LundBlog: Beautiful Letters

olbermann on bush’s unforgiveable interview

Fri, 16 May 2008 03:48:38 GMT

Keith Olbermann's recent Special Comment is a doozy: Mr. President, the war isn’t about you — or golf. At over 12 minutes, it's probably the longest SC I've seen him deliver, and I've never seen Olbermann more passionate. Definitely worth viewing.

(via Cherie)

surreal life

Thu, 15 May 2008 10:10:05 GMT

Wow. Barack Obama is apparently now following my updates on Twitter. To which I say:

Dude, don't you have, like, more important things to be spending your time on?

Although, to say that I'm beyond flattered is an understatement.

And yay for John Edwards for giving his support to Obama. I very much hope that when Obama takes the White House, there will be room for Edwards somewhere. Vice President, hopefully, or Attorney General at the very least.

Oh, and just in case you didn't know:

snerf

Thu, 15 May 2008 09:04:38 GMT

That's the sound been coming from my nose since about 5 p.m. yesterday. Buh. Went to the doctor today, and it's viral flu. Again. The third time in as many months. One of the risks of teaching in an all-boys school, I suppose, but I am getting damn tired of being sick so often.

I also have conjunctivitis (ie Pink Eye) in my right eye and a little in the left, so I got some drops, which seem to be helping. At least they aren't nearly as itchy as they have been for the last couple of weeks.

So today I missed school, but this is sabbatical week; instead of conducting a course like the fiction-writing workshop last term, I'm helping out my colleague Nick with one on filmmaking. Today and tomorrow should be fairly light, as the students will be out wandering the campus with cameras, so if I had to pick two days to be off (and I will be doing so; no more going back to school before I'm well), these were two good days to do so.

With Vesak Day on Monday, this has unintentionally become a five-day weekend. Although feeling as shitty as I do, I'm not sure how much I'll be able to enjoy it.

That said, I'm postponing the official start of Reader Request Week to next Monday. I hate to keep putting it off, but if I'm going to answer a different question each day of the week, I want to be well and coherent before doing so.

I'm off to take a nap now. Cheers.

i am teh suck, but also teh awesome

Tue, 13 May 2008 13:33:57 GMT

Once again, no RRW post this evening. Today was particularly exhausting, but I got all my papers marked. Just need to input the grades tomorrow and then I'll be done done done. Productive, but I only have one or two brain cells firing at the moment.

Off to bed. Nighty night.

reader request week #0: singapore observation

Mon, 12 May 2008 13:25:05 GMT

My apologies, but Reader Request Week will be starting tomorrow instead of today. This afternoon and evening was spent marking papers (still have about 20 to go), and I just got off Skype with a long overdue convo with my parents, so I'm wiped.

However, here's a teaser, a single-serving Singapore Observation, Jonathan Carroll style...

46. They board the train at the Orchard MRT stop, tall, statuesque, one blonde and the other brunette. It would be easy to think of them as models, in Singapore for a photo shoot and returning from a high-priced consumer spending trip at Orchard Road, but this also makes a lot of assumptions that may not be true. Dressed casually both, though the blonde wears her shirt unbuttoned to her sternum, revealing the edge of a lacy pink bra. They speak English with Eastern European accents, possibly Russian, intensely involved in their conversation, paying no attention to the rest of the crowded train car. The other riders, however, male and female alike, cannot take their eyes off of the two young women, so bright do they shine.

(for jeffsoesbe)

More tomorrow!

Previous observations: 1-4, 5-8, 9-13, 14-17, 18-22, 23-25, 26-30, 31-35, 36-40, 41-45

ask me anything!

Sun, 11 May 2008 03:27:01 GMT

Just a reminder that you've got one more day to ask me a question about any topic you'd like me to write about for Reader Request Week. Feel free to post your comments here or in the original RRW entry.

you : organ grinder :: me : monkey

Thanks!

nbcc good reads spring list

Sat, 10 May 2008 07:31:38 GMT

The National Book Critics Circle recently posted the Spring Edition of their Good Reads recommended reading list (voted on by the membership) to Critical Mass, the org's blog.

Here are the results:

Fiction

Richard Price, Lush Life (Farrar Straus & Giroux)
Jhumpa Lahiri, Unaccustomed Earth (Knopf)
Steven Millhauser, Dangerous Laughter (Knopf)
Charles Baxter, The Soul Thief (Pantheon)*
Peter Carey, His Illegal Self (Knopf)*
J.M. Coetzee, Diary of a Bad Year (Viking)*
James Collins, Beginner's Greek (Little, Brown)*
Brian Hall, Fall of Frost (Viking)*
Roxana Robinson, Cost (Farrar Straus & Giroux)*
Owen Sheers, Resistance (Nan A. Talese: Doubleday)*

Nonfiction

Nicholson Baker, Human Smoke: The Beginning of World War II, The End of Civilization (Simon & Schuster)
Drew Gilpin Faust, This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (Knopf)
Mark Harris, Pictures at the Revolution: Five Movies and the Birth of the New Hollywood (Penguin Press)
Honor Moore, The Bishop's Daughter: A Memoir (Norton)
Susan Jacoby, The Age of American Unreason (Pantheon)

Poetry

Grace Paley, Fidelity (Farrar Straus & Giroux)
Frank Bidart, Watching the Spring Festival (Farrar Straus & Giroux)
Eric Gansworth, A Half-Life of Cardio-Pulmonary Function (Syracuse University Press)
Marie Howe, The Kingdom of Ordinary Time (Norton)
Robert Pinsky, Gulf Music (Farrar Straus & Giroux)

* There was a seven-way tie for fourth in fiction.

