“I know it still seems incongruous, first of all, for me or a writer of my literary training, generation, and pretensions to be writing stories featuring anybody with swords.”

The above line comes from the afterward of Michael Chabon’s Gentlemen of the Road, a book that I’ve only just begun to read, and which I don’t have much of an opinion on yet, except that it seems like too strong a lift from Fritz Leiber and his Mouser and Frafhrd stories, and that might be a bit of a turn off for me. You should probably ignore the fact that I read the afterward first, as I was skimming of an acknowledgement of it, but haven’t found one yet.

At any rate, there’s something about the comment that, I must admit, kind’ve makes me laugh at Chabon, who is a writer that I quite like, for the most part. He can be patchy: the Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay is pretty cool, though it sags in the middle, and Wonder Boys is quite well paced; but Summerlandis big and bloated, and the Yiddish Policeman’s Union, while quite lovely in its writing, feels like it’s nothing more than a TV serial, and never moves beyond the opening episode, in which the characters and place are introduced. But what makes me laugh is the idea that the author of any of these books would sit there and talk about his literary training, as if it were something to be admired, as if he was somehow prepared in a secret castle in the mountains, where strange and esoteric skills were given to him. Now, I’m not quite sure if he means much beyond the Master of Fine Arts that he has, or the BA he got before that, but unless he sat at the feet of the resurrected corpse of James Joyce and spent five years having Finnegans Wake explained to him, there’s not much in ‘training’ there, not least in my opinion.

Perhaps, however, what makes me laugh is that there might be a distinction between what Chabon has written before and after Gentlemen of the Road, and that his training, generation and pretensions have made that. He claims, in the same afterward, that most of his fiction had appeared in “sedate, respectable, and generally sword free places like the New Yorker and Harper’s, and featured unarmed Americans undergoing the eternal fates of contemporary short-story characters–disappointment, misfortune, loss, hard enlightenment, moments of bleak grace. Divorce; death; illness; violence, random and domestic; divorce; bad faith; deception and self-deception; love and hate between fathers and sons, men and women, friends and lovers; the transience of beauty and desire [and] divorce.” The repetition of divorce is a joke, but none of these experiences are unique to the sedate, mainstream fiction he is alluding too; indeed, the truth of it is, the genre fiction that he writes now is filled with the same array of misfortunes, as all fiction is. That sequence of events is essentially the plot of the Yiddish Policeman’s Union, after all.

It’s funny to me, I suppose, because in my opinion, what Chabon has done has simply shift from one popular form to another, and it is one that has not, honestly, required him to change a lot. The writing is still beautiful, but it is without experimentation–it does not break the boundaries of what is acceptable with the page, the form, or the narrative, and it does not seek to challenge the reader or writer in any way of form. The lack of challenge for Chabon is, indeed, easy to spot: his obsessions with Jewish heritage is still prevalent, as is his interest in sexuality, and no genre shift has forced him to put them aside. Not, mind you, that I think he should–I’m just illustrating how these works are, despite the clothes of the narrative, still part of the same work that he has been producing for years now.

Still, literary training. That’s funny, that is.

No doubt everyone has heard, by now, that Paul Newman died over the weekend at 83. Cancer, by all accounts.

When someone famous dies, there’s always that sense, from people who write about the person, that they knew them, or had some insight into the person that they are, but I won’t claim that. I did like some of his films, though, and I always thought that he had a fine screen presence, even until his last films–he was the only reason to watch Road to Perdition, for example. Some of the older films, like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and the Sting were influential on me as a teenager when I was soaking in every kind of influence I could get, and despite the accents, I’ve always had a soft spot for Cat On a Hot Tin Roof, though this is probably in part because I’ve always had an amazing weakness for old Elizabeth Taylor films. Yet still, and this might seem strange, but the thing that I knew Newman for first wasn’t films, but rather the sauces that were made under his company, Newman’s Own, and which featured his face on the label. I remember seeing it as a kid, when my Mum did grocery shopping, and thinking that the label on it looked cool. The sauces were never all that great, though, despite the reportedly one hundred percent of profits going to charity. Still, the man was an actor, and I never really held the dodgy sauces against him.

