Overgrown madness

Unexplored Earth

The idea of a voyage to the bottom of the Mariana trench and other depths of the sea, adventures that don't even require leaving the atmosphere...  Kinda cool, though an ego that knows no bounds is less uncommon than the wallet to back it up.  I write this on a Virgin phone, so hey, rock on dude... Another article with video. 

And then she discovered fire...

Playing with the fire pit on a perfect Saturday night, which does have little howling wolves cut into it.  The fire ring, I mean.  And pine trees and full moons.  The stars and moons cauldron went too far, but this was Minnesota tasteful... 

Skipping the State Fair this year from lack of interesting music.  Though I really want to see a horse show one of these years, and the barns are always fun.  I'm just not feeling the urge, especially after getting sunburnt on my long run this morning.   Next year in Dan Patch territory, as they say...

And now the fireworks are shooting up over the river.  Timely.

Things I didn't know before

1) I could run four miles of intervals.

2) I would become able to run two days in a row (which injury prevented until now)

3) Jay McInerney's short stories are really funny, as well was full of great turns of phrase...s...ss.

You live and learn. 

Mpls is cool and breezy right now.  An earthquake in my hometown and hurricane threat on the coast are just surreal.

Coyote rulez

Fantasy stories, especially based closely on myths or fairy tales, are often just not my thing.  Even though some times I write these very things; I'm a hypocrite like everyone else.

So this means that there are some fantasy writers I like IRL, who are great on panels, give good interviews, or give fascinating non-fiction analysis or useful writing advice whose fiction I just can't get into no matter how great everyone says it is, or objectively it looks.  But I keep trying.  'Cos then they'll hit on something that just cuts through my short attention span b.s.

A rocking story, about one of my favorite dudes, who many people hit really false notes in writing: White Lines on a Green Field.  (Coyote's a trap.)

Loch Hiawatha

It looked like one today, with mist hanging over the water and the edges all lavender and pink from reflecting the sky.  Maybe more Mists of Avalon meets my little pony, I don't know...

It was cool, anyhow.  And a relief to run in cold air, though still weirdly humid.

I see Ted Chiang won a Hugo for "The Life Cycle of Software Objects."  I was sort of rooting for N.K. Jemisin, because Ted has already won a lot of awards, but I tend to like SF better and TLCOSO was probably one of the best SF books I read last year.  Moxyland is up there too.   The Ten Thousand Kingdoms is dang good for the kind of gods and kingdoms kind of fantasy I don't usually like at all, though.  Well worth checking out. 

N.K.'s short fiction is da bomb, though, like  Non-Zero Probabilities.  (In audio too.)  Anyway, time to get some coffee and head to work.

The Importance of Place

"If it's the same story wherever it happens to be set, it isn't Urban Fantasy." -John Clute in an interesting rant about how real cities are key to Urban Fantasy.

A locally set story I have to check out.  I have liked the Disch I've read a lot, but have been slow to delve deeply, not really sure why.  This sounds cool: "Thomas M. Disch's "The White Man" (2004) desolately supplements his Minnesota Quartet sequence, conceiving in true fantastika fashion (that is, with the deadpan literalness central to the twentieth century's finest fiction about the twentieth century) of whites as the true vampires who have desiccated Minneapolis."

And he mentions a Richard Bowes story I have not read, yay.  I am always on the lookout.  He writes the NY and east coast I remember, grungy, wrung out by poverty and drugs but dotted with little miracles here and there, and oh so queer.

Speaking of which, I need to remember to check MN poet James Wright's massive posthumous anthology out next time I go to the library.  He had crazy range.  Bone-chilling, brilliant, devastating.  And mainly in iambic pentameter, IIRC. 

Eureka

What the endless watering, weeding, and worrying is all about. 

Speaking of worrying, I did more research and it turns out the creature living in my front yard in a very residential big city neighborhood is a groundhog. 

I thought it was chipmunks, until I saw its furry face pop out of the hole one day.  That made me think it was a gopher, 'cos it looked just like the one in Caddyshack.  It turns out they used a groundhog in Caddyshack.  And gophers have the big long teeth and do not hibernate, like my guy does and groundhogs do.

Now I just have to find out how one removes a groundhog to wilder digs, legally and feasibly, as well as affordably.  The 357 Magnum a friend used on a 25-lb chicken-thieving raccoon on his farm way out yonder won't play so well in the city, I suspect...  Plus the groundhog is pretty freaking cute.

And I did watch Caddyshack 5,000 times thanks to little brothers, so I do have a small amount of respect for the adversary...

Friday Night with the Fishy

A fine way to spend Friday night...

Walk on

On my way to work this morning I ran into a pink sign saying something like, "Warning, many walkers."  As the sidewalk was empty, I took this for a warning to the NiceRide bicycle renters at the nearby kiosk. 

Lo and behold, at lunch there was a steady line of walkers, with much pink and many pink tutus passing by Cancer Survivor Park.  Susan G. Komen walk, of course.