I got the chance to vote this time, and my picks were The Invention of Everything Else by Samantha Hunt for fiction (which made the also ran list), and The Open Road: The Global Journey of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama by Pico Iyer for nonfiction.

Previous results for the Good Reads Winter Edition can be found here.

social networking explosion

Sat, 10 May 2008 06:54:17 GMT

I've been procrastinating today, even though marks for Term 2 are due next week (supposed to be Monday, but thankfully I got an extension to turn them in on Wednesday, which helps). During said time-wasting, I updated some of the social networking groups that I'm in, and man alive, I didn't realize quite how many those were until today.

My Twitter account has lain fallow for almost a year, but I just updated with two tweets today. 20 people follow my actions there, even though I only know four of them personally. 16 random people have decided that the minutiae of my life is worth paying attention to. Weird.

I've been getting lots of new people adding me at Facebook (even though I've been doing nothing there lately to actively recruit new folks), to the point where I've now broken the 550-friend mark.

Here are some other places you can find me, if you are so inclined:

omega minor and war protest

Fri, 09 May 2008 13:36:45 GMT

I'm subscribed to the Dalkey Archive Press mailing list, and waiting in my inbox this morning was this interesting news:

The Independent Foreign Fiction Prize 2008 has been awarded to the Belgian author Paul Verhaeghen for his novel Omega Minor, published by Dalkey Archive Press in November 2007. Paul Verhaeghen is the first author to have both written and translated the winning title and has therefore won the full £10,000 prize. The award, a partnership between Arts Council England and the Independent newspaper, was made in association with Champagne Taittinger in the UK. Past winners have included Immortality by Milan Kundera and Austerlitz by W. G. Sebald.

[...]

Moving back and forth between the main stages of the past century, Omega Minor (translated from the Dutch) is a tale of the survival of the soul. A novel of big ideas, the book's whirlwind plot is set between Berlin, Boston, Los Alamos and Auschwitz, and takes in neo-Nazis, a physics professor who returns to Potsdam to atone for his sins, an Italian postdoctorate who designs an experiment that will determine the fate of the universe, and a Holocaust survivor who tells his tale to the willing ear of a young psychologist.

Omega Minor is Paul Verhaeghen's second novel and his first to be translated from Dutch into English. Aside from his writing career, Verhaeghen also works as a cognitive psychologist; his work focuses on memory and the basic aspects of cognitive ageing. He currently resides in Atlanta, Georgia, where he is associate professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

Paul Verhaeghen will be donating his prize money to the American Civil Liberties Union in protest of US foreign policy.

Verhaeghen's "non-acceptance" speech (in which he accepted the award but donated the prize money) is here in full, and it's a doozy and a half. Some really powerful writing. I won't bother quoting from it, because the whole thing really needs to be read.

He also did an eye-opening interview at Bookslut last November that goes into the book quite a bit; and it reveals that Omega Minor won the Flemish Culture Award for Fiction (Belgium's equivalent of the National Book Award) after its original Dutch publication in 2006, which came with a €12,500 prize, and he did the same thing with donating the prize money instead of accepting it.

So the guy has won two major international prizes for this novel, with a total cash award of ~US$45,000, and he has donated all of that money to the ACLU and Human Rights Watch so that taxes on it wouldn't go to the US Treasury and help fund the war in Iraq. Talk about ballsy.

I was so inspired by this incredibly selfless gesture of war protest that while I was at Orchard Road today, I bought a copy of Omega Minor at Kinokuniya (thankfully, it was in stock, their last copy) for only S$27 (~US$18), which is a fantastic deal for such a huge book (and only slightly higher than the cover price).

If you want your own copy, and want to support a wonderful independent publisher (they've also published Zoran Zivkovic's Hidden Camera, Gilbert Sorrentino's Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things, and Rikki Ducornet's Phosphor in Dreamland, among many many others), Dalkey Archive is currently selling Omega Minor at a 20% discount, for only US$12.80. You can't even get two tickets for a movie at that price. A damn steal, I tells ya.

N.B. I realize that Verhaeghen probably could have just opened a bank account in his native Belgium and accepted the prize money in Euros, but as he says, it'll do a lot of good for the ACLU and HRW "in their legal battles against torture, detainee abuse, and the silence surrounding it." Good on him.

reset!

Wed, 07 May 2008 13:05:02 GMT

Had a minor heart-attack today (not literally) as my iPod froze up and nothing I could do -- clicking the wheel in various combinations, plugging it into my iBook or the wall charger, tapping it on the desk, slapping it with the flat of my hand -- would bring it back to life.

