A new contest

Over where the night is always bright, Amy Ambulette, the winner of my contest, is having a contest herself, a contest called the Moonlight Ambulette Keep Trying Even Harder contest.

Write something!

A meme from Kimbooktu

Here is the original post.

1. Hardcover or paperback, and why?
Pocket paperback for easy toting and myopic night reading

2. If I were to own a book shop I would call it…
Buy Some Damn Books! I believe that it is very important to use punctuation in place names.

3. My favorite quote from a book (mention the title) is…
I have no idea. I am terrible at rememberign quotes. Plus, I kind of hate people who trot out quotes from books in conversation when they can't think of anything good to say. Quotes are for private time people!

4. The author (alive or diseased) I would love to have lunch with would be …
Well, who would I most like to talk to, who would make the best lunch companion and who could afford to pay for my giant, delicious lunch? Is there one person who is all three? I'd love to have lunch with Shelley Jackson, Maureen F. McHugh, Muriel Spark (her disease is failure to still be alive), MFK Fisher (ditto), Alan DeNiro, Julia Child (and again), Jason Lutes and Stephen King could pay the bill.

5. If I was going to a deserted island and could only bring one book, except from the SAS survival guide, it would be…
A huge one, maybe a Norton Anthology. Then I could quiz myself with the questions after each story until Jesus came to save me.

6. I would love someone to invent a bookish gadget that…
made books cheaper

7. The smell of an old book reminds me of…
Thrift stores. Delightful!

8. If I could be the lead character in a book (mention the title), it would be…
One of the first cyberpunk characters? One that doesn't die at the end?

9. The most overestimated book of all time is…
I guess it depends on what time you are in.
eta: Those Chronicles of Narnia book are pretty bad and yet everyone seems to get all misty when they are mentioned.

10. I hate it when a book…
Has embarrassingly terrible female characters.

I am supposed to tag five fine booky folks so here goes:
Moonlight Ambulette, 50 Books, British Adventuress, More Coffee Please and My Tragic Right Hip.

Did you know that the word for web page in Dutch is "webpagina?" Well, now you do.

This is Ham, the first chimp in space:

Image from the Great Images in NASA library.

I wonder if he ever got lonely up there, tough stare and tiny space pants aside? This reminds me of the MFM story "Laika Comes Back Safe" that uses that other famous space animal as a springboard to talk about mysterious attraction and loss. At least that's how I remember it. As we all know, Laika didn't come back. It was a good story.

In non-40-year-old space news, today is my birthday.

For those of us uncomfortably aware of the possibility of getting lost in the early nights of the coming seasons, a beautiful poem about SAD.

I hope to return to the land of the blogging soon. I have been feeling rather ugh and more likely to kick over the many stacks of books on my floor than pluck a book from one. This could be the mentally monopolizing effect of the otherwise interesting nonfiction book I am reading now (and the fact that nonfiction takes me twice as long to read). It could also be that when I get home I am often too tired to think and rarely am able to resist the lure of cotton blankets and vivid dreams.

My push to finish writing about books I have already read is that because of the Brooklyn Book Fest I now have six or so new books to enjoy, minus the copy of Mothers & Other Monsters I bought for a loaner. That Gavin Grant is a charming man and I enjoyed the chat we had at the Small Beer Press booth. His booth companion, whose name I can’t remember, was also a nice guy and they were both helpful while I chose books to try out. I appreciate people who understand thriftiness.

I breezed by the rest of the booths and missed all the speakers. I was there with B and my mother and the Fest was the last thing on our list before my mother had to get back to her bus. So, alas, no journotasticness from me that day. Truthfully, it was nice to just go and enjoy it without having to take notes and try to find people.

Reading and Eating are Perfect Together

My books are so often smeared with chocolate, stained with tea or spotted from the drippings of oily crumbs that I know I should be embarrassed, especially when the book is borrowed from work or a fresh copy from the library.

I can't say that I am embarrassed though, the joys of a solitary (or similarly book-bedecked companionship) meal with a good book are just too good to deny.

Thinking about this because of this, via James Tata.

