Things to read and watch 11/04/11

William Gibson, The Art of Fiction No. 211
Here is the full text of the long interview The Paris Review conducted with William Gibson. Tuck in, kids!

Why Science Fiction Writers are Like Porn Stars
Last weekend, Glen Duncan wrote a trollish piece in the New York Times comparing genre writers to, well, porn stars. Charlie Jane Anders at i09 has some questions for Mr. Duncan. The piece includes portraits by SF writer, Richard Kadrey (whose books you should be reading, by the way).

The Decemberists Played on Austin City Limits 
And I missed it. Their album, The King is Dead, is one of my favorites of the year so far. The fact that I can watch this episode on-line makes me very happy.

Here's their video for "The Calamity Song." Enjoy.

Inspiring...

Inspiration is strange and, to me at least, unfathomable.

I had the morning to write and I wanted to work on a piece for my next MFA residency. I knew that I wanted to write a short about a character I've been thinking about a lot lately (I almost wrote "a character that's been plaguing me lately" since that's what it feels like. I just can't get the guy out of my head). But knowing that, I had no idea what I wanted the story to be about. This seems to happen to me all the time and it's a major source of frustration.

One of the main influences for this character is Lawrence Block's "Scudder" books, which feature his private detective, Matthew Scudder. I decided to read a few Scudder short stories for inspiration. After I got to spent half an hour with a character I really like, I sat down and tried to map out a story for my own character.

About twenty minutes of staring at my fellow coffee shop patrons ensued before I actually got to writing. Starting with a blank page, I wrote down the first image in my head and just kept going. In bullet list style, I wrote out the broad action of the thing and some minor scraps of dialog. Then I moved on to flesh it out with an outline. (Yes, I outlined a short story. Why are you looking at me like that?)

When I was done, I had something that didn't look at all like a Scudder story, but I know, somehow, that the story I'd produced came about because I'd been thinking about Block's character and because I'd read those short stories before I began. I wish that my own creative process was a bit more transparent to me. I feel like my brain is a delicate engine, for which I never received an owner's manual. And I have to do everything I can to keep the damn thing working. I never know what will get the engine started, and I never know what will make it go completely haywire. It's very frustrating, my brain.

Regardless, I'm looking forward to now writing this story. And having it savaged in workshop...

The image, by the way, comes from Doug Savage's collection of sticky note cartoons.

Neal Stephenson speaks clever

Not sure how many of you will care about this, but since this blog is really for me anyway...

This is a video of SF writer Neal Stephenson giving a talk last May at Gresham College in London. His subject is whether or not genre distinctions really matter anymore, or if the conventions of genre fiction have been embraced by the mainstream (or "mundane" as Stephenson calls it) and rendered the distinction mute. This is a subject near and dear to my heart and, while I find his delivery a bit plodding, to topic and ideas discussed are fantastic.

By the way, Stephenson's next novel, Anathem, will be out in September. It's already on my must-read list.

Poetry reading

I am making my slow way through Jane Kenyon's Collected Poems (Graywolf Press, 2005), bought with the gains from selling a box-load of books to Powell's a couple of weeks ago. And I say slow way because I only seem to be able to read a handful of poems at a time before I reach some emotional crisis point and I have to put down the book. This happens every time I read a good poetry collection. Or, if not good, one with which I really connect. When I was a kid, I could read poetry all day and never have it affect me at all. Either I'm getting softer in my dotage, or I didn't comprehend what I read when I was younger. Maybe it's a combination of the two.

Anyway, for your evening's reading pleasure, here is a poem by Ms. Kenyon:

Cleaning the Closet
This must be the suit you wore
to your father's funeral:
the jacket
dusty, after nine years,
and hanger marks on the shoulders,
sloping like the lines
on a woman's stomach, after
having a baby, or like the down-
turned corners
of your mouth, as you watch me
fumble to put the suit
back where it was.

