dear austen keene

Dear Austen Keene (fine young fellow who I interviewed at the comic bookstore last Saturday),

I do believe that I saw you yesterday, waving at me from across the street and smiling the sort of broad, charming smile that only unabashedly clever, book-consuming, rather nice 15-year-olds can manage.

Please know that I'm often terrible at recognizing people's faces, especially when I run across them out of context or am surprised. I once ran into a boy I sat across from in English class for four entire years and couldn't place him, even after he told me his name. I once ran into the brother of a friend, had a conversation with him, and had no idea who he was until several hours after we parted. Funerals, weddings, and large parties are always a trial. I'm either faced with a familiar face that I can't attach to the story of a life, or, more embarrassingly, a face that pounces on me with recognition while I remain blank.

This is why I looked confused, turned away, and assumed you were waving at the only other young person in visual range, despite his obvious fascination with the phone clutched in his hands.

Please know that talking to you reminded me that there is a point to telling stories, beyond the pleasures of telling and consuming. Beyond craftsmanship and art and technique, there you are, the human being on the other end of the street, the one whose soul some lucky story will get to leave its fingerprints all over.

"I'd say that while I don't really have a book that's changed me, reading has sort of made up what I do, how I look at things. It puts ideas in my head. In the comic I'm reading now, the pure of heart are kind of, like, in both sides, so you're not really sure who's good and who's bad. So maybe the bad guys aren't the ones who are really doing the bad things, and things aren't really what they seem. And that really excites me. I could go on for hundreds and hundreds of books." -- Austen Keene

Oh, and if you see me again, just wave until recognition drills through my thick skull.

x. M

on reading science

I just finished a very wonderful book. I really mean that. It folded me up inside it, educated me, excited me, exercised my compassion and my wonder. It introduced me to ideas I had never considered and made my world more interesting by filling in the detail in places I hadn't bothered to look. It's also really, really, really well written.

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. It's by Rebecca Skloot. The history of cell culture, biomedical ethics, and people, in all their messy, brilliant, and ordinary glory. Oh man, but reading a good book can make me so incredibly happy!

I've been addicted to reading about science. It's a recently discovered pleasure. Several months ago, I had a conversation about taxonomy that lodged in my head and set off sparklers of delighted recognition. Here were so many of those things that I obsess over in dancing and writing -- perception, relationships, the understanding of things not ourselves -- but approached from another direction entirely. It was like studying a gorgeous sculpture for years, memorizing every minute detail of it, and only just realizing that you could walk around to the other side.

The particular of science is seductive. The astonishing and exact details that make the world more interesting to experience. The crazy beautiful shift from vague to precisely textured. There is no practical reason for why someone like me needs to know about telomeres or FISH, but learning about them is either like peeling off the surface of the world, or piling it up with layer over layer of intimate wonder, I can't decide which.

(Reading I've liked aside from the Henrietta Lacks book: Genome by Matt Ridley, Creation Revisited by Peter Atkins, The Language Instinct by Steven Pinker, The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat by Oliver Sacks.)

sheer, unadulturated greed

Today, in a fit of ravenous desire to possess, I bought a stack of reading material. I really should not be allowed into places that sell used books, or really, books in general. But... the first three are from a library book sale and I bought them for the princely sum of a dollar each. A dollar! Three dollars for several hours, possibly even days, of entertainment. How could I turn up my nose at that?

It wouldn't be so bad if I didn't already have a massive stack of books to read. I counted them recently, hoping that a solid number would encourage me to rescue one from its neglected state of uncracked pages. Instead, I foolishly chase the shiny and new, and these languish. Some of them even have bookmarks ten or twenty pages through, but most have yet to be touched. There are seventy of them. Poor things.
It occurs to me that this habit of compulsive acquisition may say something about my personality. And also why libraries and curios and museums have such dusty, magnetic charm for my easily distracted heart.

May reading

I finished an embarrassingly small number of books this month. A mere four. I've started an absurdly large number, enough that the height of the piles on various surfaces in my bedroom is a little mortifying, but I only finished four. Too many wonderful friends visiting. Too many trips to bookstores full of temptation (a warning: if you ever let me take you to my favourite places, you'll fritter a lot of time away in spaces between bookshelves).