I have all the music stored on it backed up on an external hard drive, but it would be a huge pain in the ass, not to mention an unexpected expense, to replace the iPod with a new model (even though the new models are shiny shiny, and have more storage capacity, and a color screen, and play videos; mine is the 40GB version to the right). Plus, I don't need another paperweight; I'd rather listen to the music inside.

Thankfully, after searching through Apple.com, I found a support page on how to reset the damn thing when it freezes up. I performed the magical sequence of button-pushing and switch-toggling while dancing on one foot and wearing nothing but a strategically-placed sock (not literally; there was no sock), and wonder of wonders, the iPod springeth back to life.

Whew.

reader requests next week

Mon, 05 May 2008 13:43:25 GMT

Some great questions have already been asked for Reader Request Week, and I'm hoping for even more. To give you a little extra time to rack your brains, I'm extending the deadline until Sunday, 11 May.

This coming week is the final crazy week when all the tests and assignments that have been piling up need to be marked so that I can input the grades next Monday (although I would prefer to do it before then). I may pop up occasionally during the week (such as with the NIN news in the previous entry), but blogging will most likely be light.

So get in those questions! Make me dance for my banana!

new! free! nin! the slip!

Mon, 05 May 2008 13:11:23 GMT

As a thank you for his fans and loyal supporters, The-Awesomeness-That-is-Trent-Reznor today released a new Nine Inch Nails album, called The Slip, as a completely free download. That's ten MP3 songs, baby, completely for free, with no DRM. W00t! (Streaming audio here.)

As with Ghosts I-IV, each song has artwork attached (if you use iTunes), and they seem to have some relation to Year Zero, especially the one for "Letting You," which looks to be the OSR flag turned sidewise.

Once again, the music has been released under a CC Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license, readymade for remixing, sharing, blogposting, podcast background or foreground, et cetera.

This is so full of win I can hardly stand it.

That download link again.

literary linkses

Sat, 03 May 2008 05:42:56 GMT

1. Tavis at the Powells blog notes that a film is being made of Aimee Bender's wonderful novel An Invisible Sign of My Own. Bender is an amazing writer, so this is very cool news.

2. Colleen at Chasing Ray has put out a call for bloggers to write about their favorite political books (fiction or non-) during the month of August. I know I'll be blogging about Orwell's 1984, which sits among the top of my list of influential novels, and will probably also talk about the groovy new cover by Shepard Fairey. Mention will also most likely be made of Cory Doctorow's Little Brother, which just hit bookstores this week.

3. As cmpriest mentioned, if you have signed up for the mailing list at Tor.com, the free e-book this week was her own Four and Twenty Blackbirds. Yay!

4. storySouth just revealed the Million Writers Award Notable Stories of 2007; i.e. the best online short stories published during 2007. In addition to the attention paid to the short fiction of lots of great writers (matociquala, pgtremblay, ombriel, catrambo, kenscholes, jeffvandermeer, cybermonklives, Paul Jessup, snurri, yhlee, samhenderson, Gavin Grant, timpratt, Jason Stoddard, mevennen, scalzi, lucius_t, and Gene Wolfe, among others), Farrago's Wainscot won the Million Writers Award for best new online magazine or journal. W00t to Darin Bradley and the whole FW krewe!

reader requests

Sat, 03 May 2008 04:40:26 GMT

I've quite enjoyed blogging (almost) every day this week, and want to see if I can continue to keep it up. But to do so, I'll need your help.

Earlier in the week, jeffsoesbe asked if I wouldn't mind writing another entry in my Singapore Observations series, and I'm happy to do so (and am quite chagrined that the last of these entries was in September 2007). So that will be my next actual entry. But instead of just blathering on after that, I'd like to answer any questions or discuss any topics that you, my smart and beautiful readers, might be interested in. Back in March and April, scalzi ran a Reader Request Week, and I'd like to do the same.

So here's your chance to ask me anything. It can be serious or silly, political or geeky (or politically geeky), about writing, publishing, expatriation, living in Asia, being in an interracial relationship, whatever. The topics are completely up to you. I'd like to be able to do a week of these, so if I could get seven questions at the very minimum, that would be perfect. It's your chance to, as Scalzi says, "make me dance like the proverbial monkey."

If you're worried about duplicating questions I've already answered, you can search through the blog archives and/or double-check yourself with the following interviews: Ecstatic Days, The Story, Behind the Wainscot, Tobias Buckell Online, I Should Be Writing (audio), The Spoken Alexandria Project (audio).

Requests should go into the comments for this entry.

Thanks in advance!

blog-every-day-this-week week: phuket

Fri, 02 May 2008 15:25:54 GMT

blog-every-day-this-week week: bag pr0n

Thu, 01 May 2008 05:10:39 GMT

Taking a cue from 2muchexposition, I will be blogging every day this week. Nothing big, nothing profound, just a series of short entries to see if I can do it. With the amount of test and assignment marking I have to do over the next couple of weeks, this will indeed be a challenge. Tune in daily to see if I can keep it up, or if I royally fall on my face!

