Category: Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption

It would be wrong to say that I pitched a PhD topic about series just so I’d have a legitimate reason to read Joe Lansdale’s Hap and Leonard books and call it work, but I do not know that it would be 100% inaccurate. It was cold as an Eskimo’s ass in an igloo outhouse, but it was clear and bright and the East Texas woods were dark and soothing. The pines, cold or not, held their green, except for the occasional streaks of rust-coloured needles, and the oaks, though leafless, were thick and intertwining, like the bones of some unknown species stacked into an elaborate art arrangement Joe Lansdale, The Two-Bear Mambo. It’s one thing to learn the big, macro-structures of narrative that will allow you to tell a decent story – and make no mistake, Lansdale’s got that shit down. But the thing that impresses me, over and over, is his control on the micro level, putting together

For the first time in a long time, Fridays are a day where I’m primarily writing and researching. Here are some things that have been on my mind this week. Angela Slatter launched a Patreon this morning. It’s full of shiny options for supporting her career and getting cool things in return. You know what to do. Cat Rambo is doing a re-read of a whole bunch of Doc Savage novels and making notes about her thoughts as she goes along. The first of them covers Doc Savage: Quest of Qui, and I’m largely flagging this here for my friend Chris who is my designated person-I-talk-to-when-I-talk-about-pulps. Bloomberg has a guide to making incredible nachos that makes me excessively hungry and glad there’s a Guzmon and Gomez on campus. Chris Hemsworth continues to be an adorable Thor, who is,in turn, a terrible flatmate. Kat Mayo did an incredible piece on lazy journalism about feminism and romance fiction, to which I basically find myself

I saw Leonard Cohen live a few years back. The concert was the same week my father had his heart attack, and I was meant to be going with my dad and my sister. Instead, my father was hospitalised and being prepared for surgery, and my sister stayed with my mum. I was encouraged to go Cohen anyway, find friends who could make use of the spare tickets. I did. We ate Indian food. Leonard Cohen wore a suit on stage, and he performed with the kind of serenity and poise you’ve got no choice but to envy. I was not in good shape before my dad’s heart attack, and things were considerably worse after it happened. Seeing Leonard Cohen was the only time that month it felt anything close to okay. Now it’s been three weeks since Cohen died and I’m seated on the balcony of my parent’s apartment, listening to my dad watch the cricket inside. It’s thirty-something

It took me two days to read Dan Charnas Work Clean: The Life-Changing Power of Mise-en-Place to Organise Your Work, Life, and Mind. It would have taken less time, but I had a busy weekend, which meant I was largely carving out blocks of time to read through the book as fast as possible. I was two-thirds done when I raved about it in the Sunday Circle. I am now finished. And, upon finishing, I scrolled back to the start of the ebook and started reading it from the start. It’s that kind of book. I love me a good book about productivity. I devour them like popcorn, especially when they’ve got odd little hooks. Charnas’ approach is all hook. He looks at the way people learn to be chefs, the system and the mindset that’s instilled in them in order to keep a busy kitchen functional. He extrapolates out from that, talking about mise-en-place as a philosophy and approach to

I went to see Suicide Squad last night. Not because I had any real hopes of it being a good movie, but because it’s a comic book film and I will end up seeing all comic book films eventually. Even the Zack Snyder one’s, which ’cause me actual pain to watch. I will watch them, when it costs me nothing, and then I will hate myself. Suicide Squad did not cause pain. Mostly because it’s an incredibly tedious couple of hours, by virtue of someone taking all the core beats of six different stories and throwing them in the air, then figuring “eh, good enough,” when the pages are re-assembled. Suicide Squad is what happens if you try to make the Magnificent Seven and do the assembling the team sequence, then throw out oh, by the way, these guys are meant to be saving a Mexican village. It’s the film that happens when you kick of Die Hard with Hans Gruber taking

Love and Friendship looks like a Jane Austen film, when you first glance in its direction. This is largely because it’s based on Lady Susan, Austen’s epistolary novella that you’ve probably only read if you’re a hardcore Austen reader or someone who picked up a volume with a title like “The Complete Works of Jane Austen” that took it’s remit rather seriously. And because you walk into it thinking its an Austen film, and you know exactly what you’re going to get, Love and Friendship is all kinds of fucking glorious as it starts to fuck with those expectations. It’s incredibly funny without devolving into parody; incredibly engaging, without actually having a sympathetic character; incredibly slippery, in that there are machinations at work throughout the film and you’re never entirely sure of a character’s motivations. It is a two-hour love-letter to the fact that Austen is incredibly funny, when you read her works, and the film takes it as a personal

