Jeff VanderMeer's Blog, page 154
April 7, 2009
60 in 60: 23 Books in 3 Lines in 1 Post
As the above photo shows, I’ve been preoccupied with shooting down deadlines. The 60 in 60 on the Penguin Great Ideas series should resume next week–who knew I meant 60 books in 60 years–but in the meantime, I’ve been prepping by reading the back covers and first page of each one (cheating? who knows). To give you a preview based on my gleanings, here are my three-line non-trad haikus on each. Prepare to be horrified.
#37 - Henry David Thoreau’s Where I Lived and What I Lived For
Hippy words
Talks
April 6, 2009
FML: Good, Bad, Ugly?
My stepdaughter Erin clued me in to this site, which includes, for example, this anonymous post:
Today, I went on a date with a guy for the first time. We went to Starbucks and got coffee. We talked for awhile, and we weere joking and having a good time. Suddenly, he put his hand on my stomach and said, “soon, this will be plump with my seed.”
I am laughing at a lot of this even as I’m thinking, “I’ve begun to see Facebook status messages that approximate some of this.” Are we all getting a littl
Twitterface
Well, I give up. I’m going to be on Facebook through my mobile phone, so I’ve synched up Facebook and my Twitter. If you want to follow me on Twitter, my Facebook status will post there, along with links to blog posts. I’m not a huge Twitter fan, but that means I’ll have a presence there until that daft micro-fragmentation platform withers away (right about the time that the nano-dinosaurs decide to re-upload into their former mighty sizes and do away with electricity and the intertubes entirely
Music Acquired–Like-y/No Like-y?
Picked up some used CDs. A couple of these folks I’d never heard of before.
The Afghan Whigs - 1965
Isobel Campbell and Mark Lanegan - Ballad of the Broken Seas
Ray Davies - Other People’s Lives
The Fray - The Fray
Emily Haines & The Soft Skeleton - Knives Don’t Have Your Back
Interpol - Our Love to Admire
Kula Shaker - Kollected: The Best Of
Ben Kweller - Changing Horses
Lilys - Everything Wrong Is Imaginary
The National - Boxer
A.C. Newman - Get Guilty
Scientists - Sedition
April 5, 2009
Secret Lives on Brit Fantasy Award Longlist? (Want One?)
Wow, the collection that fell into a black hole of doom and garnered hardly any reviews (despite being close to selling out) made the British Fantasy Awards longlist, and the looooong list in this case, for story collections, ain’t really that long. (How many votes put it on there? One? Two? Three? Doesn’t matter to me.)
I care less and less about awards these days having been too often privy to the garbage that goes on behind the scenes, but it perked up my day a bit to see that just because of
The Church–Shriek Music on MySpace
In addition to the title track from their forthcoming CD, The Church have included a couple of Shriek CD tracks on their MySpace page: Aan Tribal War and Incident on Bannerville.
April 4, 2009
Another for the Archive: Knowing When Not to Write
Another entry from the old blog I’m just bring back over to here, loosely under writing tips. It’s actually kinda funny, because I realize I’m talking about Finch. And I sound kind of bitchy. Still–I was right, I needed the extra time to think about it. Meanwhile, this year is shaping up to be an even mix of fiction and nonfiction, a balance I rather like. Archiving complete.
A few people, some out of concern, some perhaps out of exasperation at finding a VanderProject or VanderInterview staring
So This Is What the Outside World Looks Like…
But where are all the peoples? Oh, there they is.
Booklife Sliver: The Imagination (Draped with Venus in Furs)
(DeVotchka covers the Velvet Underground, transforming the song by re-envisioning it through their own musical imagination.)
The imagination moves beyond passion: it is a life-long relationship with the world that transforms both the world and the writer. All of the best fiction hums and purrs and sighs with the imagination, and in this way fiction mirrors the best of life. But no imagination can long survive without recourse to curiosity and receptivity and discipline as well. It needs all of t