The Language of Bees by Laurie R. King
This is the ninth book in King's Mary Russell series. The first book is The Beekeeper's Apprentice, and I love it so much that I think I've read it at least five times. It's one of the few mysteries that I'll read over and over, even though I know exactly how the puzzle works, just because I enjoy spending time with the characters.
Each of the books has a different flavor, a different focus or particular fascination. This one deals with beekeeping, mystical cults in 1920s England, and surrealist art. It's not one of my favourite books in the series, mostly because the narrative splits up Russell and Homes and they experience most of the case separately, rather than having them gallop through it together; but I still enjoyed it.

The Exchange by Graham Joyce
My friend, Damien, recommended that I try Graham Joyce. This was the only book of his that we had in the store. It's a YA novel and there's so much about it that I like: brilliant, brilliant premise, and a character who is clever, a bit selfish, and tough without being annoying. I was so happy for the first few chapters, and then I got increasingly less happy because the gap between what I wanted to read and what was actually there got larger and larger as the story went on. It's not the story's fault, not really. It was a nice enough book, it just didn't chase down the shadows and byways that I wanted to.

Man and Camel by Mark Strand
I'm a little obsessed with Strand's poetry right now. They feel good to read and they open up little stories in my head. They're like boxes with strange, uncomfortable, light-footed worlds in it. The ones that press on my head most insistently in this collection are "Fire" and "I Had Been A Polar Explorer". You can see some of it here and see Mark Strand reading other poems here.

The Unlikely Disciple by Kevin Roose
I read this on the recommendation of the fabulous Cressida, who reads more books than I could possibly cram into my head. It was interesting, mostly because it's a guided tour of a world that I find completely alien. Kevin Roose is a student at Brown University who decides to spend a semester at Liberty University, which is an fundamentalist Baptist school in Virginia, and then write about it. I wasn't won over by his writing, but I liked the way he introduced people and experiences, leaving room for both sympathy and understanding. I have to admit that when I think of evangelical Christian culture, it's with absolute bafflement. It seems so smooth and rigid and enclosed, and I've never had any interest in trying to look inside... but this pulled open a tiny window and it was interesting and uncomfortable.

Some books started (+ possibility of reading more)
The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson
(I don't think so. Fell asleep during investigation scene.)
The Selected Works of T. S. Spivet by Reif Larsen
(Possibly. There is a great deal of literary flimflam and quirk in this one, which I find both irritating and peversely attractive.)
Sunnyside by Glen David Gold
(Definitely. I loved Carter Beats the Devil.)
Peace by Gene Wolfe
(Oh yes.)
Trampoline edited by Kelly Link
(Yes. There are some stories that are so strange and discomfitting in this book that I have to imbibe them in small sips.)

April reading

Not very many books this month.

The Magicians by Lev Grossman
This book opens with an absolutely brilliant thing: a young man walking with his friends and doing a coin trick in his pocket, where nobody can see it. It's one of those things that make me think, oh I wish I had thought of that. It's the sort of detail that only works in a book and in real life, and there's so much fun that you can dig out of it.
The basic bones of the story might be familiar: a young man discovers that he can actually do magic, real magic, and he goes off to boarding school to learn it. He makes friends, and finds out that a fictional world really exists on the wrong side of the water in a fountain. But Quentin is an overachieving and dissatisfied high school senior; the magical school is a bizarrely insular university; and there are really bad things in the world that magic doesn't help at all. I think the last bit is why I felt unsatisfied when I finished the book. Quentin is so discontented by everything that it made me want to punch him in the nose, but his ridiculous expectations drive the story and they infected me so that nothing was enough. I felt like I gorged on detail and fascinating, caustic relationships... but I was still hungry.

Britten and Brulightly by Hannah Berry
I thought that this was going to be funny. It wasn't. There were some funny things in it (Brulightly is completely bizarre), but it's actually kind of crushing. It's really good though, and I'm glad I read it. The art is perfect for a noir: grey and full of rain, odd faces brought in at strange angles, still and frozen snippets of rooms, and a slippery feeling that makes it seem like the truth is always shifting around.

