Random Observations

The Lady of Situations and Moby Dick

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A book, a book, a spokesbear, a bed

I’m always a bit ish-ish about recommending books to people. Giving books to people is fine – there are few things I enjoy more than randomly giving friends books they might enjoy – but asking people to trust my taste and spend their hard-earned money on something is…ish-ish.

This doesn’t mean I don’t do it.

And after slinging stones in their direction last month about some writer’s guidelines I thought I’d take a moment to recommend a few of  Ticonderoga Publications publications, especially since they’re running a sale that takes  10% off pre-orders and 20% off direct orders of their existing fiction until the February. The former, for instance, would include Bluegrass Symphony by L.L. Hannett in both Hardcover and Softcover, while the latter would include Angela Slatter’s The Girl With No Hands and Other Stories, and ordering work from either of these fine writers would be a worthwhile use of your hard-earned discretionary cash.

I’d also point out that aspiring writers could do worse than ordering a copy of Stephen Dedman’s The Lady of Situations, which is the book I reach for when I contemplate short story collections and how they should be put together. The writer David Jauss once put together an essay, Standing Stones, on the various ways short story collections become a unified whole, a brilliant read in and of itself, and every single thing he identified is at work in The Lady of Situations; the hand-offs from one story and the next are beautifully coherent without being obvious, there are liaisons between the stories in the form of words and image being reworked from different angles, there are contrasts and mirrors and occasionally there are motifs rise to the surface without becoming heavy-handed. Stephen Dedman as a short story writer is brilliant – the story From Whom All Blessings Flow alone is testament to that – but the collection as a whole…

Well, as a whole, it’s something to aspire too. Reading Dedman’s collection with Jauss essay (available in the collection Alone with All That Could Happen) may have been one of the most educational things I ever did as a writer. If you’ve got the cash to purchase both and you’re interested in the short story collection as a form, I highly recommend it.

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As we amble towards my thirty-fourth birthday, I’m slowly discovering things I should no longer do.

Order prawns on a pizza, for example.

Stay up all night working on a story when I need to go to work at 8 AM the next day.

Guess which of these I did last night, and exactly how much I’m paying for it today? It would be nice to say I regret nothing, but mostly I regret the pizza.

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Over on twitter Tansy Rayner Roberts noted that the current explosion of Australian SF podcasts doesn’t actually include a podcast that interviews Australian writers, and the general consensus seems to be that everyone thinks this is a very good idea, but no-one really has the time to do it. Or they have the time, but lack the technical know-how.

It’s a good enough idea that I expect someone will break eventually. Had I an adequate microphone for the task of recording, a fiendish partner in crime, and the free time to edit audio files into listenable form, it probably would have been me.

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I’ve started reading the unabridged Moby Dick, mostly because of Jeff Smith’s Bone comics. It’s not the book I was expecting it to be, but mostly in a good way. Mostly, when I pick up copies of Moby Dick, I read the chapter on the Whiteness of the Whale and read it aloud for the pleasure of reading it aloud and then put it away again.

I blame Bone for my tendency to do all these things, right down to the choice of chapter, for it’s mentioned (in the introduction, I think) of the same collected volume that contains the Great Cow Race, which is really the volume of Bone you want to own if you’re only going to own the one, if only so you can figure out why comic book people laugh at the phrase stupid, stupid rat creatures. And occasionally giggle at quiche.

Moby Dick is a stranger book than you’re expecting, if you’ve never picked it up before. It’s also intimidatingly large, should you find yourself pressed for reading time. I like it, though. It’s the product of a time when the concept of the novel wasn’t quite so formed, and it’s a massive  tangle of words, but it’s intriguing in its bizarreness.

The Day After Valentine’s Day

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I’ve just seen the first review of Electric Velocipde 21/22, courtesy of Lois Tilton at Locus online, and it says very nice things about Memories of Chalice and recommends it to readers. I’m going to steal a bit from the end, since the beginning mostly sets up what the story’s about:

While the narrator speaks of dollars, rock stars and penthouses, the setting seems more to be some timeless European castle in a valley isolated from the mundane world, where wealthy gnomes guard vast fortunes in their vaults beneath the mountains. This author is one I always look forward to; his offerings are fine and well-crafted.

And really, there are worse ways to begin the day than reading that, aren’t there? You can read the entire review for EV 21/22 and a few other fine magazines over at the Locus website.

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Yesterday I stopped off to buy some groceries on the way home from work and the guy manning the register asked I’d taken off early for Valentine’s Day. Probably not an unreasonable question given that I was there at 1:40 in the afternoon, but it perplexed me none-the-less.

“Er, no,” I said, “I’m always done with work around this time.”

“Oh,” the check-out guy said. “Do you at least have to start early? Otherwise I’ll have to hate you.”

“Sure,” I said, lying through my teeth ’cause it’s easier than explaining why I only work part-time, “early starts. That’s the trade-off, of course.”

Then I paid for my groceries and went home to make a delicious ham-and-salad sandwich for lunch. And then I wrote things. Poorly, initially, and a little better as the day wore on, because that’s how writing things tends to go.

