Fiction

Walking and Book Buying and Peanut Butter & Sweet Potato Soup

PETERMBALL Journal , , , , ,

Yesterday I caught a train out to West End, walked to my friendly local independent bookstore, unexpected caught up with Trent Jamieson while he was working there, bought a copy of the new Michael Cunningham novel alongside a few other books (Hell’s Angels, A Fairwell to Arms), walked from West End to Anzac Square Arcade in Brisbane city, bought more books from Pulp Fiction – my favourite bookstore in the world, bar none – and then caught a train home whereupon I collapsed on the couch and watched old episodes of NCIS until I fell asleep.

And really, that was yesterday, and we call it a win. Exercise and books are an unbeatable combination.

‘Course today I’ll be dead on my feet at the dayjobs, forcing myself to stay awake, but these are small problems and entirely worth it.

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My friend Laura Goodin is an American ex-pat living out in the Australian wilderness (well, Woolongong), writing stories and plays and, if I remember this correctly, the occasional opera or symphony  cycle (I can’t remember which, specifically, because it occurs me that  know too many people writing such things, which is one of those odd things to realise about your life).

She also cooks many tasty things, including this Sweet Potato and Peanut Butter soup recipe she’s just posted for public consumption.

I got a copy of the recipe not long after Laura and I met in Clarion South back in 2007, and it’s one of those meals that you occasionally make for people and they say you know, this is rather good, can I have the recipe please? and you have that lovely moment where you can be either magnanimous or cackle like a comic book villain and say no, it’s a secret.

The latter can make you look cruel, but it will also prepare you for the hard decisions and harsh realities of eventual global domination.

But the Peanut Butter soup really is a nice meal, one that’s become a staple of my winter diet and one of my sister’s default shift-work meals, and since I tend towards magnanimousness I give you the link to try for your own self.

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Got one of those pleasant do you mind if we reprint this story? emails today, which also conveniently ticks off one of the entries on the secret list of writing goals I very rarely speak of.

I’m always caught by surprise when people want to reprint things. Especially since it’s rarely the things I  expect people to want to reprint.

Tenters & Zucchini & Reasons to Shop for Books This Afternoon

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This morning I went to start the blog with the phrase “waiting on tenterhooks,” which is one of those expressions that’s been around for a while without me ever really understanding where it actually came from.

And so there was google, and this rather succinct discussion of the phrase where I discovered the tenterhook was a series of hooks on a wooden frame used in  making woolen cloth, specifically in the bit where the  freshly woven  fabric was stretched out to dry after being cleaned in a fulling mill. The tenter was the frame and the hooks went around the outside, and it had the side-effect of straightening the weave.

We’re not much with the tenters these days, but I found myself looking at the description and though, well, yes, life feels exactly like that at the moment. There have been doings and goings-on in regards to dayjobbery and we have hit the bit where I wait, quietly, filling in the hours with distractions so I don’t over-focus and be disappointed if things that may happen do not, in the end, happen.

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Last night there was writing. Bits of Flotsam 6, bits of the other short story about faeries in paddle-steamers that in that state where I’m rewriting and bridging together disparate ideas, and bits of other things as well.

As distractions go, writing is a good one, although I’m starting to get that itchy-despairing-feeling that comes from being in the middle of lots of things without really getting things finished.

Say Zucchini, and Mean It went live over on the Daily SF site, for those who may be interested in reading the story but aren’t particularly interested in subscribing. There’s been a surprising number of people who’ve emailed or tweeted to let me know they zucchini the story, which is one of those things I hadn’t really expected when I sent the story out, but is really very cool.

The last time this sort of thing happened, it largely involved unicorns. Honestly, I could probably handle being the zucchini guy for a bit.

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Apparently there is a new Michael Cunningham novel out. I foresee a trip to the bookstore this afternoon. Quite possibly by train, so I can finish reading the Laura van den Berg collection on the way, given that I’ve managed to devour all but the final story in the space of two evenings.

What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us remains a phenomenal collection of short fiction. The kind I feel the need to foist upon people with enthusiastic burbling and enthusiastic recommendations. It is precise and lovely and understands how to make a collection a unified thing, rather than a series of short stories packed together between a common cover.

It makes, I think, the whole a much more precious  thing than the sum of its parts.

 

Sometimes the World is Just a Three-Minute Sex Pistol’s Song

PETERMBALL Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption , , , , , , ,

Last night I started reading Laura van den Berg’s short story collection, What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us,  which became one of those books that you start reading at a reasonable hour and stop reading in the wee hours of the morning, many hours after you planned on going to sleep.

It’s not simply that it’s a good book, more that it’s fiction that’s brushed with that touch of magic that great short stories are capable – brief and delicate and surprising and altogether beautiful. Not quite fantasy stories, but certainly on that strange intersection of literary and almost-fantasy-but-mostly-weird where all sorts of interesting things happen.

It reminds me very much of reading Miranda July’s short story collection for the first time, or the peculiar rewriting of the familiar that comes from your first exposure to Kelly Link.

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I may be a little scarce online this week. I’m trying not to be, of course, but the Third Edition of the Mutants and Masterminds roleplaying game landed in my mailbox over the weekend and that means the next week or so will be a frenzy of updating my old superhero campaign notes and preparing for the resumption of the superhero game I’m playing with some friend on Thursday nights (temporarily on hold due to teaching commitments).

Yes, this is quite possibly the geekiest thing I’ve ever put on my blog, but it’s not like that should come as a surprise to anyone. I am, after all, a huge freakin’ nerd and roleplaying games where I get to create my own superhero universe from scratch are my kryptonite.

If you need me, odds are I’ll be over in the corner of my office, giggling to myself while I try to figure out how many ranks of fighting and agility guys named Shadow Boxer and Archon should have while Justice League: Umlimited is on the television in the background.

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I found todays post on unemployment and the creation of a perpetual youth underclass on Tiger Beatdown kind of fascinating, especially since it touches on the same issues that were brought up by an Alain de Botton talk that I saw on (I think) TED some time last year.

The gist of Botton’s talk went something like this: the idea of living in a meritocracy is actually kind of terrifying, because if you’re being rewarded for your hard work and achievements, what does that mean when you fail? The shadowy side of a merit-driven culture is that those people on the bottom have only got themselves to blame.

I gather the ideas are explored in further depth in his book , which I’m probably going to unearth from my to-read pile now that I’ve been reminded of its existence.

It’s never really been a secret that these kinds of issues were going to become a problem, culturally speaking. Graying populations, massive changes in the marketplace, the class divides growing wider and wider – this things have been occurring for the better part of my lifetime and the solutions proposed have been stop-gap at best.

For all that SF have moved away from its tropes, these kinds of issues suggest it’s still a cyberpunk kind of future we’re facing.