Saturday Recording: Sea Secrets! Fossils! Fictions!

Today was spent mostly recording percussion and guitar with my sister, Mandy, on her project, Sea Secrets! Fossils! Fictions!. Judging from what she already had recorded this is going to be one awesome EP. Hopefully, my additions helped in some small way. Mandy'll be continuing with this project as Tin Tin Can heads to Austin, though from the looks of things today, most of the hard work is done. What's left is mostly mixing and mastering, except for one song which needs a bit more. I'm not sure yet when this will be available for listening, but I'm guessing sometime in May or June at the latest.

Here are some pictures taken while we were recording.

I am playing slide guitar with the Spencer Bell shotglass.

An alternate name for Sea Secrets! Fossils! Fictions! is Mandy, the Accordion and the Gas Mask.

Where the magic happens.

Hitting a tom and thinking very hard about it.

Drum close-up!

Mandy is thinking, Why oh why.

Simplex Thoughts: Babel-17 & Conversation in the Cathedral

The last two books I finished, Conversation in the Cathedral by Mario Vargas Llosa and Babel-17/Empire Star by Samuel R. Delany, have been reviewed and analyzed to death, so instead I'm going to give my initial, visceral reactions to both. Know that I find both novels to be wondrous works in their own right.

Conversation in the Cathedral

This book was difficult to wade through. Sometimes on one page there are three or four conversations happening at once - several happening as past events and usually one happening in the present. It's a little disorienting. Okay; it's a lot disorienting. Never have I read a book where the feeling of vertigo has come over me so often or with such force. Once you realize this is happening and you can kind of ground yourself - figure out which is up and which is down (and it changes chapter to chapter, by the way) - then the story becomes clear.  It's a pretty simple message Conversation conveys: dictatorships are evil. However, Vargas Llosa imbues his characters - the good and the bad - with such moral ambiguity it's clear that, on both sides, there are good and bad people - and that's what makes great literature. Essentially, what Vargas Llosa is doing is working toward an understanding of the monstrous within each of us.

Another way of putting this: Conversation in the Cathedral is very, very bleak. Even if the economy and government institutions have gotten better in Peru than during Vargas Llosa's writing, sadly, a lot of the discourse presented within the story will resonate today when we look at what's been happening, most immediately, in Egypt and Libya, but elsewhere as well in places like North Korea and Zimbabwe.

Babel-17/Empire Star

Chip Delany, whether he knew it or not, had been (and perhaps still is) working toward a particular conceit in his fiction: the novel as cyclical process; language, of course, its defining principle. This idea culminated, in my opinion, with his 1975 novel Dhalgren, but diagrams of the idea existed, perhaps starting with Babel-17/Empire Star and onward with The Fall of the Towers trilogy and the Neveryon series. In Babel-17, he explores the idiosyncracies of language, including body language and the minuteness of facial expressions. The main character of the novel, Rydra Wong, is a kind of telepathic linguist, in that she can determine what you're thinking or what you're about to say by the way you shrug your shoulders or the slight lift at the corners of your lips.

What struck me the most while reading Babel-17, however, was the differences in various languages (for instance, the sounds of L or R or V or W, etc), though I am aware this conflict, having studied Thai and French and some German; and the inferences we make about a person or people concerning our own limited knowledge of language.

I found Empire Star - the novella that accompanies the main novel - to be just as interesting, but in far different ways. Empire Star is half Flowers for Algernon and half mini-bildungsroman. Though Babel-17 is not, Empire Star is cyclical in process and it's always entertaining to watch a writer working toward something you know will pay off (in dividends!!) in a later work.

Empire Star is also a meditation on the actions of our choices and our perception of - not necessarily what is right and wrong - but how we choose what is right and wrong. Delany uses three different perceptions of thought - simplex, complex, and multiplex - to make his argument. (This might be a simplex way of putting it, by the way.)

The Methane Ranches of Titan

My most recent story, submitted to Asimov's a few days ago, concerns a miner working on Saturn's moon, Titan. Anyway, the factory I pictured while writing this story looks something like this:

Fast Tomes at Ridgemont High: Rediscovering Heroic Fantasy

Pardon the terrible pun of a title, but if you'll recall a few weeks ago I mentioned that my reading list in 2011 was shaping up to be (in more ways than one) the year of the great tome of books. Well, it's still true, though I haven't exactly kept pace. In February I read four books, all of them quite thin-spined but no less great because of it. The Fixed Stars by Brian Conn and Redemption in Indigo by Karen Lord are two masterpieces of fiction. Anyway, it seems as though this year, along with tomes, is also going to be the year I rediscover heroic fantasy.