Well, it looks like I've already fallen on my face, as I missed blogging yesterday. But in my defense, after school I came home and crashed (I'd only gotten four hours of sleep the previous night), and then we met up with friends for dinner later in Kampong Glam, which went until 11:30 or so. I did blog twice on Tuesday, but I don't think that counts. So I missed a day. Onwards!

I have a phenomenal amount of marking to do today (Labor Day is thankfully a public holiday here), so this will be an especially short entry.

Last December, I visited Hong Kong with Janet's family, and while there, I picked up a groovy Diesel canvas messenger bag in Stanley (a touristy area near Repulse Bay). Here's what it looks like:

It's fantastic. All the pockets are perfectly suited for the stuff I cart around: the slanted one in front holds a Moleskine pocket notebook or two, the one on the flap holds my sunglasses and school ID card, the zipped one on the right side holds my iPod and headphones, and the snapped one on the left is for my mobile phone. The inside is spacious, enough for all the papers I have to bring home.

I do wish that the entire thing was canvas, instead of a mix between canvas and leather, but I haven't seen any models of this type without the leather.

On the flap is a metal plate, a statement from the manufacturer:

"This bag is made by diesel factory from the finest high density canvae We are specialized in producing high class causal bags."

I'm not sure if the typos here are because the bag may be a knock-off, or if this is how they all are, but it reads as if translated into English from another language, and tickles me every time I read it. I feel very special to have a causal bag. :)

free cone day redux

Tue, 29 Apr 2008 10:31:11 GMT

I was thwarted in my attempts to get free ice cream from Ben & Jerry's today, as everybody in Singapore also had the same idea. The queue wrapped all the way around the basement of Raffles City, at least an hour's wait for one small scoop of ice cream. Feh. I was tempted, but I've got too much shit to do to hang around in line for that long.

blog-every-day-this-week week: fell by ellis & templesmith

Tue, 29 Apr 2008 10:03:53 GMT

Taking a cue from 2muchexposition, I will be blogging every day this week. Nothing big, nothing profound, just a series of short entries to see if I can do it. With the amount of test and assignment marking I have to do over the next couple of weeks, this will indeed be a challenge. Tune in daily to see if I can keep it up, or if I royally fall on my face!

When I'm too distracted at school by all my other duties there, and I just need to get tests or assignments marked, I've lately taken the train to Gloria Jean's, an Australian-based cafe chain that has a shop in the basement of the Raffles City shopping mall. They got me hooked in February, when all their hot drinks were only S$2.00 (regular price is S$5.00-6.00), as I could take my coffee over to the seating area and work. When the nearby music store starts playing their music, it's usually enough to just don earphones and listen to my own music (although sometimes the store blasts their selections so loud that it's driven me away).

Last week, after my eyes had begun crossing after the 30th paper or so, I packed up my stuff and wandered around the mall a bit before heading home. On the third floor of Raffles City is a comics store that mostly sells collected trade paperbacks (although they do have a handful of single-issue books as well) in addition to Magic cards and other gaming stuff. I browsed around, and happened upon Fell: Feral City by Warren Ellis and Ben Templesmith. Ellis (who is authoring about 800 simultaneous comics scripts as I write this) made me a fan with Transmetropolitan and Crooked Little Vein, and I've lately come to appreciate Templesmith's artwork after the VanderMeers (rightfully) gushed about him (I've got the second Wormwood volume, and am waiting on another comics shop to call me about the first). I also noticed the price, S$21.00 (~US$14), which was actually cheaper than the cover price for the book, something that is frankly unheard of, since book prices here are hiked up to cover the cost of importing them.

So I paid the man, and into my bag the book went.

Last Sunday night, I figured I'd read a couple of chapters before bed (the book collects the first eight issues of the series), but dammit, I kept reading until I got to the end. Each short chapter is self-contained, a deliberate move on Ellis' part, so that anyone could enter the series at any time, but the main arc concerning protagonist police detective Richard Fell is compelling enough to carry you from one chapter to the next. The hard-boiled sensibility, along with Templesmith's almost hallucinogenic visuals, combine to produce something that made me not want to put the book down. I already want to re-read it.

Googling the book yesterday yielded this article by Ellis on the format and pricing of the book:

Fell is a 24-page single, that contains 16 pages of full color comics and several pages of what's called back matter -- text stuff, sketches, background material, perhaps even audience emails as we get going. And it retails for $1.99 American.

Further; each issue is a self-contained story. If you read them all, yeah, you'll see ideas and relationships develop. But there's nothing stopping anyone entering the series at any moment, understanding the set-up and getting a complete experience out of it. It's no harder to walk in on than any episode of Law and Order.

Self-contained, as densely packed as Ben and I can manage, with extra reading material in the back, for a buck less than most books of its type.

Why? Well, I don't know about you, but I remember being poor. I remember the difference between (the local equivalent of) a dollar ninety-nine and three bucks being the difference between buying a comic or missing a meal. And for that purchase price, I wanted value -- a complete experience that I'd want to replay again and again.