Good Omens by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett
I love this book. I've read it more times than several, though it's been a while since the last time. I copied my friend, Kat, and read it while on a plane. I couldn't believe that I had run out of pages by the time I landed. (my copy has a much less attractive cover, one that reminds me of some weird spiritual book about brightly colored spirits that dance on triangular feet)

That Mad Ache by Francoise Sagan, translated by Douglas Hofstadter
This is Hofstadter's translation of La Chamade, and I thought it was an interesting and infuriating novel. It's about people who can't figure out how to be happy, or how to love each other, and it's absolutely claustrophobic because you get trapped inside their self-absorbtion with them. It's like drowning inside another, really irritating, person's skin.
This edition is interesting because it has an extended essay on translation by Hofstadter in the back.

Nation by Terry Pratchett
I always like his books. Even the ones that are not my favourite book of the last six months are still books that I'm happy while reading. I didn't fall in love with this one, but I thought it was very sharp, and sometimes it made me uncomfortable while still being funny and an adventure in the company of sensible young people who are actually heroes. Also, there is a shipwreck, and exotic island, and a tribe of cannibals.

Mr. Punch by Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean
This book frightens me. It's also one of the things that I like best of everything that he has done. The story has all kinds of space in it, so I fill it in with my own memories and all the things that scare me about people who I think I know, but don't. And there are weird shadows and details that change shapes while you read. Dave McKean's art is genius.

Troll's Eye View edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling
I'm really picky about fairytale retellings, mostly because I think that the good fairy tales are so entrenched in our minds that it's hard to make a retelling compelling enough to be better than starting from scratch. That's just a personal prejudice though. Some of the stories in here are very good, but my favourite is "A Delicate Architechture" by Catherynne M. Valente. It reminded me of E.T.A Hoffmann's Nutcracker, and it took me a while to figure out that it was a "Hansel and Gretel" story.

March reading

April Fool's Day is a holiday that I've always loved more in my head than in the world, mostly because I'm always surrounded by people too busy or too lazy to take advantage of it, and since I'm also too busy and too lazy, a day devoted to tricks and pranks and illusions goes by with nothing but vague wistfulness.

***

March books:

The Ramen King And I by Andy Raskin
This book made me laugh (snort, giggle, and squeak). It made me hungry, especially for ramen and sushi (I may have to hunt down the local restaurants mentioned...); and it made me squirm at the difficulty of figuring out what actually makes someone happy. It reminded me of Murakami, a head-on collision between the mundane and the weirdness of real life. It comes out in May (I'm putting a link here, since the book isn't out yet).

The Books of Magic by Neil Gaiman
Gobbled this one up. It's been a while since I read a comic. I always feel like the dual punches of words and images overload my brain a bit. My imagination goes hyperactive, trying to unfold in too many directions at once, so I dole these out as an occasional challenge and treat. All of the art in here is GORGEOUS.

The Manual of Detection by Jedediah Berry
Absolute delight. Reading this felt like romping through a Magritte painting. It has so many of my favourite things in it that I felt like I was unwrapping one of those crepe paper balls, and every little trinket that fell out made me hop with its shiny rightness. Detectives, dreams, bicycles, umbrellas, typewriters, carnivals, clocks, phonographs, hats, and sleepwalkers.

The Private Patient by P. D. James
This book has one of the most unflinchingly horrible discoveries of a body that I've ever read. And its so succinct, and so brilliant, that I read it three times to see how she turned my stomach over. I've never read a P. D. James book before, and I was taken aback by how good it was. It made me think about how a mystery story is a distorted portrait of intersecting trajectories.

The Good Thief by Hannah Tinti
I liked this book, but it didn't grab me the way I wanted it to. It's a story about an orphan shoved out into world that teeters on the edge of strange and ridiculous things that hurt the unlucky. I wasn't sure what kind of world it was though, or how far into the strange it was possible to go, so I always felt like I was tripping over things.

Suzy, Led Zeppelin, and Me by Martin Millar
I laughed a lot. And I was very sad. And I got all nostalgic for music that I don't really know at all. I couldn't think of any of the songs he mentioned, not even a tiny bit of melody, but I still had so much fun. So, I think that's a good sign.