Uh huh.

Advertising

I'm sorry, Quizno's, but a salad we go to your store to buy will never be a Farmer's Market Salad.  That's like calling it a CSA special if it isn't overloaded with rhubarb, chard, and kohlrabi, with only one tomato...

1927

"It is said that little girls want the same thrill in their reading that is so persistently sought among adolescent gang boys - 'tales of blood and thunder, detective stories, and mystery yarns.' This seems to show that boys and girls are much more alike than the traditional social patterns would indicate."

-Frederic M. Thrasher, The Gang, U. Chicago Press, 1927/1936

We need sociologists to tell us this?

¿Minnie?

I started a longer review of a book of longer essays about the Matrix trilogy and of The Taqwacores, a novel about Muslim punk rockers that described a fictional scene that kids who read the book decided to make real.  But internet connectivity issues and my dog having a bad arthritis pain episode got in the way.

That last Fringe show we were going to squeeze in didn't happen either, but we did go to see Brandi Carlile at the MN Zoo.  We all got very lucky that it did not rain and she put on a great show as always.  The covers of Johnny Cash (Folsom Prison and a snatch of Jackson) and Patsy Cline (Crazy) were my favorites.  But she kept referring to Mpls.as "Minnie."  I'm sure St. Paul was miffed because we were actually in Apple Valley and not calling it the Twin Cities was kind of inaccurate.  It was kind of jarring.

Anyway, this is one of my favorite murals in Minnie, at 42d and 28th Ave.

Neighbor dog

Because he's cute and likes to eat science projects.  All dogs love science.

Technophilia

The concept I've been mulling over the last week or so is based on a William Gibson quote from the Paris Review summer '11 interview:

"...I take it for granted that social change is driven primarily by emergent technologies, and probably always has been."

He went on to say that the SF he grew up with did not agree that tech emergence was more of a random thing.  (Of course it was heroic individualism and resourceful red-blooded young men and all that.)  And, "Today we're more likely to feel that technology is driving us, driving change, and that it's out of control."

That is reflected more in SF and certainly in cyberpunk and its offspring.  In a way, though, the more negative reaction to steampunk highlights that in earlier eras feeling controlled by technological change rather than at its helm had a distinct standpoint aspect- class, race, gender... 

Some people have said steampunk and things like Maker culture (I think of Linux, Open Source, and Cultural Commons as well) are reactions to this type of disempowerment.  Steampunk and cyberpunk both have aspects that explore and deconstruct or oppose the alienation and disorientation that come with technological change. 

I think the confusing or frustrating thing for many people about these so-called movements is that progressive social change is not necessarily the focus and primary concern of many of these explorations of alienation and subjugation of people related to technological change.  Stories in these subgenres are often more like Gibson says of some of his stories, more like a tombstone rubbing than a prescriptive text.  The endless question about fiction, its legitimate purposes and its limits.

Anyway, that's what I'm mulling over, when not thinking about work or food, or mindlessly running.

...Coming back to this in the a.m., I'm not sure it makes so much sense.  An emergent thought.  Ideas take a lot of time to percolate in my brain, and they usually come out in bits and pieces and tangles...

A sphinx emerges

From the county government building.  End times, baby.

Say it ain't so...

"L.A. Banks (1959-2011) —  Writer Leslie Esdaile Banks, 51, who wrote urban fantasy as L.A. Banks, died August 2, 2011 of adrenal cancer in Philadelphia PA. ..."   For more... 

I had not read her books, but I heard her read a couple times and greatly enjoyed it.  More, she was an awesome, very funny yet very down to earth GoH at Convergence just a couple of years ago, and gave some very good writing advice.  She was so young.  And there are not so many black folks who are SFF writers, period, especially so well-published.  Damn...

The Girl Gangs

In my 'hood, they will slap you up 'side the head with a Stupefy or Expelliarmus...  Best believe.

A gay YA fantasy writer and the last gay concentration camp survivor passed away

The gay fantasy YA/children's writer William Sleator passed away this week.  I loved his book Angry Moon as a child.  I didn't know the author was gay until reading the NYT obit this weekend, but I'm not surprised because my gay uncle gave it to me back in the day.  He may well have known WS, or known about him. 

From the NYT obit by Margalit Fox:  "Critics praised his spare, stylish, often darkly comic prose; hurtling plots; and deliciously strange characters, among them a gasbag-like flying octopus." Awesome...

There's a good write up in the  School Library Journal Obituary.  Wikipedia had links to a copy of the book Oddballs on his brother's site.  The NYT obit has the text of a novel he wrote at age 6.

The last person who was forced to wear a pink triangle by the Nazis also died this week.  Rudolf Bravda, imprisoned in Buchenwald three years, was 98.   NYT obit:

"Rudolf Brazda was born on June 26, 1913, in the eastern German town of Meuselwitz to a family of Czech origin. His parents, Emil and Anna Erneker Brazda, both worked in the coal mining industry. Rudolf became a roofer. Before he was sent to the camp, he was arrested twice for violations of Paragraph 175."  Two books were written about him, and the obit contains a good, succinct history of the treatment of gay men by the Third Reich,  with quotes from writer and archivist Gerard Koskovich, who was a stellar queer activist even back when I lived I'm books...