I write for an early-adopter audience who likes reading the chapters of serialized graphic novels as they're completed. But I also write for people who want to go into a store with pocket change and come out with a complete story, what Alan Moore once called "a real slab of culture". That's why I did Global Frequency and the Apparat books. And that's why I'm doing Fell. Give me your pocket change and I'll give you a full whack of story.

Awesome. (Like a hot dog? Yes.) I do wish that the back matter Ellis talks about was also included in Feral City, since it apparently makes up one-third of each individual issue, but I'm not complaining much.

Fell issue #1 (the first chapter of Feral City) is available online completely for free. If that first taste doesn't convince you to fork out your own bux for the trade paperback, nothing will.

blog-every-day-this-week week: b&j free cone day

Mon, 28 Apr 2008 13:08:59 GMT

six things make a post

Sun, 27 Apr 2008 12:35:54 GMT

1. Ted Chiang's "The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate" has won the Nebula Award in the Novelette category (full results here). Yay Ted! My review of the SubPress hardcover edition should be coming out next month from IRoSF.

2. Gavin notes that if you want a hardcover version of John Kessel's The Baum Plan for Financial Independence and Other Stories (and you know you do), you'd do well do order a copy sharpish, as Small Beer's distributor is running out of copies. Don't miss out on the chance to see and own for yourself the amazing! reversable! technicolor! dustjacket! of awesomeness!

3. While driving around this evening, I thankfully came across The Word on the BBC World Service. Tonight's show includes an interview with Salman Rushdie about his new novel The Enchantress of Florence, as well as discussions of footnotes in fiction, euphemisms, and hardcover vs. paperback editions of books. The show is listenable on The Word website, although I notice that it's not listed among the BBC's podcasts, which seems a terrible oversight.

4. Sean Carman at the HOBART blog writes about The Solace of Bookstores. Word. Every time I visit a new city, I try to keep an eye out for the bookstores; it's almost a sickness. Though I've been fairly good about keeping my purchases down (books add a lot of weight on plane flights). Still, just browsing makes me feel at home.

5. The Southern Writers Network, a groupblog started by two of my fellow candidates in the NCSU creative writing program, Louisa Jones and Lisa Morgan. Some good posts, and I appreciate the comments made of "Carrying America's Shadow" by David Payne. Check it out.

6. Venerable Thubten Chodron will be speaking at Gonzaga University about the roots of violence. If anyone living in the Washington (State) area is interested in going, I can't recommend her teachings and lectures enough. You lucky people.

one less crawlspace

Fri, 25 Apr 2008 04:23:42 GMT

As has been reported elsewhere, the groovy folks at Farrago's Wainscot have sold an anthology to Drollerie Press -- Crawlspace: Selections from the 2007 Farrago's Wainscot Exhibition -- to be released in Fall 2008. darinbradley has flattered me immensely by selecting my story "One Less" for inclusion.

Here's the final Table of Contents, and wow, is it a whopper:

"The Yellow Baron" by Forrest Aguirre
"Bird of Leaves" by Jay Lake
"The Snooted One: The Historicity of Origin" by Nisi Shawl
"The Drowning" by Bruce Bond
"Charades" by Jeffrey Barnes
"Half-Alphabet Nursery Rhymes" by A. Ross Eckler
"The Ballad of Matelotage and Mutiny" by Hal Duncan
"Apple Magick" by Paul Jessup
"One Less" by Jason Erik Lundberg
"Chrysalis" and "Sand" by Ryan Cornelius
"Five Million Years to Earth" by Bryan D. Dietrich
"Shifty (A Puzzle)" by Will Shortz
"Oma Dortchen and the Pillar of Story" by David J. Schwartz
From Source of Gravity by Ekaterina Sedia
"The Return of Lazarus" by Phil Sueper
"Rampion" and "The Immigrant" by Catherynne M. Valente
"Notes on the Necromantic Symphony" by Yoon Ha Lee
"The Miraculous Nature of Everything" by Timothy S. Miller
"Portrait of High Window with CEO and Booze" by Mark Cox
"Space Age" and "Thanatos" by Lise Goett
"A Walk in the Snow" by Marie Prior
"Liberty" by Adrienne J. Odasso
"Detail from a Painting by Hieronymus Bosch" by Rudi Dornemann
"The Proslogium of the Great Lakes" by Catherynne M. Valente
"The Histories of Now" by Jonathan Wood
"Mountain-Hunting for Beginners" by Yaroslava Strikha
"Shadow Box" by Esther Bergdahl
"Refraction" by Becca De La Rosa
"Living Inside the Box: Three Thought Experiments About Your Life (And Mine)" by Angie Smibert

Talk about kick-assery. I'm very proud to be in such company.

Look for the book later this year.

