an update for friends, relatives, other possibly concerned individuals

in a few hours, i'll be flying out to San Diego for work. no, i am not looking forward to it.

meanwhile, this is a bit late but:

I'm happy to inform you that by the end of office hours today, Apr. 25, the ff. outlets will have their copies of PGS2 delivered to them:

Fully Booked SM North EDSA
Comic Quest SM North EDSA
Fully Booked Promenade Greenhills
Comic Quest Megamall
Books for Less Starmall, EDSA cor. Shaw Blvd
Fully Booked Gateway Mall, Cubao

By the end of the week, more outlets will have their copies delivered to them.

By the end of next week, hopefully, my inventory accounting will be fixed with mag:net so that they will have their copies ready for sale also.

Thanks.

K.

K., as i've mentioned before, is Kenneth Yu, staunch editor of the Digest of Philippine Genre Stories.

and just so you know, no, there still won't be regular updates here for a while yet; there may be pictures over at Zen in Multiply every now and then, but no promises. anyway, i'm a horrible photographer, even with the most idiot-proofed cams.

on the autism-induction apparatus for the duration of the trip:
The Shins, Wincing the Night Away
Feist, The Reminder
Stephin Merritt, Pieces of April
Bamboo, We Stand Alone Together

i may add Patrick Wolf's Lycanthropy and/or Feist's Open Season, but i'm happy with my playlist for the mo.

i'll also be taking either Lud Heat or White Chappell, Scarlett Tracings by Iain Sinclair, or James Salter's Light Years. i haven't yet decided.

right. said more than i'd intended. ta.

V. 1922 - 2007

no, not quite a fan, nor even necessarily a believer. but is there any particular reason i need to explain myself to you? to anyone?

*

later: this ETA/update posted exactly one day before this blog turns one.

quick one with mushrooms...

e. cross saltire is churning-up some real lonely-planet-style blogging over at nontrivialpursuit. good reads, and you'll learn quite a bit about places with not enough vowels in their names. kinda puts to shame a recent realization i had that while my initial vision for 'my fiction' was to manufacture something completely disassociated from reality, i am now almost certainly engaged in attempting to generate a connection between this rather stark, depressing and obviously muddled-up interior and the 'real world'...

but i digress: what i'd really wanted to say before being waylaid by further solipsism and uninteresting narcissistic rumination is that i just had a minorly surreal moment when i realized i was having oyster *mushroom* crisps ('wasabi flavour'...masochistically delish) in Spore City...

screaming memes.

after all this, this, and this, not to mention this followed quite suddenly by this, i wasn't going to drop by, but then i happened upon this while tripping on the interweb again:

"...all I had to do was write a really good short story...it has to have
that lovely, logical, just gutting inevitability. That's where you want to get
to in fiction, whether popular fiction or high literary fiction or whatever -
you want to get to the point where everything feels inevitable, where what
you're getting is a true, and I use this word in the Sandman sense: a true
account of what happened...True, in the sense that it's much more real and
important than facts."

-Neil Gaiman, from Neil Gaiman: The truth according to Sandman, here.

it's up online, and other people have linked to it, and other people will, no doubt, but then when you come across something like this, you've just got to go on and shove it on people, haven't you?

it's like one them thingums, uhm, screaming memes. or something.

a matter of perspective

while E. Cross Saltire begins his journey through a more respectable kind of no-man's land than the one i find myself in, i, at the urging of a friend, a Spore City girl named Annie, set out on my own expedition, alone into the city fully intending to be, as she put it, 'more there'. i was astonished by my response to the place.

i walked, for once, without my glasses, or the burden of my laptop, or even a book; there were pens in my pockets, but they are always there, and otherwise i had nothing, in fact, to occupy my mind but where i was.

there was the City.

none of the details were really new to me, and yet there was no denying that they were: the unusually clean atmosphere in the midst of urbania, suddenly more fresh than sterile, with its abundance of foliage, the Hitchcockian mobs of corvines (and other bird families, i'm sure) giving the impression of trees casting their leaves up to punch holes in the thin grey overcast, to reveal an unflappable, shiny blue beyond. the people, oh yes, the people, with all their accents and fragrances and odors and colors and hues and melodies and gaits and rhythms and inertias...

oh, wait, there were The Shins in my ears, of course. that may have had a hand in it all as well. and i did come home from the trip with some amazing 'new' reads.

it could have been perfect, i suppose. but only just.

wishing for "a certain kind of fiction..."

recent conversations with Banzai Cat have led me into taking on the role of detective rather than mere victim to investigate my own growing discontent with Fiction and all things 'literary'.

the answers, apparently, are always here. if never quite complete.