Last night I attended the book signing of Patrick Rothfuss, heir apparent to the Tolkein throne. Or so many of his fans and Onion A.V. Club think him. Well, he's supposed to be really good and over the rest of March and April I will find out. Seeing Rothfuss speak at the Oak Brook Borders was certainly a treat. He read the very short prologue to his latest release, Wise Man's Fear, as well as a poem about spring he'd written and a hilariously sadistic story about guinea pigs that was published in a weekly advice column he did for his college newspaper. The Q&A section of the night was the most interesting for me, however. Several questions concerning the language of the different peoples in his books were brought up. Though Rothfuss confessed he was not a linguist as Tolkein was, there were certain facets of the languages he'd made up, mentioning that he'd spoken pronunciations of certain words into a phone for the audiobook reader to have some grounding. But Rothfuss was more interested in the psychology and sociology of peoples rather than specific patterns of language - in other words, he cares more about how a person or a people react to given situations. In other other words, I am very excited to read his books.

George R.R. Martin, an instructor of mine at Clarion, announced on his website last week that his fifth book, A Dance With Dragons, now has a release date: July 12, 2012. For thos of us that've been waiting for five years, this is awesome news. I cut my teeth on GRRM in high school and throughout the aughts. I've read A Song of Ice and Fire - the series of which ADWD is part of - probably four times now, and each time I see something new within the text. These are big books and George has promised to his latest will be just as big, so...oh boy.

Daniel Abraham is beginning a new series in April called The Dagger & the Coin. I am a huge fan of his previous fantasy outing, The Long Price Quartet, and am looking forward to the new series. However, I read the prologue of the first book, The Dragon's Path, and wasn't as impressed. Though I've heard a lot of people turned away from GRRM's books because of the prologue of his first. Sometimes prologues are slogs and maybe we should all just agree that Elmore Leonard, in his 10 rules of writing, is right: Avoid prologues.

N.K. Jemisin is also in my queue to read. She's two books deep into The Inheritance Trilogy and managed to put out both of those books within the same year. I don't know that that was a particularly well-employed marketing campaign by her publisher, but whatever: two books! I have the first one and the second one is waiting on the shelf at Borders just for me. I've heard all kinds of excellent things about Jemisin and her work, so I'm excited to read these books. These aren't tomes, however: around 330 pages with crime novel-sized print. (That's not a jab at crime novels, I swear. I love Elmore Leonard. Also, second Leonard reference? Check.) I've had Jemisin's first book, The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, for awhile now and there really isn't a reason I haven't read it yet.

Except this:

I've called this post "Rediscovering Heroic Fantasy" for a reason. The last heroic fantasy book I read was in 2006 and it was A Feast for Crows by George R.R. Martin. Yep, the book prior to the July 12 release. It's not that I haven't tried. I really really really tried to like Steve Erickson's Mazalan Empire, but ugh, no thanks. I loved the aforementioned Long Price Quartet, though I don't count them as heroic fantasy; if anything Abraham's series is tragic fantasy. Anything published by Pyr Books I tend to stay away from. Joe Abercrombie has enticed me before - but especially since he was mentioned in the recent diatribe of the doom of fantasy from Leo Grin (note: a lot of fantasy writers responded to Grin's scathing essay and I'm definitely in their camp: I like my heroes tragically flawed, thank you very much.) Another is R. Scott Bakker: I read the first two books in his Prince of Nothing trilogy, but sort of lost enthusiasm to read the third. I liked them, but I didn't love them - or maybe it wasn't the right time for me to read them.

That said, I'd definitely like to give Abercrombie and Bakker a shot. Perhaps later this year I will. Right now, however, I've got so much on my plate. The books mentioned above, and Shantaram awaits me, as well as the Javier Marias series, the new Jesse Bullington and Genevieve Valentine, Gene Wolfe, dear lord, it won't stop.

Are they any other heroic fantasy books I should have read/be reading?

Rothfuss Signing: Pre-Party

This evening I'll be driving to the Oak Brook Borders, rain and bad transmission be damned, for the reading and subsequent book-signing of Patrick Rothfuss, author of The Name of the Wind and the just released Wise Man's Fear. Unfortunately, I do not have my copy of Wise Man's Fear yet because Amazon has failed to deliver so far. (Although I'm particularly looking forward to the second half of that Amazon order: Robert Walser's The Microscripts, but more on that in a post this weekend-ish when I receive the book.)

Okay, so first I have to come clean: I haven't read anything by Rothfuss but I've heard a lot about him: he's a heroic fantastist, and considered a gem in the field. He's also written a not-for-children children's book that I hope is available for purchase at the signing because it sounds very perverse and amusing. Clarionites Leah and Dallas both positively luurve the books - in fact, Dallas posted about the Rothfuss signing he went to here.

Like Dallas, I also intend to ask Rothfuss some questions concerning world-building, along with character development and frame stories, if given the chance. If someone else beats me to that particular punch, perhaps I'll ask his opinions on the demise of the bookstore (I'm being only a little facetious here, of course). However, I may inquire as to his thoughts on the growing popularity of ebooks and the future of publishing.

At any rate, if there's any one of you readers who wishes to accompany me tonight, the reading is at 7pm at the Oak Brook Borders. We'll get some coffee, talk shop, listen to a what I understand is a nice and funny man reading some words he's put together well, and show whatever rain is coming that we will not be defeated.

