand attendees at the Intel Developer Forum here Tuesday. The chips are capable of exchanging data at a terabyte a second, Otellini said during a keynote speech. The company hopes to have these chips ready for commercial production within a five-year window.

Intel uses its twice-yearly conference to educate developers on its long- and short-term plans. Over three days, hardware developers and partners get a chance to interact with Intel employees and take classes on new technologies.
Intel’s 80-core chips

As expected, Intel announced plans to have quad-core processors ready for its customers in November. An extremely fast Core 2 Extreme processor with four cores will be released then, and the newly named Core 2 Quad processor for mainstream desktops will follow in the first quarter of next year, Otellini said.

The quad-core server processors are on a similar trajectory, with a faster Xeon 5300 processor scheduled for November and a low-power Xeon slated for the first quarter. Intel’s first quad-core processors are actually two of its dual-core Core architecture chips combined into a multichip package.

“Performance matters again,” Otellini said, disclosing that the quad-core desktop processor will deliver 70 percent faster integer performance than the Core 2 Duo, and the quad-core server processor will be 50 percent faster than the Xeon 5100 introduced in June.

One reason performance didn’t matter to Intel during the last couple of years was because it was getting trounced on benchmarks at the hands of Advanced Micro Devices’ Opteron and Athlon 64 server and desktop processors. That all changed with the introduction of the Core 2 Duo chips this year.

“With this new set of dual and quad-core processors, we’ve regained our leadership,” Otellini told developers. The growing Internet video phenomenon, as evidenced by the spectacular rise of Web sites like YouTube, will keep these processors busy during intensive tasks like video editing, he said.

Road to Santa Rosa
Notebooks will get a face-lift next year with the Santa Rosa platform, which will provide notebooks with new technologies like 802.11n wireless and flash memory. Intel believes that it will be the first to add flash memory to a notebook motherboard, which will improve boot times and reduce power consumption, Otellini said.

System power consumption is only one part of the equation. During the next few years, Intel wants to improve the performance per watt of power consumption of its transistors by 300 percent through new manufacturing technologies and designs, Otellini said. The next step on that road, Intel’s 45-nanometer manufacturing technology, will enable the company to build chips that deliver a 20 percent improvement in performance with five times less current leakage, he said.

But the ultimate goal, as envisioned by Intel’s terascale research prototype, is to enable a trillion floating-point operations per second–a teraflop–on a single chip. Ten years ago, the ASCI Red supercomputer at Sandia National Laboratories became the first supercomputer to deliver 1 teraflop using 4,510 computing nodes.

Intel’s prototype uses 80 floating-point cores, each running at 3.16GHz, Justin Rattner, Intel’s chief technology officer, said in a speech following Otellini’s address. In order to move data in between individual cores and into memory, the company plans to use an on-chip interconnect fabric and stacked SRAM (static RAM) chips attached directly to the bottom of the chip, he said.

Intel’s work on silicon photonics, including its recent announcement of a silicon laser, could help contribute toward the core-to-core connection challenge. Rattner and professor John Bowers of the University of California at Santa Barbara demonstrated Intel’s newest breakthrough model of silicon laser, which was constructed using conventional techniques that are better suited to volume manufacturing than older iterations of the laser.

Many of the architectural nuances of the 80-core chip can be traced back to earlier research breakthroughs announced at previous IDFs. Connecting chips directly to each other through tiny wires is called Through Silicon Vias, which Intel discussed in 2005. TSV will give the chip an aggregate memory bandwidth of 1 terabyte per second.

Intel, meanwhile, began to discuss replacing wires with optical technology in computers and chips in 2001 and has come out with several experimental parts for enabling lasers and optical technology to replace wires.

The same year, Intel began to warn about the dangers of heat dissipation in processors. One of the solutions, the company said at the time, lay in producing chips with multiple cores.

Where else but Stanford can one amble out at twilight for a walk and come across a two-time Pulitzer prize winner giving a talk on the importance of History? Joanna and I were taking a stroll last night and we came across of bunch of high-ranking university people having an event in the quad. The Sad Grad Students were lit up and they were serving drinks in the courtyard. As we were wandering around, somebody at the podium mentioned that David McCullough was going to be speaking after dinner. Having just read 1776 (hardcover copies selling for less than $9 on amazon.com) and enjoying it immensely, I was very interested in hearing him speak, so we hung around for an hour while the distinguished guests ate dinner.

