Gwenda

Like the White Rabbit

1 Comment / Excuses, Excuses / By /

I’m late, I’m incredibly busy, I’ll try to throw up a real post later on.

In the meantime, after reading two books back to back for review assignments that I would never have read otherwise, I am mucho happy to be reading Andrea Seigel’s To Feel Stuff. She gave her first "reading" in support of the book over the weekend, and there are pictures of the dancing. That’s right: she danced. And plans to do so again. (At Book Soup on Tuesday.)

Would we be constantly moaning about the fate of the written word if more writers shook their thang for the masses? I think not.

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New Verb Needed

2 Comments / Scientifiction / By /

Ben‘s Rosenbauming on slipsteam and topics relevant over at an old post of Jeff Ford’s. I particularly like this comment:

Most times, when a story makes us say "what the hell does that mean?" it doesn’t *work*. We aren’t drawn in, we don’t stay in the story. We withdraw. We are alienated from the *story*. The effect is dimmed, lessened, by unclarity.

It takes a master like Link to hold us so powerfully, that when we get to that unclarity, we stay with the *story* and are alienated from *the rest of life* — from ourselves. We are lost, bewildered.

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Grrrrrr

2 Comments / Luddite Trouble / By /

Just lost a huge-ish hangovers post full of mucho good stuff to an inexplicable Firefox restart. I may try and recreate tomorrow. (Whatever happened to that little "recover post" thingy in Typepad?)

Again: Grrrr.

In other news, we repositioned our desks (and somewhat recombobulated our kitchen!) according to the ancient mystical guidelines of Feng Shui. I feel more productive already.

Or I did before the post went poof. Grumble. Grumble.

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Making Mummies

1 Comment / Science Project / By /

Now that’s a crappy day job:

DALIAN, China — Tucked away in the back of this coastal city’s export-oriented manufacturing zone is a place that can only be described as a modern mummification factory.

Inside a series of unmarked buildings, hundreds of Chinese workers, some seated in assembly line formations, are cleaning, cutting, dissecting, preserving and re-engineering human corpses, preparing them for the international museum exhibition market.

“Pull the cover off; pull it off,” one Chinese manager says as a team of workers begin to lift a blanket from the head of a cadaver stored in a stainless steel container filled with formalin, a chemical preservative. “Let’s see the face; show the face.”

The mastermind behind this operation is Gunther von Hagens, a 61-year-old German scientist whose show, “Body Worlds,” has attracted 20 million people worldwide over the past decade and has taken in over $200 million by displaying preserved, skinless human corpses with their well-defined muscles and sinewy tissues.

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Tuesday Hangovers

3 Comments / Hangovers / By /

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Monday Hangovers

1 Comment / Hangovers / By /
  • Jeff Ford has been blogging up a storm (always an uplifting development). His commentary on the crappiness of HBO and War of the Worlds: I left it on, figuring,  "How bad could it be even with Cruise — aliens, killing, running, explosions, more killing.  What the fuck."  It was about what I expected until it got to the part in the basement and Dakota Fanning (like this is a real name — winner of the golden corn dog award) asks Cruise to sing her a lullaby.  Oaf that her old man is, he doesn’t know any, so he sings "Little Deuce Coup" by the Beach Boys.  I couldn’t fucking believe it — Cruise, breathlessly squeaking out in verbal mouse farts the lyrics to the tune.  I was laying on the bed and had to sit up straight.  He had tears in his eyes.  Oh my Christ, oh the humanity.  I knew I was witnessing film history — a bona-fide Five Star Simpering Moment.
  • New SF ezine Heliotrope is live, featuring lots of interesting stuff; see here for details. A very welcome development.
  • Glen Hirshberg finally makes good with the next installment on writing implements: For me, writing really is somewhere else, an island I can’t live on, but that I need to visit every single day of my life, because it resists mapping, keeps revealing itself with every new ridge I climb or cove I duck into. The challenge is getting there.
  • Mr. McLaren resurrects an out-of-print friendly dictators trading card set. I choose Number 14, General Manuel Noriega, but mostly because of his pen pal.
  • Justine weighs in with a fabulous post on the Tiptree bio, about how it is a book she once intended to write herself. The bio also received a very odd review from Martin Morse Wooster in the WaPo over the weekend. Odd, in that this sentence, the last in the review, is pretty much the only part that deals with Julie Phillips’ writing: "Julie Phillips does an excellent job in telling Sheldon’s story." The rest of the review summarizes Tiptree’s life. Seems ODD.
  • Max rounds up the 2006 Lettre Ulysses Award longlist, which recognizes excellence in book-length reporting. As he points out, it’s an eclectic list with some fascinating-looking, off-the-beaten-review-path titles.
  • World Fantasy Award noms are out and it’s a great, great list all round. Congratulations to Ms. Link, Hal Duncan, Joe Hill, Paul Park, Caitlin Kiernan, and all the other nominees! (Via Gavin.)
  • Pinky, aka Carolyn Kellogg, tells the story of getting her purse stolen on NPR. Pinky has the best hair and great taste in everything. So go listen.
  • And now I’ll go back to obsessively watching things on YouTube like: Siskel and Ebert bitchfighting; David Bowie and Marianne Faithful singing "I Got You Babe" from 1973 (what is she wearing?); and (this is briliant) OK Go on treadmills.

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One Happy, One Sad (Updated)

3 Comments / Books / By /

Happy first: Janet Maslin gives Julie Phillips’ Tiptree biography a very nice review in the NYT. (The ending’s mention of the suicide is far too simple, compared to, say, life or Carter Scholz’s review.) My new favorite phrase is "the wildness of science fiction."

Now sad: Caitlin Kiernan finds out in the worst possible way that her books have been remaindered. (Hint: It involves breach of contract)

Sort of related: Why the word suck rules.

UPDATED:

On thing one: Lots of discussion about how unlikely it is Maslin has ever read much Tiptree (or "got" it) and inconsistencies in the review. (Which I still think is great for the book’s prospects. But "the wildness of science fiction" — if that phrase alone doesn’t show that Maslin knows only a pinch about genre!) Anyway, it’s Maslin, so yeah. Those seeking more substantial commentary on the biography itself should mosey over to Mely’s Coffee and Ink: here’s a post collecting some of her thoughts about the biography and Julie Phillips’ KGB reading and here’s the reaction to the Maslin review (check out the comments). Meanwhile, putting Tiptree into Google News and having the results not be entirely about water leaks in England makes me happy.

On thing two: Caitlin posts an update on her situation, with some much better news.

On thing three: The word suck still rules.

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