N.B. I should say that darinbradley has given "One Less" a life far beyond what I expected. When it was first published at Americana (NCSU's student arts journal), and then, a few months later, when the site revamped and the story vanished into the cyber-ether, I thought, okay, well, not my best story, but it had an okay run. But then along came Darin, who not only bought the story for Old Man Farrago, and chose to reprint it in ink and paper with the above anthology, but also seriously examined it in his doctoral thesis. He validated the story in three incredible ways, and I can't thank him enough for that.

sharealike m.e.a.l.

Thu, 24 Apr 2008 13:27:32 GMT

Been offline for a few days, so I missed the celebration yesterday of the second annual International Pixel-Stained Technopeasant Day (ipstp). However, I am belatedly participating nonetheless.

For your viewing pleasure, I have posted my short story "Most Excellent and Lamentable" (originally published in Text:UR - The New Book of Masks, ed. Forrest Aguirre, March 2007) for free on my website.

Not only that, but I am releasing it under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 License. Which means that you can "remix" the story (i.e. convert it into different formats, such PDF or TXT or MOBI, or scrawled by hand on papyrus with a quill pen), and create derivative works from it (a short film, a dramatic podcast reading, a song with lyrics based on the prose, artwork based on the characters, &c.) just as long as you give me credit as the original author, you don't take any money for your efforts, and you release your own work under a CC BY-NC-SA license. You don't have to ask my permission to remix the story or derive your own creative work from it, but I would appreciate receiving an email about it, so that I can link to your groovy reworking on the M.E.A.L. page.

For a story that does quite a bit of ShareAliking of its own (it relies heavily on the Commedia dell'Arte and Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, and there's even a tiny reference to Neil Gaiman, as well as other little bits and bobs), it seems wholly appropriate to have others try and make something of their own based on it.

Whenever I can find the time in the near future, I'll be recording the story for my podcast Lies and Little Deaths: A Virtual Anthology, accompanied by music from the Nine Inch Nails album Ghosts I-IV (which was also released under a CC BY-NC-SA license).

Nota Bene: Most of my published fiction can be found online for free; links to these stories are at the bibliography page on my website.

Postscript: NIN just today released a new single, also as a completely free download, called "Discipline." Pretty groovy stuff, and free!

two new reviews, vandermeers and burdett

Sat, 19 Apr 2008 10:44:07 GMT

After a six-month drought of published book reviews (that is, besides the book talk here at the blog), two new reviews of mine were both published on the same day, yesterday:

Best American Fantasy, ed. by Ann & Jeff VanderMeer, at The Internet Review of Science Fiction

Best American Fantasy approaches the process a bit differently, by deliberately seeking out content from literary journals and zines in addition to material from genre publications. This ethic has resulted in a strong yet eclectic anthology.

More importantly, it does what good genre blending should do: bring together both groups whose tropes are being utilized. Jeff and Ann VanderMeer and Matthew Cheney all have roots and connections within the speculative fiction field, and so readers familiar with their work are more likely to pick up the anthology than if it were edited by someone else, and will be exposed to many authors that they may not have heard of, since a good majority of the stories were printed in traditionally "non-genre" venues; conversely, readers familiar with the reprinted authors and the venues in which their fiction was originally published are more likely to pick up the anthology than if the stories were written by writers more closely associated with speculative fiction, and will be exposed to the wild variety of ways that the fantastic can be applied in a fictional milieu. Both groups get a surprise, led through a threshold they might not normally have crossed.

Bangkok Haunts by John Burdett, at Strange Horizons

Bangkok Haunts is the third in Burdett's detective/thriller series, and is the best so far. The story begins with the viewing of a snuff film sent to [Detective Sonchai Jitpleecheep] anonymously; the victim on the DVD is Damrong, a prostitute who briefly worked in the brothel run by Sonchai's mother, and who made Sonchai fall completely in love with her (a relationship that he barely escaped intact). Helping with the investigation is Kimberley Jones, the FBI agent who assisted Sonchai in the previous two books, and who has been ensnared by Bangkok's vibrant lifestyle and by Sonchai's katoey (transsexual) police partner Lek.

At the same time, Sonchai's superior, the opportunistic and savvy Colonel Vikorn, has decided to throw his hat into Bangkok's pornography industry, wanting to produce high-quality films to be shown in the city's hotel chains. They hire Yammy, a Japanese auteur with a death-wish, to create and direct the films, and are soon in business. However, much as Vikorn would like Sonchai to ignore the Damrong case and focus on porn, the murdered whore is proving difficult to forget.

I actually wrote the BAF review in September of last year, and pitched it to a number of reviews venues (newspapers, literary journals, online magazines), and had a helluva time selling it. Bluejack at IRoSF bought it not too long afterward, but because of the site's redesign and reorganization, it took a bit longer to publish it than I'd expected.

With Bangkok Haunts, things got in the way, mostly with the new teaching job, and I kept putting off writing the review. Niall got edits back to me quickly, but it took me several weeks afterward to get to them, as there were some substantive changes to make.