And browsing the online obits, there is a 1950s test pilot and the first black federal judge in the Deep South, whose story is quite interesting.  For starters:

"Matthew J. Perry Jr., who as a young lawyer had to wait in the balcony of his segregated local courthouse before a judge would hear his case, then went on to win hundreds of civil rights legal battles and to becomgr the first black federal judge from the Deep South, died on July 29 at his home in Columbia, S.C. He was 89."

It may be somewhat morbid to read the obits, but I find people's stories and old photos fascinating, and it's an old habit from the days when every day somebody from the gay community, often influential in some way to many of us, was in the obits...  I always learn something new.

Multi-tasking

Listening to the Current -so far OMD, Iggy Pop singing "The Passenger," one of the songs I learned to play in one of the short-lived  two-person punk bands I was in as a teenager, New Order, the Sex Pistols.  The Saturday morning show is an 80s alt  feast...

Also cooling down from a supposedly race-pace 5k run where I was a little too slow to be happy with it, making coffee and fried potatoes for the 12-mile runner who is mid-run, dogsitting, and thinking about a trunk story.

The crazy young dog is unhappy about not getting to run and pacing around my yard our house, going in and out, while my old dog is playing troll under the bridge under my deck.  The old concrete pilings under there are very cool even in much heat.

Now the Current is playing the more boring parts of 80s new wave and I am thinking about putting on  Black Blondie, a local TC band I haven't heard in a while. 

Then I need to get organized about writing on my newly Ubuntu'ed laptop, which I have been dragging my feet about.  Though I have at least been researching new ISPs so I can connect it to the interwebs.

OK, they played the B52s just in time, and now that song... Well, that one that goes, "Touch me once, touch my twice."  My brain has shed some 80s trivia to make room for... something important, I'm so sure...  And now the Stray Cat Strut.  It's as if they were digging into my scary little vinyl collection.  I'm sure that's good inspiration... 

Ah, it was more OMD, of course, and now The Smiths, who Phranc opened for when I was a h.s. senior, thus making my life complete, briefly.  Nostalghia, such a fun drug.

The Fringe Begins

I always get excited about the Fringe Festival, even if I never end up getting it together to go to any plays.  Most years I go to several.  I usually try to support the gay ones and some funny ones(but not the oh sooooo  very funny ones, just not my thing).

The last couple years have been kind of a nadir for lesbian fringe plays, but I'm ever hopeful.

The steampunk play on the cover of the Citypages Festival issue looks promising.  Robot Lincoln: The Revengeance.

 One Gay Show here.  And there's an adaptation of an Edward Gorey book.

 This year a fellow TC speculative writer, Michael Merriam, has a storytelling show.  And Charles Busch's Vampire Lesbians of Sodom: A classic. 

Failed Hypothesis

Wasabi peas before tempo run in moderate heat/ direct sun, not one of the better food experiments.

Then the cat wanted to rub up against my legs while I did cool-down stretches.  There is a downside to running.

On the upside, my shins hurt but the feet seem to really be happy with minimal shoes, lots of stretching and core stengthening, and daily icing.  This is progress after years of plantar fascitis preventing running more than every three, at most two days.  Knock wood.

The other possibly faulty theory is that all this speedwork can make a body faster, but that still entails being passed by hundreds of dudes and young thangs every run.  Thank the goddess for apps that chart your progress inch by bloody inch.  What did we do before them?

Quote of the Day: The Sprawl

"I've always been taken aback by the assumption that my vision is fundamentally dystopian.  I suspect that the people who say I'm dystopian must be living completely sheltered and fortunate lives.  The world is full of much nastier places than my inventions..."

-William Gibson

"You have to remember the book was written before '68, the moment when innuendo ceased to be a legally necessary literary technique.  ...the age of innuendo and the coyly placed line of white space, as the hero envelops the heroine in his arms, ended.  Fifteen years later, AIDS rendered them permanently obsolete."

-Samuel R. Delany

Both from the Summer 2011 issue of the Paris Review.  I felt kind of stupid plunking down $12 for a fat literary magazine with two short interviews of SF writers and not much else that looked interesting.  (In this issue.  I do read TPR when it has interesting stuff, like Graham Joyce or Kay Ryan.)  But it had some amazing photos of both Delany and Gibson, from bygone eras, and what the hey, support SF writers in lit mags.

It turned out that I have gotten a lot of mileage out of the issue, poring over these interviews.  It's not that the contents are particularly earth-shattering, but lots of ideas to chew on that seem timely.  Good light rail reading, too, because of the format.  I would have preferred to buy an e-issue, but they were only selling subscriptions in e- formats.  Annoying.