Monthly Archives: September 2009

09/28/09

Last Drink Bird Head pre-order

Coming out of hole to say that Last Drink Bird Head, awesomely imaginative flash fiction for literacy, is available for pre-order:

What Is Last Drink Bird Head?

That’s the catalyst editors Ann and Jeff VanderMeer provided to over 80 writers in creating this unique anthology, with all proceeds going to ProLiteracy.org. All each writer got was an email with “Last Drink Bird Head” in the subject line and the directions “Who or what is Last Drink Bird Head? Under 500 words.” The result? Last Drink Bird Head is a blues musician, a performance artist, a type of alcohol, a town in Texas, and even a song sung by girl scouts in Antarctica. Famed designer John Coulthart did the interior, which features bobbing bird heads in the corners of the pages, so that the antho is also a flipbook.

Cover image:
bcs-lastdrinkbirdhead

Order Page

As I said in my earlier post, the contributor list is awesome. Having been given permission to include teasers in this advertisement, my piece is actually 5 short pieces, one of which is a poem that starts like this:

In the land of the thundercloud
on that most open of pinion ayeways, that scraaa-aa-apes down
from Hrim Town of the iron filing cabinets, iron horses, iron heads,
longbows, curfews, depressions, down to Hum,
known for its many used Tarota dealers
(& the astonishing aerial ballétopétomachia, held every June at the Grand Opera),
the goondas’ silver trail, the high and cold
gutter down the roof of the world,
which the gamblers call Rue Misère Ouverte or Miserie op Tafel Straat,
and the shills—not a damn one that speaks except in tongues—
call the Dill’s Doodweg—passes through Last Drink Bird Head,
where the deciduous Marquis, to prove
that a white Borsalino was the real thing…

(The Marquis, Borsalino held over heart, smiles winsomely, bats a silver-sugared eyelash, and whispers that you might like to buy the book…)

* * *

While I’m out of the hole, I’m looking at artist Melli Ink. Glass skeletons, insects, savage plants…  And at the bottom of this page, the poem Blue Horse, by Masako Takiguchi.

I was going to go back in the hole and close comments off this post, but changed my mind. In case comments help sales, or the Marquis needs to say more, or something.

09/22/09

Hiatus

In addition to writing projects and teaching, I now have some paying work that I couldn’t turn down (because the teaching job pays fuck all).

I have too much to do and I’m getting tired. Because I’m tired I’m less able to think clearly and work efficiently. I’m also still having flashes of irrational fear/paranoia. I could cut back on the writing, but my lack of productivity over the last few years has really got me down, and I think the only cure for that is to be productive.

One thing I can do to make more time and space for myself is leave the internet for a while.

So, a little quiet time now.

09/16/09

Eye candy time again

One of my students gave me a present — a Yoshitaka Amano weekly art calendar. She apologised for it being a 2009 calendar, but of course that matters not when it’s Amano. It has a booklet of 52 pictures, many of which were new to me. Quite a lot of them are cute and cartoonish, including several adorable ones of Vampire Hunter D in chibi style.

This is the calendar -

amano00

And here is the company that made it -

Art Vivant
- but I can’t find either this or a 2010 calendar, though I’ll check back from time to time.

The Amano section of their site has a gallery of small pictures. To see more works (on the right), click on the link below the pictures with the numeral 10 in it. There are also some small prints (or just postcards, I’m not sure, but they seem to be limited editions) of D and other subjects — some of the links show you extra pictures — but I can’t see any price or ordering information. And if you’re a diehard fan with time to kill, clicking on the top link here will open a navigable advertisement with even more pictures.

On the subject of art, on a recent look-in at Who Killed Bambi I was taken with Al Farrow’s reliquaries made of firearms and ammunition, Claire Morgan’s bird falling through a roof (or planar field) of strawberries, and Shi Jinsong’s nasty nursery furniture.

09/9/09

Hooray for Batman

Some of you may remember that Batman lives in our building (Milord met him in the elevator — there is obviously no batpole here). Well, Milord has also seen and identified Batman without his batsuit — he teaches martial arts somewhere in the office section of the building. Yesterday, just outside the construction site across the street, Batman disarmed a guy who was waving an apparent gun around, threw the gun onto the roof of a building, and held the guy down until the police arraved. The gun turned out to be a replica — available on the street here — but hey, it’s nice to know that if the gun had been real, it would have been out of play thanks to Batman. I just wish he’d been wearing his suit at the time of the incident.

Speaking of gunmen, last night I dreamed I was revising The Art of Dying, but it was live action, and Gwynn was wearing a floor-length pink chiffon peignoir over his damask tailcoat. There was some argument about the peignoir, although I can’t remember whether he was in favour of ditching it or keeping it. And his hair was up in an elaborate Edwardian do — probably inspired by Milord having returned from a trip to a friend’s village with his hair in a beautiful braid arranged by a nimble-fingered child of the family. The braids I do are very workaday in comparison — perhaps I need to go to a hairdressing workshop!