Digression – Everyone who has any interest at all in American History should read 1776. My high school textbooks made it sound like the US was predestined to win the War of Independence, when, in fact nothing could be further from the truth. (Providence, with a capital “P” is a character in many books which does a great disservice to the founders by waving away their accomplishments, great by human standards, and claiming “God willed it so, and so it was”) Having read 1776, one comes to better appreciate the fragility of the present. Not only that, it is an excellent read. My main complaint is that it ends (not surprisingly) at the very beginning of 1777 and I have not been able to find a good history that finishes the story (1777-1783) – can anyone recommend one?

McCullough’s talk was great and totally made it worth waiting to hear him speak. The main thrust of his speech was that most students – even those at supposedly high-ranking universities – are largely ignorant of American History, and that something should be done about that. He told an anecdote from a time when he was teaching an advanced undergraduate “honors” seminar at Harvard – to a bunch of kids majoring in History. The first day of class, to kickstart discussion, he asked, “Who knows who George C. Marshall is?” Nobody knew the answer.

As a computer science major, I am often inclined to discount fuzzy subjects as being largely irrelevant. This is not to say they cannot be engaging – I do, after all, have a minor in Classical Literature. So when McCullough first started quoting statistics to support that notion that more time should be spent studying history in schools, I was dubious that there was actually a problem. Certainly from my own experience at Stanford, I often had the feeling that the people majoring in fuzzy subjects had it a lot easier (they did) and that they should be forced to have basic literacy in pure science, mathematics, and computer science. On the other side, people majoring in various sorts of engineering had to take IHUM, PWR, and five GERs consisting of the area 3 and 4 classes – classes focusing on fuzzy stuff. That’s a lot. With a year of Latin or Greek, every engineer could graduate with a double major in Classics (almost).

However, McCullough told a very convincing story about the leaders of the American Revolution being shaped and strengthened by their fluency in Classical History. He told us about the darkest days of the American Revolution, the darkest days of American History, in the year of 1776 when George Washington and his rabble in arms escaped narrow defeat on several occasions. He told us how at one point, the continental army, the hope of America, consisted of three thousand desperate men, arrayed against the forces of Britain – the only superpower of the 18th century. He told us of how the continental congress fled the impending capture of Philadelphia, vesting absolute power of the state in the hands of George Washington. He told us how King George III once commented that if Washington relinquished that power at the conclusion of the war, then he would be the greatest man to ever live. I said McCullough’s story involved Classical History and it did – he thesis was that the colonies were able to muster such great men as Washington, Knox, Greene, Jefferson, Adams, and others because those men understood the Greek notion of History as a play, with each man to play his part. The script, of course, is improvised, but actors in a play are conscious of their character’s motivations, strengths, and goals. Thus it is hard to turn aside in despair when it would be out of character. He gave us a Greek saying by Heraclitus, which I like, so I will repeat here: “Character is destiny”.

So at the end of the night, I was not so sure that I really needed that bunch of introductory physics classes I had to take to complete my CS major. Perhaps McCullough is right.

* * *

For anyone who has read this far, I just came across a clip from the Daily Show of David McCullough being interviewed (link below).

Jon: You and I are both historians and authors, to some extent.

Jon: You chose to fill your history book with “facts”.

David: Yes.

Jon: Interesting choice, tell me why.

Daily Show Clip

I’m afraid I’ve fallen behind on my blog again. It happens from time to time when I am very busy. I was going to post a huge picture bomb of all the things I have done in the past two weeks, but I think instead I will break them up and back post them. My main motivation for doing this is that I want people to see my Cylon Tea hack, and if I post everything at once, it will be buried. Mmm… Cylon Tea.

At the beginning of the quarter, Joanna and I took Thursday and Friday off and went on a mini-vacation to LA. I went to my first Seder ever at Jo’s dad’s house, which was fun. However, I did think that the stuff that was read from the little-book-whose-name-starts-with-an-h was a bit over-the-top jangsty. Groups in general seem to like to dwell on how they have been wronged or oppressed in the past.

Other highlights of the weekend included: getting up and writing my BS 12-page project proposal for CS194 at 10:30 on Thursday, so I could email it to Travis by 3pm, so he could print it out and hand it in for me, going to the Urth Cafe, and hanging out in Santa Monica. We spent about two hours in a large bookstore dedicated entirely to architecture and adjacent disciplines.

