I'll be away from home for the next week, so posting will be light-on. Astute observers of this blog may not, in fact, notice the difference. ;)

In other news, I was prepared to be disappointed by The Dark Knight, given the level of hype around it. Particularly around Heath Ledger's penultimate performance. But I can't remember the last time I saw such a display of malevolence on film. Also: like a superhero film for grown-ups. So very much going on, I was exhausted by the end!

Also, watching those car chases on the iMax. Yeah. Can make you nauseous.

He wasn't just big. He was a giant. He looked seven feet high, and he wore the loudest clothes I ever saw on a big man.

Pleated maroon pants, a rough greyish coat with billiard-balls for buttons, brown suede shoes with explosions in white kid in them, a brown shirt, a yellow tie, a large red carnation, and a front door handkerchief in the colour of the Irish flag. It was neatly arranged in three points, under the red carnation. On Central Avenue, not the quietest dressed street in the world, with that size and that make-up he looked as unobtrusive as a tarantula on a slice of angel-food cake.
-- Raymond Chandler, 'Try the Girl' -- from Killer in the Rain (a Chandler short story collection)


Apparently 'Try the Girl' along with another short story, 'Mandarin's Jade', formed the basis of Chandler's 1940 novel FAREWELL, MY LOVELY. He did this with a lot of his short story work, later turning it into successful novels. From the intro to the collection (ibid.), "He called the process 'canabalisation'."

"His method was a complex one. Sometimes he would use entire scenes, other times merely a few lines."

In fact, Chandler was so unapologetic about his pilfering of his own short stories (is it plagiarism if you're plagiarising yourself?) that he forbade the short stories from ever being re-published in his lifetime. They were first collected 5 years after he died.

This collection (which I want to call 'a funride through wit, with bullets') collects stories from 1935-41, from Black Mask and the delightfully named Dime Detective Magazine. It's like a book of one-liners that've been arm-wrestled together and fixed in place with a gun to the ribs.

The heroes are interchangeable (and of course form the basis for Chandler's Californian dick, Marlowe), the dames are emotionally self-victimising and/or drug dependent. And the men are assorted, but often tragic figures who've thrown it all away for love, and would again -- if only they'd live long enough.

Raymond Chandler. I ask you: what's not to love?

Via xkcd & J.

Commander Swanson's cabin was bigger than a telephone booth, I'll say that for it, but not all that much bigger to shout about. A built-in bunk, a folding washbasin, a small writing-bureau and chair, a folding camp-stool, a locker, some calibrated repeater instrument dials above the bunk and that was about it. If you'd tried to perform the twist in there you'd have fractured yourself in a dozen places without ever moving your feet from the centre of the floor.
-- Alistair MacLean, Ice Station Zebra.

In today's reading, a story about the dude who created the addictiveicanhascheezburger site.

His newest site is totallylookslike -- which currently features only ONE example of George W. Bush totally looking like a chimpanzee. But I know there's more. We've all seen the emails.

Also the relatively unsurprising news (well, in hindsight, at least) that sleep deprivation has been found to increase the formation of 'false memory'. Sleep, the theory goes, is useful for the consolidation of "certain types of memory". I guess they mean 'the honest kind'.

The implication of the study got my attention, though:

As is pointed out in the comments at the bottom of the article, these findings have obvious implications for the use of sleep deprivation in interrogation, at least when accurate information - as opposed to a false confession - is sought from the suspect being interrogated.

And good news for sleep-deprived caffeine-addicts: coffee produces 10% less false memory for those short on sleep.

But not, I assume, for those of us who slept fine last night, thanks.

Today I'm loving the smarts of Mr David B. Coe (davidbcoe), as he lets us in on a few secrets in the repertoire of the repeat-novelist.

Also loving Friday's Forgotten Books over at pattinase (now with lj feed: pattinase_rss).

This week, Alistair MacLean & Iain Banks -- both unexpected authorial entries. But it's all about the forgotten books, not the forgotten book-writers. Having just commenced MacLean's Ice Station Zebra two days back & instantly fallen back in love with his style, I'm now hanging to find a copy of HMS Ulysses, MacLean's first novel (circa 1955).

Enough time has passed that I can talk about Jose Saramago's novel, Blindness, without my raving fangirl side coming out. I think.

