Bleeding Fiction

Blog: Slightly wonked due to a hacker. Bastard. Host is cool, providing on-site visits and discussions of poetry. Also, she fixed the blog. Mostly. Last update along these lines lost to the digital ether. Good riddance, I say.

Vitaly: Got married recently. Yay! Nice wedding, very traditional, right down to the break-dancing-Brad-Pitt-look-alike rabbi.

Kiki: Now engaged. About damn time. She and Raphael have only been dating for eight and a half years.

Erin McKeown: Free show at South Street Seaport past Thursday. Excellent music, as always. Open air = poor acoustics but great breeze. Too much sitting, not enough dancing.

Visitations: Something Positive went pro; creator-dude Randy got mad donations and quit his job to do the comic. That's cool. Also, Bekah started a livejournal. Its bilingualness astounds me. Go be astounded too.

Lena: What I said I'd write: Everything she says about why she and I should not be together makes perfect sense. But my life bleeds fiction and makes no sense, so there. Plus, I love fairy tales and happily-ever-afters.

Mother: In hospital for non-serious, non-diabetes problems. Yeesh.

Borges: My current reading. Witty and self-deprecating. Major images are mirrors, labyrinths and knife-fights. Very cool.

Saved: A movie. Pokes fun at very religious types. Funny as hell. Go see it. I want to see it again. And own it on DVD.

Work: Increasingly less busy. Or decreasingly busy. Whichever. Yay.

School: Registration papers to arrive... soon?

Writing: It's June. Leave me the fuck alone.

Back to a regular schedule presently.

Sometimes you find a book and you realize that it was written for you. I feel that way about The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon. It's been sitting on my shelf since my mad trip to Massachusetts this past summer and I finally began to read it this afternoon. I'm only a sixth of the way into the book right now, but I'm already in love.

I want to recommend this book to everyone. At the same time, I hesitate; I'm not sure that anyone out there but me would get it.

Obviously, I'm wrong. The book's won the Pulitzer Prize, among other awards, and was a New York Times bestseller. Clearly, other people get this book.

So, the book. Why do I like it? Why does it speak to me? Should I say that much of the first part of the book concerns a young Jew's escape from Nazi-invaded Prague along with the golem, stored in a coffin, presented as historical fact? Should I point out that the boy escapes to New York and, with his cousin, makes comic books? Should I mention the dedication to Will Eisner? Or even the fact that this is the first book I've read in a long, long time that made me get out a dictionary?

Maybe. Maybe this is enough for you to understand. Or maybe I need to quote you the opening paragraph, the paragraph that hooked me in, and let the book speak for itself:

In later years, holding forth to an interviewer or to an audience of aging fans at a comic book convention, Sam Clay liked to declare, apropos of his and Joe Kavalier's greatest creation, that back when he was a boy, sealed and hog-tied inside the airtight vessel known as Brooklyn, New York, he had been haunted by dreams of Harry Houdini. "To me, Clark Kent in a phone booth and Houdini in a packing crate, they were one and the same thing," he would learnedly expound at WonderCon or Angouleme or to the editor of The Comics Journal. "you weren't the same person when you came out as when you went in. Houdini's first magic act, you know, back when he was just getting started. It was called 'Metamorphosis.' It was never just a question of escape. It was also a question of transformation."

I've mentioned Hitherby Dragons before, and it's still worth reading, but that's not what I want to talk about here. Instead, I want to talk about Pulp Decameron. It's microfiction, like a certain someone writes, but all with some pulp genre as a base. Let me stress that it's not true pulp fiction (clearly - it's digital!), but rather stories that use the pulp mileau or tropes or genre as a jumping off point and then heads in some pretty wild directions.

The guy what does it is doing ten sets of ten, so 100 stories. He's already through ten of them. He's pretty clever, too, and most of them are well, well worth reading.

