Gwenda, Author at Gwenda Bond

In Which She Clicks Her Heels Together & Blinks

6 Comments / Nattering / By Gwenda / January 19, 2007

H-O-M-E. Where life is sweet, and the bathrooms are private, and the laundry’s in the back room.

I came home to find a copy of one of my most-anticipated reads of the year, Liz Hand‘s Generation Loss — sadly, it’s going to have to wait a couple of weeks, until my first packet of work is turned in. In the meantime, here’s the wondrous opening paragraph:

There’s always a moment where everything changes. A great photographer — someone like Diane Arbus, or me during that fraction of a second when I was great — she sees that moment coming, and presses the shutter release an instant before the change hits. If you don’t see it coming, if you blink or you’re drunk or just looking the other way — well, everything changes anyway, it’s not like things would have been different.

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Flying Home Friday Hangovers

Hangovers / By Gwenda / January 19, 2007

Fusenumber8 has all the relevant links for looking in on the awarding of the Caldecott, Newbery, Coretta Scott King and Printz awards on Monday.
The divine and hardcore-hockey-playing Cecil Castellucci has started a new blog where she’ll be posting different people’s top 10 punk lists in honor of her most excellent new novel Beige, due out this summer.
New Young Pony Club tracks.
Carl Zimmer relates a Mark Twain anecdote: Mark Twain once discovered to his horror that his story "The Jumping Frog of Calaveras County" had been hideously translated into French. He went so far as to publish the original story, the translation, and his own retranslation of the French back to English to show just how badly it had been abused. "I claim that I never put together such an odious mixture of bad grammar and delirium tremens in my life," he declared. Apparently not as bad as being translated by Creationists.

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Also

9 Comments / MFA Rock / By Gwenda / January 17, 2007

There is ice on the INSIDE of my dorm room window. How do you people live like this?

The Doctor Is In

1 Comment / Nattering / By Gwenda / January 17, 2007

Most of you who know me well know that I like to diagnose illnesses in myself (and others). Usually, I’m right, although occasionally I’m wrong.

I’d been thinking what I have is a garden variety corona- or rhinovirus — and it may well be — but what it’s really reminding me of? Is mycoplasma, aka walking pneumonia, which I had a few years ago (Wiscon!), and was very similar. I felt crappy and tired, but not at a high enough level to stop all activities and thought. And, more importantly, I had a cough — I never have a cough, in fact, that’s the only other time I can remember having a cough in recent history. Oh, and this is the perfect setting for acquiring such a beast; it’s way common in younger children in close school settings.

So, I’ve made an appointment on Friday for when I get home and we’ll see if I’m right. (If I am, that would be nice, because it won’t get much worse than this before then and a course of antibiotics will kick it.) Luckily, the heavy lifting here is done, now on to packing, and the remaining lectures and paperwork.

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Freaking Freezing Hangovers

3 Comments / Hangovers / By Gwenda / January 17, 2007

And now I officially know how cold is TOO cold. Brrrr. Sore throat miserably hanging on, cough cough cough, as am I — tonight’s my last night here, then one in a hotel, then HOME HOME HOME. (Yes, Carrie, I’m taking the echinacea/goldenseal/usnea/vitamin C cocktail at least twice a day — it may be keeping me going.)
Scholar’s Blog is a new one to me — an independent English scholar focusing on fantasy books, including lots of ones for children. See also: her excellent children’s and YA book meme, which I’ll do as soon as I have time. (Via Big A little a.)
Daniel Handler reviews kids’ etiquette books for the NYT.
Bizarro World: 1949 Time piece that touches on the fad of SF. (Via Matt.)
Chicken Spaghetti compiles a list of all the formal Best ofs for children’s books in 2006. Particularly handy if you are deciding what to read this semester.
Jenny D posts an amazing little excerpt from The Invention of Telepathy.
Maud on Jesus Camp.

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Read This Crow

2 Comments / LitBlog Co-Op / By Gwenda / January 16, 2007

From the increasingly frigid northeast, I wave you all over to the LitBlog Co-Op, where Carrie Frye (in tangerine muumuu, of course, and Groucho Marx glasses, of double course) extolls the virtues of the fabulous, fat Wizard of the Crow, our Read This! pick for Winter 2007.

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Historical Models

2 Comments / Science Project / By Gwenda / January 16, 2007

Scientists have reconstructed Dante’s face:

Italian scientists have made a reconstruction of the face of the poet Dante some 700 years after he died and have found some surprises, particularly about the supposed shape of his famous aquiline nose.

You think?

(Stolen from Jeff.)

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Under the Weather Monday Hangovers

1 Comment / Hangovers / By Gwenda / January 15, 2007

Sore throat’s back, with a cough. (And I never get coughs!) But I’m rethinking my novel and taking in as much as I can and some nice person gave me cough drops, so everything will be okay. Assuming I get some sleep tonight.

Matthew Cheney has all the goods on how you can help indie publishers being hurt by the AMS/PGW debacle.
Jeff VanderMeer on what he’s seeing while reading for Best American Fantasy.
Peter Matthiessen admits that establishing The Paris Review was part of his CIA cover story. (Via Maud.)
John Crowley on books that critics, reviewers, and even readers love, but which the writers may consider failures, jumping off a Zadie Smith comment. (Girl can give an interview.)
An oldish Terri Windling article on Gypsies. Fabulous!
Lauren Cerand on poetry over at Callie’s place.
This Book is For You on Glamour magazine (pro). I know I’m always happy the years that’s the women’s magazine that my dad accidentally subscribes to.

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Baby, It’s Wintry Weather

9 Comments / MFA Rock / By Gwenda / January 15, 2007

Some selected scenes from snowy Vermont. First up, a picture of College Hall, snow and jogger from yesterday:

The stern old man painting in the main lecture hall has been dragged up, first by the graduating students, then by the students throwing the Mardi Gras party:

And, finally, this is the view outside my window this morning:

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A Big Shout Out

4 Comments / Books / By Gwenda / January 14, 2007

to Ellen Klages (emcee extraordinaire) on winning the 2007 Scott O’Dell Prize for Historical Fiction for children and young adults for her debut novel The Green Glass Sea!

Unrelatedly but not wholly, I was buying an issue of F&SF from the early ’70s in one of Montpelier’s fine used bookshops yesterday because it featured James Tiptree, Jr., on the cover, and the owner says to me, "That was the last thing I expected you to buy." At which point, I schooled him.

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