Well, some really frustrating personal stuff aside, this was a good day.

(1) The University of Miami, for reasons that elude reason, has not yet moved into the twenty-first century. To wit, grad and professional students can't register for classes on-line, "although this service may become available in coming semesters." So there's been an undercurrent of frustration for a while about whether any one got the course registration sheet I mailed them a few weeks ago. Anyway, today I logged onto "myUM" and its finally up. So I am in fact registered for classes. Good to know. For the record, they're:

"Phil 543: Probability, Induction and the Philosophy of Science," with Peter Lewis, who I remember from my visit wearing a T-Shirt to the beach asking, "What part of the quantum theory don't you understand?"

"Phil 610: Topics in Logic," with Octavio Bueno, who I remember most vividly for giving a philosophy lecture that I attended while I was there in a shirt with the top few buttons unbuttoned, gold chains, etc. I guess no one gave him the memo about how philosophy professors are supposed to wear rumpled suits and crooked glasses.

"Phil 691: Structures of Reality," by Colin McGinn. What can you say about McGinn? A few years ago, I read big chunks of his autobiography, "The Making of a Philosopher," while whiling away a few afternoons in Barnes & Noble (or was it Borders? anyway, sorry man, if you're reading this, I didn't actually buy it.) A few weeks before my visit to Miami in March, I was reading the New York Times Book Review, and McGinn had a letter in their objecting to their review of most recent book (philosophy and film), and when I came to the end of the letter, it jolted the hell out of me, since it was signed, "Colin McGinn, Miami." What do you know? Colin McGinn, formerly of Oxford and then Rutgers, now teaches at Miami, where the wind-surfing is better.

(2) On a related note, I got my copy of my lease back in the mail from my landlady in Miami. This is Good. Not only classes but a place to live. This is starting to feel very real--I can almost feel the warm, salty winds against my cheek on August 15th when I move, as I ash the tip of my CarlosTorano into the canal by the house and try not to get eaten by one of the hungry alligators living in said canal.

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On a different note, I finished "Kitty and the Midnight Hour" by Carrie Vaughn today. Wonderful stuff. By far my favorite werewolf novel since Kelly Armstrong's "Bitten," in some respects maybe slightly better, though its comparing rabbit flesh and raw vennison. (I thought that sounded more werewolfy than apples and oranges.) It deals head on with the nastier implications of the mythology in a way I found plausible and riveting, while still being sympathetic. (Being too much of a contrarian, my own werewolf story--"Crying Wolf," which I just workshopped at WisCon--had an extremely unsympathetic perspective, exactly the opposite of the "nice people with an unfortunate condition" perspective common among most contemporary werewolf stuff, from Laurel Hamilton to J.K Rowling, whereas "Kitty" is more of a clever 90 degree turn from that take.) You get the idea that Vaughn probably has a dog, and that she might have thought long and hard about how disturbing behavior that we find cute when it comes to dogs would be in humans--grovelling for the attention and love of more dominant creatures, etc.

Also something you'll enjoy if you enjoy talk radio...or even hate talk radio but can't help listening to it out of strange fascination. Myself I'm somewhere in between. I only ever listen to the radio when I'm in the car, but I do listen to a lot of talk radio when I happen to be in the car--the standard line-up of fascist standard-bearers in the afternoon and evening (Limbaugh, Hannity and Savage), which I listen to out of sick fascination, and "Coast to Coast AM" with George Norry, in the wee hours of the morning for pleasure. For those who don't listen, at a certain time of night, those stations switch over from politics to UFO's. The talk radio in "Kitty" is of the latter variety, and the connections from crazy radio speculation to real werewolves is handled beautifully.

Also a fun book to read in an aspirational sense, since Vaughn in her acknowledgements thanks Jeanne Cavelos and her classmates at Odyssey, where she apparently workshopped early versions of the novel. Since I'm going to an (even better) summer speculative fiction writers workshop in two weeks, this was a neat thing to read.

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Speaking of that, now that I'm done with "Kitty," I'm starting up Paul Park's "Princess of Roumania." (The paperback edition just came out, so Tor was including them free with WisCon registration.) Since Park is teaching the first week at Clarion West this summer, I'm going to try to read "Princess..." before I leave and one book by each of the other instructors before their week. Since there's only two weeks left until Clarion, it's getting to be about time to start it up.

Which is really cool.