Promethea

Alan Moore and JH Williams' comics series (along with inker Mick Gray, colorists Jeromy Cox and Jose Villarrubia, and letterer Todd Klein) began life as a pastiche of super-heroine comics, a la Wonder Woman, but it quickly grew into a meditation on the history and philosophy of magic.

The plot concerns college student Sophie Bangs who is researching a character called Promethea who shows up in a number of stories across a number of media throughout the late 19th and early 20th century. But Promethea doesn't just show up in stories, she also shows up in real life, giving aid and comfort to those in need. As a consequence of her research, Sophie actually becomes the latest incarnation of Promethea.

Book one and two concern themselves mostly with Sophie assuming her new role and learning the histories of the Prometheas who came before her. Books four and five focus on Promethea traveling up the Qabbalistic Tree of Life to the God-head. And in book five, we watch Promethea preside over the Apocalypse and what comes after it.

For me, Promethea works best when it acts as a magical primer. Moore can slip easily between scenes of action and instruction. Those few chapters that are purely plot or action driven feel the weakest to me.

Special attention has to be given to the art team of Williams, Gray, Cox and Villarrubia. Moore's scripts make so many demands of them and they are up to all of them. During the sequence where Promethea climbs the Tree of Life, each issue is drawn in a different art style; no mean feat for an art team.

Part of me, a small part, wishes it was this series, not League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, that was going to be continued by Top Shelf Publishing. But then, where else is there to go after the world ends?

Magic or Madness

Young Adult novels are so much better now than I remember them being when I was an actual young adult. I recall reading some S.E. Hinton, but not much else.

The "Magic or Madness" series by Justine Larbalestier (Magic or Madness, Magic Lessons, and Magic's Child) is one of the best fantasy trilogies I've read; YA or not. All of the books are well-paced, exciting, and feature well-drawn, believable characters.

The story focuses on 15-year-old Reason Cansino who discovers very suddenly that magic is real. More than that, she is a magic user. In the word of the books, however, magic is a double-edged sword. Use it and it will shorten your life; but if you don't use it, you'll quickly go mad. For the most part, we watch as reason figures out how to use her magic, and how she avoids other magic users who would steal her magic so they could lengthen their own lives.

Besides Reason, there's a whole host of supporting characters, some who wield magic, some who don't, but all who lend their support in making this an exciting story.

I would pay heed to the Young Adult label and would share this with kids who are at least in their teens, as there are some plot elements that might raise uncomfortable questions from a younger reader. But once your kids (or you) have finished the Harry Potter series, this is a great series to pick up next.

It cures what ails ya

I stayed home sick today. The first of many, many colds I'll experience this year, I'm sure. When I'm sick, there are a couple of things that never fail to make me feel better: 1) Get plenty of rest 2) drink lot's of fluids and 3) Read comics!



Hellboy, volume 1: Seed of Destruction
by Mike Mignola with script assistance by John Byrne

The first volume of Mike Mignola's awesome Hellboy series. It's amazing to me how much of the series is in place here. Often with a first series you'll feel like the author is trying to find the right tone, the voice of the characters, the correct pacing. But this book sings right out of the gate. This volume shows us some of the origin of Hellboy; introduces many of the characters that will be important later in the series; and shows his first battle with the terrible Rasputin! This is great, Pulp-inspired fun.



Street Angel
by Jim Rugg and Brian Maruca

You are required to love a comic that features a rogue geologist as a villain. Yes.

Street Angel is the story of a homeless 13-year old world-class skateboarder and ninja fighter. She lives in a world of (the aforementioned) ninjas and scientists, but her world is also chock full of Aztec gods, Conquistadores, Irish astronauts, Satanists, and the headaches that come with being homeless. This volume collects the five issues of the series as well as short stories, covers, and a wealth of pinups and sketches. And it is a thing of beauty.

