Writer Wednesday: Post Card Fiction Prizes

Making your mark in the world can be a tenuous thing; as long as the good will of others holds up or their indifference doesn't take over, you stand the chances of being forgotten within your lifetime. You may find fame and fortune, but the odds are against it. So don't be depressed by that! Make every day fun. Create something, anything. I made a lovely postcard for a friend this morning with my Tate Mod postcard book (a book of blank postcards of heavy paper stock) with my watercolour pencils and it sort of turned out like I imagined it.

As far as I'm concerned, that's success.

I got paid very well for a very short story: that's success, too. But it can't be the reason for doing it because writing takes so long even for a rather short story. The pleasure of creating, of figuring out the myriad puzzles that go into anything you make, that has to be its own reward -- often it will be the only one you get. Hey, I didn't say stop trying for more mundane success -- keep at it. As the lottery ads in NY say, "Hey, you never know." You stand a better chance at succeeding with your creativity that you do with the lottery anyway.

If you need a laugh, go read my silly poem "On Seeking a Place for a Picnic." If you want something more substantial, go read my reviews and whatnot over at A Knife & A Quill. Or go "like" our Burning Bridges book trailer: it's got a "dislike" -- I suspect our former publisher has found it.

All right, enough delay: let me announce the first annual Postcard Fiction Contest prize winners. First, let me thank everyone who entered. I was well pleased with your cards and stories -- some of you went all out and I have to say the postcards did enter into my deliberations. How could they not?

So I read and re-read and finally narrowed it down to three finalists. Because I promised a cash prize for the top winner, I decided I needed some other kind of prize, so it will be titles.

DICKINSON PRIZE (AKA second runner up)

"alessandra" for 'Amherst's Mad Pastoral' on postcard of Trastevere (I can almost taste the food)


MOORE PRIZE (AKA first runner up)

"mbilokur" for 'Better the devil you know' on postcard of Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera & a giant papier maché demon



and the grand prize including cash in the current value of US$25 goes to --

[drum roll]

POSTCARD FICTION GRAND PRIZE

"shloobee" for 'Don't do it, Salvador!' on postcard of 'Salvador Dalí in jener fiktiven Position, die auf sein Gemälde La gare de perpignan übertragen wurde, assistiert von Dr. Soler-Roig in einem Helikopter' of which the text here follows:

'Don't do it, Salvador!' The lemur sounded more alarmed than she felt. Dalí was always up to some sort of ballbaggery and usually came out of it quite well. A token protest was always welcome to the artist's ears, however, and the lemur liked to please. 'Do not fear, my little one,' said Salvador, 'nothing can go wrong. This world is but an oyster in a jam jar ripe for the taking.' The lemur watched as Salvador pushed himself from the balustrade and swan dived out into the empty space. He hung there for a moment, or so it seemed...and then plummeted to earth. The lemur watched him hit the ground. 'Oh dear,' she said. 'Who does he suppose is going to clean that up?'

Congratulations, all!

Tuesday's Overlooked A/V: What is Creativity?

Sculpture by David Batchelor at the McManus

Rabbit, rabbit! First of May and sumer is icumen in, lhude sing cucu! If you're out protesting in the streets, I hope you're enjoying a fine day. My film today is a bit of an odd choice, truly in the spirit of the "overlooked" like no other I've written on.

I *think* it's called What is Creativity? At least that's how I've remembered it all these years. I suspect it was an hour or less long, as it was shown to me in junior high art class in 6th and again in 7th grade. The only 'name' in it was John Astin, but it doesn't appear on his list of films in IMDB. The three things I remember from it are seemingly indelibly fixed on my memory -- however, given my proclivity for 'adjusting' quotations to suit me and never quite getting them right (a habit I gave to Ro in Owl Stretching) I'm sure I may have adjusted them somewhat. But they're so vivid! And as it was on creativity, I was sold from the start.