So, Rebecca Sean Borgstrom. She's sort of one of the best game writers on the planet. Also, apparently, completely insane. She writes this funny (read: odd) nanofiction website called Hitherby Dragons. You might've heard of it. There's an overall plot to Hitherby. It's often hard to pin down, both because the stories themselves are subtle and because there are often a lot of crazy, tangential posts between "plot" posts. What Rebecca really needs to do, I've been saying for a while, is collect the Hitherby stories into books and make them available to readers in dead-tree form. That way, we could read them all at once without the strain of sitting in front of a computer.

Ask and ye shall receive.

Hitherby today carried the announcement that the first Hitherby collection, Primal Chaos, is available for purchase from Lulu.com. The second collection should be available before another month is out. Here is a direct link to the purchase page.

If you like good fiction, insanity and buying things, in any combination, you owe it to yourself to pick this up. It's very, very worth your while.

I purchased Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell the week, if not the very day, that bookshops placed it on their shelves. I had heard many good things about the book from people that I respect and admire. If you were to check the dates attached to the two pages I just linked you might note that, although my purchase of the novel came in a timely manner, my commentary on it was perhaps a little delayed. I have nothing to offer in my defense. I will simply gesture in silence to my bookshelves, weighed down with books as they are, and consider my point made.

(The polite reader will refrain from noting that both gentlemen I referenced above have more shelves with more books on them than I, and doubtless busier schedules as well.)

As a book, Jonathan Strange &c. is not hard to describe. It is square, some eight hundred pages in length, and each page with a delightfully ragged edge. It stands near ten inches tall at the shoulder, almost six and a half inches wide and just over two inches deep and it weighs in at a robust two pounds. As to its subject, the novel concerns itself with the revival of English magic in the early years of the nineteenth century. It is, in no uncertain terms, a work of brilliance, by turns both grotesque and humorous and, on occasion, both at once. It is filled with style, such as this poor attempt at witty formality cannot mimic. It has characters both admirable and detestable, footnotes of an informative nature and such persons in as might be considered fairies. Its ending is not something I care to spoil, but I will note that, like a great deal of good literature, the novel ends the only way it could.

This is what you must do: Approach your nearest bookseller and procure for yourself a copy of this novel. Following directly, read said novel to your profound enjoyment. You may instead, if you like, mail a cheque for the novel's cost directly to its author, Ms. Susanna Clarke, care of her editors. You will deprive yourself of the opportunity to read this wonderful story, but at the least you will not deprive Ms. Clarke of the reward she deserves for her effort.

I'm looking for a book written by one Harlan Ellison. You may have heard of him. The book I'm looking for is called Deathbird Stories. It's a collection of short stories first published in 1975 and re-printed various times since then, most recently in 2001. It's been out of print, as far as I can tell, for about four years and is something of a hot commodity.

I've tried Amazon, The Strand, the various used bookstores in the U. District and at Pike's Place Market here in Seattle and I've tried a general run of desperate web searching. I'd see if I could check it out from a library, but I need to own this book.

I haven't given up, but I figure that multiple heads are better than one (unless you're fighting Hercules, at which point the man's already got your number, so you might as well give in), so I'm opening my search up to the public at large. If you find yourself in a bookstore, at a library getting rid of books, a rummage sale or with a few spare minutes to kill online, do me a favor and keep your eyes open for a readable copy of Harlan Ellison's Deathbird Stories. I'd appreciate it and I'd pay you back.

I finished my paper on time. Which is to say I finished it in enough time to run to campus, print it out at the library and get it into my professor's hands about three minutes before she walked out of her office for the summer. It was 14.5 pages long, which gets rounded up to 15 and means "mission accomplished."

I didn't have time to write a second draft. I pretty much never bother to do that for papers, anyway, but for this one I would've liked to. I figure an ambitious thesis deserves me showing a little ambition in the writing. Plus, it would've made it less painful when I had to re-read it next year for my thesis. Either way, it's good enough for now. I think.

I was interrupted mid-morning (and mid-paper writing) by the arrival of the UPS man, who had one, two, three (mwa ha ha!) packages from Amazon.com for me. It was a nice gift (also known as "how I spent a portion of my freakishly huge income tax refund"), and I made myself wait until I got back from handing in my paper to open it. I sort of didn't have a choice.