Oh. Right. The pre-party. I'm going to drink a cup of jasmine tea and finish reading the novella, "Empire Star."

Nooks & Crannies: Visiting Book Nook in Peoria

I love it when I find a good used bookstore. Especially when the bookstore has an excellent scifi/fantasy section and, even more so, when the books are cheap. This is what happened this weekend when we took my mother out for a birthday dinner at Yen Ching's Chinese Restaurant. Though our waitress was totally insane and may or may not have poisoned my Tsingtao, that story will have to wait for another time. This is the story of a used bookstore.

Catty-corner to Yen Ching's is a little store called The Book Nook.
It's the kind of bookstore that's flush with paper- and hardbacks, scattered throughout the store seemingly haphazardly. The owners do break it down into sections for the peruser; however, as you first walk in, seeing all of these books crowded on shelves together, is, to the say least, over-stimulating.

The Book Nook is a wide selection of books, too: from new releases to classics, encyclopedic texts to romance, a wonderful display of children's and YA novels - and, of course, my favorite, a rather extensive science fiction and fantasy section. I ended up nearly buying the store out of its stock of Samuel R. Delany novels. The Einstein Intersection (above), City of a Thousand Suns and The Jewels of Aptor are now in my collection. (SHOUT OUT: Greg Bossert, I'm coming for you and your collection!) I also purchased Dangerous Visions, an anthology of stories edited by the infamous Harlan Ellison, and Walter John Williams' Voice of the Whirlwind. The Delany and WJW books were $2.50 each and the Ellison anthology was $6.00.

My girlfriend bought a 16-volume collection of The International Library of Music, which includes hundreds of piano pieces and opera scores for $40. Originally, the volumes were $60 but we haggled with the owner for a bit and brought the price down. I mean, after all, he did have two sets of the volumes.

If there is one slight detraction to The Book Nook it's this: though the store was not short on bestsellers like Tom Clancy or Dean Koontz, it lacked a "lesser known titles" selection. I was hoping for some Europa series titles but found none and lesser known authors like Kent Haruf or Alina Bronsky.

This really only applies to "literary fiction" (for whatever that means) because, as I've mentioned above, their scifi/fantasy section is unquestionably the best I've seen from a used bookstore in a long time. Even Chicago bookstore cannot compare to the selection: Kate Wilhelm, Damon Knight, Ellen Kushner, Ellen Datlow anthologies, Jack Vance - a lot of these books are only available online and, I have to wonder, if a few are even in print anymore.

I'll definitely be returning to The Book Nook. Next time I might buy them out of their Stephen R. Donaldson - even though I'm not a big fan of Thomas Covenant. At this point, I'm really out to out-collect Greg Bossert.

What bookstores near you rock?

Writing & Music: Your Wednesday Update

I'm proud to announce that my story, "Shiny Things," will be published in the Spring Issue of the new literary magazine, Prime Mincer. "Shiny Things" was my final Clarion week story and it took me almost two weeks to write, so I'm particularly happy it has found a home. The inaugural issue of Prime Mincer will be available soon in print mid-March, as well as through itunes and for the nook and kindle.

And for those of you who haven't read it yet, my story "Galilee" was published last September in Aphelion Magazine. The editor thought it was an incredibly dark Heinlein juvenile story; and several comments mention how totally depressing the story is. Well, what can I say? I guess I was in a mood.

A few friends have exciting news on the horizon, too:

Clarion chum and rock climbing fiend, Gregory Norman Bossert's novelette, "Slow Boat," originally published in the April/May issue of Asimov's, is being translated into Russian and will be featured in Russia's oldest science fiction and fantasy magazine, ESLI. I don't know that it gets any cooler than this. There are a few of you from Russia out there reading this blog (I see you!) and as more details become available I will let you know.

In case you missed the last signal boost, Karin Tidbeck's story is available in Weird Tales, Tamsyn Muir's story is now available at Fantasy Magazine, Kali Wallace's story is out in the current issue of F&SF, Adam Israel's story is online at Crossed Genres, and John Chu's story is upcoming at Boston Review. How's that for links galore? And, can I just say, Clarion 2010 is taking over the literary airwaves? Yes, I can. Clarion 2010 is taking over the literary airwaves!

Michael Martello, multi-instrumentalist for Tin Tin Can, has released a new solo record, titled Sheep Numbers & the Canine Psychology. Though I don't think this is available online as yet, he will be selling cds at upcoming Tin Tin Can shows and it is well worth a buy. Mike recorded the songs over a week while he was dogsitting.

My sister Mandy, talented artist that she is (that's her art up top), is also an awesome musician. She's working on an EP that should be available soon through Prospero Records. Mandy and I used to perform together in Root Shoot Leaf and I can tell you that her songs were always the audience's favorites. Be looking out for her EP!

I hope I haven't missed anyone. Leave a comment if I have and let me know what you're up to.

END TRANSMISSION.