While in Santa Monica, we ate lunch at Ye Olde King’s Head – a British Pub. We also shopped at the Tudor House, which makes delicious chicken curry pies. The Tudor House also sold some very strange British food. I think that the Brits’ main motivation in conquering India was to bring the yummy food of the Indian man into the Empire. And who can blame them, really. Boiled beef? Ick.

I haven’t updated my blog recently, and I have had this post from Spring Break sitting around on my computer unposted for about a week. I went home for Spring Break this year, instead of going to LA with Jo, in the hopes of making it to Delaware :-/

While home, I did get to the Aldrich museyroom, the flea market, and to Borders 4 times to read books in the store without paying for them (but while paying for very expensive coffee). Among the books I read for free was Gregory Chaitin’s Meta Math! I had actually grabbed three books to read while enjoying my coffee that day: Meta Math!, Imaginary Beings, and Labyrinths (the latter two by Jorges Luis Borges). I opened Chaitin’s book to the first real chapter, and lo, it commences with a quote from Borges. I suppose mathematicians are wont to quote Borges, as infinity, self-reference and incompleteness (of the complexity class sort) are some of his recurring themes. Still, what are the odds?

Full Stop

What it is: A artist’s studio completely constructed in cardboard and ink. It took 8 months to construct.

Why it is awesome: It’s like walking through a 3D virtual environment with everything rendered using surreal shader techniques.

Cons: Flammable.

Chaitin’s Constant

What it is: For all programs written in a specified language, Chaitin’s constant omega is defined as the probability that a particular program chosen at random will halt. For the universal Turing machine, the first 64 bits of omega are known. Omega = .00787499699… For more, see WikiPedia

Why it is awesome: The astute will realize that determining omega to N bits is equivalent to solving the halting problem for all programs of length less than or equal to N. Therefore it is impossible, in the strongest sense of the word, to enumerate all the bits of omega. It is irreducibly complex. Chiatin claims that omega is evidence of randomness at the heart of mathematics, the philosophical implications of which are hotly debated.

Cons: Requires a degree in CS to appreciate.

—

Victor: Full Stop

Full Stop is a complete experience. That omega exists is interesting, but one gets the idea that it is only a small piece of a much larger story.

Runner up: Extended Afternoon

The light rays are painted on.

Just finishing up my Susan musings, I was wondering why it is that great authors so often are followed by lame, talentless hacks. The quintessential example is Christopher Tolkien, of course.

—

On 22 January 1957 C.S. Lewis wrote to a boy named Martin: “The books don’t tell us what happened to Susan. She is left alive in this world at the end, having then turned into a rather silly, conceited young woman. But there is plenty of time for her to mend, and perhaps she will get to Aslan’s country in the end-in her own way.”

In 1980 a cloistered Carmelite nun in Flemington, New Jersey, wrote an eighth chronicle of Narnia, telling what happened to Susan, and called it The Centaur’s Cavern. It was so good that she soon found a Protestant publisher who wanted to bring it out. The altruistic plan was to make it extremely clear that this was not by C. S. Lewis, and to donate all profits to the work of Mother Teresa. One of Lewis’s personal friends, the well-known author Sheldon Vanauken, endorsed the project; and everyone involved felt sure that Lewis would have approved. But those in control of the Lewis Estate turned the nun down flat. Narnia was very private property, and no creative nuns were allowed to trespass in the name of charity.

The right to issue new books about Narnia was evidently being reserved for whoever might offer high enough financial gain to the owners of the Lewis Estate.

The Problem of Susan
Neil Gaiman

—

She has the dream again that night.

In the dream, she is standing, with her brothers and her sister, on the edge of the battlefield. It is summer, and the grass is a peculiarly vivid shade of green: a wholesome green, like a cricket pitch or the welcoming slope of the South Downs as you make your way north from the coast. There are bodies on the grass. None of the bodies are human; she can see a centaur, its throat slit, on the grass near her. The horse half of it is a vivid chestnut. Its human skin is nut-brown from the sun. She finds herself staring at the horse’s penis, wondering about centaurs mating, imagines being kissed by that bearded face. Her eyes flick to the cut throat, and the sticky red-black pool that surrounds it, and she shivers.

Flies buzz about the corpses.

The wildflowers tangle in the grass. They bloomed yesterday for the first time in, how long? A hundred years? A thousand? A hundred thousand? She does not know.