So, what I do recall of this elusive film: there's an animated sequence that covers the history of the world through art. The "dark ages" literally blackness until the 'Renaissance' comes along with a light [insert medievalist eye roll]. There's an exchange between Michaelangelo and someone else: "What are you doing?" "I'm painting a ceiling. What are you doing?" "I'm painting a floor."

There's another part that's a parable told with ping-pong balls almost Jonathan Livingston Seagull-ish, with one non-conformist ball who decides to try to bounce as high as he can, with an inconclusive ending, "Some say he never came down..."

My favourite bit was the part with John Astin, who played an artist who wasn't doing very well then suddenly had an inspiration to put together mannequin parts and gears and whatnot in a kinetic sculpture. He debuts it to a crowd of critics and suddenly he's dressed as a gunslinger as the potshots come in. He shoots back in vain until at last there's one positive voice in the noise: "I like it!" He leans forward, encouraging the comment, until he hears, "I mean the materials alone must be worth something!" Bang! And he goes down.


So, am I the only person who remembers this?

As always, find the complete round-up of neglected works over at Todd's.

Love and Theft

"I'm not quite as cool or forgiving as I sound..."

 "Floater" by Bob Dylan

I'll have some lovely photos from the trip to Connemara up soon, but there's something else I need to deal with first. This week has been a head shaking one in several ways that's ended up leaving me with a couple fewer publications than I had before.

However, before I get to that, a digression. Those of you who have experienced me teaching know my proclivity for doing that. I blame Beowulf: chock full of digressions. Like that great poem, however, my digressions have a point. Think of it as a parable and then a lesson if you like.

The other day on Facebook I shared Jim Jarmusch's quote that I love and have used before. It came in a nice graphic form, so I'll share it here, too.

I always say that becoming a medievalist saved me from the terror of "originality" -- because there's nothing like studying a thousand years of literature to show you without a doubt that every story has been told before. My creative writing students who find this revelation deflating I give the reassurance, "But no one has told your version." If I'd been paying more attention, I would have learned the lesson from Shakespeare. The bard's stories are not "original" -- looted from various sources from Ovid to histories to contemporary events. Yet no one told the tales as he did; that's why we still read him with such pleasure.

We need to recognize that we stand on the shoulders of giants; pretending that you have no influences is simply ignorance. The arrogance of believing that you can create anything without those myriad voices in your head, sights in your eyes, sounds in your ears, shapes in your hands is an illusion. The "stealing" Jarmusch refers to here is not a mindless copying of another's work but an appropriation of elements that resonate through your soul. Because once you've placed your stolen object in a new location, it transforms.

Bob Dylan is a master of this. Love and Theft offers a lot of "thefts" -- something Dylan's always been conscious of doing. His title comes from Eric Lott's book Love & Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class. The album features what Greg Kot in the Chicago Tribune described as:

"The kind of twisted, instantly memorable characters one meets in John Ford's westerns, Jack Kerouac's road novels, but, most of all, in the blues and country songs of the 1920s, '30s and '40s. This is a tour of American music—jump blues, slow blues, rockabilly, Tin Pan Alley ballads, country swing—that evokes the sprawl, fatalism and subversive humor of Dylan's sacred text, Harry Smith's Anthology of American Folk Music, the pre-rock voicings of Hank Williams, Charley Patton and Johnnie Ray, among others, and the ultradry humor of Groucho Marx."

A fine list of looted treasures. What makes his work a success is not who he steals from, but what he does with the stolen goods. In my own small way, I've stolen from Dylan, too. My story "Tangled Up in Some Sort of Cerulean Hue" took Dylan's "Tangled Up in Blue" and mashed it up with Christopher Marlowe's Doctor Faustus and then just played around. My forthcoming novel Owl Stretching stole  its sadly funny tone from Kurt Vonnegut and stole as well as from William Blake (for all the quotes Ro gets wrong)  and The Descent of Inanna. I steal from everywhere; things collide in my head that would not collide the same way in anyone else's head. I run with those collisions and make something the original creators never intended and would not recognise. That's what Jarmusch means.

