Title!
Get a title for your very own best-selling young adult novel. Mine’s
Help! I Turned into a Somewhat Underage Sexpot.
Via Literaticat, who made it.
Also, an end-of-the-world scenario.
Happy Friday
Still sick, but you’ll feel better if you mosey over to the most excellent Noise for Toaster blog and avail yourself of Shan’s commentary and three amazing tracks from Emily Haines & the Soft Skeleton’s Knives Don’t Have Your Back (out later this month). So good. (Emily Haines = Metric lead singer.)
Also, does everybody already know about The Lipstick of Noise poetry MP3 blog? Addictive; so much better on sick-couch than The View.
Why yes, I did spend much of the morning making a new folder for music blog feeds, why do you ask?
Nice weekend, everybody.
p.s. If you follow the link to the Hype, you can also get the drop-dead gorgeous "Crowd Surf Off a Cliff" and "Reading in Bed." (And more.) What an album.
Nun vs. Gangster
I think there’s a pretty good chance that the White Stripes will tap Meghan and Alex McCarron for their next video.
(And c’mon, give the brother’s version some love too; only 39 views. For shame.)
Thursday Excuses & Hangovers
I’m home with some sort of truly nasty crud, currently watching an episode of the A-Team on Sleuth, which bears the following description: "The team works from a pub to stop a loan shark from terrorizing small businesses; guest Wings Hauser." (The commercials they show on this network are terrible, sad and funny.) Next I’ll watch Rosie on The View. A few things:
- Liza Palmer has ended her fabulous personal blog, but will still be posting at The 5 Spot group blog. I linked to Liza as recently as yesterday, so this makes me sad. But let’s hope there’ll be more writing advice and Poet pictures anyway.
- Matt Cheney on why we should all be happy that about Michael Palmer winning the Wallace Stevens award. After reading several of his exceptional poems here, I’m convinced.
- Justine divulges the secretest secrets of how to write a novel.
- Niall Harrison with a whole bunch of links related to Slipstreamy goodness and debates thereof. Meanwhile, Graham Sleight continues Strange Horizons slipstream-themed week of reviews with a look at The Vintage Book of Amnesia, edited by Jonathan Lethem, which came out in 2000. This is one of my favorite anthologies and my only quibble with Sleight’s review is that it doesn’t mention Shirley Jackson’s "Nightmare," one of my favorite stories in the book (and of Jackson’s). (But I’ll grant that it’s far too rich an anthology for every story to get its due; especially when how these stories might speak to definitions of slipstream is the main concern.)
- Take the Fantasy or Football? quiz. (Via Rarely Likable.)
Now I go back to collapsing. Emails I owe you will come soon. Promise.
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Infirmary Ghosts & Waffle Girls
Andrea Seigel has done something not very many writers actually achieve: followed up an incredibly exciting first novel with an incredibly exciting second novel That Is Completely Different. If Like the Red Panda was a coming of age story (or a suicide valentine; pair it with Lynda Barry’s Cruddy), then To Feel Stuff is a ghost story about being alive.
Elodie, beset by malady after malady, lives in the college infirmary at Brown. Dr. Mark Kirschling becomes fixated on her as a phenomenon infinitely more fascinating than your typical case study. Chester, who has always been a golden boy, gets attacked and comes to stay in the infirmary; he and Elodie promptly fall in strange, believable love. The novel gracefully interleaves the viewpoints of the good doctor with those of the lovers. Fittingly, Elodie’s version is the richest, because only she truly understands herself and her place in the world. AND she starts to see ghosts, or maybe not exactly. Maybe she’s inherited her mother’s gift, maybe something different. Elodie’s story feels full of ghosts, of history and of what will never be.
And I can say without reservation that this book features two sequences that are undeniably the best of their type in all of fictionland, in the categories of journey in search of waffles and karaoke-gone-wrong. Which points up one of the things I loved about this book, and that’s its easy unexpectedness. Lots of times when books dabble in the kooky side character who brings her bird into work one day or try and achieve a truly off-kilter protagonist (that isn’t just annoying), it’s painfully obvious that making the oddness of life seem normal AND interesting in a way that also feels real is damn hard. Often, it comes across as trite. In trying to capture a more sideways snapshot of what life’s like, the quirky becomes the banal. But that is definitely not the case here. Here, Seigel makes it work in a way that reads as effortless and honest. An oddways reality bounded on all sides by how far the characters can, or can’t, go, outside those infirmary walls and outside themselves. And whether they are, ultimately, okay with where and who they happen to be.
The book’s distinctly distant yet completely absorbing view of the world, like Elodie’s from her own traitorous body, is unnerving in the best possible way.
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Wednesday Hangovers
I’m about a bajillion years behind on email, but am slowly catching up.
- There’s an excellent interview with Sara Zarr at Cynsations.
- A new Ben Rosenbaum story, "The House Beyond Your Sky," is up at Strange Horizons (which is having a great year). He talks about the story here.
- Liza Palmer on knowing what’s at stake for your characters. And also, on playing god: As a writer, you have to have the bawls to cut and add and re-name and kill people off and get raw and honest and admit when you’re wrong and laugh when you’ve taken the easy way out. And do it without looking back – know and trust that you’re right and that you know what’s best – even though that character phenomenon is nowhere else in your life – that steely cocksuredness – it has to be in this part. There is no room to be indecisive or apologetic in writing.
- Padgett Powell interviewed in The Believer. (From all over.)
- Andrea Seigel on being on tour. It sounds more fun than most. Hotel love helps, I’m sure.
- The Watcher on the new season of The Wire, the beginning of which is imminent.
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NEVERMIND
Where is David’s site? It was there last night. Did some first amendment-hating jerk send a letter to his ISP? Heard from David: It’s just a coincidence; site should be back up later today. Whew.
Today is the Greatest
Day to buy Kelly Link’s Magic for Beginners in paperback from Harcourt. (As Gavin reminds us all.) Go see on magical realism mystery tour. Read the stories. Laugh. Cry. Be happy again.
Won’t you please read the title story just in time for the fall TV season? You should.
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SERIOUSLY (Updated)
Alan for PRESIDENT (of SFWA sure, but also, the WORLD).
UPDATED: If you want to see a little taste, tonally at least, of some of the comments David Moles pulled from the private SFWA forums (which are all taken down now, I believe), I’d "suggest" going over to this thread at Asimov’s. Le depressing. No one there is saying that what happened was appropriate, but LOTS of "get over it," "it’s none of our business," "not that big a deal," "those intarweb kids are out of control!" type stuff.
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Three Recommendations
All of which I’ll say more about later. But if you want to have a three-book streak to envy:
1. To Feel Stuff by Andrea Seigel.
2. Winter’s Bone by Daniel Woodrell.
3. Shriek by Jeff VanderMeer.
I’m already agonizing over what to read after I finish Shriek, so I’m trying to finish it slowwwly.
Now to walk the dog and write some new words.
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