Memorial Day is in the can and my A/C cut on yesterday for the first time this year, so summer is nigh, and my list of tasks is piling up.  I have to write a new story for a critique-group deadline in two and a half weeks, and I’ll have thirty crits to read/write by mid-July.  I need to spray the last guitar I built with lacquer in the next month before the weather gets too humid, but I’ve got to take it apart and sand it first.  And around all that, I’m working on a big new project that’ll be the first step in my super-villain plan to dominate the world (more on that as it unfolds).  Summer is definitely nigh.

Nightshade books is having a sale! Lots of great stuff there and half off too -- including Fast Ships, Black Sails, which has my story "Skillet and Saber" in it.

May as well make space beside the toilet now.

This beast is an example of the peculiar fauna that inhabits Manhattan buildings:

My buddy Rabbit and I live across the street from each other. We used to work within five blocks of each other and take the train home together, but she recently started a new job so now we meet up on the weekend and go to the diner together. (We'll also geek out and play board games like Talisman on Saturday nights.) Usually, it'll be me, Rabbit, and her girlfriend Duck, and the three of us will go to a diner down the block from us on the other side of Queens Boulevard (aka THE BOULEVARD OF DEATH). More often than not the three of us wind up talking about religion. It being Sunday morning after all...

Now Rabbit and I were both raised Catholic - she of the Hong Kong colonial variety, and me of the Irish/Italian scourge yourself with a rock variety. Duck on the other hand was raised in a Taoist household of the folk variety. This isn't the Tao of Pooh cushy Westernized variety, but the 'I can talk to spirits, drink draino and be unharmed, and cast magic spells' variety. Her dad talked to spirits.

I repeat: Her dad talked to spirits.

He made them do things. They entered his body. Sometimes the family would be eating dinner and her dad would stop eating all of the sudden and say in another voice: "Tell your cousin not to go to the hospital today." The dad could also perform various feats of endurance and see ghosts. Duck remains skeptical but she has seen some weird shit. I am certainly quick to point to a bio-physical cause for these things. But still -- fascinating stuff.

One thing that came up in the conversation is the fact that Folk Magic, and in particular Black Magic, is widely practiced by criminals involved in the drug trade. The whole Golden Triangle is a necromancer's playground. Gangs will resort to sorcery in order to achieve their ends: curses, spiritual combat, guardian demons -- the whole bit. Overall it was a very interesting conversation, but I was a bit pissed 'cause the waitress refused to come over and refill our coffee cups.

You'd think she was scared of us or something.

Have at it.

From the always classic Self-defence with a Walking-stick: The Different Methods of Defending Oneself with a Walking-Stick or Umbrella when Attacked under Unequal Conditions (1901)

Bounders, hooligans, and expert kickers beware!

Further plumbing the depths of the dreck I watched as a kid. Ralph Bakshi’s Wizards has to be the dreckiest of the bunch. David Brin is on record as calling it, "just about the most evil thing produced since Goebbels ran the Nazi propaganda mill."

Set two million years after World War III, when the Earth is divided between the lands of Scorch where the mutants live, and Montagar where the elves, dwarves and fairies live, a pair of twin brothers vies for control of the land. Avatar the Elf is all about magic and nature; and Blackwolf is all down with the technology and being EVIL. Unfortunately, Blackwolf’s mutant army sucks and it’s not until he can dig up some Nazi propaganda films that he’s able to make them into the fighting force he needs to take over the world.

The mere sight of Nazi propaganda freaks all the elves out, and the forces of Good look set to crumble. At which point Gandalf, I mean, Avatar decides to lead a small group (an elf with sharp teeth, a sexy fairy, and a reprogrammed android) into Scorch to confront Blackwolf.



The whole thing is like some third-rate Frazetta poster artist did his version of Lord of the Rings. Much of the footage Bakshi rotoscoped over is swiped from Eisenstein’s Alexander Nevsky. The character design and concept is lifted from the work of Vaughn Bode. (He of the Cheech Wizard and accidental auto-erotic asphyxiation fame.) The movie plays out like a grab bag of 70s Hippie kitsch vomited onto the screen.