Aiding and Abetting: A Novel by Muriel Spark

Another summer reading book by the unmatched master of the sentence, Muriel Spark. Another short review from me for a short book.

AA is a re-imagining of the Earl Lucan story that gripped the UK in the seventies and beyond. Basically a story about class and privilege, the Lucan case consists of a few major facts: Lucan was a gambler, his nanny was attacked and murdered in his home, his wife was brutally attacked soon after and then Lucan disappeared, likely aided in his escape by his rich friends. Occasional Lucan sightings in exotic spots like Australia and North Africa continued to feed the story for years later but the erstwhile earl was never found.

Spark takes this very real story and fictionalizes it. Her main creation is another mysterious person, a popular and expensive psychiatrist named Hildegard Wolf who practices in Paris and has an enviable love life. I like Hildegard because Spark has filled her out well; each time she appeared I the book I saw her in my mind vividly. As her story is revealed, she becomes more interesting and the way she becomes tangled in the Lucan affair is nicely invented. Of course Spark invented it all, besides the facts of the case, and it hangs together so plausibly, so perfectly that I thought about it alongside being thoroughly entertained.

Although I say above that Spark is a sentence master, there was no one line (or two) that I felt would capture the charm of AA. But the secret may be that in this sweet little mystery story, Spark breezily covers class issues in Britain, identity, crime, growing up and getting away with it. And just because it goes down easy doesn’t mean that her take on stuff won’t be working away in the back of your brain for some time. It is not her best but it is a perfect summer read or maybe a good book for a cold winter night.

The Family That Couldn’t Sleep by D.T. Max

Last night, sluggishly chugging up to New York from Philadelphia I finished The Family That Couldn’t Sleep by D.T. Max. I got the book at work and will now return it to the shelf of review copies and lonely hardbacks near the window, but it will be returned by someone very satisfied, unlike, I imagine, most of the others on that shelf.

TFTCS is about fatal familial insomnia that is exactly what it sounds like, an inherited disease that causes an insomnia that kills you. One day, usually in middle age, after all the baby-making is done, the victim’s pupils get really small, they start to sweat uncontrollably and they never really sleep again. It is a horrible way to die—as the body shuts down, the victim remains conscious, in fact they can never escape consciousness, expect maybe into a half-sleep that doesn’t refresh or into hallucinations that terrify more than they comfort. Members of the pseudonymous Italian family that harbors FFI know at this point that their loved one is going to suffer and die, and they also know that there is nothing to do to stop it. When FFI brains are autopsied they are full of holes and sometimes full of clumps of dead protein strands. Only forty families in the world are known to have FFI, but as Max’s book deftly shows, the story of prion diseases, of which FFI is one of a handful including mad cow disease, is complicated, important and fraught with intrigue and strange characters.

The introduction to this book left me cold. I am not sure why. However as soon as the chapters began I was immediately drawn into the story of the Italian family whose story frames the book and the larger story of the discovery and investigation of prion diseases, misunderstood because they are not alive like viruses or bacteria, they don’t have a clear transmission path and they don’t have an easy or uniform presentation. I learned so much from this book and was entertained thoroughly for the weeks I read it.

It is hard to come up with a passage to quote for you to show Max’s elegant style. This book was great for the way he presented the story, allowed for interesting digressions and made scientific concepts easy to understand and fit into a larger discussion of the way medicine and science work in the discovery of new diseases. As I read, questions that arose were answered, avenues I never thought of were peeked into and unexpected details popped from the story and into my imagination.

Short review: I loved it and loved the surprise of loving it.

kimbooktu is putting together a list of bookish links on her site. If you want to be included, go there, check it out and then email her.

Sine she was so nice as to include me, I guess I'd better hurry up and write her a description of this circus of cerebral delight.

Back List Boogie

Approximately one million years ago I received a couple of sci-fi-y books from Soft Skull Press to get me primed and ready for Jamestown. They were Under My Roof by Nick Mamatas and H2o: A Novel by Mark Swartz. Both are thin, quick reads and neither really got me in the good spot.

