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.