I got some books for school research ("Critical Terms for Religious Studies" and "Supermodernism"), some books for writing research ("Pacing the Void" and "Records of the Grand Historian" - oh, yes, The Ogre�, that's right: by Sima Qian) and some books that I just wanted to have (The second volume of "The Deer and the Cauldron" and Teresa's totally awesome "Making Book"). I got some DVDs (Gilmore Girls 3rd season, The Incredibles and Enemy at the Gates).

I also got some CDs (Tori Amos, The Beekeeper; Richard Shindell, Vuelta; Ben Folds, Songs for Silverman; and the Rushmore soundtrack. Rushmore is an awesome movie, with an awesome soundtrack and the girl who shows up towards the end playing Margaret Yang, Sara Tanaka, looks really and truly almost identical to my friend Vanessa, who I have sadly lost touch with.). The CD I did not get, due to my not, in fact, ordering it when I thought I had, was Ani DiFranco's Knuckle Down, which I really, really want. A trip to Best Buy this weekend will fix this oversight, as well as possibly get me a CD from the Pixies or the Shins or the Clash. Or possibly a coffee table.

Now I have to go and write a Fable tonight, to catch up to the fact that I didn't post one at the stroke of midnight (or a reasonable facsimile thereof), and also start reading for that other, seven page paper that I have due on Thursday. That one's much less ambitious (not ambitious at all, actually) and should be much, much easier.

And, of course, now that I'm back Seattle has a series of visits from some Very Special Guests:

September 9(?)-11: Erik, my erstwhile roommate, will cap off his driving tour of the Left Coast here in Seattle. I'm not quite sure when he'll get here and neither is he; Friday or Saturday, most likely. Seattleites! I say unto thee: be around to entertain my out of town friend, for verily he will appreciate your particular brand of madness.

October 3: Erin McKeown, who is tiny but sings with voice enough to topple Jericho, travels as some dude's opening act. All opening acts should be reffered to as "heralds," but that's besides the point. The point is that I'll go see her play anyway, because Erin is worth it alone, and the other guy might be good.

October 4: Neil Gaiman, a man who I don't have as much to say as I ought, will be here that evening to sign his new book. I will be there to have said new book signed. Possibly other books as well.

October 19: Dar Williams, who probably doesn't remember me, is going to hit Seattle a month after her new album does. I haven't seen Dar play in much, much, much too long. I don't always think about it, but when I do it makes me sad. Seeing Dar again will make me happy.

That is all.

Erik got here on Thursday night and left again this morning; a brief but, for me, satisfying visit from a good friend. We didn't get up to much, just some minor sight-seeing around town. I'll let him tell you more about it at his leisure.

Now I'm feeling a little fuzzy, a little frayed, like my body's here but my mind and my energy haven't really caught up to me yet. I feel like there's something profound that's just missing right now. Too much done all at once, I guess, between the Right Coast, getting everything back into order here and then Erik. I'm sure that things will settle back down to normal soon.

While I'm waiting for that to happen, though, I went down to a reading from Susanna Clarke at the University of Washington bookstore. She's a rather charming lady: well-spoken, polite and knowledgeable, with just the right amount of stumbling awkwardness. She spoke about the deep influence of Jane Austen on Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, and that was almost enough to get me to grab a copy of Sense & Sensibility or something. Almost. Instead I think I'll take the opposite route and recommend Strange &c. to Eric and Stefanie. Anyway, I got my copy of the book signed, and Lukas' as well since he couldn't make it, and it didn't occur to me to mention Patrick until after I'd already left the store. Oh well.

Or: A Tale Of The Frightfully Weak

Neil Gaiman's new book, Anansi Boys, came out yesterday.

As I've mentioned before, Mr. Gaiman will be at the Wash in about two weeks to read from and sign said book. I'd planned, of course, to go to the reading and pick up a copy of the book then. There would be many of them on hand, after all, and that seemed to make much more sense than walking down to the bookstore, buying a copy, carrying it home, carrying it back down to the signing and then carrying it home again.

