“Vikings will work for plunder. Geeks and artists will work for a dream. But businesspeople require… other forms of motivation.”

SF icon Neal Stephenson wishes video games with swords were more fun. And why the hell shouldn’t we help him out with that?

See: Neal Stephenson’s Kickstarter for CLANG (a.k.a. “Guitar Hero with swords”).

Basically: “Hi, I’m Neal Stephenson. I like hitting other people with sharp objects. I am dissatisfied with representation of this activity in existing virtual entertainment for nerds. I would like to make better virtual representation of this activity.” [N.B. I’m a gamer. No actual nerd-hate contained in this post; that would be silly.]

Even if you’re not inclined to contribute, make sure to watch the accompanying videos, which are delightfully absurd. If you’ve ever wanted to hear Neal Stephenson dryly comment on the current state of video-game combat, watch him recruit a Viking berserker to lure a caged CEO into fueling their failing studio’s electricity via human-sized hamster wheel, or witness the same Viking berserker testing a hipster’s reflexes, now’s your chance!

– E

I can’t get enough of…

…the superhero redesigns over at Project: Rooftop! Jemma Salume’s winning entry for the Canary on the Catwalk contest was my first (and possibly still greatest) love (if I could marry an illustration…) (IT’S JUST SO PERFECT), but there’s always something new to catch my eye, often accompanied by tantalizing snippets of imagined storylines.

I wish Denis Medri’s 1950’s Batman reboot were a real thing, for starters; it’s just the perfect blend of retro glam and grit, down to the muddied-up candy hues of the color palette. Betty Paige as Catwoman, hot-rod Batmobile, and leather jackets everywhere – sigh.

Project: Rooftop is also fun in that it highlights one of the most fascinating elements of the superhero genre: the relative freedom that different creators have to weld new themes, aesthetics, and cultural anxieties onto the preexisting chassis of a given character or series. I can’t think of any other contemporary media that enjoy both the long-term continuity and short-term adaptability of a comic-book hero who’s remolded and rebooted (and occasionally resurrected) over the course of countless issues, in the hands of dozens of artists and writers, each seeking to carve out new narrative space and (ideally) to reflect some aspect of contemporary culture. Hellblazer (which has been running continuously since 1988) has to be given particular props in the continuity department, since its timeline progresses and its characters age more or less in real time – in my mind, that level of verisimilitude can bolster the series’ effectiveness as a work of cultural criticism, though I haven’t really read far enough along yet to judge how well John Constantine ages as a character past the ’80’s.

Of course the eerie agelessness of most superheroes simply adds to their status as modern-day quasi-deities. I can’t remember who it was whom I first saw drawing a parallel between the teeming universes of Chinese folk traditions and superhero comics (possibly Barry Hughart? I can’t find the quote, at the moment), but it’s an apt comparison.

– E

Ray Bradbury, R.I.P.

Ray Bradbury passed away yesterday at the age of 91, during the transit of Venus. I’m too stunned to feel right now, but I know I’m going to miss him.

Some articles and remembrances (you can find a far more exhaustive list at Charles Tan’s blog here):

New York Times obituary
Obama’s tribute
Caitlín Kiernan (one of my favorite stories of hers is “Bradbury Weather” – it’s an sf tale set on Mars, of course): “He showed me how to rub two words together and make a spark that could become a glorious and terrible inferno.”
Neil Gaiman in The Guardian: “Ray Bradbury was the kind of person who would give half a day to a kid who wanted to be a writer when he grew up.”
Neil Gaiman’s introduction to The Machineries of Joy
Lev Grossman in Time: “Bradbury was a fearless explorer of both outer space and inner— they were really the same thing to him. He loved innocence, but somehow that never impaired his understanding of evil.”
Bruce Sterling in the NY Times:“He used to speak of a mystical experience: instead of attending a family funeral, he ran off to a carnival. He found a sideshow huckster named “Mr. Electrico,” who told him that he was not a 12-year-old but a reincarnated spirit. He hit him on the head with an electrical wand and told him to aspire to immortality.
If it sounds like a half-hour fantasy TV episode, it’s probably because Bradbury wrote so many of those, years later. But more important, it’s a metaphor for sci-fi as a way of life: departing a funereal mainstream culture to play techno-tricks with the tattooed sideshow weirdos.”

– E

Nebulas and more farewells

Been behind on award etc. news, I know, but that’s just how we roll around here these days.

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Congratulations to the 2011 Nebula winners!!

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Maurice Sendak passed away on Tuesday, May 8, at the age of 83.

Kakaner has a very sweet story about the importance of Where the Wild Things Are in her childhood, but I’ll leave her to tell it if she likes. Outside Over There was my Sendak of choice, tapping as it did into my embryonic love for tales of uneasy melancholy and queer nocturnal goings-on, kickstarting my obsession with changeling stories before I knew what a changeling was, and giving me exactly the best kind of nightmares in the weeks after my kindergarten teacher first read it to us. (Only a little bit facetiously: It’s a shame that most obituaries don’t seem to mention the influence of Outside Over There on Jim Henson’s Labyrinth, which launched its own wave of weird childhood hang-ups.)