The Secret History of Moscow by Ekaterina Sedia
I've been wanting to read this for a while. I liked it and I loved, loved the strangeness and harshness of the magical underneath version of Moscow. I wasn't quite satisfied with the almost-end--the explanation for why things happened didn't quite balance out for me--but the very end was exactly what I wanted it to be without being anything I expected.

before bed mutterings

I've just started a book which opens with a character performing a coin trick in his pocket where nobody can see it. Brilliant. Wish I had thought of that.
(book: The Magicians by Lev Grossman... I believe it comes out in August)

***
I'm writing a short story right now. Well, not right now. I was writing it earlier, back when there was sunlight and my brain still worked. Anyway, it's about the strange chill that falls upon you when you drink too much wine in the summertime. Or, it's about dancing. Or, possibly, it's about an old woman who guards the door to faery. Or, then again, it might be about losing things. I'm not entirely sure. It's all vague and foggy, and while I know what happens, I don't actually know what it's about, so it's hard to figure out what I need to tell and what is best left untold.

And, I have a character named B. because I can't think of a name for him. Sad.

***
My sister has the best taste in YouTube treasures: How Wings Are Attached To The Backs Of Angels (Comment Les Ailes Sont Attachees Au Dos Des Anges) by Craig Welch. An easy comparison of flavor would be to Edward Gorey. Also, I've always liked that Chopin nocturne.

summing up February books

I've just realised that the last few posts have all been lists of books. And here's yet another. I'm pretty sure that I do things aside from read books, and look at books, and think about books...

Books read:

How I Write: The Secret Lives of Authors
Edited by: Dan Crowe, with Philip Oltermann
This is a well-designed, extremely covetable book as work of art. Everything about it--fonts, images, margins, broad expanses of color or simple white space--is presented to you slow down while reading and consider the words almost as objects, which might ordinarily be distracting (or, distressing), but here is entirely appropriate. It's gorgeous, and would be something nice for sitting out and getting dusty on the coffee table except the innards are too addictive.
Mr. Crowe sent correspondance to a number of authors, mostly famous, and asked them what they can't write without. What do they need, what little habits, obsessions, and lucky talismans, are essential to getting words onto paper? They sent back miniature essays and Polaroids and confused emails. The Guardian has an extract here.

Tender Morsels by Margo Lanagan
I liked this book a great deal. I did not love it, but I think it could be the kind of book that would make people fall in love with Lanagan's writing and seek out everything else that she's written, particularly her brilliant short stories. The way that she tells the story in a whole chorus of different and distinct voices, without losing track of them or letting them blend into each other, is wonderful. It lures you along, and at the same time, makes you retrace your steps and reinterpret the same events through different lenses.
Also, Muddy Annie is one of my favourite new characters that I've met this year.

The Seance by John Harwood
I read an ARC of this, but it just came out. It's unrepentently Gothic: apparitions, possibly cursed manor houses, unsolved murders, spiritualism, gloomy paintings, and thunderstorms. I enjoyed it, and it kept me entertained over the course of two flights, even with stomach-dropping turbulence, but I found some of it confusing (it's told in alternating narratives as well, but without as strong control over the voices and time).

Museum of the Missing by Simon Houpt
My friend, Todd, knows about the my current obsession with art theft, so he picked up a copy of this when he went to the library and passed it on to me. I sort of gobbled it up. Houpt tells the stories of some of the most famous, brazen, and strange episodes in the history of art theft. He also introduces Harold Smith, who was a famous art detective and also tall, elegant man with a black eyepatch. The last pages of the book are devoted to a catalogue of a imaginary gallery of stolen works of art with miniature reproductions.
I've never been especially fond of Vermeer, but this book made me want to seek out some of his paintings and see if I've changed my mind.

Books bought:

The Lost Painting by Jonathan Harr
About a stolen Caravaggio.

The Mystery and Lure of Perfume by C.J.S. Thompson
I bought this book used from the lovely Bell's Books in Palo Alto. It's from 1927 and has a lavendar moire cover with an amphora and roses embossed in gold on the corner. It has several engravings and is slightly ridiculous, but I'm fond of writing from the 20s and I'm making the excuse that it's for research.