Besides, I have plenty to do to keep me busy right now. Three short stories to re-draft, two new ones to write, the Fables, dear God the Fables, the first season of Fraggle Rock to watch, a seemingly infinite amount of books already owned to read and of course Dynasty Warriors 5 to play.

But Neil Gaiman's new book, Anansi Boys, came out yesterday.

I wasn't, strictly speaking, surprised when I left my apartment for roll of quarters yesterday, around noon, and walked right past the bank, headed, instead, for the bookstore. It wasn't a shock to me that I picked a copy of Anansi Boys up off the shelf, paid for it and headed back home again. I wasn't even amazed that when I got home I began to read the book and continued on until I was halfway through and had to leave the house for a previous and regular Tuesday night obligation.

It's just that I hadn't actually planned any of that.

As I said, I didn't read the book straight through. I put it down to go out last night, to sleep, to watch Gilmore Girls on tape this morning and to go to the bank this afternoon. But I still finished it tonight. It's not particularly long.

Not that it's short, either. It's as long as it needs to be and also, I'm convinced, pretty much as long as most books should be. Much longer than this and, even with the best of books, I usually start thinking that it really has gone on long enough and maybe should have ended by now.

So, Anansi Boys. Neither too short nor too long, and also really good and mostly funny although often (intentionally) quite the opposite. There's a sort of effortlessness of voice and tone that makes the book both very easy and fun to read and also makes it seem like it was very easy to write. It's sort of enviable, actually; there was a point in there, early on, where I found myself saying "hhm, I wish I wrote more like Gaiman." Much as I love Gaiman's writing, that's not something I've ever wished before, so maybe that tells you something.

The inevitable question, I suppose, from other Gaiman fans, is where I'd rate this one vis-a-vis his other books. I'm not sure that I like it more than American Gods but, then, I'm not sure that I like it less. I don't like it as much as Neverwhere or Stardust but, then again, maybe I do.

Classes started up again today, so I actually have obligations that demand to be met. Japanese language class was first. I have mixed feelings about it. On the one hand, when I compare the work in this class to what I did over the summer, I laugh a heart laugh. "Only 4 chapters in 10 weeks, but 50 kanji to learn and a mere hour of class a day? This is nothing," I proclaim in a stentorian voice, like that of the Mighty Thor. "Fie! What of the days when classes lasted 5 hours, when 9 chapters were the subject of 9 weeks' time and when 200 kanji or more had to be met and mastered? Offer unto me a challenge befitting my might!"

On the other hand, the class is conducted entirely in Japanese. We get, basically, no participation credit for the day if we use English in class. Honestly, it shouldn't be that bad; it's just responding to questions I already know the answers to, right? I should be able to manage. But, still: Eep. And my grade actually matters, now. I've got to get, at minimum, a 2.5 in Japanese to get credit for the course and get my degree. Hopefully I'll still have the aid of my (cute) tutor; just waiting on her to call me back.

(Update: spoke with (cute) tutor. Tuting will continue apace, twice-weekly and still at no cost.)

My other class (yes, I'm only taking two. I'm lazy; you all know this.) is about Civil Society in Japan. While I do like the non-profits, I'm finding in a little hard to get excited. I mean, if it's not Freaky Japanese Cults then, really, what's the point?

I wanted to take the class on the Samurai Tradition and Noh Theatre. Sounded cool. I mean, samurai. Rock on. Noh Theatre? Also cool. If I had to guess, I'd say that the entire class is probably about the Tale of the 47 Ronin or something. Sadly, they're only offering the class through the experimental college, which means I don't get credit if I take it. Also it's only offered from 7 to 10 at night on Tuesdays. That's just dumb.