Below, some extracts from the moving New York Times obituary, from which I learned for the first time about Sendak’s melancholy childhood – and the fact that he was gay, and was with his partner, psychotherapist Eugene Glynn, for 50 years prior to Glynn’s death.

“A largely self-taught illustrator, Mr. Sendak was at his finest a shtetl Blake, portraying a luminous world, at once lovely and dreadful, suspended between wakefulness and dreaming. In so doing, he was able to convey both the propulsive abandon and the pervasive melancholy of children’s interior lives.”

“As Mr. Sendak grew up — lower class, Jewish, gay — he felt permanently shunted to the margins of things. ‘All I wanted was to be straight so my parents could be happy,’ he told The New York Times in a 2008 interview. ‘They never, never, never knew.'”

And if you have the chance, please, please, please lend your ears to Sendak’s extraordinary interview with Terry Gross on NPR last year, in which he speaks with heartbreaking honesty about children, his childhood, aging, and death. At some point while listening, I overfilled my tea mug, and when I looked back to see it dripping onto my desk, my first impulse was to assume that it was also crying. Yeah.

(I also felt for Terry Gross: you can feel her wishing that this was a true conversation, rather than an interview during which she must maintain her radio air of pleasantly neutral inquiry.)

See also this brief and wonderful comic on children and books drawn by Sendak and Art Spiegelman (via Neil Gaiman and Caitlin Kiernan’s memorial posts).

Maurice Sendak, R.I.P.

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Jean Craighead George passed away on Tuesday, May 15, at the age of 92. The only rival to the number of fantasy books and fairy tales I consumed when I was little was the number of nature and wildlife books; I was particularly passionate about Julie of the Wolves and re-read it and its sequels heaps of times. (I remember getting caught re-reading Julie… under my desk during fifth grade once – which was I think the same year that I first read My Side of the Mountain, from which I notably learned about Walden and Thoreau, whose name I was convinced had to be pronounced “Thor-yew”…) George’s works and characters embody meticulous observation and a luminous sense of wonder, speaking to a lifetime of loving study of the natural world and its inhabitants (humans included). Thanks, Ms. George, from this now-biologist, for sharing your passion with us. R.I.P.

– E

Go to:
“The Golden Key,” by George MacDonald, illus. by Maurice Sendak (1867): review by Emera

Extremely silly photos…

…of extremely serious writers.

Made my day. Click for mostly deadpan photos of Sontag, Hemingway, Proust, et al. wearing animal costumes, kicking stuff, and hugging Muppets, among other august pursuits.

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Unrelatedly – I’d seen a few of early 20th-century artist Harry Clarke’s illustrations for Edgar Allan Poe’s tales before, but never all of them in one place. Check out this post at illustration blog 50 Watts to see high-resolution scans of his terrifying, Beardsleyesque, immensely powerful work. Clarke uses black to evoke dread and suspense like no other, and his characters’ Rasputin-like eyes alone are arresting. But my favorite might be this stunning, nearly abstract piece for “A Descent into the Maelström.”

– E

News allsorts

Groundbreaking poet and essayist Adrienne Rich has passed away at the age of 82. Rich wrote widely of her personal experience and on feminism, war, racism, and other issues of social and political concern; she lived and worked openly as a lesbian. Read an obituary here.

R.I.P.

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WHIRR WHIRR WHIRR‘s sold-out Mythology Anthology, reviewed here, is now available for purchase as a PDF. Check it out for five original takes on world myths of catabasis and anabasis, by up-and-coming illustrators.

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More reasons to look askance (at the least) at Amazon:

Workers complain of harsh conditions in Amazon warehouse:

“Working conditions at the Lehigh Valley warehouse got worse earlier this year, especially during heat waves when temperatures in the warehouse soared above 100 degrees, he said. He got lightheaded, he said, and his legs cramped. One hot day, Goris said, he saw a co-worker pass out at the water fountain. On other hot days, he saw paramedics bring people out of the warehouse in wheelchairs and on stretchers.”

“Temporary employees said few people in their working groups actually made it to a permanent Amazon position. Instead, they said they were pushed harder and harder to work faster and faster until they were terminated, quit or were injured.”

And in a replay of 2010’s highly public e-book pricing dispute with publishing giant Macmillan, Amazon removes Kindle versions of over 5000 books distributed by Independent Publishers Group. This was breaking news back in February, but so far as I can tell, is still ongoing and drastically cutting into the sales of the affected titles, and hence many of their publishers. In short, Amazon is yet again attempting to a) expand its ability to aggressively discount wares and thereby cement its hold on both the physical and digital market, and b) eliminate any middlemen (distributors, publishers, physical bookstores) between them and the consumer.