So, in February:
The fascination with illicit art acquisition has yet to abate.
Genre fiction makes for more absorbing travel reading than fashion magazines.
Non-fiction is more delightful when obsessive, specific, or over the top.

Clarion reading list, part 3

I'm sure many books were mentioned in the last three weeks, but, for some reason, I don't have them written down. I think this might be a result of a brain that was getting rapidly overstuffed.

WEEK FOUR (with Neil Gaiman)

1. Drowning By Numbers by Peter Greenaway
This one is a film and not a book, but Neil mentioned it as an example of a strange and oddly structured story that fulfills the only real rules of storytelling (which are: you don't bore your audience, and when they get to the point where they're finished, they feel satisfied and not cheated).
2. Peace by Gene Wolfe
3. The Infernal Desire Machines Of Doctor Hoffman by Angela Carter
Also: Nights At The Circus and The Bloody Chamber
I read Nights At The Circus a couple of months ago and found it both absolutely glorious and extremely discomfiting. The ideas (a woman with wings, a humble reporter, circuses and trains, dancing clowns, snowed in wilderness, a wild musician...) fit into all of my own particular fascinations and delights; and the way those ideas are melded into a story is remarkably believable and beautiful. However, the shadows are very deep and there is no flinching away from letting bad things happen to decent people, or tidying them away into a nice balance of deserved and undeserved.
4. "The Gardener" by Rudyard Kipling
This story is enigmatic and brilliant, and I won't say anything more because it's much better if you read it for the first time all unaware of what's going to spring at you.

This interview with Alan Moore, done by Daniel Whitson was also interesting. He says some brilliant stuff about story and about plot, and how the two work together.

The next two books were mentioned in a lecture on anthropology that we had with Thomas Levy:
4. Journey To The Copper Age by Thomas Levy
5. Archaeology: Theories, Method, and Practice by Colin Renfrew and Paul Bahn

WEEKS 5 & 6 (with Nalo Hopkinson and Geoff Ryman)

1. The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy
Geoff used an excerpt of this for his lecture about plot and story. The way Roy structures her story is fascinating. She fractures the chronological order of events and presents them in a layered, circuitous fashion that propels the reader along an emotional narrative and shapes their reaction to the bare bones cause and effect of plot.
2. Adulthood Rites by Octavia E. Butler
3. "Field Study" by Rachel Seiffert
We looked at this story as an example of the use of setting. It's spare and quietly written, and even though it's about our own, ordinary world, the stillness and precision of it gives it a very foreign quality.

Geoff also told me to outline the plot of The Golden Compass and The Remains of the Day so that I could try to learn how stories get put together into functioning narratives. It's a slow exercise, and a bit tedious, but very interesting and useful all the same.

And that's all I have. I'm sure there were many, many more that I've forgotten.

Clarion reading list, part 2

Oddly, I don't have any reading recommendations from week two, which was Jim Kelly's week. I do, however, have copious notes on the "TEN EVIL PLOT TRICKS," but as those aren't really part of the reading list, they don't belong here. Maybe later.

WEEK THREE (with Mary Anne Mohanraj)

1. Towing Jehovah by James Morrow
2. "The Star" by Arthur C. Clarke

Mary Anne had us do this lovely exercise where we went up to the blackboard and wrote down the title of a story that we were absolutely crazy about. Here's the list I wrote down:
3."The Author of the Acacia Seeds" by Ursula K. Le Guin
4. Beloved by Toni Morrison
5. The Neverending Story by Michael Ende
6. The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy by Douglas Adams
7. Wicked by Gregory Maguire
8. Winter's Tale by Mark Helprin
9. The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin
10. His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman
11. Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep by Philip K. Dick
12. The Tempest by William Shakespeare
13. The Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett
14. Footfall by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle
15. A Wrinkle In Time by Madeleine L'Engle
16. Alanna by Tamora Pierce
17. The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien
18. "The Library of Babel" by Jorge Luis Borges

Notice that the links don't take you to Amazon, but to the website for Kepler's, where you can see if we have a book in the store and where it might be located, just in case you might, you know, want to visit me... Also, rah-rah indie bookstores and all that.

