Dedalus Books is a publisher that I would guess not a lot of people have heard of. Based in the UK, they specialise in literary fiction and translated fiction, with a bent towards the fantastic, surreal, decadent, postmodern and strange. Their best-known publication is probably The Arabian Nightmare by Robert Irwin; they also publish postmodernist author Andrew Crumey, contemporary decadents Medlar Lucan and Durian Gray, acclaimed French author Sylvie Germain, classic authors like Octave Mirbeau and Rachilde, and an impressive list of others, as well as collections of translated short fiction and some non-fiction. Their translations have won various prizes, including The Pen/Book-of-the Month-Club Translation Prize in the USA and The Oxford Weidenfeld Translation Prize in the UK.

Unfortunately, producing high quality books isn’t enough to keep them afloat. They used to receive an Arts Council grant, but lost it after a good year. Although they intend to apply again, they’re currently in a somewhat tight situation, explained here. I just thought I’d mention them here, with Christmas coming up and people possibly looking for books to buy. Me, I’m looking at Bruges-la-Mort and Emperors of Dreams: Drugs in the Nineteenth Century (who knew that Queen Victoria took cannabis for period pain?)

Philippines spec fic guru Charles Tan gave me an opportunity to yadder over at his blog, Bibliophile Stalker.

Reading: I recently finished reading The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, the memoir of Jean-Dominique Bauby, former editor-in-chief of Elle magazine, who suffered a massive stroke that left him with locked-in syndrome — a state where a person is conscious but unable to communicate due to total paralysis of the body. Bauby was left with some movement in his head and eyes, and wrote the entire book by having a helper recite the letters of the alphabet in their order of frequency in French, and blinking when the right letter was reached — meaning that he had to compose everything he had to say beforehand. The book is short and mainly describes his life after the stroke, in brief chapters — it’s a series of sessions in which facts, feelings and images are arranged with no wastage of words, but with finely tuned artistry, in such a way that a big picture of a life is created. Recommended.

In the paper today I read about Belgian locked-in syndrome sufferer Rom Houben, who was thought to be in a vegetative state for 23 years, whereas he was aware the entire time. I can’t process what that would be like — it’s literally unimaginable. How would you not go mad? Perhaps you would want to go mad, and be tortured by your ongoing full awareness and sanity. Houben is also writing a book.

Awwww….

Via Random Index, press for All Sorts of Remedies, a show by Herbert Pfostl at Observatory, an exhibition/classroom/event space in New York:

“Small paintings as parables of plants and animals and old stories of black robbers and white stags. Fragments on death like mirrors from a black sleep in the forests of fairy tales. All stories from the dust of the dead in fragments and footnotes like melodies of heartbreak and north and night and exploration–breakdowns. About saints with no promise of heaven and lost sailors forgotten and the terribly lonely bears. The unknown, the ugly – and the odd. Collected grand mistakes, noble errors from many sources. Sinking signals – conscious or not – sonatas and last letters and great insults. The impossible tears in landscapes of ocean or stranded whales. A going far back to coals and cruelties and sobbing like songs in whiskey and blood. Of soldiers’ last letters and all seven seas. With pirates and wars and prayers in holes in the ground. Of fallen women and orphaned children and drowned slaves and burned saints.”

I rather wish I could just pop over to New York and see this. Pfostl is the publisher of Blind Pony Books and displays his drawings and paintings online at his other website, Paper Graveyard. He is also a collector of wonderful quotes, and is one of the collaborators on To Die No More, an artist’s book of quotations “designed to pay homage to the fairytale forest of death”.

Spritemaker General Penchaft has turned Gwynn into a sprite:

Not that the real Gwynn would consider taking on the No Life King, even for the sake of the best hat in this world and the next. Running the fuck away from the ancient, souped-up undead is the better part of valour. He is quite disturbed by how small his gun looks in this picture.

But a hat was still desired…specifically, something like this Australian military feathered slouch hat.  After running through some options…

… a perfectly charming hat was supplied:

Many salaams to Penchaft! Now he’s all dressed up, he just needs a place to go. Like Beth’s house for bondage orgy Red Tantra Black Mass dinner.

And on the subject of squees — squees in advance for Where the Wild Things Are and The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus. I can’t wait (but I have to wait until late January for Wild Things! D:).

EDIT: Yippee, Penchaft made transparent backgrounds:

She has a sprites comic site here, with themes including FFVII, eating kittens, shinigami, ninjas, existentialism, and pants, with a page of delightful silliness for Hellsing fans.

British art student Sara Watson, 22, from Central Lancashire University, has painted a Skoda Fabia so that when viewed from a certain angle it appears to vanish into the parking lot where it sits. “I was experimenting with the whole concept of illusion but needed something a bit more physical to make a real impact,” Watson said. The work took three weeks and is quite amazing. I’ve tried to find more of her work online, but no luck so far.

I’ve joined an art studio near work, so I can now go to classes and use the studio whenever I want. There are lots of classes on offer, and it’s also a nice sociable place.

My aim in taking classes is to improve my technique and stretch my mind so that I can find more interesting ways to draw or paint the subjects that give me pleasure. Which means lots of figures with animal heads, men in fancy clothes, masked Venetians, and the occasional bit of porn.

This is a new minotaur, half copied from the last one, which was copied from a couple of photos. The head teacher discourages students from working from photographs, saying that it hinders you in developing our own style because you concentrate too much on just copying the picture. And I can see her point. I’m going to try to use more drawings from life as references from now on. If I want to walk a mile or so up the canal, there’s a water buffalo tethered on a vacant block, so perhaps I should go there and try to do a life study. They’re rather handsome bovines with clean-cut faces that ought to be easy to draw. Speaking of water buffaloes, bareback water buffalo racing!