Anyway, I'm glad they're done and that they're up for your perusal. I owe a review of Cherie Priest's Not Flesh Nor Feathers to Bill at Subterranean, and I also need to write one up for Cory Doctorow's Little Brother and Samantha Hunt's The Invention of Everything Else. I've just gotten some more ARCs in the mail as well. Teaching full-time has certainly cut into my reading (and reflecting) time that's so necessary to get to these books, but I am hoping to do lots of it during the June holidays.

passing for human: one year gone

Thu, 17 Apr 2008 14:46:42 GMT

"Passing for Human" by Jamie Bishop

A year ago today, I found out that my good friend Jamie Bishop had died. One year, and it's passed so quickly. I almost missed the date entirely; school has been especially hectic lately, and I've also been ill, which dampens my concentration and cognitive abilities. Today was a long one, wherein I helped to invigilate a term test for about 250 students, and didn't even leave campus until 5 p.m., and I'm tired and really should be in bed by now, but I didn't want today to pass without any comment of its significance.

A year ago, I was just stepping out of the shower, and Janet was telling me, "Don't turn on the TV." When I asked why, she just told me to come upstairs and see her as soon as I finished getting dressed. Janet's not one for surprises, and doesn't like keeping secrets, so I really knew something was up. I pulled my clothes on quickly and hurried upstairs, where she told me about the horrible massacre at Virginia Tech. At that point, it was still unclear who had been killed, and how many, but the news was that a German class had been hit, and the teacher had been shot.

It was one of those moments where I was taken completely out of myself. I felt lightheaded and numb (I'm sure all the blood had drained from my face), and it was as if I was no longer looking through my eyes, but somehow behind my eyes, which made Janet and the room in which we stood seem very far away. I didn't want to believe the news. I couldn't. I quickly fired up the iBook and checked the BBC and Google News, but the reports were still preliminary, and no names had been released. Mass confusion, and wild speculation, and no one knew exactly what had happened yet.

Email brought messages from Alex Wilson and Mike Jasper, who had also been great friends of Jamie's (and who wrote beautiful remembrances of him here and here, which I did not properly acknowledge last year; sorry, guys), asking if anyone had heard from him or Steffi. I still had their phone number from when Janet and I had visited Blacksburg in January 2007, and I ran downstairs with it in my sweating fist. After getting the okay from Janet's mum that it was okay to make the transcontinental call, I dialled multiple times, getting busy signals; understandable, since I figured other people would be trying to also find out if they were safe. After maybe a dozen tries, the call finally went through. My hands were shaking and my breath was unsteady.

A friend of Jamie's (a colleague at VT, I believe) picked up the phone, but his voice sounded so similar to my friend's that the first word out of my mouth was "Jamie?" For that split-second before he answered in the negative, an entire other world unfolded before me, one where a different classroom had been hit, or where he'd called in sick and someone else had covered his lessons, or where the media had just been wrong about what had happened and blown everything out of proportion, or where he'd been shot but it had only grazed his shoulder and he was already home from the hospital, or where, or where, or where.

But then his friend said, "No, I'm sorry," and told me his name, which I almost immediately forgot. When I told him who I was and asked if Jamie and Steffi were there and safe, he said, "Look, I hate to do this, but I'm going to have to ask you a few questions first. The media have been calling here all day, and I need to make sure you're a friend." He asked me to describe something that people wouldn't normally know about them, and after faltering for about a minute, he asked me to give some specifics about their living room (I'm guessing because he was standing there at that moment). I told him about the DVD shelf Jamie had constructed, and the four giant digital collages he'd created (by blowing up an image then printing it out in smaller segments, then painstakingly reassembling the images into the whole by pasting them all onto plywood, and doing it so carefully that you could only really see the seams if you were less than a few feet away).

After a few minutes of listening to my stumbling description, he stopped me and said, "Okay, I believe you. The good news is that Steffi is safe; she's here right now, in the other room. But Jamie was one of the ones killed."

I let out a long shaky breath and couldn't speak. Jamie's friend let the silence hang for a moment. I don't know whether he volunteered to be the spokesman for our mutual friends, or if it was thrust upon him, but I deeply appreciated (and still do) his patience and his delivery. He'd just lost a friend as well, but here he was fielding phone call after phone call, having to deliver terrible news over and over, and do it with a steady tone and unwavering understanding.

I thanked him for telling me the truth, and asked if there was anything I could do, although I couldn't imagine what I could contribute, being on the other side of the planet. He said that things were being taken care of, and that Michael and Jeri Bishop were on their way up from Georgia. I felt helpless in that moment, useless by dint of distance. I wanted to do something, anything. I told him to please relay my sympathies and support to Steffi and both their families, and then I hung up.

My feet didn't want to move, but somehow I made it back up the three flights of stairs to the room that Janet and I use as a home office. She turned in her chair and said, "So?" All I could do was nod my head before bursting into tears. She hugged me, and I held her close, not wanting to let go, needing to cling onto something important in this life, and we both wept and held each other and wept some more.

Eventually, I was able to sit back at my iBook again and relay confirmation of the news to Mike and Alex, as well as to Andreas and Luna Black (again mutual friends), and then blog about it.

On April 16, 2007, Jamie, along with thirty-one other VT faculty members and students, was murdered by Cho Seung-Hui, a young man with severe behavioral problems and easy access to semi-automatic firearms.