Last, Mike did something cool and got me the first two volumes of the Journey to the West at a garage sale. It's one of the classic novels of ancient China, in a similar category as the Romance of the Three Kingdoms and the Outlaws of the Marsh. It's a lot more magical than the other two; the main characters are, aside from a Buddhist monk, the monkey king, a pig monster, a half demon and a dragon prince.

I've said before that the Three Kingdoms holds the same place in the Chinese mind as the Illiad or Arthurian Legends do in the West, and that the Outlaws of the Marsh holds the same place as the Robin Hood story; I'm not sure, if we're making equivalencies, what I should compare Journey to the West to. I'm open to suggestions. Anyway, I'm eager to read it.

I stole that title from somewhere. Just not sure where.

I saw Neil Gaiman speak tonight, to a crowd of some 800 or so, in a church next to the UW bookstore. There's a comment to be made about seeing Neil speak from the veritable pulpit and religious experiences, but I'll leave that for other people.

Me, I'll just say that it was pretty cool. Neil continues to be funny and witty and kind. Neil continues, too, to have a totally awesome voice, though it was a little ill-served by the accoustics of the church and the nature of what he was reading; the characters in that particular section of Anansi Boys have accents that stray a bit far from Neil's normal English one. Stray almost to the Carribean, in fact.

Neil looked a bit haggard, though. Not a surprise, I guess, given that he's been on a signing tour for a few weeks now. That's the sort of thing that'll run a person down; cramped fingers, bags under the eyes, a general diassociation with where you currently are. I've been there (only minus the being famous and the name-dropping and the having people want my signature, of course). It's not much a situation I envy (and the way I've been sleeping lately, it's not a situation I'm far from), but the Neil I saw tonight certainly cut a different picture from the, let's face it, dead sexy shot on the dust jacket of the new book.

Also, I noticed something a little funny tonight. I couldn't help but feeling, as Neil was talking, that I'd heard it all before. What he read from the book, yes, of course, but his questions in the Q&A session, too. I'd read them on his blog. It's the strange and almost awkward power of the internet; I don't need to hear him speak, because I already know what he's going to say. His own words have become a digital oracle, and now he's only echoing himself. Signal edges dangerously close to noise, and the signing itself, the sheer size of which makes more meaningful connection impossible, becomes almost redundant.

The beginning of that last paragraph is true. The first 4 sentences, say. Where I get by the end of that paragraph, though, I'm not sure that I agree with what I wrote. But I don't take any of it back.

I just saw John Hodgman interviewed on the Daily Show. He was very funny, in a sort of understated way, and was hawking his book. If he was funny, I think maybe his book will be funny. I think maybe it would be funny to hear him speak tonight (Thursday).

But I've never heard of the guy before and can't seem to find anything exciting about him on the intarweb, so I just don't know.

So, please, enlighten me. Tell me of this man called John.

As I briefly related in the comments section of my first John Hodgman thread, I took Eric's advice and did some digging into Hodgman's work on This American Life. There are now things you must do.

First, go here and, at 31 minutes into the real audio file, listen to Hodgman talk about his relationship with Bruce Campbell. Then, go here and, at a bit over 45 minutes in, listen to Hodgman talk about his script for the Phantom Menace and things related to that.

The stuff on the Little Grey Books site is keen, but a bit less cool than the American Life stuff - it's got some good bits, but tends to be too rambling, takes too long to go anywhere, to make it really funny for me.

Definitely going to get the book, though.

I bought the promised John Hodgman book last week and I've been reading it in fits and stops since then. It's funny, really very funny, in a dead-pan, wry sort of way. It elicits snickers and chuckles at every turn, but (so far) stops short of a full-fledged guffaw. Odd thing about it is that there's a lot of little things in the book that, in another context, would be creepy, surreal fiction stuff.

For example, to find Warren Buffet's house in Robin Hood Hills, stand on any street corner in the town and put a quarter on its side; the quarter will then roll straight there. Or the Sterling Memorial Library at Yale which, on its rooftop, has a miniature model of the entire city of New Haven, the Sterling Memorial Library and its rooftop model included. By the third itteration, the library is small enough to contain only one book, which it does, containing "within its pages the fate of the United States, in great detail, to the year 3000."

