M-I-C. See you real soon. K-E-Y. Why? Because we love you.

Hello, readers. My posts have been fairly absent of late. This is due to many things, none of which are the swine flu, Tokyo's self-propelling goo, or Barbara Streisand. Two things to which it is actually due would be those events to which sometimes I refer (and involve my family hopefully not all deciding to die simultaneously), and also this thing here, which is a magnelephant blog started by me in which I plan on discussing everything ever. There will probably be a lot of posts about cats.

In other words (are there any other kind?), this may be my last post here, and it may not, depending on how the moon strikes me. It's been fun and this magazine will have many wonderful people, not me, working for it next year. One of them you can read her stories here and here. If you ask her nicely, maybe she will sometimes post on this blog, or poke someone else into doing it. If she pokes hard enough, that someone else maybe will sometimes be me.

One last/more/erm time, here's a list of things that I more or less found interesting enough to compose into a list, occasionally annotated by my silly serious ruminations:

The Nebula Awards have been announced. LCRW tabluates winners according to gender, which makes sense if you understand the concept of Tiptree-ian momentum.

A person with my name, along with my brain and my fingers and my ankles, has published an article in Strange Horizons called, "Imagining the Perfect Man: Science Fiction and the Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin." The pictures are quite nice.

A list by John Crowley in which there are suggested many books for people, especially those with fantasy and sci-fi inclinations [taken, as are most of my ideas, from the man in black who doodles rats and doesn't--yet--have a famous album of him singing in a prison. Though there are reports of him carrying dead women in alleys.]

Happy tomorrow, readers.

ttfn.

Sunday Square Finds

Hello, readers. Your blogger spent his Sunday walking around the Oxford Square, perusing the shelves of our local booksellers. And he found things, some of them interesting, a few of them he'll share with you here. Pictures included where appropriate.

In the Believer, there is a list of the Fifty Greatest Things That Just Popped into Jack Pendarvis' Head. Included are such things as windows, curtains (because sometimes windows are too good to be true), and also, erm, something else representative and humorous but which I can't think of at the moment. For more of Jack, a person/thing which is great and often pops into my head unannounced in a hilarious manner similar to that of Kramer from Seinfeld, visit here, which is the place where Jack Pendarvis has a blog.

At Square Books, Jr., John Green's Looking for Alaska called out to me, but he will be read later. As well, perhaps, as will something called The Chronicles of the Imaginarium Geographica, a series concerning the geography of imaginary places. What truly stuck out to me, though, was the great number of books concerning the awkward and occasionally tragic experiences of attending high school with zombies, or as they're called in Generation Dead, the living impaired, or differently biotic. It seems zombies are not quite the brainless moaners of yesteryear. They listen to music. They ride the bus. They hope you will sit with them in the cafeteria, but they know you won't because they smell funny. In You Are So Undead to Me, they receive counseling from a fifteen-year-old girl named Megan Berry. She's a zombie settler. It's her job to help the recently undead adjust to being no longer dead. Perhaps that all sounds a bit hokey, and rather--excuse the mixed monster punnage--defanging to the zombie mythos, but such premises appeal to me, at least in theory, because of their implicit and empathetic message that monsters are people, too. Frankenstein could have used an understanding listener like Megan. Perhaps he wouldn't have ended up quite so homicidal or alone.

Finally, but not leastly, a book called Born in Flames: Termite Dreams, Dialetical Fairy Tales, and Pop Apocalypses surprised me by existing and the more so by containing many amazingly schizophrenic and insightful rants into pop culture's milieu. Howard Hampton is the author. He's like Quentin Tarantino if Quentin Tarantino went back in time and ate Lester Bangs' brain so as to take his powers of criticism and hyphenation. Topics for Howard include a dissection of the beflanneled songstresses of the "weirdo republic"--Cat Power, Lora Logica, and Enid Coleslaw, plus a wonderfully long-winded and overly hypenated discussion of Lester Bangs himself. As someone once said, "knee-jerk intellectuals may find it easy to lampoon someone who takes pop this seriously, but Hampton is a writer--possibly the only one--who can analyze Buffy the Vampire Slayer in the context of D. H. Lawrence ("American Daemons") and make it work."

Until next time, dear readers, happy Monday, and if you see a zombie, take a moment to not run and really listen to what they're trying to say. If after a few minutes, it seems to only be "Grr...Argh," or the like, and also if they try to bite your shoulder, then probably you should go back to Plan A and start running.

The Year Ahead, In Which There Are Many Challenges, A Licked Moon, And Zombies

Hello, readers. Have you made resolutions for the New Year? Plan on Wii-ing your way to a better body? Or finally getting started on that poem about licking the moon and eating bras (Alas, someone beat you to that one.)

Maybe you plan on taking part in one of the numerous literary challenges that abound around the internet. There's the livejournal 50bookchallenge where you and others can join in the noble goal of reading 50 books a year. Perhaps you've got a stack of books waiting to be read? There's a challenge for you, too, at avidbookreader's TBR challenge. For a site to browse various challenges for the one that inspires you, try the novel challenges blog. They've got a list of active challenges around the web, including, among others, a "Graphic Novel" challenge and a "Get Inspired" challenge, the latter being a challenge to pick a self-improvement work to read in the first part of the year, and then act on for the remaining months. Very helpful, perhaps, for those with resolutions.

