literary links (revised)

A short story by Herman Melville: Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street - is it simply absurd? Wikipedia describes the plot, so better read the thing first: the story can be downloaded from Project Gutenberg.

Henry James: The Lesson of the Master. Short but massive.

Guardian Unlimited Books of the Year 2006 chosen by various critics and writers like Billy Bragg and Simon Callow.

Acquired: The London Collection. Packed with facts. Good fun. Keep in the loo to weigh down those old copies of Fortean Times and keep the splashes off your Schulz and Schott's.

Joanne Harris has written a childrens' book called Runemarks about "Norse gods at the end of the world".

Nigel Hamilton in his Biography: A Brief History calls Woolf's 'Orlando' "a spoof biography of Vita Sackville-West", which it is.

Still available: The Planet Suite by my old school chum Allen Ashley. Also don't miss his 'Urban Fantastic' and 'Somnambulists'. OhMyNews recently published an interview with Allen: Writing, Perseverance and Shaggy Dog Stories.

Mike Moorcock has a story in Kiss the Sky: Fiction & Poetry Starring Jimi Hendrix edited by Richard Peabody. I think the story was in a Hawkwind tour programme thirty years ago.

The music of science is Michael Moorcock's review of graphic novel 'Horace Dorlan' which, unlike its two predecessors, has some text. It sounds remarkable. Watchman meets Kafka.

'Nova Swing' by M John Harrison; Gollancz, £16.99, reviewed by Brian McCluskey.

Design: Envisioning Information by Edward Tufte. 3D into 2D.

Vampires meet modern TV: Fangland by John Marks.

In the Spectator, Matthew d'Ancona suggests that Prime Minister Gordon Brown's new book Courage: Eight Portraits is a suitable "page-turner" for the beach on your holiday. Not me, I'm going to Iceland. He also says the book provides a ninth portrait of Gordon himself. Sounds interesting.

The Open Library aims to include every book "our planet’s cultural legacy" and make them all available on the interwebnet.

SciFaiku, er, science fiction haikus.

NPR: Under the Radar: Books Not to Miss.

The official blog of Penguin Books UK: The Penguin Blog.

At last! Leading from the front page - six feminist magazines launch in the UK.

...when they launched their first issue last summer she had become particularly aware of a "massive wave of crap women's magazines. We thought we probably had something more interesting to say." Although the magazine didn't start out as a feminist project, it quickly became one - a natural result of trying to create a publication for women that didn't follow the usual mould.

Geek to Live: Turn your blog into a book, part II.

Something for all bloggers to aspire to, ha ha The world's longest diary.

The Biggest Geek and the SF List is one reader's list of significant genre novels. I disagree with most of it but the comments below are interesting.

English lessons via podcast from the Grammar Girl "a quick and dirty success". Librarian chic.

Guardian Unlimited Books. Book blogs at The Guardian.

Free books! Digital ones. eBooks from Adobe. They seem to be quite legible on-screen.

Semantic Soup is a Flickr group devoted to recording misuse of the English language.

books... mostly sf

Triffids and Jizzle
Originally uploaded by jovike.

Elastic Press have published many of my friend Allen's books, including The Elastic Book of Numbers which has just won a BFS award, and on Saturday 4th November they have a special event to launch a new anthology with a musical theme Extended Play, edited by Gary Couzens, with an introduction by Jean-Jacques Burnel. The event features live performances from Lene Lovich, Tall Poppies and Ciccone. Ten quid for three bands and ten authors!

Another old schoolchum Nick Papadimitriou has an essay in the new book London: City of Disappearances edited by Iain Sinclair.

VISCO is the Visual Index of Science Fiction Cover Art with some good articles on various sf, fantasy, weird and horror fiction magazines. Another way to explore the cover art from VISCO is SF Cover Explorer, by Jim Bumgardner, of krazydad.com, a great programmer I met on Flickr.

I'm a member of the Penguin Paperback Spotters' Guild group on Flickr, devoted to the art and design of Penguin book covers. See also Penguin books at the Design Museum.

The University of Otago's online exhibition Straight Jackets notes that "the general neglect of book jackets has resulted in a scarcity of early examples".

Of course we would not have these fascinating images and great reads if it were not for physical books, a medium that will survive this digital age as explained in Chris Mitchell's review of Double Fold in Spike magazine. (What's coming after digital? Analogue again, probably.)

Bookshops: Fantastic Literature. They have a nice email newsletter in which old duffers like me try to remember the titles of sf stories they read as youths. For more general than genre titles, also available by the yard, try Any Amount of Books on Charing Cross Road. I've been to the shop and climbed to high shelves many times. Download their enormous catalogue and read their news and trivia. Another good source is AntiQbooks.