When I initially pondered blogging the book, I figured I could write 'It's brilliant, I love it' over and over until I ran out of characters. (Characters, not character -- I imagine I'd run out of character sooner than that.)

But, frankly, I loved this book. In a year of simply excellent reading, this book is top of the list. And I can't really explain why.

Sure, Saramago has enough prose-quirk to fascinate me, enough quirky rendition of dialogue and oddly inconsistent-but-never-discordant POV shifts. Sure his allegorical style is alluring. Sure, his insights into the human psyche have that deep thrum of verisimilitude that marks a true Observer of the Human Race ("a powerful sense of the folly and heroism of ordinary lives", as reviewer Andrew Miller put it). But what *is* it sets Saramago apart from meaner spirits like, say Kozinski or Kafka*?


Who would have believed it. Seen merely at a glance, the man's eyes seem healthy, the iris looks bright, luminous, the sclera white, as compact as porcelain. The eyes wide open, the wrinkled skin of the face, his eyebrows suddenly screwed up, all this, as anyone can see, signifies that he is distraught with anguish. With a rapid movement, what was in sight has disappeared behind the man's clenched fists, as if he were still trying to retain inside his mind the final image captured, a round red light at the traffic lights. I am blind, I am blind, he repeated in despair as they helped him to get out of the car, and the tears welling up made those eyes which he claimed were dead, shine even more.
-- Jose Saramago, Blindness, Chapter 1 (excerpt here).


( This is a quirk of the book, by the way: )

World Youth Day (All Week Long) is having some unexpected benefits:

1. In jaded inner city suburbs such as the one I like to inhabit, there is now often the sound of cheering, singing and clapping. Yes, clapping. Not clapping as in applause, but clapping like a production of Hair when they start singing Let The Sunshine In. You know, clapping ... with rhythm. It's weird. But oddly ... cheering.

2. People are wearing funny hats and bright yellow-orange-blue backpacks on the bus. And they're *smiling*. In a kind of benign, good-natured way. And occasionally taking the mickey out of themselves by loudly counting the number of souvenir flags they've affixed to their funny, funny hats. How can you not laugh along?

3. There's a buzz of activity on the edge of town even on a Wednesday night.

4. The age of people hanging out after dark at the local pizza cafe has just trebled. Older people are sitting at tables; middle-aged people (ie. anyone 15-20 years older than whatever age I happen to be) are chatting and laughing at the bus stop, eating chips and interacting with teenagers. (There's also a fair share of sullen teenagers and strange, loud types with giant flags, but luckily I don't think they're allowed on buses. The flags, at least.) I kinda like seeing the crowd get a little mixed up for a while.

Reminds me of a night I had in Naples four years ago, sitting at a stepped restaurant on a steep cliff opposite Mt Vesuvius*, eating something my hosts referred to as 'Italian sushi' (a kind of ceviche, I think) and trying to ignore the sense of dread that comes from watching the volcano that wiped out Pompeii so very effectively.

So I was instead staring at the people around me, the elders sitting in the family groups, the youngsters watched over by aunts, cousins, parents. And I was just on the verge of verbalising how nice it was to see these extended family groups, the crossing of generations, etc, etc, when my young host said in his thick accent,

"I miss Sydney. I miss all the young people in the city." Then he eyed me morosely and said, "I don't want to grow old."

He was strange & maybe kinda fucked up, & I reflected he probably wouldn't.


-----
* Says wikipedia of Mt Vesuvius, "It has erupted many times since and is today regarded as one of the most dangerous volcanoes in the world because of the population of 3,000,000 people now living close to it and its tendency towards explosive eruptions. It is the most densely populated volcanic region in the world."

Rule #24. A robot must plant two trees for every cat it kills.

Via Doc Lawless, Asimov's three Thirty Laws of Robotics.

gapingvoidtest is on a roll today. Sounds a little like a Red Meat comic, actually.

The NoToPope Coalition scored the victory when the Federal Court ruled that legislation that would have prevented its members from handing out leaflets and other items was invalid in law.

The court, comprising Justices French, Branson and Stone, said that part of the World Youth Day Act, passed by the NSW Parliament to keep order during the World Youth Day events, "should not be interpreted as conferring powers that are repugnant to fundamental rights and freedoms at common law in the absence of clear authority from Parliament".