– E

Bookstores of Wellington, New Zealand: Arty Bees Books

Hello! It’s been quite the year-long hiatus… well I’m finally returning after having most recently traveled some countries, including bunkering down in several bookstores in NZ during my stay. Honestly, I planned only two bookstore visits in Wellington according to some recommendations, and was so impressed by the selection and presentation that I proceeded to bookstore hop for an entire day. So even more bookstore reports to come!

Arty Bees Books is located right off Cuba Street in the heart of Wellington, and offers sprawling selections of just about anything– fiction, references, instructional pamphlets, children’s literature, music, histories, rare/old tomes, and most importantly, bizarre bibliophilia curiosities. The best (and strangest) part was that I kept laughing while browsing Arty Bees whether from interesting shelving formations, weird collections displayed proudly, or the endless number of interesting genre placards. That does not happen at chain bookstores!

arty bees front
Sheet music AND imported SFF

Continue reading Bookstores of Wellington, New Zealand: Arty Bees Books

The news gauntlet

Two bits of Caitlín Kiernan excitement:

The growing gallery of Kyle Cassidy’s photographic work based on Kiernan’s next novel, The Drowning Girl, forthcoming in March. The documentary clarity of Cassidy’s photos is unsettling in combination with the uncanniness of many of the scenes, particularly when angular, predatory Eva (as portrayed by model Sara Murphy) is involved. Other shots are intimate, introspective, rich and dusky in lighting. Prints from the collection are available for purchase, and one in particular is on sale.
An appetite-whetting interview over at Bloody Disgusting on Alabaster: Wolves, the forthcoming Dark Horse comic featuring Kiernan’s lonely, teenaged monster hunter Dancy Flammarion. Dancy first appeared in Threshold, and later in short stories collected in Alabaster (review).

“Through all her earlier misadventures, Dancy has always been guided by an angel, this seraph, unless the seraph is only an expression of insanity, or some unconscious aspect of her that, inexplicably, leads her to these creatures. In the first issue, she breaks with her guardian angel, so to speak, and is on her own for the first time. She is reborn. Her will and her wiles become her only guiding force. I don’t want to drop too many spoilers, but Alabaster: Wolves is largely about Dancy finding her own way, and it’s a much darker road than she’s ever walked. Maybe this is a book about Dancy going sane. As to other themes, I’m really trying to address the grey areas between what we call good and evil. Dancy has always struggled with the idea that maybe she’s just another sort of monsters, and possibly some of the beings aren’t necessarily evil. You’ll see a lot of that.”

The strength (/blindness) of the earlier Dancy’s convictions made her both admirable and something of a psychological cypher, since she ultimately responded to any uncertainty or self-doubt by destroying external threats, and thereby, supposedly, restoring some measure of metaphysical order. I very much look forward to the new direction that the older and “rebooted” Dancy will take.

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The Sindiecate is an artist collective (six members so far) who post tributes to independent comics, featuring a different series each week. I’ve enjoyed browsing their archives both to see art of familiar favorites (Mouse Guard, Umbrella Academy, Oglaf [link is to my favorite piece of the bunch, which is, predictably if you know Oglaf, very much NSFW]…), and to glean recommendations for future comic reads.

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Check out The Open Road for a critical symposium spotlighting Hubert Selby, Jr., author of Last Exit to Brooklyn and Requiem for a Dream (review). I haven’t had a chance to read all of the essays yet, but so far I’ve particularly appreciated M. G. Stephens’ reflections on the development of Selby’s voice – one of his most remarkable assets, alongside his urgently expressed compassion for suffering – and the creative milieu he occupied in bohemian New York.

– E

Go to:
The Umbrella Academy, Vol. 1, by Gerard Way & Gabriel Ba (2008), review by Emera
Mouse Guard: Fall 1152, by David Petersen, review by Emera
Mouse Guard: Winter 1152, by David Petersen, review by Emera
Legends of the Mouse Guard, by David Petersen and others, review by Emera

Wislawa Szymborska, 1923-2012

Polish poet and Nobel laureate Wislawa Szymborska passed away last week, on Monday, February 1, at the age of 88. The Poetry Foundation has a brief obituary and one of her poems here. Rest in peace.

I spent several months last year reading a few of her poems in multiple translations (many of which I found through this aggregation assembled by the University of Buffalo), particularly “Brueghel’s Two Monkeys.” Her poems are carefully observed, ironic, sometimes cuttingly so, yet without the least trace of cruelty or bitterness: it is clear that she always wrote from a place of sorrow and love.

– E

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Undercover: Pretty Monsters

Here’s a photo-feature that I’ve been wanting to start for a while: a series featuring the subtle design quirks that I occasionally find under the dust jackets of hardcover books. First up on the plate is Kelly Link’s Pretty Monsters, whose full cover design you can see here. Will Staehle’s enigmatic, Victorian-funereal (with horned women) design easily ranks in my top, oh, twentyish? favorite book designs of all time. That thar is a very rough assessment, but hopefully my point is clear: there are a lot of book covers that I like, but I really, really, really like this one.

The little monster-mark underneath just seals the book’s place in my affections:

Rawr!

– E