Octopuses Are Holy Creatures
This can’t be said often enough. Neither can It’s so easy to join!
This can’t be said often enough. Neither can It’s so easy to join!
Tonight at Fantagraphics in Seattle, a wonderful event: Paul di Filippo appeared with Jim Woodring (see his website on the blog’s sidebar) to read from Cosmocopia, which you can buy here (in a limited edition of 500 copies). Cosmocopia is a novel inspired by Woodring’s art, accompanied by some of said art, including a 500 piece Woodring jigsaw puzzle.
I have known Paul for many years, but we have never met in person. Years ago, he circulated a small zine called Astral Avenue, and I began to bury him in correspondence, little knowing how well Paul would rise to the challenge. For many years, I would receive one or two envelopes a week from Paul, each one heavily and lovingly collaged, and full of weird ephemera he’d scoured from the antique stores and garage sales of Providence. We eventually appeared in Mirrorshades together, and collaborated on a short story about the photographer Weegee (“Sleep is Where You Find It” aka “The Human Head Cakebox Murders”), and even tried to get a collaborative novel off the ground. Weirdly, with the advent of email, we corresponded less. When I lived on Long Island in 1988, we spoke on the phone once. We’d never met in the flesh until tonight. So to meet Paul and Jim Woodring, one of my artist heroes…in a shop crammed with Fantagraphics’s amazing creations…it was quite a night. Followed by huge amounts of great food, hilarious conversation and Hard Corn Poneography at Hing Loon. As an extra bonus, I met Max Woodring, who it turned out I’d already run into at the Gage Academy a few months ago. So it was a night packed with import and sure to give rise to significant strange events somewhere up ahead and unforeseen. I can’t wait to read Cosmocopia–and one of these rainy nights, maybe I’ll tackle the puzzle as well.
Colorful account of a jailed Thai blogger. Nothing to do with John Norman.
This is what the King County library catalog index has in its summary of The Mayor of Casterbridge:
“A drunken, unemployed hay-trusser sells his wife and daughter at a fair, is eventually reunited with them when he is the mayor of a thriving market town, but in the end he becomes bankrupt and a social outcast.”
Hey! Maybe I didn’t want to know the whole plot!
And he came from the future to deliver his talk. I was there to watch the presentation at the Austin Game Developers Conference, and it was a captivating talk, replete with magic tricks, gags, and audience provocation (lighting a cigarette in a smoke-free zone).
In related news, Flurb #6, is out.
(Austin by Nightphone)
Myths Over Miami is still one of the most amazing things I’ve ever read. Over 11 years old, the link still works.
I’m in an industrial compound. To one side, a hothouse, its windows covered with steamy vapor. On the other, an icehouse whose outer walls are rimed with frost. One of the workers is opening a blast furnace with a long flexible contraption of dark blue rubber fit with gears and faucet handles that extends his grip and guards him from the heat. But I’m getting nervous. Someone has just cleared a patch of ground, exposing a long-buried rectangular doorway with steps leading down into the earth, from which a cold blue glow emits. On the threshold are etched the words: THORIUM STORAGE. I start backing away slowly, thinking that this is a good time to leave.
The word “thorium” got into my thoughts for no good reason the other day. This is what comes of it. (I don’t even have mining skills. I’m a simple gatherer of herbs.)
UPDATE: I admit, I’ve also been thinking of Dejah Thoris and her hometown of Helium. Maybe that figures into it.
Over at the F&SF website, John Joseph Adams has posted an interview with me about the writing of “Childrun,” the latest Gorlen Vizenfirthe story.