Which means this shirt is now legal again.

Damn.

(S'ok, I was going for this one anyhow.)

Yo! Issues of the subconscious are obsessing me lately. See, I'm writing a novel (I don't like to talk about it much, lest it fall in a heap). The working title of this novel has been several things, but the latest is a wry 'Dog's Breakfast' -- an indication of how I think said novel is progressing. Anyhooooo, one of the things I'm trying to understand is consciousness. Tangentially, one of the things impacting on my understanding is SUBconsciousness.

Oddly coincidentally, here's a project I've taken on with the delightful ladnews:

The Daily Dream: taking the temperature of our collective unconscious.

This community exists to capture a snapshot of the world's unconscious musings--all its anxieties and desires, and all that is just plain meaningless as well.

Post your dreams every morning, or whatever time you wake up, in simple one-sentence summaries. Whatever captures the mood and the message, with as few clauses as possible. Think "Jesus wept", the classic simple sentence. Add as many as you like, with a hard return between each. Use an asterisk to indicate any that aren't yours. Keep non-dream posts in the comments.

Tell your friends.

Who knows what currents flow at this depth, and what they might bring to the surface?

Technorati founder David Sifry, who compiles extensive blogosphere stats from time to time, released numbers last spring that showed a potential plateau of blogging growth. While the number of blogs was still increasing at an impressive clip, the stats showed more and more people weren't updating the old ones, thus keeping the number of active blogs stalled at about 15.5 million. Blogging activity appeared to have peaked.
-- Rob Peters, Is Personal Blogging Fast-Fading?, June 26, 2008.

Blogging, sez the article, has become business rather than fun. Personal bloggers are heading towards 'microblogs' -- 200-character text boxes that promise bloggish wisdom in small doses.

... not a bad idea.

DH: Do you think this is inherent in the genre, or is it more a result of the marketing/publishing demands of our culture?

TD: It's never been an esthetic necessity; you could always write adult science fiction, the question was, could you make a living writing it? If you write very good fiction, and it's science fiction, you can usually find somewhere to publish it, unless you write a peculiar sort of novel that creates its own special audience within science fiction. I'm thinking of R.A. Lafferty, who wrote as though he were Piers Anthony writing for grown-ups; there simply is no audience outside of SF for that particular combination, it's a taste that only exists within SF. I suppose there are a few writers like that, who are so sui generis that they can only be published within the ghetto walls.

Then there's Philip Dick -- couldn't get his mainstream work published, and he had a hard time getting his good SF published, too. It was nip-and-tuck whether he would survive long enough to become recognized properly for what he did. He was very well thought of through his creative heyday, but the admiration of his peers wasn't enough to put a meal on the table for himself. He had lots of responsibilities, and I don't think he met them all very well; it was constant anxiety for him.

DH: You've mentioned the SF ghetto. How much have you run into those walls?

TD: Snubs? Lots. There's a certain kind of academic who relies on that kind of defense, but it's become more passÈ in time, and those academics are now more careful of their snobberies than they were, say, 20 years ago. The most effective snobbery is simply not to read the people that you snub, and not to write about them, and not to have them at your awards ceremonies and all that. The ghetto is still very effective in that way, in that the doors of most establishment publications are closed to science fiction people. However, there are very few science fiction people rapping on those doors. So there seems to be a general agreement that we live in two different worlds, and we only marry our own kind.

Link.

The most drought-ravaged areas of NSW have received the cruel double blow of worsening conditions and a looming locust plague. [snip]

Up to 900 properties have discovered "beds of locust eggs" -- though apparently the government has a plan. I hope the plan at least in part is to destroy the beds of locust eggs.

Beds of locust eggs. What a revolting phrase.

Tangentially (because my brain works that way), there's this: Not long after 1400 the palm finally became extinct, not only as a result of being chopped down but also because the now ubiquitous rats prevented its regeneration: of the dozens of preserved palm nuts discovered in caves on Easter, all had been chewed by rats and could no longer germinate.

That's Jared Diamond on the death of civilisation on Easter Island. Rats instead of locusts, but there's a certain similarity in pestilence, don't you think?