Witless theft, on the other hand, stealing without respect or transformation, is a crime not only in the legal sense, but to the spirit of creativity as well. Stealing someone else's work and passing it off as your own, you commit a shabby crime and a lazy one as well. In the digital realm, it's also easy to uncover. I've removed my two stories from Trestle Press for this kind of theft: cover art images, not words this time. I first got a tip off from Mr B and he has already found a new home for the Drunk on the Moon stories (well done!). I don't know what I'll do with "Mandrake and Magpies" yet. I'll think of something.

You can read other authors' (more timely) accounts of the revelations and fallout like Julia Madeleine's, Luca Veste's and BR Statetham's and they'll lead you to many more. I feel bad for the first time writers who received a painful lesson in the crazy world of publishing. After you've been through the folding magazine phenomenon and fly-by-night publishers you find it easier to shrug off the inevitable Dickensian Grubb Street betrayal. Swearing a lot helps at first, but then you just get back to writing -- it's what you need to do.

Over at the League

I have a post up over at the Women's League of Ale Drinkers today on Daniel Pink's A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future. It's a fascinating book on why people who can synthesize information across borders of various kinds, find the narrative hooks and figure out what people really want and need in their lives will thrive in the new information-saturation world.

I woke up this morning dreaming I was walking in Lady Gaga's shoes. As if! You will recall how badly I inured myself on perfectly flat shoes and a very small hill; imagine me actually trying to clomp around in these. Even Gaga took a spill in the middle of Heathrow.

Grading this morning; revising this afternoon. I got my contract for Craft Critique Culture at U Iowa. Now I have to decide some things about next summer: what do you reckon? Iceland or New Zealand? Iceland could be combined with England (the Great Writing conference will be in London this year), but I've never been to New Zealand. Of course it's a lot more money too, unless I can get someone else to foot the bill (when's that grant deadline?). Hmmm.

UPDATE: Part 7 of La Ronde over at Eric Beetner's blog.

Seeking Crafty Women

Hey, Vicky tells me we're getting some great submissions for the inaugural issue of the Journal for the Women's League of Ale Drinkers, but we haven't got much in the way of crafty things. There's still plenty of room for lovely photos of your crafty projects: knitting, crocheting, needlepoint, sculpture, food -- the possibilities are endless!

The photo from Cake Wrecks is just to spur you on!

Here's the skinny and the general call once more: do please consider sharing your work with the world!

"Passion. Vision. Daring. Humour. Any alone will be intriguing--but to have them all is to be sublime."

That is the mandate of the new journal for the Women's League of Ale Drinkers, for which I am editor. We seek only work that meets these criteria, the output of creative women who may feel that their vision and passion has been overlooked elsewhere, that their daring has brought only disapproving stares, that their humour has met with stony silence. We delight in work that crosses traditional genres. We do not ask for your credentials, awards or publications. We ask for your heartfelt work.

The inaugural issue will be out for Halloween. The full colour PDF format will be a showcase of talented women.

DEADLINE
September 21, 2010

FORMAT

Writing: fiction, drama, humour or non-fiction up to 5k; poems up to 100 lines total; submit as RTFs (or paste into an email).

Images: scans of paintings, drawings, multimedia, etc. or photos of handicrafts, sculptures, etc. or original digital designs in JPGs (resolution of 300dpi).

Music, Sound and Video: via links to your site or host site (e.g. YouTube, Vimeo, etc.)

And if we select your work for WLoAD, we ask that you wear the badge proudly -- link to our site and your fellow artists, promote the journal assiduously and celebrate this forum (i.e. comment on the issue and your colleagues).

Submissions should be sent to VICTORIASQUID@GMAIL.COM

Be sure to include links to your website, blog, Twitter, Facebook, etc., in the email with your submission. Thank you!

