need to think up something other than that jiggety jig thing

about an hour til the plane takes off and the gate is open. i hadn't planned on blogging until i got back from my vacation, but didn't quite feel like joining the snaking queue just yet so here i am. mostly just enjoying using this compact NEC keyboard they use at this terminal. the keys have a nice thick compact-notebooky feel to them and make a nice muffled thuckety-thuck sound as you type. the size of the keys is something to get used to all scrunched together as they are, but at least each key is where it should be.

i'd leave you with something interesting, but i don't get to open multiple windows/tabs here, so instead i'll just be redundant and point you over to http://www.jeffvandermeer.com where i've got a couple blog posts up.

right. see you when i see you.

*

not home yet. the queue's still a bit too far off the windy side of snakey for my tastes, so i thought i'd come back and add a bit more to this post.

the autism-induction device is currently loaded with, among other things, the following:

the entirety of:
Harpo's Ghost, Thea Gilmore
Le Maison..., CocoRosie
Year Zero and R3M1X, NIN

some things that show my age, including 'The Killing Moon', Echo and the Bunnymen and 'Head over Heels', Tears for Fears and 'Harbourcoat', REM and 'Six Different Ways', The Cure.

i don't plan on doing much reading or writing on this trip, but i've packed Kleinzeit and the collected and Mervyn Peake-illustrated ed of the Alice books which, for one reason or another, i have never read.

nothing much more interesting to kill time with than that at the moment, i'm afraid. though the queue *is* getting a little less windy now. and since i have less than 5m left in this session, i think i'll hit 'publish' now. ta.

*

still not home. inside the gate. boarding now. just keep forgetting to add:

Happy Holidays everybody!

right. run now.

more weird thingie-ness

woke up later than i had hoped i would this morning (though earlier than yesterday)to find this in the box:

Dear chiles,

Your second blog post is now live. You can find it here:

http://www.jeffvandermeer.com/2007/12/22/weird-tales-chiles-samaniego-on-being-asked/#more-556

Sorry I was late getting it up today. Been very very busy!

Ann

you can fine my previous ED blogpost here, and i first mentioned guest blogging for Ann on Jeff VanderMeer's Ecstatic Days here.

as i'd promised earlier, i think i managed to make more sense and you may find more to talk about there. i only wish i knew more about what i was talking about than i actually did. er. 'know' and 'do' would do just as well in that last statement as things haven't changed much for me on the 'knowing things' front since i sent that post in. er. right.

again, please do drop by, and please do set me straight where you think i've got things crooked.

now i read it again, i wish i'd done less of the 'i am Filipino ergo i am representative of all Filipinos'-thing as people who know me know that i most definitely do not. though yes, i am Filipino. just not typical. not that i imagine i'm typical of anything.

moving on...

*

Mike Mignola is absolutely brilliant. Hellboy is absolutely brilliant. i strongly encourage anyone who doesn't yet know the World's Greatest Paranormal Detective who just happens to be the Beast of the Apocalypse or who only knows him through the Guillermo del Toro movie (brilliant in its own right, imho, just not quite the same) to go out and find a copy of one of the books and read it right now. go. that's right. right now. start with Seed of Destruction and proceed from there; or, if you would prefer to be introduced without being thrown headlong into continuity, The Chained Coffin and Others and The Troll Witch and Others should do nicely.

i finally caved (i'd been hedging for, er, financial reasons) and got the last two volumes (it's xmas, ennit?), Strange Places and The Troll Witch ....

if i have a problem with the Hellboy series it's that i tend to be baffled by the climaxes. however, this is, of course, probably my fault for being a bit slow in the head. and anyway, it's also part of the joy of it, figuring out (or trying to) what just happened; as Mr Mignola himself put it, in his introduction to 'The Hydra and the Lion' from The Troll Witch...: '...in supernatural stories you need bits that are beyond human comprehension...'

apart from that quibble, the art, the story, the stories-within-stories, the ubercool protagonist, the humor, everything in a Mike Mignola Hellboy story is just perfect. imho.

The Troll Witch... also features a story drawn by P. Craig Russel and one by Richard Corben. i pretty much knew what i could expect from Mr Russel, but i admit this was the first time i'd (knowingly) encountered anything by Mr Corben. Mr Mignola's distinctive style will always be *the* way to draw Hellboy, but Mr Corben's work here is absolutely stunning and lovely and brilliant.

so there.

currently reading: Kleinzeit, Russell Hoban

on the spinner: still mostly NIN, but with CocoRosie's Le Maison de Mon Reve and Noah's Ark sprinkled lightly over Year Zero and Y34RZ3R0R3M1X3D

Cloverfield again! and Avenue Q! and...

well, not a Cloverfield update, but a fix. of sorts.

i can't seem to get the video to show up on my previous post. the widget works all right though. on the sidebar. er. in case you hadn't noticed.

those of you reading this on multiply (who wouldn't have noticed) will have to check out the 'real' location of this blog, here:

http://skinnyblogcladdink2-0.blogspot.com

go ahead. grab that widget. you know you want to.