In the days that followed, I tried to stay on top of the news stories, and blog about them, to spread the information. Reporters from National Public Radio, The Washington Post, The Associated Press, Carolina Alumni Review, and The Carrboro Citizen emailed requesting interviews or statements, and I pointed them all to my tribute, stating that this was everything I wanted to publicly say. (At least they were polite, unlike Inside Edition, who made Alex throw up in his mouth because of their incredible lack of tact.)

Any news about memorial scholarships, or essay awards, or any other kind of encomiums to Jamie went up on the blog. It became an obsession for a while, a way to finally be able to help in some way when I couldn't before. When Paul Di Filippo (who is an extremely nice guy, and is very close friends with Mike Bishop) would post news first up at theinferior4, most likely because Mike had emailed him the information, I would feel left out of the loop, cut out of the circle of importance, and angry at Paul for posting it first. Sure, Paul is a close family friend, but what about me?

Grief brought out a profound selfishness, which I'm sure that you, my astute and long-suffering blog readers, were probably aware of. My pain was most important, my suffering was worse than anybody's, my feelings were at stake. Forget Jamie's devastated wife, and his grieving parents, and his many other family members and friends, and our mutual friends, forget about everyone else, what about me?

There are times in my life when my ego has gotten me into trouble, but it was never as big as in the days and weeks and months after the shootings at Virginia Tech. And I feel like such a shit about it now. Even after I had begun moving on, and living my life again, and feeling guilty that I wasn't hurting as much, I still felt like my blog should be the most comprehensive source for information concerning Jamie's death and his legacy. And this wasn't fair. I didn't treat a lot of people very well in the last year because of my ego, and I'm very sorry for this now.

I still think about Jamie quite a bit. I was passing by a comics shop a few weeks ago, and on a whim asked if they had a copy of Bill Sienkiewicz's graphic novel Stray Toasters, which Jamie had enthused about during the Blacksburg trip. Luckily, the shop had one copy, so I bought it, took it home, and over the next four nights read it. It's extremely dark and surreal, and I'm still trying to suss out the significance and symbolism that saturates every page. Not an easy story to read, but the artwork certainly shares a sensibility with Jamie's work, and there are some moments of dark humor that I could see him laughing at and wanting to discuss.

During a lull in classes today, I visited memory39, and was glad to see that it was back up again (I'd checked several days ago, and the site was down, making me wonder if VT had canceled Jamie's account there, which seemed like an incredible loss, as his entire portfolio is on that site; I wrote to Mike letting him know this, and I don't know what he did, but the site is back up now, although I notice it's now on a UNC server, which is where it was previously located while he was working there). I browsed through the different illustrations and photographs, reading the commentary, as well as the bio and artistic statement, and in general reacquainting myself with my lost friend.

I'll just end with a quote from Mike Bishop, taken from the catalogue that accompanied the recent exhibition of Jamie's work at the Lamar Dodd Art Center at LaGrange College. (I very much hope that Mike doesn't mind.) It refers to the artwork posted at the top of this entry, which is the cover art for Passing for Human, an anthology forthcoming from PS Publishing in the UK, which was edited by Michael Bishop and Steven Utley. It is the last book cover that Jamie undertook, and it will appear posthumously.

Jamie himself was fully human, with all the quirks and qualities that the phrase "fully human" implies, but he was definitely passing for human, as we all must do; and I regret with all my heart that he passed, with no real chance to do otherwise, long before he should have.

--Michael Bishop

I still miss Jamie an awful lot. And my heart goes out to everyone else who does as well. May we all never forget him, and see him in another life.

free kessel free

Thu, 17 Apr 2008 05:37:39 GMT

Yes, I ripped the title from Gavin's post; it was too good not to steal.

John Kessel's new collection (his first authored book in more than ten years), The Baum Plan for Financial Independence and Other Stories (which I recently pointed to here), has just been released out into the world. To celebrate its publication, and to offset any doldrums caused by Tax Day, Kessel and Small Beer Press have done a very k3wl thing in also making the book available as a free download "in a number of completely open formats--with, of course, no Digital Rights Management (DRM)."

The Baum Plan includes Kessel's Tiptree Award-winning "Stories for Men" (gender inequality meet Fight Club . . . on the moon), "Pride and Prometheus," a mashup of Frankenstein and Jane Austen, and "Powerless," an amazing mix of pulp fictions, paranoia, and academia.

The Baum Plan is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 license, allowing readers to share the stories with friends and generally have at them in any remixing/interpretation/Web 2.0 huddly-cuddly noncommercial manner.

The collection is provided in these formats: low-res PDF, HTML, RTF, and text file. We encourage any and all conversions into other formats. Read more, download, and or order the collection here.

In addition, podcasts have been recorded of stories from the collection, and are also freely downloadable: "The Baum Plan for Financial Independence" (33:03), "Every Angel is Terrifying" (39:05, read by Gregory Frost), and "Pride and Prometheus" (Part 1 (1:02:25), Part 2 (27:52)).