BitchBuzz: Hate Cute

My latest column:

Mainstream Media Realize RomComs Hate Women

Suddenly everyone in the media seems to have noticed what women have been talking about for years: how rom-coms seem to really hate on women.

 The high profile story is Maureen Dowd's back-and-froth with social historian Sam Wasson about "Why romantic comedies now reek." It's a fairly entertaining exchange with highlights like Wasson saying, "Every time I see Jennifer Aniston’s or Jennifer Garner’s face I wince. Basically, every time I see someone named Jennifer." But they also get a few good points across, such as Dowd's suggestion that more female-run studios ought to have resulted in more female-positive films. Wasson laughs:

“Even the studios that are run by women aren’t run by women. They’re run by corporations, which are run by franchises. Unfortunately for us, Jennifer Aniston is a franchise. So is Katherine Heigl and Gerard Whatever-His-Name-Is, and even when their movies bomb, their franchise potential isn’t compromised because overseas markets, DVD sales and cable earn all the studio’s money back...The worst part of it is, from Hollywood’s point of view, it ain’t broke."

Read more: http://culture.bitchbuzz.com/mainstream-media-realize-romcoms-hate-women.html#ixzz0vmT9ndaW

There's a reason people still love and adore films like His Girl Friday, Philadelphia Story, The Lady Eve and Holiday: they're fun and funny. I guess writing romcoms that don't insult women is going to have to go on my list of things to do. What's your fave?

Self-Reliance

"There is a time in every man's education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better, for worse, as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till. The power which resides in him is new in nature, and none but he knows what that is which he can do, nor does he know until he has tried. Not for nothing one face, one character, one fact, makes much impression on him, and another none. This sculpture in the memory is not without preestablished harmony. The eye was placed where one ray should fall, that it might testify of that particular ray. We but half express ourselves, and are ashamed of that divine idea which each of us represents. It may be safely trusted as proportionate and of good issues, so it be faithfully imparted, but God will not have his work made manifest by cowards. A man is relieved and gay when he has put his heart into his work and done his best; but what he has said or done otherwise, shall give him no peace. It is a deliverance which does not deliver. In the attempt his genius deserts him; no muse befriends; no invention, no hope..."

[read more]

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Kantele TV

(check the credits at the end, too :-)

Tweet

A moment of idleness finds me -- done teaching and finals aren't until Thursday and Friday. Of course I have a billion things to do that have piled up for various reasons, but I can actually draw breath for a moment and reflect on how to fill my one month break with a massive load of work.

Of course, a lot of it is already filled with holiday celebrations and travel (have to go to MLA to interview candidates for my department), so there might actually be about two weeks "free" -- and yes, today I already need to use to order my spring texts (long overdue), catch up on web updates for a couple of organizations, schedule some interviews for Prose at the Rose, and oh, about a million other things.

Naturally, I'm instead thinking about Twitter and its effect on blogging. Seems like every one is "so over" blogs. Twitter, for those of you who don't recognize the Fail Whale, is microblogging. You have a limit of 140 characters to blip your thoughts. Suits a lot of people who have things to say, but don't ramble on like your average blogger (e.g. moi). There's also Facebook, of course, which allows people to waste as much time as they do on MySpace but without all the hideously ugly clutter and endless ads.

All of which makes me wonder how much time I ought to be investing in blogging -- is it worth doing anymore? Especially with three blogs (since I am a glutton for punishment), I'm beginning to sense a law of diminishing returns. Part of this is the lack of interaction here (i.e. few comments but spam), but I'm also thinking about these issues for the conference next June and the grad class in the spring where we'll be exploring the effects of new media and Web 2.0 interfaces.

I just don't know. Given my obsessive need to write, it's always good to have an outlet, but I'm beginning to think I'm a tree falling in the forest with no one to hear it. I'm no Stephen Fry after all.