The better of the two was UMR. It is a YA novel, but could definitely be enjoyed by adults, and was by many. In a post-apocalyptic USA, a psychic teen watches his world crumble then reform into an action-packed dream when his father decides to play out his midlife crisis by seceding from the country. His bargaining chip is a homemade atom bomb hidden in a garden gnome. In the beginning, having a country is like having a popular but mediocre rock band; people appear from everywhere to get in on the action, but few see the rebellion for what it really is. Because the kid can read his father and everyone else’s thoughts, he knows, but doesn’t quite know what to do. I think this is an apt metaphor for adolescence and maybe a ten to twelve-year-old would be really into the crazy stuff that happens and the character’s ability to eavesdrop on people’s thoughts.

I am going to do Mark Swartz a great disservice and attempt to review his book even though I don’t really remember it. It does say something that I was unwilling to re-read this book for a fresh look. The plot goes something like this: in a world without potable water, where artificial water-like drinks are heavily advertised and rarely drank, a scientist discovers a natural fungus that seems to exude more fresh water than the seawater it takes in. He is only a pawn in the water wars and knows it, but his doesn’t stop him from trying to be an agent of his own fate. This does not go well for him. The scientist character lacks a total personality which made it hard to root for him and the secondary characters, a natural water activist, a PR lady, weren’t that intriguing either. I suppose the world Swartz built was meant to carry the novel but it didn’t.

These two books aside I am still excited and surprised by much of Soft Skull’s catalog. They are in more financial trouble than usual so go there and buy some books. While you are at it, buy Heredity by Jenny Davidson for me.

More Comics

Doing some internetting on Cliff Face Comics I found a link to Julia Wertz's The Fart Party a comic that is now dear to my heart.

TFP made me feel many things:
1) laughy
2) bloated
3) lazy
4) missing my brother with a more targeted than usual ache. this is the one that really did me in.
5) inspired

If you read it, you will want to stalk her too, now much easier since she moved to New York.

Question

Have any of you seen the film Born to Win by director Ivan Passer? It played last night at the Film Forum as part of their NYC Noir series. Don't worry, it was just a kinda boring junkie romp through 70s-style Time Square.

I came away from a screening of that film with one question and one question only: What the fuck was that thing on George Segal's weiner? As B put it, an "unnaturally bound" genital region marred Segal's full frontal nude scene and I need to know if it was cloth, some sort of nut-bra or a hastily concocted hideaway made from an infant's athletic cup and a few rubber bands. It looked like a very wobbly person of small stature taped his dick to his nuts.

Even with exhaustive googling ("george segal penis,""born to lose nude segal,"etc) we could find nothing. No pictures and only a few mentions of the scene in question- nothing about the strange and obvious dong catcher. Now it's almost as if we didn't see it at all...

Any information, screenshots or analyses would be greatly appreciated.

Two Things of Importance

Very Important: Lynn Peril of Mystery Date has a blog! Mystery Date was my favorite zine as a teen. It was a huge influence on my interest in gender studies, collecting crap and listening to the past to understand the present. One time my father, knowing very little about the self-published world, threw away a postcard from Lynn with an update about MD thinking it was some kind of perverted dating service come-on. Silly Dad. Her book, Pink Think, is the best birthday present I have never recieved.

Less Important: NYRB is having a summer sale with good discounts on their book collections and 25% off single books.

When a day filled with shameful consumerism becomes night, what else is there to do but buy comics?

At Forbidden Planet I perused the single-issue racks for something new and saw the cover for Tear-Stained Makeup #6. I liked way the cover girl’s life was in her room and obviously not going so well. I flipped through and liked what I saw and being the narrative completist that I am I was pleased to find that all the back issues were available.

TSM is a story of a band, a librarian, a possibly evil plot and lots of broken hearts. The art is noticeably, wonderfully handmade. You can feel the hours artist Marcos Perez put into each issue. In issue six, he gives us a page-by-page breakdown of what each section took, in both an artistic and emotional way. I love each of the covers; numbers 2, 5 and 6 are the ones who get left more in the will.