The stories in Street Angel happen free of context and, blessedly, continuity. Each story seems to happen in its own little universe of fun. I suspect that Rugg (artist and co-writer) and Maruca (co-writer) weren't so interested in telling a grand, linear story; they were mostly concerned with figuring out how comics work. They needed to figure out the rules, and then they needed to break them completely.

The collection I own is called "volume one" in the indicia. I pray that there will be a second some day.

I am so pre-ordering this

I'm having a hard time containing my excitement over this one:

Kick-ass astrophysicist and guest star on both The Simpsons and Futurama, Stephen Hawking has penned a novel along with his daughter, Lucy, and the French astrophysicist Christophe Galfard. The novel, George's Secret Key to the Universe, is the first in a planned trilogy. It's a sci-fi story that will explain astrophysics to kids, using a group of children as its main characters.

One hopes that this will sell as well as Hawking's previous book, A Brief History of Time, but that it will actually be read by those that buy it.

I ganked this from boingboing.net. Here's a link to the original article on the Cosmos Magazine site.

My Daemon

I saw this on Lani's blog and had to get my own.

Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy came out during the height of the Harry Potter craze, so you may have missed it. They are, in my opinion, much superior to the HP novels and I would recommend them to anyone who enjoyed HP, or who enjoys kid's fantasy lit in general.

This daemon thingie comes from the website for the first film based on the series, The Golden Compass. Maybe now that a film is coming out based on the books, more people will give these great books a read.

Diary of Indignities

Patrick Hughes got his start at the brilliant, yes brilliant, Bad News Hughes. This book is a collection of the best of those blog entries with a few extras thrown in. Hughes documents the absurd, painful and humiliating episodes that seem to hound his life. The back cover describes the book as, "Whimsical stories of soul-melting shame," and that about covers it. It can be amazingly funny (I can't remember laughing out loud so much as I read a book), but be warned; it can also be extremely profane and crude. This book s seriously not for the faint of heart. But for all his bluster and bravado, Hughes always manages to give these stories a lot of heart and some of them can be heart-breakingly bitter-sweet. Don't let that wimpy last line lull you into a false sense of security, though, because the moment you start thinking he's a softy, Hughes will bring you back to reality with a story about something like frying a turd. And God bless him for it.

Good Reads

I become easily obsessed with social networking sites. I spend way too much time on myspace and I belong to about a dozen other similar sites which I infrequently or never visit. But I just found a new networking site that feels like it will become my new obsession. Goodreads.com was recommended to me by my friend Lani, she of Sometimes I Think I'm Clever. It's a social networking site, but it has a very narrow focus: books. You can enter books you've read, plan to read, are currently reading, and keep up with the same from all of your friends. Amazing, and useful. I'm always looking for book recommendations, and now there's a site where I can get them without having to pester people with emails.

Truly we live in an age of marvels.

Impending violence

I am a grown man and I my biggest fear at the moment is that some mouth-breather is going to spoil the ending of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows for me. I should be ashamed, right?

I remember when HP and the Half-Blood Prince came out; there were reports of spiteful dipshits yelling at the people waiting in line to buy the book, "Dembledore dies!" (Sorry to anyone who hasn't gotten around to reading book six yet.) Here in Salem, there was a guy driving around town with a big sign on his car proclaiming the shock ending.

The charitable part of me wonders what awful things must have happened to people like that to turn them into such douche bags killjoys. And I worry about my reaction should I meet one of them. This Friday will be the first of the midnight releases that I go to and, if someone shouts out or otherwise reveals any of the resolutions to the myriad loose ends, I think I might be capable of violence. I might just grab a fake wand from the nearest 12-year-old and shove it somewhere life-threatening.

Will they allow me to have my copy of Harry Potter in the pokey?

Ugh... There are any number of things I should be writing, or at least thinking about writing, and still I spend my time worrying about Harry Potter. What is it that is wrong with me? This is meant as an introduction, by the way. Hello.