Seven Deadly Sins

Of course, this spider isn't deadly, but it looks as if it were! Okay, there's not really a link to my topic, I just thought this picture Stephen Fry posted on Twitter was terrific. He's currently down in Madagascar and if you follow his tweets, you will get some cool photos.

In class today I had my sophomore class do an exercise I have used before, but the results intrigued me because this is one of those quiet classes that seldom speaks. Consequently, they have made a lot of extra work for me to come up with a variety of techniques to get them to engage with the materials, including making them lead the discussion at the start of each day. Not always successful, of course, but at least they get to feel a little empathy (I hope) for my frustrating situation.

The exercise focuses on our reading of Chaucer's Pardoner's Prologue and Tale. The Pardoner is a swindler who not only tells his fellow pilgrims how he swindles people, but tries to do it to them at the end of his tale. That's some chutzpah! In demonstrating his art, he actually offers a moral sermon on the theme Radix malorum est cupiditas, or avarice is the root of all evil (a subject he knows all too well).

In the course of the discussion, we talk about the Seven Deadly Sins, a popular rhetorical tool in the Middle Ages (and beyond: Marlowe gives us a wonderful parade of them in his Doctor Faustus). Then I mention how the Vatican has come up with a new list for our time, modernizing the medieval trope.

Before I show them that list, I ask them to work in pairs and make their own list. I also ask that they provide people in the news to exemplify them. It's always interesting to see what they come up with. I did a version of this just a week or so ago with the freshman medieval class: their major point of concern? Gang violence, for one, which seemed an odd thing to focus on in this relatively safe city (especially for a bunch of mostly small town and suburban kids). They also came up with some of the same concerns as the Vatican, like environmental damage, drugs and excessive wealth.

The sophomores also focused on greed, citing Enron, the oil companies, Hollywood and, perhaps unfairly, Bill Gates, as examples of avaricious wealth. The big thing for them, however, was adultery. I think every single group listed that, citing either Brad Pitt or Bill Clinton (they ran neck and neck throughout). Pity that this seems to be the legacy for Clinton, not that balanced budget and lack of debt that we're all paying for now with the no-tax-but-plenty-spend (AKA après moi, le déluge) practices of the current administration. There was one group who blasted stupidity and named W and Palin as examples, but by far Clinton was a favorite target. Those who named murder as a key sin also mostly named O. J. Simpson as the example. I mentioned that he had been found not guilty in his criminal trial, but they seemed to disregard that detail.

Paris Hilton was the equivalence of conceit for several of them. There was a group that found flashy dressing to be a sin and mentioned a co-worker as an example (too much glitter). One group mentioned rape as well as murder (Ted Bundy and Charles Manson respectively), but on the whole I was struck by their very personal and judgmental focus. There was little perspective on the larger world around them or vision beyond their own immediate concerns.

I always learn from my students, but I don't always like what I learn.

Too Much Writing

A friend suggested I need to take a break from writing, but I can't think without writing, so I'm not sure how to do that. But being a little preoccupied at present with work (mostly writing), I cheat with the blog today, offering some words of wisdom from wiser heads than mine about this madness we call writing instead of actual original content (am I forgiven?):

There's nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and open a vein.
~Walter Wellesley "Red" Smith

You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.
~Ray Bradbury

Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia.
~E.L. Doctorow

And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.
~Sylvia Plath

First forget inspiration. Habit is more dependable. Habit will sustain you whether you're inspired or not...Forget talent. If you have it, fine. Use it. If you don't have it, it doesn't matter. As habit is more dependable than inspiration, continued learning is more dependable than talent... Finally, don't worry about imagination. You have all the imagination you need...Persist.
~Octavia Butler

I am a galley slave to pen and ink.
~Honore de Balzac

What a writer wants to do is not what he does.
~Jorge Luis Borges

I am irritated by my own writing. I am like a violinist whose ear is true, but whose fingers refuse to reproduce precisely the sound he hears within.
~Gustave Flaubert