If one removes all the bells and whistles of contemporary genre fiction---the thrills, the suspense, the ghosts in the machines, the machines themselves, from computers to fembots to gene splicers and dicers in the grocery aisles---one is left with very little to entertain or enlighten readers with a taste for transcendence, or even just something resembling Real Life in the 21st century, where the Future butts up against the Everyday, every day.

Elizabeth Hand

from an old review of M. John Harrison's Travel Arrangements, here, at The SF Site.

*

almost forgot, i've been meaning to say: on the spinner:

Badly Drawn Boy, About A Boy
Stephin Merritt, Pieces of April
The Shins, Wince the Night Away

(while i strongly recommend that you get copies of each yourselves, the links point to where you can check each album out here, over at Zen in Multiply?!?)

yes, i know. the movies take another casualty. (for those outside the 'little Zach-Braff-movie-watching, This-American-Life-listening, Frappuccino-sipping demo-ghetto' -- thank you, Amazon.com's Mike McGonigal -- The Shins gained a wider, arguably more 'mainstream' audience thanks to Braff's Garden State; i've been turned onto The Shins since before i saw that one, always, always looking for and listening to their cds in record bars despite keeping them away from the cash counters due to the usual financial considerations, but that scene with Natalie Portman sealed the deal.)

still, i like those films (step away from the comment link, snarks!), and the music is just plain lovely.

why we write

there is no why.

 

http://uzwi.wordpress.com/2007/04/05/risky-business/

the city stains inadequate

a single cloud reaches out from the line of the city reclining already asleep on the horizon. in this room, you are high enough to see more sky than you are accustomed to: the cloud almost fills the sky, the city's stain incapable of bleeding through it entirely, but almost; a bare rim of white puffs above the muddy orange, barely but successfully limns your perspective in a warm pallor; light, feathery, pure; untouched by grime.

you trace the line where the stain ends and the purity begins; your finger earthy, small, inadequate as the stain as a means of defining the cloud; quiet, so quiet, so serene, and still, you almost don't want to breath. then you remember how clean the air seems up here, and you take a swallow of it with your cheap, unsatisfying wine. you swallow some more; but you will not empty the bottle tonight: it isn't that kind of place.

sometimes, you think, you could love it here. but you know you don't want to, can't afford to; what you love isn't here.

pale shadows: orange. muddy orange. rain. and white.

the only science show predicted by Nostradamus

Brainiac: Science Abuse!

somewhere from series one to four, with Top Gear's Richard Hammond presenting.

we don't get The Office anymore, or The Kumars, but not a bad trade off what with Bond-Girl Rachel Grant popping in every now and then as 'Professor Myang Li' to give science a well-deserved whipping. here, the science is only as useful as it ought to be.

uh, yeah. Jon Tickle's funny, too.

i do miss Kari Byron, though. (her art is pretty cool, too, btw.)

if you liked this title, see the wiki and other online sources for more cool Brainiac taglines.

WiFi goes DIY

http://www.google.com/tisp/

the hunting of the snark

i've been in a biting mood lately. reviews make me tired. they seem pointless: a manifestation of a writer's need to be acknowledged by someone other than himself. the kind of affirmation you get from support groups.

by that logic, negative criticism would be more meaningful, more useful. 'fight club' to those support groups. really? it certainly doesn't seem so. you'll write what you'll write after all, and who should say anyone knows any better than you?

still, i've got a cup or two of red wine in me, and, anyway, i've been in a biting mood lately...

Kenneth Yu asked for feedback on the Digest of Philippine Genre Stories, Issue 1 stories, and i had promised to dish 'em out a while back. so here they are, over on me other life.