For real sf nuts (remember Skyrack?) eFanzines are obviously fanzines online, in web or PDF format. A labour of love. Or here's a more professional magazine from the US: Locus. I keep up-to-date with science fiction with Ansible's estimable email newsletter. Sf fandom invented words like fandom and fen - the plural of fan. trufen.net is stuff for fans.

Download free science fiction books!

Why not catalog your books online in a big library thing? I did this on paper once, thirty-five years ago (no laughing please) and I can see that online you won't get the benefit of my lovely handwriting and doodles. Anyway, here's the entry for Olaf Stapledon.

Buy me a book for Christmas! Or better still, buy Elemental a short story anthology to raise funds for tsunami disaster relief with contributions by big name authors Brian W. Aldiss, David Gerrold and Larry Niven inter alia.

"We contacted Sir Arthur C. Clarke," said Kontis.

Clarke, the author of "2001: A Space Odyssey" among many other great works, lives in Sri Lanka and was directly affected by the disaster.

Savile assured the author that they were not asking him for a short story — because of his age and poor health, Clarke does not write much, if at all, anymore.

"We asked him to write the foreword," Savile said. "Within 24 hours, we heard back from him, and within another 24 hours, we had the foreword."

If you're thinking of using Writely instead of Nisus or Word or whatever to write, then head for Google Docs. Authors can collaborate online! There is a revision history and word count. Documents can be saved in plain, HTML, RTF, Word, PDF and OpenOffice formats.

Aspiring writers sometimes ask published authors which pen they use... The Write Stuff. And mind your apostrophes!

Book reviews are always to be found at The New Statesman, like this review of So Now Who Do We Vote For? by Suzanne Moore or a review of A Woman in Berlin by J. G. Ballard.

Literary blogs: many are linked to in the excellent This Space.

A Literary Quiz for Easter

This Eastertide my task for you is simple: match the opening paragraphs with the six books and give your answers in the comments in the form 1A 2B etc. (If you enjoy this, here's another one I did earlier.) Cheers!

Book 1: Louisa M. Alcott: Little Women (1868)
Book 2: R. D. Blackmore: Lorna Doone
Book 3: John Bunyan: The Pilgrim's Progress (1678)
Book 4: Alexandre Dumas: The Three Musketeers
Book 5: Charles Lamb: The Essays of Elia
Book 6: Charles Reade: The Cloister and the Hearth

Excerpt A:

As I walked through the wilderness of this world, I lighted on a certain place where was a den; and I laid me down in that place to sleep: and as I slept I dreamed a dream. I dreamed, and behold I saw a man clothed with rags, standing in a certain place, with his face from his own house, a book in his hand, and a great burden upon his back. I looked, and saw him open the book and read therein; and as he read he wept and trembled: and, not being able longer to contain he brake out with a lamentable cry, saying, What shall I do?

Excerpt B:

"Christmas won't be Christmas without any presents," grumbled Jo, lying on the rug.
"It's so dreadful to be poor!" sighed Meg, looking down at her old dress.
"I don't think it's fair for some girls to have lots of pretty things and other girls nothing at all," added little Amy, with an injured sniff.
"We've got father and mother, and each other, anyhow," said Beth, contentedly, from her corner.
The four young faces on which the firelight shone brightened at the cheerful words, but darkened again as Jo said sadly —
"We haven't got father, and shall not have him for a long time." She didn't say "perhaps never" but each silently added it, thinking of father far away, where the fighting was.

Excerpt C:

If anybody cares to read a simple tale told simply, I, John Ridd, of the parish of Oare, in the county of Somerset, yeoman and churchwarden, have seen and had a share in some doings of this neighbourhood, which I will try to set down in order, God sparing my life and memory. And they who light upon this book should bear in mind, not only that I write for the clearing of our parish from ill-fame and calumny, but also a thing which will, I trow, appear too often in it, to wit — that I am nothing more than a plain unlettered man, not read in foreign languages, as a gentleman might be, nor gifted with long words (even in mine own tongue) save what I may have won from the Bible, or Master William Shakespeare, whom, in the face of common opinion, I do value highly. In short, I am an ignoramus, but pretty well for a yeoman.

Excerpt D:

Not a day passes over the earth, but men and women of no note do great deeds, speak great words, and suffer noble sorrows. Of these obscure heroes, philosophers, and martyrs, the greater part will never be known till that hour, when many that are great shall be small, and the small great; but of others the world's knowledge may be said to sleep: their lives and characters lie hidden from nations in the annals that record them. The general reader cannot feel them, they are presented so curtly and coldly: they are not like breathing stories appealing to his heart, but little historic hail-stones striking him but to glance off his bosom: nor can he understand them; for epitomes are not narratives, as skeletons are not human figures.