1. Find a subject you care about.
2. Do not ramble, though.
3. Keep it simple.
4. Have the guts to cut.
5. Sound like yourself.
6. Say what you mean to say.
7. Pity the readers.
~Kurt Vonnegut

I write for the same reason I breathe - because if I didn't, I would die.
~Isaac Asimov

Words are sacred. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones, in the right order, you can nudge the world a little.
~Tom Stoppard

Many red devils ran from my heart
And out upon the page,
They were so tiny
The pen could mash them.
And many struggled in the ink.
It was strange
To write in this red muck
Of things from my heart.
~Stephen Crane

Albacon & Fall Colors

Ran out to get a hair cut yesterday and decided I needed a little color too, so voilà: Purple highlights! Thanks, Joy. She's so good that she matched the color to the jacket I was wearing.

We had a short night at Albacon -- one panel for me on writing flash fiction. True to form, we cut the panel short (hee hee!). But I sold two copies of Jane Quiet at the end of it (slight upward blip in whuffie), so whoo hoo! We had some tasty ice cream at the ice cream social, but having both slept badly the night before, we went home early and watched the news before collapsing. More today at Albacon -- should be fun. There's free wireless in the hotel, so updates to Facebook likely.

The corset did its job: despite being on my feet all day and driving (a stick) for the first time in a month, there was very little swelling around the ankle. Yay! I even managed to find something to Sanrio-fy it, so that's good.

October Country returns...

I will put aside for a moment the anxiety I feel that my Halloween cards are not even conceptualised, let alone ready to send (HA HA HA). Instead I will think of all the lovely fall colors beginning to appear -- more slowly up here, but much further along in Connecticut. I can't get over how beautiful the leaves are there -- more colors than I remember anywhere else. I know Vermont is supposed to be the foliage queen, but Connecticut wins every time. As we drove through the Berkshires back to New York, you could see the palette shift and change, growing darker and more green.

It's the time of year Dark's Carnival returns and you think, maybe this year you'll run away and join up. What could you do? Maybe a juggling act -- or performing as a geek, or maybe once you join you'll find that there's something weird about you that you never acknowledged before. Something that will make people stare, something that will provide a living as the carnival moves from town to town, old hands slipping away into the darkness as new recruits join up. Doesn't matter -- they've always been there, even if they just arrived last night.

The bonfire of dead autumn leaves perfumes the air. It's October again.

Repetition

What is it about repetition? My need to repeat things over and over? At least three times I repeat a thing! I like to blame genetics -- we did always run a joke into the ground when we were kids. There's a series of jokes one group of friends knows so well that we just give the punchlines ("Terrible!" "Dung!" "Tang!" "A stick!" although the order can vary).

I brought up the Crane quote three different times in the last twenty-four hours. I used an offhand comment from yesterday at least three times (or maybe four), the last time in a piece I sent off to an editor a little while ago (the Crane quote got in there, too -- amazing what you can cram into 500 words!). Slightly different nuances in each iteration -- maybe all the repetition is about trying to get it right. That's it -- it's just revision!

We're off to Miss Wendy's for Rosh Hashanah dinner tomorrow afternoon. We'll be stopping by Rein's to pick up the challah and looking forward to seeing some friends around the table.

iTouch Things

I have a new computer. It has a camera. It has PhotoBooth which has some nifty effects. With the educator's discount, I got a free (eventually) iPod Touch. It's charging. We'll see what it does when it's ready.

Of course, there's still the transferring of files to do...

Review: Ginger Geezer

I'm not actually going to write a review of the book: it's about a fascinating artist, Vivian Stanshall, told in a journalistic manner, which in this case means a meandering although vaguely sequential narrative, without an iota of beauty or style, but one which nonetheless proves to be an enjoyable read just because it is so chock full of the wonderful, whimsical words of Vivian himself. Former musical collaborator Mike "Tubular Bells" Oldfield assures us on the back of the book that Viv was "Rock-n-Roll's answer to Peter Cook" as if Peter Cook were a question, but it's a fair equivalence in some sense simply because both were so singularly inventive and, of course, damn funny.