For beach readers who want stories that are thoroughly engrossing but can be finished before it's time to reapply yet another coating of sunscreen, this anthology definitely delivers.
-- Bucks County Courier Times (Levittown, PA), June 26, 2008

And catsparx gets a special mention for her 'beautiful and unsettling' tale. Woo hoos all 'round!

Did you know that the days and nights are stitched from bolts of unearthly cloth, joined by the sewing machine of the Tailor of Time? And, if the Tailor creates the passage of time, then one can arrest him and gain just an extra moment, right? Avery, whose daughter is dying, seeks more time for her from the Tailor. When he grants this desire, the Tailor affects the world all the way down to a dying girl and all the way up to the Engineer of all. In “The Tailor of Time,” Deborah Biancotti spins out her conceit with a light and fluid intelligence. She resists the treacle of simple wish fulfillment, choosing instead to study the characters of Avery, the Tailor, and the Engineer.
-- Elizabeth A. Allen, Jul-8, The Fix


Now to the books. Norilana, established by the fantasy writer Vera Nazarian, is showing commendable dedication to publishing original anthologies, with a commitment to several new series of these: first Lace and Blade, and now, with a very strong first volume, Clockwork Phoenix, edited by Mike Allen. Established writers and new names all are in good form here...
-- Nick Gevers, Jul-08, Locus


"Author and editor Allen (Mythic) has compiled a neatly packaged set of short stories that flow cleverly and seamlessly from one inspiration to another.... Lush descriptions and exotic imagery startle, engross, chill and electrify the reader, and all 19 stories have a strong and delicious taste of weird."
-- Publishers Weekly

Via norilanabooks || Buy Clockwork Phoenix

Trapped indoors for most of the past two days with a cold, I gravitated towards James Lasdun's 'The Horned Man' for my distraction.

'The Horned Man' is a perfectly polished pearl of a book -- perfect, indeed, for someone with a headcold. Its prose is light, pristine, and easily readable, and its perspective shows evidence of that strange surreality that a headcold can bring. It tells the story of one man's journey through the gendered landscape after his wife leaves him (apparently, for a sexual exploration of her own). It begins with confusion and ends with strangeness, and along the way there are mistaken identities and doppelgangers and unnerving acts of violence whose ( consequences are only glimpsed )

I like it.

1. I'm sorry I don't get more time to interact online these days. (This is more an apology to me than anyone else. I miss it.)

2. I'm sorry I'm so judgmental. It's just that ... I'm good at it. :)

3. I'm sorry for all the times I didn't apologise when I should've.


Via Jeff VanderMeer.

But when do the rejections outweigh my belief in this book? When do I accept that even though I love it and remain certain that it’s my best work ever, no one else sees it the same way? I’m not ready to give up on this novel yet. I still believe it will sell, and I also believe that when it finally hits the shelves it will do well. But my faith, in this book in particular and in my self-judgment in general, has been shaken by the experience. And I fear that sometime soon, I’m going to have to let go of this dream.

So, I guess I’m asking: When does that time come? When do I give up and accept that those editors who have rejected it know better than I what’s good and what’s not? Have any of you faced similar issues in your own work? Is it possible to love a book too much? Could it be that in making the book so special to me, I’ve made it less attractive to others? I’d be grateful for feedback.

David B. Coe -- a man so funny he could be an Australian -- is asking the eternal writing questions. And I really, really want to know the answers.

So hop on over to sfnovelists.com & give him what for. I mean, provide him with some erudite insights, if you will.

Frisbeetarianism is the belief that when you die, your soul goes up on the roof and gets stuck.
-- George Carlin

My God, to read without joy is stupid.
-- John Williams

Via the Mumpsimus (mumpsimus_feed)

My work was doing pretty well, and now it is doing dramatically better. Is that because people are collecting the pictures because of their notoriety? Or is that simply because people are more aware of the work, and like it, having become aware of it? I don't know. I'll never get to know.

It's really, really hard to make it as a fine-art photographer exclusively. Now that I am, I'm permanently deprived of the pleasure of knowing whether that's based entirely on my work's merit or whether that's based on amplitudes lent by notoriety. That's something that's been stolen from me that I don't get back.
-- Jock Sturges, visual artist.

Via coopstock

The SF label has stuck to him - "It has some pretty powerful adhesive" - which irritates his subversive side.