Edited to add: I've actually found a photo of this list on the blackboard with an excitingly lemon yellow-haired Ferrett in front of it.

Clarion reading list, part 1

I've been typing up some notes that I took while at Clarion (mostly because, while I usually have perfectly legible handwriting, my Clarion notes are cramped and scribbly). We had many books recommended to us, or mentioned as examples, so I've been putting them together into a list...

WEEK ONE (with Kelly Link)

1. Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud
Scott came and talked to us later. He has fascinating ideas about story and structure.
2. Feed by MT Anderson
3. "Start the Clock" by Benjamin Rosenbaum
4. The Darkening Garden: A Short Lexicon of Horror by John Clute
5. The Game of Kings by Dorothy Dunnett
6. Angela Carter and Cormac McCarthy
Kelly mentioned them specifically as examples of writers who use a dense setting to give a sense of the geography of characters.
7. "Ringing The Changes" by Robert Aickman
8. What It Is by Lynda Barry
9. A Company of Swans by Eva Ibbotson (romance)
I'm slightly suspicious of this as it's a romance novel involving ballet dancers, which is dangerous territory...
10. In The Woods by Tana French
11. The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing by MT Anderson
This book is incredible. It's one of the few on this list that I had read before going to Clarion. It was nothing like I expected it to be, and I think I admired it even more because of that.
12. Life Is Funny by ER Frank
13. "Sea Oak" by George Saunders
14. The Melancholy of Anatomy by Shelley Jackson
15. A Very Long Engagement by Sebastien Japrisot
I was so enamoured with Japrisot's name that I borrowed part of it for a character in a story.
16. Grace Paley
Kelly suggested that I look at her work for examples of clean, well put together dialogue. Her stories are very strange and quite compressed, and some of them ring through my head while others fall flat. It's really interesting.
17. Peter Dickinson
I love Peter Dickinson, particularly his older works, so it was fun to meet someone else who was also disappointed by how few of them are kept in American bookshelves (my store doesn't have any of them, not even King And Joker or The Dancing Bear, which I read at the library a long time ago and, when I discovered that I couldn't buy it at the store, was tempted to steal).

Her atrocious aunt had deprived the child of all her gravity.

I bought a copy of The Light Princess by George MacDonald at work the other day because it is one of my favourite fairy tales. It's beautifully, cleverly written and it has stuck in my imagination since the first time I heard the story (because my mom read it to me before I read it myself). The edition I bought has the delicate Maurice Sendak illustrations, and it's small and light and the color of butter. Reading it again, I loved it even more. I decided to order a handful to press upon my friends, but was dismayed to discover that there were none to be found in our distributor's warehouse.

I may have to find some used copies, snatch them up, and stash them away to be handed out in moments when gravity has crushed all the laughter out of everything.

This is the sort of story that makes me boggle at people like the customer who told me that she didn't want fairy stories or books with magic in them for her children because they aren't about real things. Silliness and laughter and resentment? Love and humor and sorrow? What kind of real world do they live in, people like that? It must be a bland one.

booklog

Recently finished:

The Ransom of Russian Art by John McPhee
Discusses the outrageous smuggling of unofficial Soviet era art, as performed by a professor of economics.

The Lost Art of Walking by Geoff Nicholson
Self-explanatory. Light and fun to read for the most part, until you get to the end and he tells you, very plainly, about his childhood on an English council estate.

The Newton Letter by John Banville
Absolutely crushing, but some of the most gorgeous writing I've read lately. All kinds of tragedy at work.

Loot by Sharon Waxman
Really wonderful, though I appreciated it more for the quirky facts and dramas than for the effort it makes to decide where iconic artifacts really belong.

letters standing in for other things

Heard, on NPR, today a news story about the Climate Change Conference in Poznan (and no, I don't know how to put an accent over my "n"). Actually, heard several stories about the UNFCCC, but my favourite was the one about climate change acronyms (which you can admire here). And then there are the other languages.

Gobbledegook. Alphabet soup.