It’s been a while since xkcd was funny.

Now, if you excuse me, I have to go back to convincing Lucius Shepard that Michael Bay’s Transformers was a better film than anything done by Steven Speilberg.

Link.

You know, there’s a strange similarity between this and the George W. Bush bio pic from the other day…

This is the trailer for Oliver Stone’s biopic about George W. Bush.

Something tells me it’s not going to be too flattering, though Josh Brolin looks pretty decent as Bush. Can’t say I’m excited about the film, as bio flicks tend to be rather one sided, and lack the breadth that a biography in book form does for me. Also, lets face it, I don’t really care about American Presidents that much either.

But Oliver Stone did write the screen play for Conan the Barbarian and in this day and age, I’ve decided that holds water for me.

Today my contributor copy of A Field Guide to Surreal Botany arrived.

In fairness, whenever I appear in a book, I pimp it, so you’ve no doubt learnt to take what I say with a grain of salt; after all, I want you to buy the things I’m in. With that said, however, this here is a groovy little book, I have to say. It’s a slim chapbook that clocks in at seventy pages, and contains forty eight pieces discussing various surreal plants. It is, in a short, a book that you pick up, flip through, read a bit here and there, though you may be the kind who would read it in one sitting (that’s never been my style for these kinds of books). The true attraction of it, however, is not the pieces in the book, nor the authors attached to it, nor even the dream like art of Janet Chui. No, the attraction of the book is the thing itself, and the design of it, the weight of the pages and the work that has been put in to bring both the art and writing together.

Honestly, it’s a really fine and neat thing, a kind of off beat, strange little project you’re not going to find around readily. It’s very much an object as it is a collection to be read, and on that level, I can’t recommend it enough to you.

Link.

A lot of reef creatures could be in the red.

A widespread capacity for fish, corals, worms and other animals to fluoresce red has been largely overlooked, contend Nico Michiels of the University of Tübingen in Germany and colleagues in a new study.

Seawater quickly absorbs the red wavelengths of daylight filtering through, so that at depths below 10 meters the red portion of sunlight disappears and the blues and greens dominate. The majority of fish tested so far from this zone have vision tuned to blues and greens.

Reef biologists have treated red as “irrelevant,” Michiels says. Red, however, deserves more attention since a substantial number of reef animals produce their own red glow, he and colleagues say in an upcoming BMC Ecology.

Michiels noticed the red fluorescence in 2007 while diving with a mask that filtered out all but red wavelengths for another project. As he descended, the sun’s available red light dwindled quickly, leaving him in virtual darkness. Then he was startled to see the red fluorescent eyes of a fish, the red fin of another. Since then, he and collaborators have found that 32 reef fishes sampled from 16 genera give off a red fluorescent glow. Substances on their bodies capture light at other wavelengths and release the energy as red light.

Me, I reckon it just looks cool.

Link.

Your phone is ringing.

I hear it.

Planning on answering it?

Probably shouldn’t.

Oh?

Lemme just say I’m glad it’s your phone that I borrowed while I was here.

…

…

I hate you.

I know.

You’ve been in this country for four fucking days, bro, and you’ve already left some kind’ve mess behind you-where’s your fucking shame?

I tried not too, but I just made a bit of a mistake, and when I tried to make it better, just made it worse.

I mean, I’ve apologised, but apparently that’s not good enough, so…

I don’t want to know.

Good.

But.

But?

But aren’t you an adult now?

Meaning?

Meaning shouldn’t you know who to fuck and who not to fuck now?

Most of the time.

When Cas gets back here I’m going to laugh at you with him.

I’ll give you ten bucks to not do that.

Ten bucks?

I bet him that I could live consequent free for the entire trip. If he knows, he’ll call it on me when I least expect it.

Gimme my ten bucks now.

…

Thank you.