All this was snow, she thinks, as she looks at the battlefield. Yesterday, all this was snow. Always winter, and never Christmas. Her sister tugs her hand and points. On the brow of the green hill they, stand, deep in conversation. The lion is golden, his hands folded behind his back. The witch is dressed all in white. Right now she is shouting at the lion, who is simply listening. The children cannot make out any of their words, not her cold anger or the lion’s thrum-deep replies. The witch’s hair is black and shiny; her lips are red.

In her dream she notices these things.

They will finish their conversation soon, the lion and the witch…. There are things about herself that the professor despises. Her smell, for example. She smells like her grandmother smelled, like old women smell, and for this she cannot forgive herself, so on waking, she bathes in scented water and, naked and towel-dried, dabs several drops of Chanel toilet water beneath her arms and on her neck. It is, she believes, her sole extravagance.

Today she dresses in her dark brown dress suit. She thinks of these as her interview clothes, as opposed to her lecture clothes or her knocking-about-the-house clothes. Now she is in retirement, she wears her knocking-about-the-house clothes more and more. She puts on lipstick.

After breakfast, she washes a milk bottle, places it at her back door. She discovers that next-door’s cat has deposited a mouse head, and a paw, on the doormat. It looks as though the mouse is swimming through the coconut matting, as though most of it is submerged. She purses her lips, then she folds her copy of yesterday’s Daily Telegraph, and she folds and flips the mouse head and the paw into the newspaper, never touching them with her hands. Today’s Daily Telegraph is waiting for her in the hall, along with several letters, which she inspects, without opening any of them, and then places on the desk in her tiny study. Since her retirement, she visits her study only to write. Now she walks into the kitchen and seats herself at the old oak table. Her reading glasses hang about her neck, on a silver chain, and she perches them on her nose, and begins with the obituaries.

She does not actually expect to encounter anyone she knows there, but the world is small, and she observes that, perhaps with cruel humour, the obituarists have run a photograph of Peter Burrell Gunn as he was in the early 1950s, and not at all as he was the last time the professor had seen him, at a Literary Monthly Christmas party several years before, all gouty and beaky and trembling, and reminding her of nothing so much as a caricature of an owl. In the photograph, he is very beautiful. He looks wild, and noble. She had spent an evening once kissing him in a summer house: she remembers that very clearly, although she cannot remember for the life of her in which garden the summer house had belonged. It was, she decides, Charles and Nadia Reid’s house in the country. Which meant that it was before Nadia ran away with that Scottish artist, and Charles took the professor with him to Spain, although she was certainly not a professor then. This was many years before people commonly went to Spain for their holidays; it was exotic then. He asked her to marry him, too, and she is no longer certain why she said no, or even if she had entirely said no. He was a pleasant-enough young man, and he took what was left of her virginity on a blanket on a Spanish beach, on a warm spring night. She was twenty years old, and had thought herself so old…. The doorbell chimes, and she puts down the paper, and makes her way to the front door, and opens it.

Her first thought is how young the girl looks.

Her first thought is how old the woman looks. “Professor Hastings?” she says. “I’m Greta Campion. I’m doing the profile on you. For the Literary Chronicle.”

The older woman stares at her for a moment, vulnerable, and ancient; then she smiles. It’s a friendly smile, and Greta warms to her. “Come in, dear,” says the professor. “We’ll be in the sitting room.”

“I brought you this,” says Greta. “I baked it myself.” She takes the cake tin from her bag, hoping its contents haven’t disintegrated en route. “It’s a chocolate cake. I read online that you liked them.” The old woman nods, and blinks. “I do,” she says. “How kind. This way.”

Greta follows her into a comfortable room, is shown to her armchair, and told, firmly, not to move. The professor bustles off and returns with a tray, on which are teacups and saucers, a teapot, a plate of chocolate biscuits, and Greta’s chocolate cake.

Tea is poured, and Greta exclaims over the professor’s brooch, and then she pulls out her notebook and pen, and a copy of the professor’s last book, A Quest for Meanings in Children’s Fiction, bristling with Post-it notes and scraps of paper. They talk about the early chapters, in which the hypothesis is set forth that there was originally no distinct branch of fiction that was intended only for children, until the Victorian notions of the purity and sanctity of childhood demanded that fiction for children be made …

” . . well, pure,” says the professor.

“And sanctified?” asks Greta, with a smile.

“And sanctimonious,” corrects the old woman. “It is difficult to read The Water Babies without wincing.”