***
Also, Loot by Sharon Waxman is a book that lots of people should read, especially if they delight in knowing things like how a circus strongman named Belzoni became a leading procurer of Egyptian antiquities.

music wars

When you walk into a bookshop, the ambient music probably isn't the first thing that enters your mind. It probably straggles in much later, after, "where is that book that I desperately want and must have in my hands in this exact moment?" or, "what direction shall I wander in first?" or maybe even, "what are those strange things that sort of look like Rubik's cubes, but aren't?"... But then, after a little while, the music seeps in. And then, after several hours, even with all those lovely books crowded around you, the music is suddenly pounding through your head and you wonder why everyone hasn't either burst into spontaneous dance, or run away with their hands pressed to their ears.

At the bookshop, we have music wars. The combatants are:

The company sanctioned, nice at first, but easily tiresome CDs that we sell. These have French songs, Spanish songs, "world beats", and other such globally inclusive tasters.

A strange amalgamation of things that reminds me of a fake honky tonk bar. Or, possibly, the parts of the 70s that I'm glad I missed.

Classical music. Mozart, Bach, and all the usual suspects. I'm extremely fond of classical music, so it makes me unreasonably happy when, say, a Bach CD makes it's way into the stereo.

Once, I think someone brought in some French accordian music, the cheerful oom pah pah kind. In small doses, it's actually quite infectious. I felt like doing jigs up and down between the shelves.

Sadly (or maybe fortunately), nobody wins for long. It's all just skirmishes and sometimes your ears bleed and sometimes they don't.
***
I've just started reading Dali & I by Stan Lauryssens. I have high hopes for this one. Even higher now that I've read the author's bio, which says that he spent time in prison for selling fake Dalis, then "turned to writing crime fiction". This is possibly the most exciting thing I've read on a book flap in a long time.

sticking points

Worked on some of those small, worrying details that pluck at me while I'm dancing and go, "right, you're really not capable here, but I guess you can just skate over the whole issue and pretend like you didn't notice." My upper back, the bit underneath the shoulder blades, isn't particularly articulate or clever. It moves in a solid, lumpy block until I'm really warmed up, and then class is almost over and there's not much to do about it.

Anyway, stood in the studio for a good twenty minutes with a glazed look on my face, contemplating the space underneath my shoulder blades and making odd shrugging movements and twitches.

Sometimes, I think about the things that I think about while I'm dancing and it all seems so bizarre. The way the front of my shoulders rotate in their sockets. The distribution of weight between first toe and last. Those little muscles that run in between my ribs. It's like someone standing very close to a painting and trying to decide exactly what color the shadow between two cobblestones should be.
***
Am reading Angela Carter's Nights At The Circus. I'm about half-way through and it's a very strange, very beautiful and twisty, piece of enthusiastic cabaret. Am also reading A Little History of the World by E. H. Gombrich, which is like history told in bedtime stories.

surrounded by books

So, I've just started a job at Kepler's, which is an excellent, friendly, well-stocked, and independent (gasp!) bookstore. I spent 40 hours this week learning how to sell, find, and shelve books (something that started to frighten me when I had a dream about looking for a book on the history of economics in Europe. Oh please don't let mundane dreams--even mundane dreams about books--hijack my imagination!). I also discovered the joys of advanced reading copies. I feel immensely gleeful about the three ARCs that I've picked up and (greedily) already dipped into:

Descartes' Bones by Russell Shorto comes out this month and is a "skeletal history of the conflict between faith and reason."

The Seance by John Harwood comes out in February and is a Victorian mystery.

Vanished Smile: The Mysterious Theft of Mona Lisa by R.A. Scotti comes out in April.

They are joining the immense (and slightly embarrassing ) pile of books next to my bed. They all have bookmarks stuck between the pages partway through, and while I'm happily reading them all, the new ones keep appearing.