So, the editors of Publishers Weekly have made a list of their top 10 books of 2009, and they’re all by men.

“We ignored gender and genre and who had the buzz,” they said. “It disturbed us when we were done that our list was all male,” they acknowledged fleetingly in the middle of a paragraph of self-congratulatory rah-rah.

Well, it disturbs us here at Chez Bishop, too. Frankly, we are disturbed like Darth Vader was disturbed by Admiral Motti’s lack of faith. If only we had Jedi powers.

Lizzie Skurnick’s essay contra PW’s list is worth reading, particularly for her description of one awards-deciding process, in which, she says, “we have…called books by women small and books by men large, by no quantifiable metric.”

The trouble is, we’re not yet in a position to say that we can ignore gender. (Or race, or culture, or sexual orientation.) Our biases are deep as shit. As The Mumpsimus puts it, ‘ There is no objective, essential “best”. There is stuff we like and stuff we don’t — texts we have developed techniques for appreciating and texts that we do not, for myriad reasons, appreciate. There are texts about which we have built large critical apparatuses for justifying as “great”.’

Which is why I think we probably ditched affirmative action too soon. Patriarchy still informs our tastes and appetites, and we can’t evade it any more than we can evade our own genes.  And it may not just be a matter of taste regarding the books themselves. Skurnick writes: “It’s not that women shouldn’t be up for the big awards. It’s just that when it comes down to the wire, we just kinda feel like men . . . I don’t know . . . deserve them.”

Which is even scarier, if it’s true, because it doesn’t speak just about a cultural tendency to prefer men’s writing but a tendency to cut men more slack, to wish them more success, to extend them more compassion and goodwill — in short, to love men more than we love women.

In the interests of honesty, I have to say that I’m a woman who has been helped, encouraged, and promoted by men. I’ve had so much male support, I should be able to insert something witty about jockstraps in here, but I’m getting over a bit of food poisoning and ask to be excused from wit. At any rate, it’s not on my own behalf that I complain. Or rather, it is — if I ever succeed in writing this book I keep failing to write, the one with all the women in it, doing womanish things, though not having affairs, because that would be too sensational.

On to the second part of this post, which is much more ruminatory…
Lizzie Skurnick writes about a group of awards judges finding texts by men “ambitious” and texts by women “domestic”, and rewarding the former even if they fell short of their goals, though the latter may have been better written.

Assuming that this was not the only time that such a finding as been made, it raises some troubling questions. Like, do women actually tend to be timid, preferring to do a good but limited job, where men might take a wild risk? Or do we fail to see where women have been ambitious because the ambition is disguised? Do we simply prefer sloppy-ambitions to skilful-safe because the former seems to inject more new material into the cultural meme pool? Or do wild ambitious works by women go unpublished because publishers know that women’s writing within certain safe bounds is saleable, but when it comes to work that shoots for the moon, the reading public is more likely to look favourably on the flawed efforts of a not-quite-genius man than a not-quite-genius woman?

Perhaps a real genius, a woman who can shoot for the moon and hit it, has equal chances with an equally brilliant man. Or maybe not — maybe there are women out there shooting for a different moon, and finding that no one cares.

As I say, ruminations. Questions, all of them hard to answer.

I mentioned recently that I made a long soapboxy post and then didn’t post it due to a flaw in the thinking I was doing while standing on the soapbox. Leaving argument aside, I’ve recently been reminded — three times — that there are still people out there who don’t acknowledge that women can be great. At just about anything, except perhaps pole dancing.

And I’m afraid that while we call this a post-feminist age, it is no more post-feminist than it is post-racist, even in the West. One facet of it not being quite post-feminist yet, daaaaarlings, is that we still don’t remember women of genius the way we remember men. Female composers get perhaps the shortest shrift of all. It occurred to me that I have never, as far as I know, heard the music of a single female composer working before circa 1960.

Now comes my confession: with the exception of a few (often histrionic) pieces that I love, by and large I don’t appreciate classical music all that much. I just don’t connect with a lot of it. So for that reason, too, I haven’t gone out of my way to listen to classical and post-classical works by women.

But now I find myself really wanting to know the music that women wrote way back when. So I’ve started off with Clara Schumann (nee Clara Wieck; married to Robert Schumann), who seems to be the best-known woman composer of the 19th century. In her own time she was famous both as a virtuoso pianist and a composer. I randomly began with her Pianoconcerto in A minor, Op. 7.
1st movement
2nd movement
3rd movement

Am I a music critic? I am not. All I can say is, I find this music complex, deeply nuanced, and inventive, with a magisterial power of communicating emotional tone. The first movement in particular changes feeling so often and so fluidly that listening to it is like being a secret ear in a ballroom full of people, picking up the vibes of different hearts and minds. Does it thrill me? In places, yes. But I’m trying not to judge this by the thrill factor, given that Motley Crue thrills me too — I’m trying to be objective. Maybe I’m not qualified to make such an assessment, but I can’t see how this music is inferior to that of the great male composers, or why it shouldn’t be as much studied and performed and lauded.

Various questions are swirling in my head and the soapbox beckons, but for now I think I’ll just keep poking around and discovering music by women.

Copypasting my own critique from DA:

Cobbled 2 or 3 references together here, not counting the bull. Anatomy could be better, hands and hips particularly, and the shadow inside the arms is probably too dark — or else the head needs more texture/detail to draw the eye to it.

And the style of drawing isn’t exactly exciting — I have a ton of trouble getting accuracy and liveliness into one picture (hey, I have enough trouble with accuracy!)

Still, I’m pretty happy with it.