*

i'm happy to report that Mabel thoroughly enjoyed Avenue Q last night, and will now be looking for the copy of the soundtrack i'd left with her which she'd initially ignored for, er, personal reasons.

given the circumstances, the only way i could take her to see it was by proxy. yes, i know. sad, ennit?

thanks to my adoptive pathologist mother, Ella, for 'filling in'.

i really wish i could've been there. times like these, having the brilliant plot device from the brilliant Mike Co's brilliant 'In the Eyes of Many' wouldn't have been all that bad. in fact (say it with me), it would've been brilliant.

(ItEoM, btw, was shortlisted for the 2nd Philippine/Graphic Fiction Awards. if the world made any sense, it would have won, too.

you can read it in next year's anthology from this year's competition.)



on the spinner: Y34RZ3R0R3M1X3D, NIN

Cloverfield 180107

omfg. this. is. so. kewl.

Holy Crap!

it was either that or 'Hell YEAH!', but i already used up my allowable willsmithian quotation quotient over on Jeff's blog.

anyway, enjoy!

Hellboy II: The Golden Army trailer

Add to My Profile More Videos

also here:

http://myspacetv.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=vids.individual&videoid=24351523

thanks to AICN.

The Dark Knight trailer's been around for a while now, too, and you can find a link (and other goodies) on the movie on AICN as well. The Joker's lookin' mighty kewl.

now. when will we get anything from Sin City 2?

Christians are Creepy

well, to be fair, these Christians are, anyway:

http://www.warrenellis.com/?p=5361



it needed to be said.

(discovered through Neil Gaiman's blog)

on being left behind; also a brief thank you to Uncle Zip’s Window

once again, i’m a few steps behind the Real World Out There, which is an awful place to find yourself when you’re trying to write and say things that are provocative or groundbreaking or in any way new and not pshawpfarpflepfart we’ve all heard that before. in this case: i’d been ruminating of late, that is to say, contemplating the idea of saying a few things about how much i have been for the most part these days getting bored with narrative, how i have lately tended towards things that layer rather than (/more than?/as well as?) propel, that build level upon level in many or all or no directions at all rather than one (usually meaning forward or reverse which is linear any which way you see it).

like i said at the beginning, once again, i’m a few steps behind the Real World Out There:

I hate narrative. I hate the narrative of aspiration. I hate Mythodology. I hate the narrativisation of contingent things, which is lying about how the world works; & the narrativisation of lumpy, uncorrected, real, unmade things, which is lying about how the world works; & the narrativisation of the unnarratable turbulent flow of events in time, which reveals your deep shocked fear of how the world works. I hate the vicious confidence trick closure, which says everything is shaped & meaningful according to the deep grammars & ideology of whoever you are. “Story” is so cheap. It is inappropriate in every circumstance, unless you are Condoleeza Rice trying to sell big murder, or unless you are trying to sell cosmetics, or unless you are Paul Coelho selling Spirituality to yummy mummies, mmmmmmm.

- M. John Harrison, here: http://uzwi.wordpress.com/alter-nova/

my own take on it is far less, er, passionate, but it amounts to much the same thing.

Mr Harrison is winding down his blog, and i, for one, admitting perhaps to voyeuristic tendencies i’m probably better off keeping in the dark, will miss peering into the RWOT through Uncle Zip’s Window.

The RWOT will just be that tiny bit less weird.

*

here’s a short list of things i enjoyed reading in 2007 that i didn’t find very propulsive, that presented to me not so much a narrative as an unwinding, an unveiling, an exposition, or even a covering up of something or other, to illustrate what i mean:

A Sport and a Pastime, James Salter
Nova Swing, among other things that never happen, ie, things by M. John Harrison
The Book of Chameleons, Jose Eduardo Agualusa
The Speed of Light, Javier Cercas
Justine, Lawrence Durrell
The Atrocity Exhibition, J.G.Ballard
Alabaster (particularly when swallowed whole and considered in its entirety), Caitlin Kiernan
Amaryllis Night and Day and Fremder, Russell Hoban

i wonder if Mr Harrison would agree with this list, or if i’d misconstrued something else entirely as an agreement of aesthetics? ah well, either way, this is what *i* mean.

quite possibly the best thing i read this year was The Death of A Murderer by Rupert Thomson, which is as good an example of what i’m talking about as any.

well, either that or Jeff Smith’s Bone, but Bone seems to me more of the other thing (ie, narrative) than what i’m talking about, so to mention it here would be putting the lie to what i’ve been saying...oops. ah well. i revel in my own inconsistencies.

*

on the spinner: Harpo’s Ghost, Thea Gilmore

the secret life of a writer

i just spent the evening ironing shirts while watching Asian Idol. to be sure, it wasn't the first time, me ironing shirts. or watching one of the Idol shows.

this may explain my peculiar taste for kitchen sink gothic, or an old desire to write what i'm told would now semi-officially be called 'Spec Chick'.

previous ironing sessions had been executed to the accompaniment of Iron & Wine, Nine Inch Nails, Ani DiFranco and Tom Waits, and, once, Brittany Murphy and Dakota Fanning. Marley Shelton and Heather Locklear were bonuses that night.

ahem. erm. right. i should probably get back to Russell Hoban's Fremder now. good night.