Via ninebelow, a profile of J.G. Ballard over at The Guardian.

I became confused by Ballard's assertion (in the article) that:

"Even today I see High-Rise and The Atrocity Exhibition referred to as science fiction. It's partly shorthand, but it's also a way of defusing the threat. By calling a novel like Crash science fiction, you isolate the book and you don't think about what it is. You can forget about it."

Did he mean that SF was the wrong label for his work? Was he, perhaps, insulted by the appellation? Or did he mean that the term 'science fiction' was used derisively by people not wanting to examine the very real possibility of the stories written under the auspices of futurism?

And certainly there is a dismissive tone to the article, whereby it claims that there emerged later in Ballard's career, a persona called: "Jim Ballard, writing in a detailed, naturalistic manner, without recourse to crystallising trees or exhausted water supplies or visions of mutilated genitalia on the Heathrow approach road. In this autobiographical novel, his longest to date, Ballard renounced the urge to fantasise" (emphasis mine).

But then I realised that Ballard himself is anti-most-genres (More than once in conversation he recoils at casual use of the term "literary" - "Oh, oh, oh: I hear a sinister word"). He reports, in fact, that SF "touched a spark, but I never wrote the kind of SF that was typical of the time."

He was, I suppose, an edge-dweller, and seemingly comfortable with that individuality. The description of his meeting with Burroughs seems to underline that -- two men who respected but didn't necessarily understand each other. Such is the gift of the outsider, to see, to hear, to acknowledge, but not necessarily to relate. A lonely but not necessarily isolating experience.

The novelist M John Harrison, who was part of the editorial team of New Worlds, the magazine that published many of Ballard's most controversial stories in the 60s, points out that he was "never well received by generic SF readers and activists. His work is too clearly poetic, satirical, metaphorical - all of which discourages suspension of disbelief and the immersive experience of the exotic on which SF pivots."

How cool is this?!

The winner of the Best Visual Illusion of the Year contest from the Philharmonic Center for the Arts:

Our illusion shows that a colored image can produce different colored afterimages at the same retinal location. The perceived afterimage colors depend on the contours that are presented after the colored image.

Ah, the human brain: the consistency of toothpaste, with wall to wall quirk inside.

You might think I'm mentioning the Strange Horizons fund drive because I'm a caring, sharing kinda grrrl. You might think that, and you might never have met me, so you have no reason for doubt.

But in fact I'm mentioning the Strange Horizons fund drive because I could potentially win a copy of The Best of Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet. And if you mention it, you might win that, too (along with a copy of Pretty Monsters: Stories by Kelly Link and The Ant King and Other Stories by Benjamin Rosenbaum). But I'm hoping you won't mention it, because I would really like to win that stuff.

I reckon you should instead give some money to the Strange Horizons fund drive and leave the mentioning to me.

Go on. The membership card is worth the price of admission alone.

Marshall Law has been declared in Sydney, with the State Government ordering the City of Sydney to rearrange the public transport system (not necessarily a bad thing, it must be argued) and kill some trees to make way for pilgrims.

All under the auspices of the World Youth Day Act.

I tried to search for details of the World Youth Day Act on the World Youth Day website, but instead I received this missive:

Forbidden
You don't have permission to access /content/search on this server.

See that? The World Youth Day website can spot an atheist.

Ayup. World Youth Day. A good time to leave Sydney if you want to catch a bus or sit under a tree.

From the Times Online:

In 1983 he published The Colour of Magic, set in a disc-shaped world that sailed through the universe supported by four elephants standing on a turtle. Discworld rapidly annexed the real world and he was soon making millions. He was the biggest selling British author in 1996. Then JK Rowling overtook him.

Ah, JK Rowling. He got into trouble a few years ago for mocking her claim that she ( did not write fantasy )

Typical June weather in Sydney today -- rain, rain and more record-breaking, torrential rain.

Well, okay, today wasn't the worst June day we've had. Rain held off long enough for Leichhardt to set a 'culinary world record':

826 freshly cooked pizzas, stretching 221 metres. Twenty-five chefs used 500kg of flour, 250 litres of tomato sauce and 350kg of mozzarella cheese.

