Category: Books

Baudrillard would actually get a kick out of this whole thing

July 26, 2006 /

The phrase “Christ of the Barricades” popped into my head this evening and won’t leave. I knew I didn’t invent it, but my usual sources for cultural context nearly failed me–Maria hadn’t heard it, nor had Wikipedia, and Google gave me only one result. That result led me to historian Frank Paul Bowman, who wrote a book in French called Le Christ des barricades in 1987. Yes, in French, and no, it doesn’t appear to be available in translation.

Putting the phrase in French and applying it to 1789-1848 (the book’s subtitle) certainly places it in context, but that only makes me want to read more. Unfortunately, I know from painful experience that academic texts with intriguing titles end up being, too often, boring and labored with odd extended rants about Disneyland. Also I don’t know French. So I’ll probably never read Le Christ des barricades.

But that’s what we have participatory media for, I suppose. What does “Christ of the Barricades” mean to you? In 101 words?

It is fun to make pictures

April 28, 2006 /

Third monochrome image post in a row! This one actually serves a purpose: it’s a very rough (and lazily photoshopped) mockup of what I have in mind for the cover of the Anacrusis book.

Brendan Adkins: Ommatidia

Image credits: the human eye came from a really nice BY-SA macro shot called fóvea, and the bug eye from a BY-ND shot called drosoph. The latter makes me unhappy, because I’m clearly deriving from a NoDerivs work, but I can’t find the photographer’s contact info to ask permission. If you are the photographer, please write me! Oh, and also write if you have a strong opinion about the cover.

You can spell cataloging with or without the U

April 14, 2006 /

Hammering on the theme of my inability to escape YA literature, LibraryThing has apparently added a new statistic: the average publication year of your books. I haven’t catalogued everything I own quite yet, but still, did it have to be 1996?

When I get a chance to sit down and do it, cataloging on LibraryThing is one of my favorite, most meditative activities. I compare it to Scrooge McDuck taking a swim in the Money Bin.

April 13, 2006 /

For probably fifteen years I’ve been haunted by the image of a man falling down a flight of stairs, falling apart at the bottom to become just a coat wrapped around an IV stand, hung with dozens of tape recorders. I knew this image was from The Tattooed Potato, a bleak and frightening book I’d read (exactly once) in elementary school. Last week, while in the library, I suddenly had to go check it out and read it. (It is not actually very bleak or frightening now, and in fact that exact image isn’t in the book.)

As per NFD policy, I’m going to wait a little while before I write any more about the book–I only finished it ten minutes ago. I will say this: it’s one thing to realize that one still reads for the things one first found in middle school. It’s another to understand that the nature of names, protagonism, surreality, pacing and imagery in one’s own writing all basically derive from an author one read in fourth grade.

Hey, look, I found a good way to link books!

March 23, 2006 /

John Joseph Adams asked what are your top ten SF-F books not written by white men? Actually, he asked it in two parts: a top-ten list of nonmen, followed by a top ten list of nonwhites. Like everyone else who’s responded so far, I can do a list of women easily; embarrassingly (and typically), of the SF-F authors whose race I actually know, almost all of them are white (the late Octavia Butler seems to be a common exception). I might be able to do a nonwhite list, but it’d be almost all comics creators.

Anyway, my top-ten-women list demonstrates a pretty strong pattern.

The Blind Assassin, Margaret Atwood
Howl’s Moving Castle, Diana Wynne Jones
Magic for Beginners, Kelly Link
Tehanu, Ursula Le Guin
The Homeward Bounders, Diana Wynne Jones
A Wind in the Door, Madeleine L’Engle
The Hero and the Crown, Robin McKinley
Lioness Rampant, Tamora Pierce
The Dark is Rising, Susan Cooper
Tie: Deep Wizardry, Diane Duane, and The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood

Is it usually this obvious that my literary development halted in middle school?