From While Not Writing A Book, in Helen Garner’s essay collection  Everywhere I Look: At the health farm, fasting. I must be hallucinating: when I walk past a pile of folded towels I see them as a huge club sandwich. I present myself for reiki treatment. The woman announces that she is going to massage my aura. I submit with a sigh. I don’t have any trouble at all believing that people have auras: you only need to have seen a dying and then a dead body to know this. But I wanted my massage to be about my gross earthly body. I do not know how many ways I can recommend this book, but I’m putting this quote here so I can add one more to the list.

This appeared on my twitter stream this morning and, naturally, I retweeted it on account of it being awesome. But twitter is a temporary medium, and this is one of those things which deserves a bit more permanence in the this is good, go read it stakes. So…over on Letters of Note, there’s a copy of a letter Alan Moore wrote in response to a very young 8-year-old comics fan, which is perhaps one of the most beautiful bits of fan engagement I’ve seen in a very long time. If you’re a fan of Moore – or of seeing how good writers engage with their fans – I’d encourage you to go read it.

I don’t get hangovers anymore, on account of avoiding alcohol in the name of not making the sleep apnea worse than it needs to be. But there are days when I miss alcohol, and there are days when I definitely miss that mild morning-after feeling where you’re slightly seedy and aware of it and things can be made better by the application of good music and prodigious amounts of bacon. Today I feel hung-over. Not because I drank, but because my brain just unloaded a whole bunch of crazy on me last night and it resulted in an evening of adrenaline and sleeplessness. And a morning where I slept through my alarms – all fucking five of them – and had started to get that shaky feeling that comes from taking the anti-depressants late. So I have cooked a pile of bacon. And applied good music. And maybe, quietly, dispaired at the idea that I will never actually create something as

I attempted to watch Pixels last night. I was having a low day, in terms of emotional and mental capacity, and I basically turned to the nearest streaming service and said, give me the dumbest thing you’ve got, it’s all I can handle. And lo, Adam Sandler’s computer game movie appeared, and I figured, well, there is zero thought required for this one, yeah? Never underestimate the amount of thought that will go into films that make you this angry. It’s not that this film is bad, it’s that it’s bad and it wastes every opportunity it has and it thoroughly reprehensible in its portrayal of…well, just about everyone. It’s all lazy stereotypes and bad dialogue and casting Sean Bean as a British soldier during an alien invasion and not bothering to kill him off. Then there is the relentless misogyny, which gets turned all the way up to eleven by the end of the movie. Fuck that. Fuck it right to

Last night I sat down and re-watched John Wick, ’cause I have this idea for a story in my head and I wanted to wrap my head around the minutia of the genre I like to call killing your way to the truth of things of which Wick is the most recent high-profile example. There are others on my list. I mainline a lot of media, in the build-up stage of writing. I’ve also been immersed in the creation of a short story course for work, where I try to pull apart the microstructure of scenes and lay out things like narrative beats and action/reaction rhythms, giving people a toolkit for pulling apart the minutia of narrative of figuring out how it does what it does. And it’s interesting, having these two things in my head, ’cause John Wick plays with narrative contrast on a scale that very few films manage. Nearly every major scene is contrasted against something else through the use of

The Marvel/Audi cross-over comic appeared in my Facebook feed this week. For those who haven’t seen it yet – presumably because you haven’t yet trained the Facebook algorithm to show you the geekiest damn thing possible at any given time – the short version is this: Audi has a lot of product placement in the upcoming Captain America: Civil War film. They are building on that. Part of the way they’re building off that is a custom, eight-page Avengers comic that places Audi cars front and centre. You can read it online, for free, ’cause there is no point in trying to get people to pay for that shit. There is nothing particularly mind-bending about the comic. In fact, it’s exactly what you’re expecting from the concept: the barest minimum of a storyline, character beats that remind you that you’ve been watching movies with all these characters in them, and a couple of really on-the-nose moments where they talk about the