Honestly, I have no idea how old I was when I first saw this movie. I do know I loved it. Elves, Nazis, and animated fairy women in bikinis -- oh boy, more scarification of the id. Since then I’ve probably seen it twice. This time, I couldn’t help but ask myself where the hell were my parents all those other times? (All I can think of is my brother and I were left with my grandmother for the day. She didn’t care what we watched and I saw all sorts of things I shouldn’t have. She also taught me how to play poker and mix a proper scotch and soda.)

Anyways, if you ever feel like trolling the gutters of Memory Lane try yourself some Wizards!

(Shamelessly lifted from my friend and colleague Kate’s blog, with my comments added at the bottom.)

These are the top 106 books most often marked as “unread” by some group’s users. As in, they sit on the shelf to make you look smart or well-rounded. Bold the ones you’ve read, and italicize the ones you own but have not read.

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell**
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi : a novel
The Name of the Rose
Don Quixote
Moby Dick
Ulysses
Madame Bovary
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre
A Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel
War and Peace
Vanity Fair
The Time Traveler’s Wife
Emma
The Iliad
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner
Mrs. Dalloway
Great Expectations
American Gods
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius**
Atlas Shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex
Quicksilver
Wicked
The Canterbury Tales
The Historian : a novel
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Love in the Time of Cholera
Brave New World
The Fountainhead
Foucault’s Pendulum
Middlemarch
Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula
A Clockwork Orange
Anansi Boys
The Once and Future King
The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible : a novel
1984
Angels & Demons
The Inferno
The Satanic Verses
Sense and Sensibility
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
To the Lighthouse
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Oliver Twist
Gulliver’s Travels
Les Miserables
The Corrections
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Dune
The Prince
The Sound and the Fury
Angela’s Ashes : a memoir
The God of Small Things
A People’s History of the United States
Cryptonomicon
Neverwhere
A Confederacy of Dunces
A Short History of Nearly Everything**
Dubliners
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Beloved
The Scarlet Letter
Slaughterhouse-Five
Eats, Shoots & Leaves**
The Mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake : a novel
Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed**
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye
On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics**
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
The Aeneid
Watership Down
Gravity’s Rainbow
The Hobbit
In Cold Blood
White Teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield
The Three Musketeers

Scott muses: this is an odd list–lots of classics but also lots of modern pseudo-literary flavors-of-the-month. Many of the classic authors have multiple titles–Austen, Dickens, Dostoevsky. But many others only have one–Melville, Pynchon, Faulkner (who wrote 19 novels, compared to Austen’s six). There are a couple genre novels, but Dune and The Hobbitt are staples of their respective subgenres, not books that non-genre people keep around to look cool (Stranger in a Strange Land, anyone?).

So these are some vacuous people who think owning lots of Austen but only one Faulkner makes you look smart. For extra flavor, I added ** next to the titles that are particularly vain modern literati tripe.  :)

So because I happened to be in the right place at the right time, I got the chance to put a new ad for the Homeless Moon chapbook in the upcoming LCRW 22. As a result of the very spur-of-the-moment nature of this windfall (I literally heard about it, sat down to design an ad, and handed it in an hour later), not even my staunch allies, the lunatics, have seen it. But the one person who did (the incalculable Jedediah Berry) assured me it was pretty darn cool, and even expressed a kind regret that there wasn’t anyplace else to show it off.

“Aha,” said I, “but there is!”

Hope you like it.

Last weekend I attended agent and writing lecturer Don Maass’s High Tension Workshop in Austin, TX. His whole “tension” idea is to make every paragraph in a work, of any type of narrative, so compelling a read that the reader can’t put it down. I found his strategies immensely interesting, partly because he presented them as a tool to be used wherever the writer sees fit. Some of them were based on anticipation or playing with reader expectations. Many others were rooted in the character, which is my favorite aspect of fiction.

Maass was a very engaging lecturer and knew his material thoroughly, using many examples from best-selling novels. Austin was also quite cool–we were at the north end of town, but I still found a cool brewpub called North by Northwest and a sampler six-pack of local ales from Blanco, TX. All in all, a damn fine weekend.