Excerpt E:

On the first Monday of the month of April 1625, the bourg of Meung, in which the author of the Romance of the Rose was born, appeared to be in as perfect a state of revolution as if the Huguenots had just made a second Rochelle of it. Many citizens, seeing the women flying towards the street, leaving their children crying at the open doors, hastened to don the cuirass, and supporting their somewhat uncertain courage with a musket or a partisan, directed their steps towards the hostelry of the Jolly Miller, before which was gathered, increasing every minute, a compact group, vociferous and full of curiosity.

Excerpt F:

Reader, in thy passage from the Bank — where thou hast been receiving thy half-yearly dividends (supposing thou art a lean annultant like myself) — to the Flower Pot, to secure a place for Dalston, or Shacklewell or some other thy suburban retreat northerly — didst thou never observe a melancholy-looking, handsome, brick and stone edifice, to the left, where Threadneedle Street abuts upon Bishopsgate? I dare say one hast often admired its magnificent portals ever gaping wide, and disclosing to view a grave court, with cloisters and pillars, with few or no traces of goers-in or comers-out — a desolation something like Balclutha's.

Meaning of Life

My To Do List is a thick wad of folded papers, this week in my bag, last week in my jacket pocket. In my mind the tatters are strewn in a line along the remote corridor of an abandoned asylum.

Most of the sheets contain really important things I have to do, like: clear two rooms of clutter, dig a pond, cancel my contact lens supply and even more paperwork like changing mortgage repayments, among interesting links for this weblog. The links' currency is devalued monthly -- but they will soon disgorge into your browser as three large posts I am working on -- and the physical clutter in the two rooms has a depressing effect because I heard from feng shui adherents that that is the effect it is supposed to have, whereas, in fact, fifteen-year-old copies of New Scientist are a joy for many reasons even if I do have thousands of similar items to wade through: to clip some art for Flickr or some future design; to read about the dreams we had before the latest bunch of politicians bollocksed it all up again -- I call this 'perspective'; most importantly just reading outside the narrow agenda of 2005.

But clearing the decks at my level of discrimination and information gathering and organization will take years and is frankly not worth it, even though a clever and balanced John Keogh may emerge who could clear the room at parties. Doing important things like getting the roof fixed or converting the attic (all happening next week!) is worth it and so is learning Dreamweaver even though I prefer to use a text editor, so I can be a webmaster if I grow up because that is what the industry demands. Unfortunately prevarication and procrastination are the order of the day here: did I really need to spend a whole day (last Wednesday) downloading large pictures of obscure 1970s album covers to merge with my music files in anticipation of getting an iPod photo? Well, I enjoyed it!

I've started reading again, unknowingly prompted by my old mate Fresco who has a third book published -- as editor this time -- which made me realize I hadn't finished his last book which was elevating my alarm clock. I really ought to review it now: damn, another item for the list. Oh yes, and I ought to start writing again, I used to be quite good at that.

Anyways, before I knew it I, last month I also polished off a Poul Anderson, a Mat Coward (Hi, Mac Howard!!) and I am now reading a Stephen Laws.

I made three mistakes with the Laws: firstly when I bought it from New Worlds (downstairs at Murder One in the Charing Cross Road) it wasn't as cheap as I thought it would be given that they are closing down the sf department when they move to new premises over the road (yes, another blow to literacy, only the fifty-ninth in my lifetime, but what is Maxim Jakubowski up to? There remain two other shops in London where you can buy new sf hardbacks but I won't tell you where they are in case they get closed down too. Any road up) but I bought it anyway. Secondly, the book wasn't in the 'Used Sale' although you could see that some lunatic had scored the back cover with hundreds of lines by using it as a base for some craft project or perhaps ritual pentagram drawing. (Craft - that'll keep'em off the streets. Nice one, John Lewis. They've got a whole department for that sort of thing, you see.) Yes, a horror novel handed down from some authentic nutter! But when the clerk queried whether the book was used, I said no, solely because I found it in a rack of new books. I'm too honest, me. Mad, more like. Thirdly, I had noticed two Stephen Laws books there and I selected the one called Spectre, even though the other volume looked newer and more collectible, albeit slimmer. Now I am a few chapters in, I find that I did not buy a new work: I have this title at home in a different edition and I read it in 1986. What am I about.

About 12 stone, that's what, the heaviest I have ever been. I'm eating healthy food but too much of it probably, not drinking enough water and not exercising enough. Python's Meaning of Life ended like this. I ought to phone my Mum more too.