Los Angeles Times Book Award b/w "On Baseball"

I. The Los Angeles Times Book Award finalists have been announced! Fiction, biography, blah de blah...what you're really wondering is: Which artists are in the running for best graphic novel?! (Once again, I had the honor to judge, along with Douglas Wolk and Joel Rose.)

Here is the tantalizing list:

Graphic Novel
Adam Hines, "Duncan the Wonder Dog: Show One" (Adhouse Books)
Dash Shaw, "Bodyworld" (Pantheon)
Karl Stevens, "The Lodger" (KSA Publishing)
C. Tyler, "You'll Never Know, Book Two: Collateral Damage" (Fantagraphics)
Jim Woodring, "Weathercraft" (Fantagraphics)

Who will win? You need to wait till April 29...

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(I might post, later, some thoughts on other really strong titles...or maybe just the names...there was a lot of good stuff...)



II. Poets Jane Yeh and H.L. Hix are featured on the site Like Starlings, going mano a mano, poetry-style! Here is the first part of her new poem, "On Baseball":

My mechanics are almost entirely self-taught.
Hawking and strutting, I hit my spots.

Nobody talks to me, they are all afraid.

The nature of perfection is half fluke, half
Fiction, like the mighty appaloosa

That haunts the hometown lake. I'm from one of those states
That never got finished, that just sort of unravelled, like the sound

Speed makes as it blows right past you.

(Jane is a die-hard Yankees fan.)

11:11

Heavy EP rotation at the L.A. Times: In my latest Astral Weeks column, I review Matt Kindt's graphic novel Revolver. I end it with a shout-out to my favorite Beatles book, Devin McKinney's Magic Circles:

As I read "Revolver," I couldn't help thinking of the more famous "Revolver," the Beatles' landmark 1966 album. Devin McKinney's description of it, in "Magic Circles: The Beatles in Dream and History," as a sort of pop schizophrenia, seems not irrelevant to the subject at hand. "Revolver" is multicolored music in a black-and-white wrapper, terse pop songs of dream, escape, cynicism, forebodings… By its exploratory nature an affirmation of life and possibility, a bold and radical advance upon the new horizon, the album was at the same time fourteen kinds of oblivion served on a Top 40 platter: nostalgic about what had been, and paranoid about what it saw coming.

I also look at Alice Sola Kim's short story "The Other Graces," which is in the latest (July 2010) issue of Asimov's Science Fiction. I just happened to look through the mag at B&N and the first few lines grabbed me...I bought the issue, finished the story, shoehorned it into the column!

Cronin's lot

My review of Justin Cronin's new novel, The Passage, is in today's Los Angeles Times. It begins:

Chosen for both the Pulitzer Prize and coverage on "Oprah," Cormac McCarthy's post-apocalyptic novel "The Road" regularly appears in debates over genre carpetbagging. Should die-hard fans of a genre (in this case science fiction) be honored or annoyed when an interloper wanders onto their creative territory? The title of McCarthy's book indicates the path its father-and-son protagonists follow, but it might also symbolize the author's journey from revered offshoot of the Melville-Hemingway-Faulkner axis to de facto practitioner of end-of-the-world lit. Justin Cronin's ample vampire-virus saga "The Passage" also presents a vivid eschatology, while its title indicates an even more profound transformation of one sort of literary sensibility into another. Whether the transformation takes is one of the tantalizing aspects of "The Passage."

Side benefit of reading The Passage is discovering his terrific first (and non-vampire) novel, Mary and O'Neil. (What does it mean when your escapist reading itself requires an escape?)

Room after room

My latest Astral Weeks column looks at a new anthology called Real Unreal: Best American Fantasy Volume 3, edited by Kevin Brockmeier, with stories by Stephen King, Ryan Boudinot, and others. A taste:

Several pieces have fun with form. Lisa Goldstein's "Reader's Guide" takes that most condescending literary apparatus, the book-club guide, and turns it inside out until it becomes a thing of Borgesian wonder. "How does Mary Bainbridge, the author of 'Winter Swan,' let us know that Donny is unhappy?" runs the first question, followed by the stumper: "Is it significant that the novel takes place in winter?" Soon enough, a narrator materializes behind these questions, just as one does in Padgett Powell's recent novel "The Interrogative Mood," and the insipidity of the format gives way to a vision of a vast Library of Story: "I think that the shelves are infinite, or at least I've never reached the end of them, row upon row of bookcases, room after room opening out one after the other."

(Winter Swan has been checked in at the Invisible Library.)

Love and Polyps

This year's Los Angeles Times Book Prize has a new category this year: the graphic novel! I was a judge, along with Douglas Wolk and Joel Rose. It was fun! I love how different these books are from each other...

Here are the finalists:

• Gilbert Hernandez, Luba (A Love and Rockets Book) (Fantagraphics Books)
• Taiyo Matsumoto, GoGo Monster (VIZ Media)
• David Mazzucchelli, Asterios Polyp (Pantheon)
• Bryan Lee O’Malley, Scott Pilgrim, Vol. 5: Scott Pilgrim vs. the Universe (Oni Press)
• Joe Sacco, Footnotes in Gaza (Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt & Co., LLC)

(Complete list of all categories here.)