After dinner I read Death: The Time of Your Life, because it’s a book about love that doesn’t make me feel bad about not being in love, and I watched Stranger than Fiction, mostly ’cause I love the line “I brought you flours,” and then I thought about writing a post about Valentine’s Day that seemed like an increasingly bad idea as I went along.

If I had written the post, it probably would have gone something like this:

I’m down with the idea of Valentine’s Day, but like Christmas it’s one of those things I’d like more if it were divorced from social convention and inherited rituals. Thus it becomes a day where I read certain things and watch certain things and engage in my own rituals, largely because I’m an inherently single person who likes the idea of building a relationship with a whole bunch of people (lets call them readers) rather than a singular entity. Relationships, by and large, required compromises on the writing front that I largely chose not to make.

Valentines doesn’t really make me feel bad about being single, but very few things do. These days I usually reserve my more maudlin “oh god, I’m single” moments for the weeks where I mainline episodes of How I Met Your Mother and fail to write anything at all, but that show also makes me feel bad for how little time I spend in bars and the fact that I don’t live in New York, so I largely write it off as a testament to the creator’s ability to sell me a lifestyle rather than any deficiency on my part. Given time, the feeling passes. And I go write another story, and hope it finds a new reader, and that reminds me why I like my life the way it is.

One day this may change, and then again, it might not.

In any case, I came across the following video by poet Tanya Davis and filmmaker Andrea Dorfman on the Coilhouse blog yesterday. It was attached to a piece about those I’m-okay-with-being-single movements, which always leave me as uncomfortable as things built around become-a-couple narrative, ’cause the answer always seems to be somewhere in between.

In any case, I liked it, and I thought it better shared on a day not quite so laden with meaning as February 14th.

Happy day that is not Valentine’s Day, and thanks for being a reader.

Credit Where Credit’s Due

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On Friday night, after a panel at the QWC’s One Book, Many Brisbanes program, I got the opportunity to go hang out with Cat Sparks, Trent Jamieson, and the elusive Ben Payne. There was beer and chatter and hot chips with tomato sauce. The true value of this experience probably doesn’t sink in unless you know Cat and Trent and Ben, but fortunately for me I do, so I got to be there (although, given I had to drive home, I elected to drink coke. This seems to keep happening when I find myself in pubs; somehow I seem to have lost the ability to get my drink on).

Should you not know Cat and Trent, the short version goes something like this: one is the author of Death Most Definite and Managing Death and more quality short stories than you can poke a stick at, while the other possesses a resume similarly stacked with quality short stories and recently took up the position of fiction editor for Cosmos magazine. Should you come across them in bar, they may look remarkably like these two:

Trent Jamieson & Cat Sparks, Brisbane, Feb 2011. Documenting the fact that Cat drinks a glass of water.

Should you not know Ben, you will just have to imagine him, for he’s not among the photographs on my phone (such are the perils of being an elusive gentlemen). I can point out that he edits a zine with one of the quirkiest titles in Australia and he’s known for his damn fine taste in writers.

– ahem –

Er, sorry, the spokesbear gets snarky when I sneak that sort of thing into blog posts. He also points out that I should publicly thank Cat for coming up with the title Horn back in 2007, back when TPP and I were stumped in terms of possible titles that would work for the weird little noir novel about unicorns. My original title, and many of the replacement titles that followed, were awful and far less pointed than Cat’s suggestion.

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A friend of mine from uni pointed out that the Motel I was talking about in yesterday’s post is still in existence, although there’s no real reports on whether it’s still got its alien-abduction motif going or there’s a motley crew of long-term residents in addition to the visitors using it as an actual motel. The website does feature the graphics from the gloriously kitsch signs they used though. I lived in the one featured on the left-hand side of the header.

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I recently bought Amanda Palmer’s new album, and one of the surprises on the album was a duet she did with a member of the Jane Austen Argument on the song Bad Wine and Lemon Cake. After three or four days of listening to that song, over and over, in the car I finally broke down and went searching for the band’s website.

Turns out they have an EP out.

Ordinarily this wouldn’t be much of a story – roughly once a month I’ll find myself going to a band website and checking out their list of albums and such. I tend to listen to a lot of music, after all, and it’s really only the limitations of my budget and the rapid closure of CDs stores in all my favourite shopping centres that keeps me from spending as much money on music as I do books.

Despite these limitations, I’ve been highly resistant to buying music in electronic formats. I like the tactile pleasure of having something physical to play, and I like album art and liner notes, and I generally just like CDs and cassettes and LPs before them. Plus I have the kind of luck with computers that says backing up daily isn’t actually one of those things you ought to do; it’s a necessity that keeps me from wailing and gnashing my teeth. As a general rule, I don’t buy MP3s.

It would appear I can’t make that claim anymore. And, well, I’m not entirely sure how it happened, only that it did. It’s one of the things that always leaves me envious about music – it’s much better at beguiling us than fiction is, if only because it takes far less effort on the part of the audience on the receiving end.

I still miss the album art though. And the liner notes.