09/8/09

That book again

On last Friday afternoon I opened the file on the current draft of what I will call that book – the one I’ve been trying to write since I finished The Etched City, the mainstream or very nearly mainstream one.

And it occurred to me that I’m sick of not writing this book, and that I won’t have the stamina to keep on not writing it forever.

I wrote 1500 words in the morning, spent the afternoon with a friend, then went back home and stuffed around. Then, at night, when I was tired, the muse turned up in all his glory and said that if I’d write another 1000 words before bed, he’d come on board for the project.

I wrote the 1000 words. Then he dropped the bombshell: You, O worthless slave, he said, will have to write 12 000 words a week, if you actually want to write the book, instead of not writing it yet again. A matter of momentum, he said, and keeping track of things and maintaining coherence.

I asked him, Will there be much redrafting afterwards?

He laughed and said, You know the drill.

His timing — I have to say, and he agrees with a ruthless grin — sucks. I have The Floating World, and Hearts & Guns or whatever it’s going to be called, and some paid work coming up, as well as teaching (not that that takes a great deal of my time, but right now I have a student on whom I have to spend more time than usual out of class).

But does His Excellency care? I should say not. Caring, he says, is for women and cattle. Or something like that. Right now, it appears, is when he can squeeze me into his schedule. So that book and I have been getting reacquainted, to the tune thus far of some 18,000 words.

And His Excellency the Muse? He is sitting resplendent in silver and blue atop a pile of skulls, all of them mine, relics from all the past lifetimes in which he has killed me in one way or another. Wineglass in hand, he is reading a book by some better writer than me. Indicating a minion who is licking the very soles of his boots until they shine like black mirrors, he infers — baring aposematically luminous vampire teeth — that my lot could be worse.

I can hardly feel him helping me, either. But I’m too afraid to stop writing in case that scarcely perceptible sense of his attention, not so much inspiring as disdainfully commanding, is, for all its icy unloving barely-thereness, necessary.

Bastard.

09/6/09

Last Drink Bird Head

Flash fiction! Jeff and Ann VanderMeer have curated a collection of flash fiction, Last Drink Bird Head, to be launched at the World Fantasy Convention this year. All proceeds go to literacy charities.

bcs-lastdrinkbirdhead

This is the contributor list:

Daniel Abraham
Michael Arnzen
Steve Aylett
KJ Bishop
Michael Bishop
Desirina Boskovich
Keith Brooke
Jesse Bullington
Richard Butner
Catherine Cheek
Matthew Cheney
Michael Cisco
Gio Clairval
Alan M. Clark
Brendan Connell
Paul Di Filippo
Stephen R. Donaldson
Rikki Ducornet
Clare Dudman
Alistair Duncan
Scott Eagle
Brian Evenson
Eliot Fintushel
Jeffrey Ford
Richard Gehr
Felix Gilman
Jon Courtney Grimwood
Rhys Hughes
Paul Jessup
Antony Johnston
John Kaiine
Henry Kaiser
Caitlin R. Kiernan
Tessa Kum
Ellen Kushner
Jay Lake
Tanith Lee
Stina Leicht
Therese Littleton
Beth Adele Long
Dustin Long
Nick Mamatas
JM McDermott
Sarah Monette
Kari O’Connor
Ben Peek
Holly Phillips
Louis Phillips
Tim Pratt
Cat Rambo
Mark Rich
Bruce Holland Rogers
Nicholas Royle
G Eric Schaller
Ekaterina Sedia
Ramsey Shehadeh
Peter Straub
Victoria Strauss
Michael Swanwick
Mark Swartz
Alan Swirsky
Rachel Swirsky
Sonya Taaffe
Justin Taylor
Steve Rasnic Tem
Jeffrey Thomas
Scott Thomas
John Urbancik
Genevieve Valentine
Kim Westwood
Leslie What
Andrew Steiger White
Conrad Williams
Liz Williams
Neil Williamson
Caleb Wilson
Gene Wolfe
Jonathan Wood
Marly Youmans
Catherine Zeidler

(Fangirly squee for being in a book with Rikki Ducornet, whose The Fountains of Neptune is one of the most beautiful books I’ve ever read.)

And a word for Neglected Topiary, a book of music for which I can’t find any samples, so that you may wonder why I’m mentioning it at all. But listen to this description:

“…the pieces may allow listeners to gradually form the impressions of a repertoire of music, in turns ceremonious, mannered, sentimental, and whimsical, with all of the internal consistancies and differences encountered in “real” repertoires, not like Pinnochio trying to be a “real boy” by learning to behave well, but like a topiary animal in a forgotten garden, which is ultimately no more real than the observer wants it to be.”

I found this paragraph so evocative that it started creating music in my mind, to the visual accompaniment of a film that never was — a grey film wandering between stormy days and quietly cloudy ones, in which the topiary animal, subject and obedient to the laws of  melancholy, inevitably returns to the natural form of a tree.