How cool is that shit?

Meanwhile, I spotted these thirty facts about Vin Diesel. Go and read, for I would not want to ruin it for you by my commentary.

Now, my commentary: I was in tears. I laughed so hard that I actually became dizzy, but I haven't eaten anything yet today and that probably had a little to do with it.

Next up, Lore Sjoberg, owner of the late, great Brunching Shuttlecocks humor site commented a week ago on his blog that, while he likes to write funny things, he runs into problems when he picks a project and sets a schedule for it. He always falls through on the schedule and feels bad about it and abandons the project. His new take is to just update as the spirit moves him. For most people this would mean that they get nothing done. Lore, on the other hand, has seen a dramatic explosion in his comedic output; he's had three Lore Brand Comics and one Rating up in the past week, as well as general commentary on whatever he finds out in the world. check it out.

Finally, I'm slowly, slowly working my way through the fourth volume of the Complete Peanuts. It's tempting to tear through the book, but Peanuts is so good that I'd rather take the time to savor it, especially as it's going to be six months until the next volume comes out. So far in this volume I've read the introduction of Charlie Brown's baseball team and the brick wall. It's just amazing that something that contains characters so cynical, so casually cruel, who are so constantly the subject of scorn and abuse, can be so life-affirming. I loves me some Peanuts.

Charles Fort is basically the patron saint of unexplained phenomena. How influential was this guy? Well, he invented the word teleportation in 1931, so I guess that ought to tell you something. He wrote seven books, four of which survive and are collected in a fairly weighty paperback, but I suppose you could thumb through them in digital form.

Fort's fun to read, but his style's a bit hard to follow. He doesn't so much consider normal English sentence structures or, you know, grammar, all that important. He doesn't offer serious explanations so much as he catalogs information and calls into question the existing answers. There's a line towards the beginning of the first book, though, The Book of the Damned, that isn't about the unexplained and makes a little more sense than most. "By 'beauty,' I mean that which seems complete," Fort writes. "Every attempt to achieve beauty is an attempt to give to the local the attribute of the universal."

So far I'm about 70 pages in and I've been mostly reading about things falling from the sky; things like oil, maize, pumice, worms or fish, which may not have been oil, maize, nostoc, worms or fish. I think he's about done with animal and vegetable, though, and is moving on to mineral in the next chapter...

The Aenied is basically Virgil writing Homer fan fiction.

Weird.

I just found out that Sarah Vowell does a weekly Op Ed piece in the New York Times on Sundays. Immediately subsequent to this discovery I discovered that I can only read the piece by subscribing to TimesSelect. Or by, you know, actually buying the print copy of the Times on Sundays.

I dunno. I don't really feel right paying money just to get 800 words a week.

Maybe they'll collect these columns into a book one day.

Some of you have heard me talk about the book Whales on Stilts in the past. Some of you have even read it. It's a beautiful thing; a wonderfully pulpy, silly, quickly-read children's book of a thing. Well, I've just finished the sequel, The Clue of the Linoleum Lederhosen.

It's not as good as its predecessor, but maybe that's just because I prefer pulp adventure more than I prefer detective novels - and as the word "clue" in the title might tell you, this is an example of the later. It's a little less manic, I think, but shares the same style - an odd wink-and-a-nod way that the author breaks the fourth wall and addresses the reader; a certain tongue-in-cheek approach to laying out what the author acknowledges are tropes.

You think it's just a totally silly, if somewhat self-aware for the benefit of adults, children's novel. But..

Well...

There's a question I've been asking myself since I read Whales On Stilts. A question about one of the characters, Jasper Dash, Boy Technonaut, and the issue of timing. Towards the end of ...Lederhosen, two of the main characters raise that very same question, lay it hauntingly right on the table, and then take it one step further.

If the title alone were not enough, this wonderful step would make me slaver for the next book in the series, Jasper Dash and the Flame-Pits of Delaware.

April cannot come soon enough.