(Howell Creek Radio address for August 19, 2012 -- ) Perch ===== As George Smiley said[^1], > "Sitting is an eloquent business; any actor will tell you that. We sit according to our natures. We sprawl and straddle, we rest like boxers between rounds, we fidget, perch, cross and uncross our legs, lose patience, lose endurance." Last May, my sister Pepper and her husband Jacques flew in from Vancouver, very early on a Saturday morning, and on that first day Jacques and I had a very long theological discussion. I love discussing these kinds of things with Jacques because we can be coming at an issue from completely different perspectives and Jacques, at his very most heated moments, will pause for a few moments and say, "I do find in myself a very strong reaction to what you're saying." It's very rare that the engine of a discussion can generate so much torque with so little friction. But I ended up being the one to stall it out in the end. We were talking -- and it suddenly occurred to me that you could have read something of our arguments by our postures: Jacques, sitting on the piano bench, upright like a plumb line, oriented to some universal, invisible axis of rightness, to which nothing else in the room could serve as a really faithful approximation; and myself, draped diagonally across the sofa, letting my head rest back on the cushion, my body utterly and languidly adapted to whatever surface it found nearest and most tangible. In the moment I noticed this, I suddenly lost hold of the points he and I had been making; suddenly it seemed to me our postures _were_ our points, that I had glimpsed the whole of the debate in a photograph which was interesting for its own sake, regardless of the outcome. * * * Trixie and I are flying out to visit our West Coast friends on Tuesday morning, and when we get back, we're helping with moves and marriages here, I have to paint Swaledale House a nice dark green, and prepare to take in our first lodger. I had a really nice little script written about our trip down to Arizona, and it'll still get done, but one more thing popped up in addition to all the travel and moving going on, which prevented my having time to produce it properly. All of my websites and podcasts sit on a server somewhere in San Diego. Several years ago I was sold a "lifetime" account on these servers for which I paid a sizeable one-time payment. The arrangement has worked well for me for the last eight years, but on Thursday I found out I'm going to have to make other arrangements, and this problem has really moved in and occupied my mind. When I'm neck-deep in the details of servers and general IT infrastructure problem-solving, my brain mistakes this for creativity and no writing gets done. I like to think of it as sort of analagous to Batman finding out that the Batcave is about to be compromised. He would have to drop all of his crime-fighting until he could set up a [brightly-lit Bat-bunker][1] hidden underneath a shipping yard to serve as a new base of operations. So the sooner I can set up my new online bunker, the better for my creative brain. * * * Thanks for being a listener of the Howell Creek Radio podcast. You can find the show on the web, with comments and liner notes, at , and on Twitter and Facebook at @HowellCreek. Also check out my new book project, _Noise of Creation_, at if you haven't already. It's a free download for your Kindle, Nook, iPad or even laptop. The music for this episode is _Skipping Stones_ by Sleep Whale. The text of this podcast is released under a Creative Commons license. Synopsis -------- Radio address for August 19, 2012: a short memory of a long discussion last May, and my search for a new secret bunker. Music is [_Skipping Stones_][2] by Sleep Whale. [^1]: John LeCarre, _Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy_ [1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Batcave#The_Dark_Knight [2]: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B003TW80HQ/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=B003TW80HQ&linkCode=as2&tag=joelsimprpers-20