books

“Oh, this Twinkie thing, it ain’t over yet.”

I woke up pretty early this morning, even if you discount the weird dream that woke me up around 4 a.m. half convinced a pizza delivery was at the door. In my dream, I was searching for cash I didn’t have, and I think my own shout of “I’ll be right there!” may be what woke me up. I can’t say with any degree of confidence that I didn’t actually shout it in real life, too.

But no, it wasn’t just imaginary pizza delivery that got me out of bed early on a Saturday. My father wanted to take the car in for its annual inspection, and right before 8 a.m. on a Saturday is the best time to bring it to our local mechanic, just as he’s opening up shop. There used to a very convenient Saturday morning train between the station a block from his garage and the station a block from our house, but about a year ago the Long Island Railroad discontinued that train. (Which I found out the hard way when a five-minute train ride became a five-minute train, ride plus a twenty-minute walk, one early weekend maybe two years back.) So I drove over in the other car so I could offer him a ride back.

Only, they didn’t have any inspection stickers today. This is not an infrequent problem, but it’s really the only one we’ve ever had with this mechanic, so I guess we can’t complain. This morning we were delayed getting to the garage, first by a car in front of us that seemed convinced green meant stop, then by a car blocking our turn because he was pulled alongside a taxi cab and was chatting to the driver, and then finally by police cruisers blocking the railroad crossing that runs near the shop. We got there just before the owner did…but there was already somebody else waiting…and he got the last of the remaining inspection stickers.

So I guess we’ll try again next weekend.

Beyond that, I spent a lot of the day reading. I finished No Dominion, the second of Charlie Huston‘s “Joe Pitt Casebooks,” which I guess you could describe as hard-edged, vicious vampire noir. I liked it, same as the first book, Already Dead, and it was definitely a quick read. With it (and a novella or two that may or not really count), I’m only up to 25 books for the year so far, out of my hoped-for annual 50. So maybe it’s a good thing that this morning I bought a copy of the third Joe Pitt book, Half the Blood in Brooklyn. Like I said, they’re quick but entertaining reads.

I also read a few stories still kicking around in my slush pile for Kaleidotrope. I’m closing the zine to submissions in a week, for the rest of the year, so I’m trying to get through what’s still sitting in my in box not yet read.

I went for a walk, did a tiny bit of writing, and then had an idea completely out of the blue that makes perfect sense for the story I’m writing…but of course does mean I need to re-write and re-think pretty much everything I’ve put down so far.

I watched a couple episodes of Breaking Bad — which I can’t believe it’s taken me this long to discover — and then this evening Zombieland –which, if not remarkable, was a whole lot of fun.

And that was pretty much my Saturday.

Monday various

  • It’s just a normal Monday here in New York, but it’s apparently Picnic Day in parts of Australia!

    Picnic Day is a public holiday in the Northern Territory of Australia which takes place every year on the first Monday of August. It was originally declared a public holiday to enable Darwin’s railway workers to go to Adelaide River for a picnic.

    I kind of love the specificity of that, the idea that an entire holiday sprung up just because that’s the day these workers had off from work. And come on, how can you not like a holiday called Picnic Day?

  • Justin Bieber has written a memoir. This is just ridiculous on so many levels.
  • Wait. Now Frank Miller worries about looking silly?
  • If Titanic II was intended as a cheap direct-to-video sequel to the James Cameron movie, that would be weird and maybe worth talking about. But since it’s just about a ship called Titanic II — and is really just your run-of-the-mill crappy direct-to-video disaster movie — it’s really not.
  • And finally…

    For the past 20 years, scientists at the Farallones have been documenting more than just puffin nests and shark breeding around the windswept archipelago 27 miles west of the Golden Gate. They’ve been keeping a daily log of their dreams, which tend to be eerily similar.

    Apparently, it’s called “day residue.” [via]

Tuesday various

  • “Scientists scouring the area around Stonehenge said Thursday they have uncovered a circular structure only a few hundred meters (yards) from the world famous monument.”

    Is it wrong that my first thought was to wonder if it was the Pandorica? [via]

  • Oh, good, because the one thing Torchwood hasn’t been is dark.

    But I kid. A warning, by the way: that link contains a pretty huge spoiler for (the pretty terrific) Children of Earth.

  • Tasha Robinson wonders: Should artists’ lives or opinions affect how people perceive their art?
  • Along somewhat similar lines — that is, of appreciating art on a level perhaps different than what the artist intended — separating the poem from the novel in Nabokov’s Pale Fire. Spoiler warnings here, too, I guess. Mostly, it just makes me want to re-read Nabokov’s book.
  • And finally, Inside the City’s Last Silent Place

    “I wish there were more drama,” said Alexander Rose, “but it’s convivial and collegiate. There’s no Norman Mailer trying to kill his wife in here. No tension, no melodrama.” Mr. Rose, author of American Rifle: A Biography, was taking a break from his work to tell the Transom about the Allen Room, a hush-hush space on the second floor of the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building (formerly the New York Public Library “main branch”) on Fifth Avenue. Founded in 1958 as a tribute to Frederick Lewis Allen, the historian and editor of Harper’s Magazine, the room serves as a workspace to a rotating group of authors. Rubberneckers take note: The door is locked at all times, and access is restricted to those who have book contracts, a photocopy of which must accompany requests for a key card. “It’s like Aladdin’s cave,” Mr. Rose said of the room, which he heard about through the literary grapevine. “I looked it up, and it actually did exist.”

    I work just a block from the Library. Now I guess I just need to write a book. [via]

Monday various

  • Rachel Maddow takes on the “Scare White People” tactics of the right. That this is a tried and tested method for securing votes is only slightly less disheartening than the fact that it seems to be working even today. [via]
  • Rochita Loenen-Ruiz, whose story “Mouse and I” appears in the April 2010 issue of Kaleidotrope, writes about finding her voice as a Filipino science fiction writer:

    I found myself thinking, yet again, on what kind of science fiction a Filipino would write, and how a writer can break free from being someone who emulates the works of writers he or she has admired to become a person who writes with a voice and with a story that comes from the writer’s own soul.

    What things influence the Filipino writer then? What’s our backstory? How can I as a writer coming from a country that has been so colonialized and that is still trapped in a colonial mindset free myself so I can write the fictions that only I can write?

  • She also shares a really terrific talk on “The Danger of a Single Story” by Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.
  • Apparently there is no gravity [via] and time is disappearing from the universe. [via] Or at least, those are some theories.
  • And finally, I don’t know if this story, about a Bosnian man who claims to have been hit by meteorites six times, is made more or less strange by the possibility that it’s all a hoax.

Thursday various