I’ve been listening to this a lot today. Back in the nineties, when grunge was still a thing, I listed to a lot more Hole than I did Nirvana. Sharing it here ’cause I’m in a retro kind of mood, and ’cause I’ve apparently never seen the clip.
So here’s the thing about my reading habits: I tend to do things in lots of four. On novel by a male writer, one novel by a female writer, one non-fiction book, one short story collection or anthology. This isn’t a hard-and-fast rule; ebooks tend to fall outside this reading pattern at the moment, since they’re largely things I read on my phone. Books people lend me tend to get read fast too, lest they fall into the vast pit of my to-read pile and never emerge. Poetry gets read whenever I want, ’cause I’m much more likely to dip into a collection and read a poem or two than I am an entire book. For the most part, though, the pack of four is my approach of choice. I have personal rules built up around it, the same way I have personal rules built up around eating out (when there’s pork belly on the menu, order the damn pork
ONE I went and saw Labyrinth at the China Town mall last night, which meaning posting this and inviting you all to get your groove in is practically mandatory: If you aren’t at least singing along to this, wishing you were Jareth and drawing odd looks from your workmates, then I’m afraid you are dead to me. TWO I love this movie. In fact, I love it with the kind of deep and abiding love that can only come from being exposed to *sheer, raw awesomeness* when you’re very young. God knows how young, ’cause I couldn’t actually tell you when I first saw it, but I’ve watched the film *a lot*. Like, as often as I’ve watched the Princess Bride a lot. Or as often as I re-watch The Gilmore Girls or The West Wing a lot. And yet, it’s not a movie that I love unconditionally. It’s simply the bits that I love, I really love, while the bits that
It’s been suggested that there’s an undercurrent of gloom running through my posts of late, which is one of those inevitable things that happens ’round these parts every Summer. I’m pre-programmed for deep seriousness December through February, largely ’cause it’s too damn hot and I spent the better part of a decade being broke during those months on account of doing session work for Universities. Also, they’re my drinking months. I brood when I drink. Still, in deference to the fact that not everyone is as fond of embracing their inner gloomcookie as I am, I figured I’d spent a blog post talking about awesome things. Specifically, this awesome thing, which ranks among the coolest books in my collection: I picked this up at a Melbourne bookstore back in 2008, although I’ll be damned if I can remember which bookstore it was. A friend of mine took me there, and it was back in the days when I’d never really
One Habitual marking of quotes is one of those weird habits you pick up when you hang around universities for too long. I still do it, despite being out of the game for the better part of six years now, which means I frequently end up with shelves full of dog-eared books, notebooks filled with hastily scribbled details, and the occasional stray post-it with a quote scrawled across it with the bibliographic details on the back. Since I don’t really teach classes or write essays anymore, the vast majority of the quotes I mark tend to be because I truly adore the phrasing. There’s a great deal of beauty in theory and criticism, if you look for it. Exquisitely phrased ideas that sucker-punch you the same way a perfectly formed poetic line does, or well-turned phrase in a piece of prose. I’ve been reading Roland Barthes A Lover’s Discourse for the last two weeks. It started as a bit of
I’ve been worrying my flatmate recently, ’cause I seem to have developed a jaunty whistle of late. This is not, as a general rule, the sort of thing that happens around our house, least of all to me. ‘Course, historically speaking, this isn’t actually true. I spend a great deal of my day with little fragments of music running through my head. I always have, one way or another, and I’ve always been fond of having music on while I work. What’s really happened is that I’ve inherited my sister’s stereo with it’s five-CD turntable and I’ve moved it out of my bedroom and into the study where I write, surf the internet, and occasionally play computer games. Up until this point, all my music had to run on either Fritz the Laptop (which meant he couldn’t do anything else) or play on the DVD player attached to my TV. Neither of these have been particularly optimal, so my music
…I still maintain that this is the sexiest two minutes and seventeen seconds to ever exist in music. If you can resist dancing while you listen to it, you’re a better person than I. The second-sexiest thing ever done in music is Nouvelle Vague’s cover of Guns of Brixton. I’ll leave it up to you to figure out what this says about my psyche.
So I had a Monday free from work this week and, in the absence of anything pressing on the writing front, I elected to spend the day flaked out in front of the Teev in a blatant attempt to recover from the worst of the GenreCon hangover. My televised tipple of choice – the first season of 2 Broke Girls, newly acquired on DVD by virtue of the fact that my local DVD store didn’t have season 2 of Castle on the shelves. I wasn’t really expecting much from 2 Broke Girls – it’s been routinely panned by pretty much everyone I’ve seen discussing it – but after mainlining all twenty-two episodes of Seasons One I think I’ve come to adore the show, just a little. Lets be clear – my adoration has nothing to do with the quality of the humour. There are sit-coms that I actually find consistently funny and worth-while (Community, Rosanne seasons two through four), sit-coms
I’m kinda pinned down by the crushing weight of my to-do list this week. Apparently running a convention will do that to you. In my absence, I leave you with some vintage Beastie Boys to keep you company: See you all Friday.
GenreCon looms like a big, awesome loomy thing, which means I’m alternating between YO, I’M CRAZY BUSY DUDES and flaking out on the couch in front of wrestling DVDS. In deference to my current state, I’m going to skip today’s post and point towards an awesome thing on the internet: THE LIZZIE BENNETT DIARIES About four months ago my flatmate wandered past and said words to the effect of “Hank, The Vlog Brother who isn’t not John Green, is doing a youtube recreation of Pride and Prejudice. You should really check it out.” Given that the last time he said this it led me to John Green’s Swindowntown Swiddleypoopers youtube videos, I flagged it as one of those things I should follow up on and immediately forgot about. Which is, like, utter damn stupid of me. ‘Cause, a) I really like Pride and Prejudice, b) I really like smart adaptations, and c) I’m fascinated by people doing smart things that
Over the last few weeks I’ve occasionally thrown a short-story link up on twitter, in that way that you do when you remember there are *fucking awesome short stories* out there and you want to share them with other people. Twitter is a horrible medium for recommending short fiction though – it has the kind of immediacy that makes it easy for people to go follow the link, but it lacks the real space to provide any kind of context beyond saying *awesome story here*. So I wrote a blog post. And threw in some stories I haven’t linked to on twitter so people who follow me there still have something to go read on this fine Monday. All of the stories are free to read online at the time of writing, so links are provided. And so, in no particular order, I give you… 5 SHORT STORY RECOMMENDATIONS IN 1,012 WORDS OR LESS 1) MARY MARGARET ROAD-GRADER by Howard
Many years ago I came across a copy of a CD featuring tracks from The Damned’s Peel Sessions. I’m not really sure why I bought it, beyond my habitual reflex of picking up anything that looked like it fit in a vaguely punk/Gothic style back when I was living in the Gold Coast. I’ve been playing that CD a lot today. One of the tracks, in particular, seems particularly relevant after a weekend where my cold upgraded itself and added exciting new symptoms.