And then she talks about ways that artists used to draw children as adults, only smaller, without considering the child’s proportions, and how Grimm’s stories were collected for adults and, when the Grimms realised the books were being read in the nursery, were bowdlerized to make them more appropriate. She talks of Perrault’s “Sleeping Beauty in the Wood and of its original coda in which the prince’s cannibal ogre mother attempts to frame the Sleeping Beauty for having eaten her own children, and all the while Greta nods and takes notes, and nervously tries to contribute enough to the conversation that the professor will feel that it is a conversation or at least an interview, not a lecture.

“Where,” asks Greta, “do you feel your interest in children’s fiction came from?

The professor shakes her head. “Where do any of our interests come from? Where does your interest in children’s books come from?”

Greta says, “They always seemed the books that were most important to me. The ones that mattered. When I was a kid, and when I grew. I was like Dahl’s Matilda.. . . Were your family great readers?”

“Not really . . . I say that, it was a long time ago that they died. Were killed. I should say.”

“All your family died at the same time? Was this in the war?”

“No, dear. We were evacuees, in the war. This was in a train crash, several years after. I was not there.”

“Just like in Lewis’s Narnia books,” says Greta, and immediately feels like a fool, and an insensitive fool. “I’m sorry. That was a terrible thing to say, wasn’t it?”

“Was it, dear?”

Greta can feel herself blushing, and she says, “It’s just I remember that seq
uence so vividly. In The Last Battle. Where you learn there was a train crash on the way back to school, and everyone was killed. Except for Susan, of course.”

The professor says, “More tea, dear?” and Greta knows that she should leave the subject, but she says, “You know, that used to make me so angry.”

“What did, dear?”

“Susan. All the other kids go off to Paradise, and Susan can’t go. She’s no longer a friend of Narma because she’s too fond of lipsticks and nylons and invitations to parties. I even talked to my English teacher about it, about the problem of Susan, when I was twelve.”

She’ll leave the subject now, talk about the role of children’s fiction in creating the belief systems we adopt as adults, but the professor says “And tell me, dear, what did your teacher say?” “She said that even though Susan had refused Paradise then, she still had time while she lived to repent.”

“Repent what?”

“Not believing, I suppose. And the sin of Eve.”

The professor cuts herself a slice of chocolate cake. She seems to be remembering And then she says, “I doubt there was much opportunity for nylons and lipsticks after her family was killed. There certainly wasn’t for me. A little moneyless than one might imagine, from her parents’ estate, to lodge and feed her. No luxuries . . .”

“There must have been something else wrong with Susan,” says the young journalist, “something they didn’t tell us. Otherwise she wouldn’t have been damned like that, denied the Heaven of further up and further in. I mean, all the people she had ever cared for had gone on to their reward, in a world of magic and waterfalls and joy. And she was left behind.”

“I don’t know about the girl in the books,” says the professor, “but remaining behind would also have meant that she was available to identify her brothers’ and her little sister’s bodies. There were a lot of people dead in that crash. I was taken to a nearby school, it was the first day of term, and they had taken the bodies there. My older brother looked okay. Like he was asleep. The other two were a bit messier.”

“I suppose Susan would have seen their bodies, and thought, they’re on holidays now. The perfect school holidays. Romping in meadows with talking animals, world without end.”

“She might have done. I remember thinking what a great deal of damage a train can do, when it hits another train, to the people who were travelling. I suppose you’ve never had to identify a body, dear?”

“No.”

“That’s a blessing. I remember looking at them and thinking, What if I’m wrong, what if it’s not him after all? My younger brother was decapitated, you know. A god who would punish me for liking nylons and parties by making me walk through that school dining room, with the flies, to identify Ed, well . . . he’s enjoying himself a bit too much, isn’t he? Like a cat, getting the last ounce of enjoyment out of a mouse. Or a gram of enjoyment, I suppose it must be, these days. I don’t know, really.”

She trails off. And then, after some time, she says, “I’m sorry, dear. I don’t think I can do any more of this today. Perhaps if your editor gives me a ring, we can set a time to finish our conversation.”

Greta nods and says of course, and knows in her heart, with a peculiar finality, that they will talk no more.

That night, the professor climbs the stairs of her house, slowly, painstakingly, floor by floor. She takes sheets and blankets from the airing cupboard and makes up a bed in the spare bedroom, in the back. It is empty but for a wartime austerity dressing table, with a mirror and drawers, an oak bed, and a dusty applewood wardrobe, which contains only coat hangers and a dusty cardboard box. She places a vase on the dressing table, containing purple rhododendron flowers, sticky and vulgar.