If you need inspiration for new books to read in 2009, check out the anticipatory lists of forthcoming great reads, graphic and otherwise, at The Millions and Comic Book Resources. Writers to look forward to in 2009 include Zadie Smith, Jonathan Lethem, and Philip Roth--who somehow still manages to put out a book a year despite his never-ending struggle against the zombie hordes which threaten our world.

Tune in tomorrow wherein this blogger will list some resolutions and/or/maybe some challenges he'll be taking part in.

Happy it's-already-almost-Friday. ttfn.

Tuesday Things

Hello, readers. There isn't much time. Events are happening. Here's a clickable list of wonders.

Vote for your favorite literature blog.

Paula Kinkaid yearns to be historicized. Also, she talks science fiction novels, about their being about now, and as examples, she looks at two novels, Of Wind and Sand and The Quiet War, which seem to be reactions to the current Iraq War.

Reviewers at Strange Horizons review 2008.

The Costa book award winners. Once upon a time these were called the Whitbreads.

Must attend to events now, readers. ttfn.

Happy New Year and Things

Hello, readers, welcome to the future. It's 2009. Only one year left until we're in a whole new decade. I celebrated last night with music, free champagne, and occasional dancing. Other things happened on New Year's though, besides my kickin about, two things in fact. Two things and no more.

Thing One: Terry Pratchett, author of Discworld and proponent of mildly homicidal luggage which doubles as a bodyguard for its carrier, must now and forevermore be referred to as Sir Terry Pratchett. Apparently, the Queen is the kind of frood that really knows where her towel is, if you know what I mean.*

Thing Two: io9 published their list of the best science fiction novels of 2008. Making the cut, among others, include Anathem by Neal Stephenson, Sly Mongoose by Tobias S. Buckell, and Liberation: Being the Adventures of the Slick Six After the Collapse of the United States of America by Brian Francis Slattery. Also here you'll find brief interviews with some of the authors, including Ekaterina Sedia, author of Alchemy of Stone, who talks of the "myth of superpowered machines," as well as her next book, which tells the story of a girl and her salamander.

Thing Three: People lie. Trust suffers.


ttfn.


*In case you don't.

Writerly Reading Habits

Generally, successful writers make reading a part of their routines. Several blogs and websites have lists of what books writers have enjoyed this past year. Here are two:

The Millions updates each day with a new list from a writer. So far, Charles D'Ambrosio has raved about Jonathan Ames' somewhat autobiographical graphic novel, The Alcoholic. Nam Lee re-realized how awesome Beloved is. And writer of horror, Peter Straub, wondered, When Will There Be Good News?

SF Signal has writers discussing their favorite genre discoveries. Here you'll find Jokers and Wastelands, Fables and Peanuts, a few Well-Built Cities, and the occasionally tragic Ghost in Love.

Happy Thursday, readers and writers. Be well. Do good work. Try to make a routine of it. It really does help.

Writerly Routines

The Schedule of One Benjamin Franklin
Are you a writer? Do you have a routine? Benjamin Franklin and the government of Oceania both advocated that slavery and freedom were not so oxymoronic as one might suspect. I myself have found that a rather absurd level of self-imposed discipline broken up by occasional bouts of whimsy works best, which is to say that generally I wake and write and read during the same times each day unless something remarkable happens like an Arrested Development marathon on G4*.

io9 has posted the routines of science fiction writers. Kingsley Amis discusses pajamas and nicotine and drinking tea until the bars open up at 6. He finds afternoons to be a dreadful time to do anything. Haruki Murakami believes that his routine is perhaps as important as the writing itself. Repetition mesmerizes him into a deeper state of mind.

For more writerly routines, make a habit (oh, humor, you rascal) of visiting daily routines, a repository of how people more famous than you organize their days.


*This isn't entirely true. It's a complete lie in fact. I only ever watch Arrested Development marathons on holidays, such as this past Thanksgiving. Or the Christmas before that. Or the Thanksgiving before that. You might call it a rou--(oh, enough of that already).

On Books, Lists of Books, and Also John Hodgman

There's been another salvo fired in the war over whether books as we know them are dying. In an Op-Ed column for the New York Times, James Gleick writes about why he sees the physical book as surviving the coming digitization of everything. "As a technology, the book is like a hammer. That is to say, it is perfect: a tool ideally suited to its task. Hammers can be tweaked and varied but will never go obsolete... It is significant that one says book lover and music lover and art lover but not record lover or CD lover or, conversely, text lover." [Via Shaken & Stirred]

Also, if you love lists, especially end of year best books lists, then largeheartedboy has just the thing to fill your time this holiday season. In an impressive bit of scouring, he's compiled a collection of dozens upon dozens of end of year best lists, ranging from such obvious stalwarts as Amazon.com or the New York Times, to the St. John's Telegram list of "best Canadian cookbooks."

And in more information than you require news , check out this interview at the New Yorker with John Hodgman about, among other things, his new book, More Information Than You Require.