The one stumbling block to my total enjoyment of the series is the writing. On the whole it is the better side of serviceable, but Perez stumbles here and there with dialogue and weird, encyclopedic sound bites that float from the characters’ mouths like doo doo-filled balloons. Tildy, the librarian, has an awkward exchange with her former roommate in #4 about the Lower East Side’s history: “That’s what I love about New York. No matter how much is changes, coffee shops, boutiques, condos, it can’t lose what came before. All the hopes, dreams, blood… and semen are still there!” Whoa. We learn in this issue that Tildy has a science journal worthy memory, so that’s her excuse I guess, but in issue 6, another character has an ill considered rap session in a music store about the history of the electric guitar. Just get back to the story Marcos! Us smartypants can do our own research.

Even so, TSM is a fun read and I can’t wait to see what happens next. TSM has certainly convinced me that I need to check out the rest of Cliff Face Comics stuff.

I also got a blue and maroon inky issue of Paping that I can't wait to tear into.

The Winner is...

Well, judging this contest was very difficult. All the entrants crafted, at the least, diverting stories, and those that put in a little more effort really blew my mind, sending stories that gave Mr. LaBovick life, either by making him real or taking his mystery and using it to illuminate another character.

Total disclosure: of the six people who sent me stories, three are my buds in some way and another is a book blog master. I made this decision with the help of B, who cares not for my blogular connections or real life friendilations.

Thanks to everyone who wrote something. Since you all took the time to send a piece, you all get of copy (by email) of everyone else's stories. A little prize for taking the time. If you don't hink I have your email, please send it to me!

Fa Fa Fa, the winner is Amy Shearn of moonlight ambulette. Amy send me your address!

Her story is here. Enjoy.

"Brian LaBovick: I think it was an accumulation of things." by Amy Shearn

With people like Brian you had to guess that it was complicated, that there were explanations just beyond the field of your vision, things that you would never quite fully understand. The one thing everyone knew about him was that his family was Mormon. We didn’t actually know what it meant, but we knew that it was something mysterious, like the Masons. Brian was in the smart kid classes but for some reason had a reputation for being slightly retarded, or possibly just crazy, but I suspected none of his strangeness had anything to do with the Mormon thing and I still think that that is the case. If anything it freed him. People expected him to be a little weird anyway so he just ran with it. He dressed entirely in white. First he had a big shaggy poof of hair on the top of his head that resembled yellow pubic hair, and everyone made fun of him for that. Then one day he came to school completely shaved from head to toe – even his eyebrows were gone – and that was almost too weird to even make fun of. He had created his own language in study hall – I watched him copy out the final version of the alphabet – and would sometimes mutter words that others thought were nonsense but that I knew were clever comebacks in the secret code. He confused everybody. That was why I started spreading the rumor that he was my boyfriend. I wanted to confuse everybody, too. I wanted to be sitting beside him in study hall when the rumor got back to him, so that he and I could laugh at how ridiculous the rumor was, and then maybe look soulfully into each other’s eyes. There was no boy in the whole school who seemed capable of gazing soulfully into anyone’s eyes except for Brian LaBovick.

I wanted to speak to him in his secret language. I wrote him a note in study hall. It said, Csjbo, J uijol zpu bsf dvtf. This meant, Brian, I think you are cute. I had stolen his code by watching over his shoulder without him realizing, and I had been practicing various words so that I could speak it too, if the need arose. There was no one in the whole school who would have done that except me, and I wanted him to know this, to feel it in his sternum, but then I lost my nerve and kept the note in the inner pocket of my backpack and never did give it to him. You would think a boy like that, eyebrowless as a gigantic flesh-colored salamander, would be thankful that any girl thought he was cute, but to be honest I wasn’t sure he would be amused. He seemed above that kind of thing. He was taking extra classes at the community college – astronomy and poetry-writing – and I’d heard he didn’t even have a TV. He was probably going to be a Mormon priest eventually. And maybe he’d think I was no real prize myself. Maybe he could see the ugliness at the core of people. In fact I was sure he could, and that’s why he didn’t care about being called names and getting pushed around. None of this high school business probably meant anything to him at all. But then thinking about that annoyed me a little, because of course I had ugliness inside but who didn’t, and I had enough un-ugliness to have learned Brian’s secret language and so he should have been able to know this somehow and therefore to love me.