Like many of the assessments of Cook, there's a lingering sense of what a shame it is that he didn't do more (instead of marveling that he did so much so amazingly well). Prefacing the start of the account is a quote from Alan Moorehead's description of Sir Richard Burton which they mean to attach to Stanshall as well:

He was one of those men in whom nature runs riot; she endows him with not one or two but twenty talents, all of them far beyond the average and then withholds the one ingredient that might have brought them to perfection -- a sense of balance and direction.

Yet, Stanshall (and Burton for that matter) accomplished so much in so many different veins -- and media -- that such a grand expression of failure seems utterly mistaken. I suspect that largely this melancholic disparagement comes from the greedy desire for an endless line of glorious works and from knowing that there might have been so much more from these wonderful artists had physical frailties not impeded their later output. Yet I can't help but wonder whether such incendiary genius could do anything other than consume its source. As poet Roger McGough wrote in his funeral encomium, Stanshall was always "walking the tightrope with the safety net firmly nailed to the floor." There's a painful nakedness there. Photographer Barrie Wentzell said, "He was tortured by his intelligence and he just couldn't stop thinking of ideas. He once told me, 'It's all in my head and I hate it.'" It's the kind of feeling that makes you want to put an auger to your head just to get it all out.

I already quoted one of my favorite comments. The book explodes with wonderful words from and about Vivian, so it's worth reading for them. I did find out a bunch of things I did not know (like all the song writing he did with Steve Winwood). I'll have to find a copy of Stinkfoot the comic opera he did on the Old Profanity Showboat. While he may be gone in a puff of smoke, it's a comfort to know that he existed and that much of his work lives on (now release all those recordings Warner Bros!).

Hmph -- well, I guess I wrote a review after all (amending post title now). Yes, I'm taking a break from the novel, which sounds preferable to admitting that I am idling away from its stern demands to post here, and which reminds me I need to update the serial as well. I'm so close to the end of the novel, but I can't seem to make it go any faster -- just plink plink plink away at the keyboard as always.

Perfection

From Ginger Geezer: the Life of Vivian Stanshall:

"If someone offered me an exhibition, I've got just about enough paintings, but like everything else I wouldn't be pleased with it. There are a few things that live on, but really I'd like an exhibition of what I'm going to do tomorrow."

Melinda Gebbie Speaks

Once again smoky and Antonio Solinas have a terrific interview up at The Sardinian Connection, this time the fabulous Melinda Gebbie -- she of the incomparably gorgeous art of Lost Girls. Melinda started off in the undergrounds and has been no stranger to controversy over the years. She talks about being compared to S. Clay Wilson (!) and the long process of co-creating Lost Girls with her partner, Alan Moore.

To the left some of her work from the Peter Pan sequence of Lost Girls -- beautiful stuff (though not for the faint hearted, apart from this fairly innocuous page).

[Part 2 here]

The Zero Hour

I made a great rediscovery the other day: Patty Leidy's Zero Hour comic! We met Patty back in the days when we went to DragonCon. Sure we bonded because she's a fellow Sanrio fan, but also because she drew this fun little strip. I had lost track of her work with all the moving we've done the past few years, but found her again on the Lynda Barry list (surprise!). She's currently working on pitching Zero Hour for syndication -- wish her luck!

Wacky Wednesday

I don't have much to say myself, so I will point you to Lynda Barry. If you don't know who she is, you need to know right now.

If you do know who she is, have you got your copy of What It Is, yet?

Have you seen the monkeys?!

Do you understand that she is Funk Queen of the Universe? Oh, yeah.

Yes, we're still moving. Yes, really.