I went to Samovar last night with Heather and Miguele. We had the most delicious chai, which tasted of real black tea and nose prickling spices rather than mystery powdered something or other, and wonderful little sweets. The bread pudding was my favourite: a creamy golden circle of buttery pastry with a layer of caramelized sugar on the bottom. The tea menu is a tiny piece of delight, with descriptions that blithely use words like "velutinous" and "viridescent" and "vegetal" to describe their oolongs and whites and blacks. The music, however, somehow reminded me of belly dancing and Christmas carols at the same time.

trompe l'oeil, butoh, and the similarities between oysters and stories

I'm reading, in bits and pieces, a collection of Rudyard Kipling's short stories as chosen and arranged by W. Somerset Maugham. The story that I'm reading right now is called "The Village That Voted The Earth Was Flat," which is an irresistible title, but so far seems to be a strange story about a wild bunch of newspaper men who are out to discredit an irritating M.P.

Maugham says something very likeable in his introductory essay though. "No one," he says,
is obliged to read stories, and if you don't like them unless there is something in them more than a story, there is nothing to do about it. You may not like oysters, no one can blame you for that, but it is unreasonable to condemn them because they don't possess the emotional quality of a beefsteak and kidney pudding. It is equally unreasonable to find fault with a story because it is only a story."

Tomorrow, well, later today actually, I'm doing a second workshop with Shinichi Iova-Koga. He is teaching us about butoh. Last time, my understanding was that butoh is a dance that is motivated from the interior, ideas bleeding out gradually to the outer layer of your skin, where they become visible to anyone who is watching... but I think that the definition of butoh is a bit liquid, and I'm sure it'll mean something else today.

I may not know what butoh is, but my neck muscles are very sore from it. Mainly from trying to not use my muscles, which my body apparently interpreted as hauling itself upright by the neck.

And I have discovered a new favorite artist. I have a postcard that my friend sent from Belgium many months ago up next to my desk because it has a pair of boots with water fountaining up from them, and it only occurred to me tonight to look up the artist responsible for the mind prickling image. His name is Roman Signer and he does many extraordinary things, often involving explosions. There is a video of his work, "Action With Sheets of Paper," here, but I like the still photograph because it looks like a grove of white trees with people wandering between them, and it's only when you look closely that you realise it's a shower of white paper falling on a crowd.

spiders, gravestones, and the inevitable pizza

On Saturday, I went with three extremely wonderful people (Dana, Emily, and Lauren) to see Neil Gaiman read from The Graveyard Book in Palo Alto. It felt strange, but good, to sit in a theater with about 600 people of all sorts--old and young, alone and in big, cheerful groups-- who were all there to listen to someone read them a story. Everyone leaned forward in their chairs, laughed at the funny bits, and held their breaths at others, and listened as Neil told us about a young boy named Bod who dances with the ghosts and the living, and sees the first of the winter snow. It was a magical kind of thing, the sort that I wish could happen more often.

There's a video of the reading here, though it's more fun to start with the first chapter (we got the fifth, "Danse Macabre"). We also got an interlude, which is called "The Convocation," one of my favorite words. It makes me think of witches and crows, for no good reason, really (I think the proper words are, "coven" or "congeries" and "murder," respectively). And then, as an extra treat, we got some bits from Henry Selick's film of Coraline, and "Blueberry Girl."

The stage was full of gravestones, and Neil had a leather armchair with a funny looking lamp and a fake crow. There was also a spider that drifted down from the rafters and almost landed on a small boy's head.

Before the reading, we had pizza. Not ordinarily something to be boasting about, though I love pizza madly, but this was a delectable pie that introduced me to the thrilling combination of ricotta and lemon zest. Fluffy cream cut with bright yellow sourness. Not something you'd expect on pizza with all the fixings, but astonishingly delicious. Pizza Chicago.

It was a good evening all round, but the very best part was standing around in our little foursome, talking about Clarion friends and writing and books, and enjoying each other's company.

Oh. Have also discovered that Saint-Saens's Danse Macabre is even more infectious than usual when played on a banjo. It sounds mad and a little funny, and it begs you to get up and dance.

bedtime stories

The Graveyard Book came out today, and reading it at bedtime makes me very, very happy. It is a story by Neil Gaiman, and pictures by Dave McKean, and it is entirely wonderful.

(I actually skipped ahead to the fifth chapter, which is about a strange and intoxicating dance, when I brought the book home this afternoon. But now I'm reading it properly, starting at the beginning.)