But I guess I didn’t know him at all, because I would not have thought he was capable of doing the things that were then done. No one knew who was skinning the chipmunks in the ravine near the football fields but everyone knew who was beating up Otis, the retarded boy, and it was definitely Brian LaBovick. It was really hot out there on the pavement. We knew there were only a few minutes before teachers and school security showed up to break up the fight so we tried to watch hard. “What happened?” I asked a kid I knew. He shrugged. “Tommy and those guys kept asking Brian about how he and Otis spend their weekends, saying how they were best friends and everything like that. I guess Brian wanted to prove him wrong.” “That’s awful,” I said. It really was awful in about fourteen different ways. Brian had pinned the fat but helpless Otis to the ground and was looking at his fist, as if consulting it about what to do next. “Isn’t he your boyfriend or something?” said the kid. “You have a great ugliness inside you,” I told him, “and also, you shouldn’t listen to rumors.”

Even though no one thought of me as the kind of person who would have done this, I stepped forward and tried to grab at Brian’s sleeves, but he just swatted me away. Poor Otis wasn’t crying but his face was impressively purplish and his eyes screwed shut, and there was this heat coming off Brian, this hard, carbony smell. But I was the one with the key. I was the only one who could stop him. “Brian,” I cried, in his own language, and then I took a deep breath and tried to summon up all of my bravery and strength and then I shouted, “Tupq! Tupq! Tupq!” I wasn’t sure how to pronounce it, so I said it like, “Tup-que,” and maybe I was pronouncing it wrong, maybe that was my fault, but Brian just slammed his palms onto Otis’s chest and stood up suddenly, looking more like he’d run out of ideas than like he’d surrendered to mercy, and then he swatted away my arms again. “Tupq,” I said again, even though there wasn’t anything to stop anymore. Maybe I had thought we would share a jolt of recognition, like two aliens who had rediscovered each other in hostile territory. Or, maybe also I felt a little like what’s-her-face, like Helen Keller’s teacher, like the one special person in the world who was fearless and kind enough to break through. Whatever it was, Brian didn’t look at me and I didn’t look at him and the gathered crowd of our classmates started to roar with laughter, going, “Tup-que, tup-que,” and Brian sort of brushed by me and said only, sneeringly, “Jejput” – Idiots – and I agreed, silently, with all of my being, and that was the last any of us ever saw of him.

Oh Jad, don't be worried about your irregular time spot. That's what podcasts are for.

PS> please upload the other seasons. I am sick of listening to season 4.
PPS> wanna do it?

(via ScienceBlogs)

the weekend

After long, hard consideration, I am leaving the computer behind this weekend while I sojourn to the land of anxiety.

When I return I will announce the winner of the contest, have some new reviews for you and hopefully some pictures.

Dear Lisa,

I totally had a contest on my blog and got a whole seven responses! Very exciting! Anyway I am reading them all now and deciding who should win. The prize is a box of books and other assorted delights. Don't worry, I promise not to give away that annotated volume of Star Trek essays you gave me for middle school graduation. Who knew you were the progenitor of slash fic?

Anyway, I said I would publish the winning story, but do you think I should publish the winning story instead, or have part of the prize bethat the winner gets to read them all or what?

Rigth now I am wearing a shoelace tied around my neck and the people at work don't seem to like it. It's not entirely unlike those tie-dyed eyepatches we made for the prom...

Miss you,
Carrie

2 more things...

... about those Matthew Sharpe books, Stories from the Tube and Nothing is Terrible:

1) they both include scenes where oil is boiled for quick-frying. Quick frying and creepiness.

2) in both reviews I mention English class/assignments. This sounds bad, but it is actually great. His work really shows someone having fun with the limits as a growing talent. Somehow that equals English class for me.