Douglas points out some nice notices already about our list...check out this one to see the covers of the books in question.

Fresh from my Google News alert

At the L.A. Times, some of my favorite SF/fantasy/speculative reads of 2008...

...and at the Columbia Spectator, I get a little "mystical" talking about Personal Days.

Psychic weather

Not the Los Angeles Times.

(Via Dzyd Dennis.)

Table-talk for April 18, 2008

Good morning! It is April 18, 2008! We are in New York City!



[...]



Oh I'm sorry—I thought I was talking to Duncan!

I. At the L.A. Times, Scott Timberg talks to me and two other editor-novelists...

NEW YORK—Is it possible to lead a dedicated literary life in the billionaire-filled, media-crazed New York of today? To be heedless of the material world as you burrow into novels and ideas the way the old Partisan Review gang did in the '40s and '50s, to come up with notions that rock the intellectual landscape? And if so, who exactly is still paying attention?

Those are questions three reasonably young men are asking now in much-awaited first novels that emerge over the next few weeks.

As a friend suggested, maybe a fact-checker made him slip "reasonably" in there....

II. Free Godzilla at the Guardian! (Via Dzyd Sam.)

III. Team Dizzies Member Izzy has a diverting piece on the longest poem in the world (or is it?), over at poetryfoundation.org. (Check out the cool illo as well.)

They came up with the idea in their 2003 self-help parody, This Book Will Change Your Life, which offers a self-improvement exercise for every day of the year. As Carey explained, "Helping to write the longest poem in the world was one of the tasks. It naturally seemed best suited to the web." They put the poem on their site in 2003, instructing their webmaster to use the line "Mercy, cried the popinjay to the Pope"—picked specifically because it was hard to follow.

[...]I think it's far to say that I've read more of "The World's Longest Poem" than anyone. In the interest of research, I scrolled through 500 pages on my Internet browser. I could fit 19 lines on a page, so I moved in units of nineteen, noting the last line on every page. When I gave up several hours later, I'd gotten about halfway through and counted 9,500 lines. I'd seen several themes develop: The antagonistic relationship between the popinjay and the Pope, recurring bits about badgers and penguins, various teenagers declaring their love, various teenagers abusing their classmates, a lot about soap (especially on a rope), and a running gag of declaring the poem over. I'd identified lyrics from R.E.M., the Pogues, George Michael, Public Enemy, Belle and Sebastian, and the entire Monty Python song "Every Sperm is Sacred." And I'd discovered that, like all open Internet forums, the content eventually turned dark, freakish, and threatening. I went to bed shortly after reading line 9,500 and had disturbing popinjay dreams.

IV. Levi's been blogging from London....Douglas is nominated for an Eisner for Reading Comics....and after protracted negotiations with ed-park.com, Personal Days got its own Facebook page!

"Unique Chicken Goes in Reverse"

In my end-of-the-year roundup at the L.A. Times, I mentioned Andy Duncan's delightful story (in the anthology Eclipse One). It's temporarily available as a free download at the publisher's site.

List List Revolution

In the ink-and-paper (I think?) L.A. Times, I run down some of the SF/fantasy/slipstreamy things I've enjoyed this year. I've written about most of these in my Astral Weeks column, though there are some extra goodies here, including Cathy Park Hong's Dance Dance Revolution...(You can also listen to CPH on DDR over at the Poetry Foundation.)

(Via Counterbalance)

Coast to 'Ghost'

Bicoastal book coverage from me this weekend: There's the aforementioned Crowley action in the LAT, and now my review of Alan Lightman's new novel, Ghost, for tomorrow's New York Times Book Review, is online.

UPDATE: The same NYTBR runs a letter to the editor from...John Crowley!

The Wind-Up World Chronicle

My latest Astral Weeks column is online—a look at Jay Lake's clockwork creation Mindspring.

Just say Node

Speaking of Gibson, my review of his latest novel, Spook Country, is up at the L.A. Times. (It's not one of my columns, just a stand-alone piece.)




















(Thanks to Bowen for the scan.)

The uses of neglect

Dizzyhead Thomas tips us off to a great site: The Neglected Books Page, "where forgotten books are remembered."

Ever read The Cubical City? No Pockets for a Shroud? 1923's Capitol Hill? Me neither...this suggests another Dizzyhead comment-fest: Favorite truly obscure novels—

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Over at the L.A. Times, a revamped Book Review is announced. I'm happy to report that I'll be contributing a monthly column on science fiction—tips and recommendations are welcome! (My column will be in rotation with three others—Sarah Weinman kicks things off this week with Dark Passages.)

Also at the LAT, book review editor David Ulin has a fond Vonnegut appreciation, and Jonathan Safran Foer is an early favorite for lede of the week honors: "Petr Ginz's parents met at an Esperanto conference."

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I thought you said you weren't going to post for a while!

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Dizzyhead Dennis talks to everyone's favorite shaggy Lacanian over at the New York Times:

In one sequence that redefines bathroom humor, Mr. Zizek connects the shower drain in “Psycho” with the backed-up toilet in “The Conversation” and compares the experience of looking up at a blank screen before a movie to that of staring into a toilet bowl. (Toilets are something of a Zizek fixation. One of his most notorious arguments traces geopolitical differences to variations in toilet design.)