chlorine hair, short story reviews and ballard interview
There is little more delicious than going to sleep in a stuffy room with slightly damp hair that smells like chlorine. It reminds me of summer vacations, concrete days by the pool. Etc. Our new version of that is Open Swim at the YMCA from 8:30 until 9:45. Just nip in before bed. Yes, I know if I don't start washing the chlorine out of my hair it'll turn colors and brittle and be extremely unhappy. Also, if our land(read: student ghetto)lord fixes the air conditioner maybe we won't need to escape the stuffiness so much.
Still, chlorine hair smell = good.
Various odds and ends today and not much else.
Our Girl in Chicago has a great post on lost things, or traded in things, or things that turn up, based around an article in today's Wall Street Journal about unusual items that have turned up in bookstores. She plugs the extremely wonderful Found magazine, from which I've cribbed the image below. (If anyone can tell me how you make text flow around smaller pictures or how to make them appear smaller, you would be much thanked -- gwenda007 AT gmail DOT COM.)
I always assume when I buy books at used bookstores that the people they're inscribed to are dead. Maybe this is an unfair assumption, but I find it comforting and intend to cling to it. Without the veneer of betrayal (death offers a legitimate reason for the unloading of books), reading the inscriptions feels like being told a secret and as a self-proclaimed rescuer of certain books from their used bookstore, basement or garage sale, I also like feeling like just one more home in a long line. It's almost like the cat or dog that shows up on your doorstep, becomes a beloved pet, then disappears to repeat the process a few years later. Or maybe it's not like that at all.
Since Mr. Rowe hasn't been updating his site, I'll point you to Bluejack's excellent review of "The Voluntary State" in the latest Internet Review of Science Fiction. (You have to register; but I believe you can still get a year free until the end of June. So hurry! Matthew Cheney has a really interesting piece in this one too!) A little taste of it:
Thus begins a remarkable adventure, as notable for its moving narrative as for the nearly unintelligible world in which it takes place. Although this appears to be a physical world, it has all the indications of some sort of virtual reality: the Gulf of Mexico, there, is actually the Tennessee River. When people bleed, they bleed real blood. When they die, they really die. But there is an interchangeability of identity, and a manufacturedness to things, interspersed with datacentric technology giving this remarkable world the organic feel of life fused to information.
And speaking of short fiction, I also found a great review of Ted Chiang's short story collection by China Mieville (from all the way back in April, but hey, I missed it then, so maybe you did too):
The short story is, apparently, in crisis: so deep, in fact, that there is an Arts Council-supported campaign to rescue it, one of the aims of which is to give the form "more prestige and a higher profile". Yet short stories have always been indispensable in SF, fantasy and horror: there, at least, reports of the death of, etc. Even in genre, though, there's still the rule that says you can't get a short-story collection out until you've published a novel or two. Two young Americans have emerged as pre-eminent exceptions to this dictum, and very important new voices in the field. One is Kelly Link, whose magnificent book Stranger Things Happen is not yet published in this country. The other is Ted Chiang.
AND, more to the point on Ted's collection:
In Chiang's hands, SF really is the "literature of ideas" it is often held to be, and the genre's traditional "sense of wonder" is paramount. But though one reads Stories of Your Life with a kind of thematic nostalgia for classic philosophical SF such as that of Asimov and Theodore Sturgeon, the collection never feels dated. Partly this is because the "wonder" of these stories is a modern, melancholy transcendence, not the naive 50s dreams of the genre's golden age. More important, the collection is united by a humane intelligence that speaks very directly to the reader, and makes us experience each story with immediacy and Chiang's calm passion.
I'm guessing about 99.9 percent of the five people who read this thing have already read everything Ted's written, but you just never know. If you're holding out, you're missing out. Go read it. And buy the British edition, which is a lovely thing to behold.
How I happened on that review was reading this really fascinating interview with JG Ballard. (Via CAAF at Maud Newton.)
And that's it.
worm "Wound That Never Heals," Jim White (new album out on June 8)
namecheck Fill in the ____________
Still, chlorine hair smell = good.
Various odds and ends today and not much else.
Our Girl in Chicago has a great post on lost things, or traded in things, or things that turn up, based around an article in today's Wall Street Journal about unusual items that have turned up in bookstores. She plugs the extremely wonderful Found magazine, from which I've cribbed the image below. (If anyone can tell me how you make text flow around smaller pictures or how to make them appear smaller, you would be much thanked -- gwenda007 AT gmail DOT COM.)
I always assume when I buy books at used bookstores that the people they're inscribed to are dead. Maybe this is an unfair assumption, but I find it comforting and intend to cling to it. Without the veneer of betrayal (death offers a legitimate reason for the unloading of books), reading the inscriptions feels like being told a secret and as a self-proclaimed rescuer of certain books from their used bookstore, basement or garage sale, I also like feeling like just one more home in a long line. It's almost like the cat or dog that shows up on your doorstep, becomes a beloved pet, then disappears to repeat the process a few years later. Or maybe it's not like that at all.
Since Mr. Rowe hasn't been updating his site, I'll point you to Bluejack's excellent review of "The Voluntary State" in the latest Internet Review of Science Fiction. (You have to register; but I believe you can still get a year free until the end of June. So hurry! Matthew Cheney has a really interesting piece in this one too!) A little taste of it:
Thus begins a remarkable adventure, as notable for its moving narrative as for the nearly unintelligible world in which it takes place. Although this appears to be a physical world, it has all the indications of some sort of virtual reality: the Gulf of Mexico, there, is actually the Tennessee River. When people bleed, they bleed real blood. When they die, they really die. But there is an interchangeability of identity, and a manufacturedness to things, interspersed with datacentric technology giving this remarkable world the organic feel of life fused to information.
And speaking of short fiction, I also found a great review of Ted Chiang's short story collection by China Mieville (from all the way back in April, but hey, I missed it then, so maybe you did too):
The short story is, apparently, in crisis: so deep, in fact, that there is an Arts Council-supported campaign to rescue it, one of the aims of which is to give the form "more prestige and a higher profile". Yet short stories have always been indispensable in SF, fantasy and horror: there, at least, reports of the death of, etc. Even in genre, though, there's still the rule that says you can't get a short-story collection out until you've published a novel or two. Two young Americans have emerged as pre-eminent exceptions to this dictum, and very important new voices in the field. One is Kelly Link, whose magnificent book Stranger Things Happen is not yet published in this country. The other is Ted Chiang.
AND, more to the point on Ted's collection:
In Chiang's hands, SF really is the "literature of ideas" it is often held to be, and the genre's traditional "sense of wonder" is paramount. But though one reads Stories of Your Life with a kind of thematic nostalgia for classic philosophical SF such as that of Asimov and Theodore Sturgeon, the collection never feels dated. Partly this is because the "wonder" of these stories is a modern, melancholy transcendence, not the naive 50s dreams of the genre's golden age. More important, the collection is united by a humane intelligence that speaks very directly to the reader, and makes us experience each story with immediacy and Chiang's calm passion.
I'm guessing about 99.9 percent of the five people who read this thing have already read everything Ted's written, but you just never know. If you're holding out, you're missing out. Go read it. And buy the British edition, which is a lovely thing to behold.
How I happened on that review was reading this really fascinating interview with JG Ballard. (Via CAAF at Maud Newton.)
And that's it.
worm "Wound That Never Heals," Jim White (new album out on June 8)
namecheck Fill in the ____________
posted by Gwenda @ 6/23/2004 04:29:00 PM
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