Incidentally, I can’t believe you made that bet.

It seemed very easily back in the airport.

Idiot.

I’m going to assume then that this guy you’re going out to dinner with tonight has a good job, respects women, and won’t turn out to be psychopathic, then?

We’re not talking about me.

No?

No.

Well, alright, but when you’re telling me what a freak this guy was a few days after you fuck him, I want you to remember this moment, and how I didn’t lord it over you.

How I accepted that you’re a flawed individual who sometimes makes poor choices.

I want you to remember that.

You really fucked up, didn’t you?

Ah-it was just.

It was this moment where all obvious logic fled me.

Haha.

Why do I feel fourteen?

You ever feel like you’re still in high school sometimes?

I just came from a writer’s thing. It’s High School cliques all over again, but there are only nerds.

Is that right doctor Peek?

Yes.

But, y’know, outside that kind of shit, no, it’s not really like school.

Are you kidding?

Every job I’ve had is cliques and drama. You never escape the he said, she said, like, not like, cool, uncool, fucked up mentality that was being a teenager. Some days High School was just like this testing ground for the rest of your fucking life.

Nah.

It totally is.

I’ll give you an example. Every relationship I ever had is about fucking ownership, because that’s what that first bit of love is, you know? It’s owner-fucking-ship. It’s wanting to possess something so badly that it cannot exist without you.

It’s the desire to consume the individual.

No wonder you’re still single.

Answer your phone then.

It’s ringing again.

Fuck you.

Take a look behind us, at what Cas is doing.

If you just admit that you’re jaded and cynical and used up, life will be easier.

Are you fucking listening to me?

Yeah. Okay. Cas. Talking to his girlfriend.

On the surface, a good thing to do in a relationship.

But what lurks deep within that desire to call is to continually re-establish ties with her, to make sure she remembers who she is owned by, who is her lord and master-

See, now I know you’re fucking with me.

Fuck.

Too far with that lord and master shit, Kel.

It’s so easy to play you sometimes, bro.

Didn’t work this time.

What’s she like, anyway?

Charlie?

Yeah.

Fucked if I know. She doesn’t like me.

She sounds awesome.

Fuck you.

What’s her thing with you, anyway?

I think she’s insane.

Like, clinically, y’know?

A couple of weeks ago, she had one of her friends look me up on facebook and start talking me. Never met her, nothing like that, and the next thing I know she’s telling me that we have a lot in common, and that Charlie thinks we would make good friends.

And yet the one thing that pisses you off quicker than anything else is people thinking they know you.

How ironic.

Also, Cas said this girl had a big hideous scar over her face.

Hahaha.

Yes.

Heh.

You shouldn’t be shallow, bro.

I try not to be cause I’m pretty ugly, but disfiguring scars-

They just not my thing.

Okay, okay, tell if this true: did she really move in with Cas?

Yeah, she’s pretty keen on him, so I just keep my mouth shut about her burning hate for me. It’s not a big deal.

Well, you keep turning down her friends and you might make her push a little harder.

Her what?

Push.

Push?

You never heard of the push?

Is this another one of your insightful moments?

No, this one is real.

See, a girl, she gets to a certain point in her life, and she meets a guy, and it’s all about settling down, about starting something. Something to give life purpose. I’m not saying that guys don’t do this, because they do, but I’m a girl, and I understand the push from my side. I understand what it’s like to find a guy and think, Yeah, this is fucking going to stay, and deciding that a couple of weeks into it, of telling yourself that you’re in love, and then starting to move everything round in his life so that it’s what you want.

That’s the push. Pushing everything into place.

That’s more fucking bullshit.

No, this one-this one I’ve done twice.

Twice?

Remember Josh and Daniel?

Stoner and the Real Estate Agent.

Pushed twice.

Didn’t work out, though.

I was engaged twice, Ben.

Valid point.

…

…

Phone’s ringing again.

Learn to tune it out.

We just both jaded old cynics, aren’t we?

Yeah.

But what you going to do besides live with it?