Which beats the previous record achieved by Florida three weeks ago. Yeah. That's how fast things change in the culinary record-setting world. Three weeks, one extra metre of pizza, and suddenly you're da King.

Via mindhacks & The Bonkers Institute for Nearly Genuine Research is a gallery of vintage drug advertising.

Sez mindhacks:

While we now think of chlorpromizine and other selective D2 dopamine antagonists (blockers) as 'antipsychotics', it's important to remember that the fact we now describe these compounds in terms of their effect on psychosis was a marketing coup in itself.
[snip]
In other words, labels like 'antidepressant', 'antipsychotic' or 'mood stabiliser' tell us next to nothing about the action of the drug and only inform us how they are used.

Thorazine, for example, was recommended for the treatment of hostility, anxiety, vomiting, cancer, senility (see title of this post), peptic ulcers, schizophrenia, menopause & even, it was claimed, benefitted 'non-disturbed patients'.

Quite the scatter-gun approach. Hell, we're probably lucky we're not all on it.

So why do I talk about the benefits of failure? Simply because failure meant a stripping away of the inessential. I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was, and began to direct all my energy into finishing the only work that mattered to me. Had I really succeeded at anything else, I might never have found the determination to succeed in the one arena I believed I truly belonged. I was set free, because my greatest fear had already been realized, and I was still alive, and I still had a daughter whom I adored, and I had an old typewriter and a big idea. And so rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life.

-- J.K. Rowling via isak_rss

Try to praise the mutilated world.
Remember June's long days,
and wild strawberries, drops of wine, the dew.
The nettles that methodically overgrow
the abandoned homesteads of exiles.
You must praise the mutilated world.

-- Adam Zagajewski, Try To Praise The Mutilated World (excerpt) via choriamb

"The knowledge that you have emerged wiser and stronger from setbacks means that you are ever after secure in your ability to survive," Rowling said. "You will never truly know yourself, or the strength of your relationships, until both have been tested by adversity."

She called such knowledge "a true gift, for all that it is painfully won, and it has been worth more to me than any qualification I ever earned".
-- Potter power: imagine better, Rowling tells students, June 6, SMH

His performance style too has that instinctive, unplanned feel. Richard Burton, with whom he starred in Where Eagles Dare, called Eastwood's acting style "dynamic lethargy". Eastwood himself prefers to call it understated type of acting.
--The good, the bad... and Clint, From the Northern Echo, first published Saturday 18th Oct 2003.

Good phrase.

One of my favourite events in the calendar is the 'Art & About' exhibition that happens in October. This dynamic event transforms Sydney each year, showcasing art throughout the city's streets and public spaces -- sez the blurb.

The Sydney Life photography exhibition (part of Art & About) is now recruiting. Prizes of up to $10,000 are awarded -- but the really cool bit is that a selection of photos are printed on two-metre canvases & hung in Hyde Park for a couple weeks. Last year I got to walk through this exhibition on my way home from work every afternoon while the sun was setting. This year, alas, I'm not working in the city & the whole thing feels fairyland & remote. I miss my city, its stoic edges & mild minutiae of change.

One of the pieces of Sydney I'm set to miss the most, though, is the monthly email from Sydney Talks. I used to rely on this email to tell me of the quirky & erudite, the esoteric & adventurous topics of discussion happening around town. See, for example:

Apocalypse Again and Again and Again...
American-born Variety film critic Eddie Cockrell, presents clips from a range of current and yet-to-be-released films. The audience is invited to engage in what's is sure to be a spirited - and hopefully non-partisan discussion on the subject.
Time: 4:00pm-5:30pm Jun 15 Cost: Free
Venue: Statement Bar, Festival Lounge, 49 Market St, Sydney
Enquiries: Sydney Film Festival www.sydneyfilmfestival.org/film_details... 136 100

Alas, no more. The dependable little interface with its cheery Add to Shortlist functionality will be gone, the owners moving on to 'other projects' (sometimes I hate the 'creative endeavours', how they burn out their subjects, short-circuit the goodwill of an exhausted & already over-committed population, & appoint no likely successors for when times get tough).

So if anyone is looking to take on an extra project, y'know, ... there's this ... just an itty bitty little website & mail list... how hard can it be*?

-----
* I would, y'know, but I have all this stuff I have to do.