March 7, 2006 /

I just finished The Book of the New Sun and I’m not going to talk about it for a while; I learned my lesson when I tried to write up The Blind Assassin a few years ago and came off like a blatherskite. (Search for it if you want, but I warned you.)

I’m not sure if The Book of the New Sun was good, but it was amazing.

Gene Wolfe is a curbstomper

February 23, 2006 /

I got these new dress shoes a while ago, where “dress shoes” is defined as “the shoes that are not my sneakers,” and man, they are some shitkickers. They’re semigloss black leather with rivets around the lace holes. The soles are like an inch thick with a deep tread, and I’m pretty sure they have steel toes. We’re basically talking about a boot with the calf cut off here. I like them a lot, although the laces are fraying really quickly.

The reason I offer this description is so that I can properly explain what Gene Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun is doing to me. Everybody talks about Wolfe, of course, but they talk about him in the same vein as the SFWA Grand Masters, of whom only Le Guin is interesting. I checked out the Book of the New Sun as a kind of homework assignment, but when I opened it, it commenced immediately (and has not ceased) to kick me in the head. With those shoes.

Segue of brutality and being amazed, the current storyline at Achewood is a masterwork in progress. When I start awarding the Grand Masters of Webcomics, I will hold up one long printout of the Great Outdoor Fight and say “this. This is what you must achieve.” For maximum run-up, start with Ana-Tomix and never stop reading, ever. But seriously, don’t click if you’re squeamish. Achewood is often unkind to squeams.

December 16, 2005 /

I have totally been served. Diane Duane, who evidently reads her referral logs with as much care as I do, wrote me an email confirming the corrections Wheeler offered the other day to my entry about her entry:

Dear Brendan,

Thanks for the mention. :)

BTW, I’ve known about Lulu.com for a long time: I used their pricing model to come up with the range of prices mentioned. Obviously there’s nothing particularly new about the concept…except, maybe, not giving up on a situation that common publishing wisdom has routinely up until now dismissed as a lost cause. But much has changed: so we’ll see what happens.

My main point was that, for the size of book in question, POD is still kinda pricey, and I wanted to see if there was any interest among the readership before I started serious thinking / work on the project. Fortunately it looks like there’s a fair amount of interest: now all I have to do is (a) consider my schedule and (b) convince my agent. ;)

Best! D.

Diane Duane wrote me an email!

Honestly, I am going to stop with the link blurbs soon

December 14, 2005 /

Diane Duane, once one of my favorite YA authors, wants to write a third book in a series that has many fans, but didn’t sell well enough to merit her publisher’s interest. She’s putting out feelers to determine whether that small but fervent audience would pay $20-$25 for a paperback copy; if so, she’ll finish writing it and self-publish. I’ve already seen her plugged by Neil Gaiman, Copyfight and who knows where else. Alan Wexelblat (in the latter) lauded her for “experiments in new business models.”

Except it’s not a new business model at all. Webcomics and indie RPGs, to name just the two that I know of, have built industries out of nothing via self-publishing and print-on-demand. It’s not about vanity anymore–it’s the members of Blank Label putting out their own collections, cheap, with unheard-of profit margins; it’s Dogs in the Vineyard still selling two copies a day after a year and a half, which is more than most big-press authors can say after their first three months. The only thing new about Duane’s idea is that she’s got offline name recognition going into the thing. And, well, it’s new to her.

I wonder if some kind soul is going to inform her of the existence of Lulu?

The Central Ethos of Harry Potter

September 29, 2005 /

I’m not sure what Fantine was going to say, but here’s my overanalysis: the central ethos of Harry Potter–that one should trust children to be competent, but shield them from the consequences of failure; that a parent should protect them from harm, but never information–is a highly political one. It’s also already stated in about a jillion other YA books, but when was the last time it was distributed on such a scale? When was the last time it was internalized so widely, so willingly, outside the classroom, by children and adults?

It’s at that question that I start to wonder what the book-burning groups are really out to fight.