Weird things

this, just in the mail:

Dear chiles,

Your first post is live. Please find it at:

http://www.jeffvandermeer.com/2007/12/13/weird-tales-chiles-samaniego-on-guest-blogging/#more-541

I took some editing liberties (I hope you doh't mind). Dont' sell yourself short! Tell everyone to read and post comments!

Ann

er, so there, that's everyone told, then, yeah? (ie, as Ann says above, please do check it out and post comments!)

Thanks, Ann!

Ann is Ann VanderMeer, current editor of Weird Tales magazine. she asked me a few days ago if i would like to guest blog over on Jeff VanderMeer's Ecstatic Days blog along with other Weird Tales contributors and, well, you can read about my response in the above linked post.

erm. i promise my second post will be much more coherent.

i was about to add that Ann's comments at the end make me feel a little cringey, but having just been told not to sell myself short, i will restrain myself. instead i encourage you to check out Weird Tales online, and maybe avail of their Holiday trial special.

more on Time and the Orpheus later.

meanwhile, i think i may have had a teeny bit of progress at my ongoing experiment/project/whatever, korzybskian autopsy. you might want to check it out. i'm pretty sure it'll all lead somewhere eventually, even if that somewhere proves only to be what Russell Hoban is talking about here.

currently reading (you guessed it, erm, if you've just been to k.a., that is, or by that little clue at the end of the last paragraph if you haven't): Fremder by Russell Hoban. this, after his Amaryllis Night and Day, an absolutely lovely, honest, truthful, realistic (honest!) little weird love story. i wasn't too happy with the ending, but the disappointment wasn't enough to ruin everything else about it for me. Russell Hoban's stuff as i've tasted it is the perfect reading for people who would find the experience of, say, being HALO dropped into a combination of Neal Stephenson's 'snulture' (read: snob culture) geekspeak and the mundane surrealism of David Lynch films in a framework of modern arthouse hyperrealism without a map not at all disagreeable. while Amaryllis might be called (revue-cliche alert#1!) a 'magic realist love story', Fremder is the same sort of (revue-cliche alert#2!) vertigo-inducing SF you'll find if you crack open M. John Harrison's Light and Nova Swing. absolutely heady stuff, in all possible definitions of the term.

also dipping into London: City of Disappearances edited by Iain Sinclair, which seems a perfectly odd companion for Hoban.

right. it is not 3:42 am by the little digital thingie in the corner of Liv's screen. i really must be trying to sleep now. dreamwell.

Philip Pullman was right

my friend E. Cross Saltire asked me to blog about this supposing that i could provide a more substantial argument given those bits of my background that are more or less associated with the material in question. i told him i'd think about it; while i have some strong opinions on the matter, i didn't want to end up providing arguments that were as inappropriate and inadequately considered as this bishop's. but having read E's post, i don't think i can be any more substantial or comprehensive than he's already been:

http://nontrivialpursuit.blogspot.com/2007/12/advice-for-your-excellencies.html

still, just a couple quick things:

2. Avoid making medical claims because, however we look at it, DD does not equal MD. Also, if Your Excellencies will point out that some contraceptives can raise the risk of certain cancers, you will be hard pressed to explain away the fact that contraceptives can reduce the risk of some cancers, and sex without contraceptives raises the risk of other cancers.

and wouldn't you know it, *not* having sex raises the risk for some cancers as well. higher rates of breast and endometrial cancer, for instance, have been observed in nuns.

How holy is choosing the strait and narrow if the wide and broad was never shown?

calls into question the whole 'forbidden fruit' scenario, dunnit?

and finally,

6. Do not oppose humane, non-judgemental counselling and health care for
anyone, even those you consider automatically excommunicated. Being humane and
non-judgemental are good things, Your Excellencies.

you can't imagine just how badly medical professionals need to be reminded of this. quite frankly, i was frequently more horrified by how these 'professionals' treated their patients than by what the patients had done to require treatment in the first place. whatever happened to that bit in the Hippocratic Oath which says, in essence, 'thou shalt not play God'?

(just to be clear, and to divert any potential snarkiness from that particular direction, this is not a statement of support for the medical malpractice law. that's an entirely different set of issues, and not one i'll be getting into here, thank you very much. only that i'm as strongly opposed to it as any sensible person who's been 'on the inside' should be, imho.)

on the conceptual spinner: Sex & Religion, Vai.

Insomniac!

http://www.comicmix.com/comic/comicmix/mundens-bar/3/reader/

actually, Insomniac! is issue 2. you'll be wanting to check that out as well. particularly fans of The Sandman and Marc Hempel.

right. 4:30 AM on a Tuesday. it doesn't get much worse than this.

well. almost.

David Cronenberg's Spider failed to put me to sleep. not that i expected it to. love that film. even with the sound turned down low enough so that all the dialogue becomes distinguishable from Mr Cleg's mumble only by pitch, tone, quality and by not sounding like Mr Cleg at all.

right. back to trying to shut the old brain up and getting some sleep.