She takes from the box in the wardrobe a plastic bag containing four old photographic albums. Then she climbs into the bed that was hers as a child, and lies there between the sheets, looking at the black and white photographs, and the sepia photographs, and the handful of unconvincing colour photographs. She looks at her brothers, and her sister, and her parents, and she wonders how they could have been that young, how anybody could have been that young.

After a while she notices that there are several children’s books beside the bed, which puzzles her slightly, because she does not believe she keeps books on the bedside table in that room. Nor, she decides, does she have a bedside table. On the top of the pile is an old paperback book it must be over forty years old: the price on the cover is in shillings. It shows a lion, and two girls twining a daisy chain into its mane.

The professor’s lips prickle with shock. And only then does she understand that she is dreaming, for she does not keep those books in the house. Beneath the paperback is a hardback, in its jacket, of a book that, in her dream, she has always wanted to read: Mary Poppins Brings in the Dawn, which P. L. Travers had never written while alive.

She picks it up and opens it to the middle, and reads the story waiting for her. Jane and Michael go with Mary Poppins on her day off, to Heaven, and they meet the boy Jesus, who is still slightly scared of Mary Poppins because she was once his nanny, and the Holy Ghost, who complains that he has not been able to get his sheet properly white since Mary Poppins left, and God the Father, who says, “There’s no making her do anything. Not her. She’s Mary Poppins.” “But you’re God,” said Jane. “You created every body and everything. They have to do what you say.”

“Not her,” said God the Father once again, and he scratched his golden beard flecked with white. “I didn’t create her. She’s Mary Poppins.”

And the professor stirs in her sleep, and dreams that she is reading her own obituary. It has been a good life, she thinks, as she reads it, discovering her life laid out in black and white. Everyone is there. Even the people she had forgotten.

Greta sleeps beside her boyfriend in a small flat in Camden, and she, too, is dreaming.

In the dream, the lion and the witch come down the hill together. She is standing on the battlefield, holding her sister’s hand. She looks up at the golden lion, and the burning amber of his eyes. “He’s not a tame lion, is be?” she whispers to her sister, and they shiver.

The witch looks at them all, then she turns to the lion and says, coldly, “I am satisfied with the terms of our agreement. You take the girls: for myself, I shall have the boys.”

She understands what must have happened, and she runs, but the beast is upon her before she has covered a dozen paces. The lion eats all of her except her head, in her dream. He leaves the head, and one of her hands, just as a house cat leaves the parts of a mouse it has no desire for, for later, or as a gift.

She wishes that he had eaten her head, then she would not have had to look. Dead eyelids cannot be closed, and she stares, unflinching, at the twisted thing her brothers have become. The great beast ate her little sister more slowly, and it seemed to her, with more relish and pleasure, than it had eaten her; but then, her little sister had always been its favourite.

The witch removes her white robes, revealing a body no less white, with high, small breasts, and nipples so dark, they are almost black. The witch lies back upon the grass, spreads her legs. Beneath her body, the grass becomes rimed with frost.

“Now,” she says.

The lion licks her white cleft with its pink tongue, until she can take no more of it, and she pulls its huge mouth to hers, and wraps her icy legs into its golden fur. . .

Being dead, the eyes in the head on the grass cannot look away.

Being dead, they miss nothing. And when they are done, sweaty and sticky and sated, only, then does the lion amble over to the head on the grass, and devour it in its huge mouth, crunching her skull in its powerful jaws, and it is then, only then, that she wakes.

Her heart is pounding. She tries t
o wake her boyfriend, but he snores and grunts, and will not rouse.

It’s true, Greta thinks, irrationally, in the darkness. She grew up. She carried on. She didn’t die…

She imagines the professor, waking in the night, and listening to the noises coming from the old applewood wardrobe in the corner: to the rustlings of all these gliding ghosts, which might be mistaken for the scurries of mice or rats, and to the padding of enormous velvet paws, and the distant, dangerous music of a hunting horn. She knows she is being ridiculous, although she will not be surprised when she reads of the professor’s demise. Death comes in the night, she thinks, before she returns to sleep. Like a lion. The white witch rides naked on the lion’s golden back. Its muzzle is spotted with fresh, scarlet blood. Then the vast pinkness of its tongue wipes around its face, and once more it is perfectly clean.

I’ve been back in California for almost two days now (though it doesn’t seem like it has been that long). It’s been a great 48 hours, and a good start to the quarter.

Highlights have included: