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.

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.

This week, I’ve been in better mental health than I’ve been in for months — maybe years. I took medicine for a condition that you wouldn’t suppose to be remotely related to anxiety, brain fog or obsessive thoughts. But they all cleared up when I took it.

It’s too soon to go into detail, as I need to see how I go this month. The sudden change could have been related to hormones, or to something else. But just for now, I’ve got my mind back.

It’s been a terrible year, really. I’ve been turning up to work, answering emails, being amiable in public, doing contract work, even writing a couple of stories, and continuing to work on The Floating World. But it has all been like diving in murky water, surrounded continually by irrational fears and obsessive anxious thoughts that wouldn’t leave me alone, with physical and mental fatigue increasing and ability to concentrate decreasing, to the point where I was starting to have trouble stringing words into coherent sentences when speaking. Writing has been like pushing a semitrailer uphill.

I was losing my intelligence, reason, self control, judgement and will. I was unable to believe in what I knew to be true, and all too able to believe in ridiculous things. My own mind was a horrible place to be in. My quality of life was sliding fast. The 100 metre drop out the window was starting to look just slightly not unattractive.

But just right now, I’m ok. But also looking around dazed, because the experience of feeling that I was going insane — of irrational fears trumping the rational mind, has shifted — I won’t say shaken, because that sounds negative, and this isn’t necessarily a negative thing — my perception of self and identity.

Was I myself when I was mad? I don’t think so. But am I myself now? Am I this rational mind?

The rational mind, with which we tend to identify, obviously isn’t permanent or unconquerable.  It’s a contingent thing. We know we can lose it.  But who are we when we lose it? It’s an abstract question, perhaps, until you do start losing it.

Neti, neti, neti — not this, not that, nor that either, say the yogis. But I’ve only looked down.  I haven’t learned the art of looking up past the mind. I suck at meditation, I have to admit. I’m too impatient. I’m actually not bad at focusing on breath and letting thoughts come and go, or even not particularly thinking at all, but hum de hum de padme hum, what happens next, baby? How long did you say I’ll have to do this before states of bliss and cosmic consciousness arise?

But hey, if I’ve really cracked what was wrong and I’m not going to be plagued by anxiety etc anymore, I should have more free time (since anxiety is a terrible time devourer). Maybe this is the year to get meditating seriously and see if I can’t get at least a peek through the clouds.

Of course, I’ll probably just get rained on.

Popping out of the cave to mention Slice of Life, a collection of stories by Paul Haines, put together by Stuart Mayne and Geoff Maloney. The collection includes the Ditmar-winning The Devil in Mr Pussy and the Aurealis-shortlisted Doof Doof Doof. (The Ditmar and Aurealis are Australian speculative fiction awards.) I haven’t read any of Paul’s work, but I do read his blog, and thoroughly believe the description of Slice of Life as “twisted and murderous black humour”. Paul has been undergoing treatment for cancer, which all proceeds from the book will go towards.

On the subject of books, I had a kind of message in a bottle from the past the other day when the always-interesting Des Lewis emailed me to say he’d written a review of The Alsiso Project, a book I contributed to a few years ago. I like something he says about one of the stories (Steve Savile’s): “Thankfully, it is flawed and over-long. The focus is spread. And we can escape.” Whether or not the reader agrees with his assessment, it’s good to see an acknowledgement that perfection (as ordained by the fashions of the times and the habits of a culture, presumably?) isn’t always the best state of being for a story, or any other work of art. How much space is too much, how much time is too much, how much faithful reproduction of the disorder of real life is too much? These are subjective questions, and they oppose the tendency of well-meaning people to make prescriptive statements about the arts (all those statements with “should” in them, which are not infrequently calibrated by the needs of mass commerce, ne?)

Gee, out of the cave and straight onto the soapbox!

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.