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http://www.jeffvandermeer.com/2008/05/19/good-press-for-new-weird-and-steampunk/

http://www.jeffvandermeer.com/?p=1102

The New Weirdand Steampunk got some good press over the weekend.

The New Weird received an excellent review from David McWilliam on the Interzone site, reading in part, “Ann & Jeff VanderMeer’s impressive anthology is the perfect starting point for an exploration of the innovative New Weird movement in genre fiction.” The June F&SF, which should be in bookstores soon, also features a very positive review of the antho from James Sallis, which, in part, talks about my introduction, calling it “a remarkably concise, thoughtful, and balanced essay on the ‘moment or movement.’” (You can find the intro in the current issue of The New York Review of SF, btw.)

Steampunk, meanwhile, popped up on Media Bistro and OF Blog of the Fallen, with another review from Kirkus that appears to be positive but which I can’t access. It’s early days for Steampunk reviews, though. Also, the first edition is sold out except for copies still in bookstores and available through Amazon and other online booksellers. The New Weird will go back for reprint soon, as well.

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http://coilhouse.net/2008/05/19/decamps-wire-heads/

I love the low-tech cyberpunk styling of these images by Louis Decamps. No heavy digital editing here, instead it’s back to basics with lighting, wires and circuit boards we hold so dear.

The projections on the models’ faces suggest an imaginary environment; the glow of a lab, distant explosions, blue acid burn. The face paint and textures add to the storytelling aspect of this series, featured in issue 2 of Wound magazine.

I do question the series’ title’s I-Do-Ru reference: while awesome, its imagery seemed cleaner than these photos suggest. In any case, this is some crunchy eye candy!

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linnaeus

roho

genet

tozier_wah

perro

Current Location: My desk
Current Mood: bored
Current Music: Weezer - Buddy Holly (The Sweater Song)
Tags: aph, coffee, dining, grilling, memorial day, midwest furfest

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http://kidshirt.blogspot.com/2008/05/rinse-returns-to-end-for-night-of.html

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http://www.technoccult.com/archives/2008/05/19/900-feet-up-with-nowhere-to-go-but-down/

http://www.technoccult.com/?p=3187

“He had learned this extreme form of tightrope walking from a homeless man who wrote books on quantum physics. But that was years ago, while goofing around on a flexible piece of nylon webbing tied close to the ground between a tree and the bumper of a Chevy van.

This was something else entirely for Dean Potter, one of the world’s best climbers, barefoot in the dying sun last Friday, walking between ledges of a U-shaped rim above Hell Roaring Canyon, a 400-foot sheer sandstone wall on his right, a 900-foot drop to a dry riverbed on his left. No leash tethered him to the rope. Nothing attached him to earth but the grip of his size-14 feet and the confident belief that, if needed, his parachute would open quickly and cleanly and not slam him into the canyon wall.

At 6 feet 5 inches and 180 pounds, wirily strong, Potter dressed in jeans and blue T-shirt emblazoned with a hawk. He wore a wide headband over unruly hair, gaining the appearance of a less gaunt and reckless Keith Richards as Alpine daredevil. As Potter stepped onto the 180-foot rope — a strand of iridescent blue against desiccated canyon shades of brick and tan and coppery green — he was believed to be the first person to combine the adventure sports of highlining and BASE-jumping.”

(via New York Times. Dean Potter’s Vlog via Aerialist )

(Video of Dean Potter’s solo on El Capitan via Google)

(Interview with Dean Potter via Buildering. net)

ShareThis

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Indeed:

A man walked free from court today after he admitted setting alight an RAF pilot who was dressed as a sheep for a fancy dress party.

His victim, Martin Geraghty, 26, suffered 13% burns in the incident, which followed a traditional piano-burning ceremony that dates back to the second world war, Teesside crown court heard.

They were watching the piano-burning ceremony and discussed how a member of staff burned his hands jumping over the embers at a previous event, the court heard. Dan Cordey, prosecuting, said: "It led to a discussion about what would happen to Martin Geraghty if he attempted the feat in his fancy dress costume. The consensus was it was a stupid idea."

Current Music: Die! Die! Die! -- Death to the Last Romantic
Tags: furries

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http://www.osmond-riba.org/lis/journal/2008_05_18_j_archive.htm#6856158459857795961

Though I'm not much for jewelry, I do wear a badge to work every day.

And I started thinking maybe I could come up with something nicer than a lanyard around my neck.

Among my requirements:

• Has to be sturdy,
• Relatively neutral colors to coordinate with most wardrobes,
• Nothing too femme or frou-frou,
• I wanted an adjustable length:
  • A 36" circumference is good for work (to reach the card-readers)
  • But at conferences, I prefer something shorter so people can see my name (eyes up here, bub!)
• As to my own preferences, I prefer rounded beads to faceted, and didn't want anything that would jingle or make noise.

I'll try to post some pictures later.

I strung black, brown, and tan beads upon a thin black leather cord, connecting it to a thicker leather cord for the back of the neck.

I used two spring clasps, and the full length can be either 38" or 27", depending where I connect them.

I still don't feel totally confident in the jump rings holding bits together.

But this was my first attempt. I still have plenty of beads left if I want to redesign...

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http://www.osmond-riba.org/lis/journal/2008_05_11_j_archive.htm#8572508666574185582

[An open letter to Stephen Greenblatt]

I noticed a recurring theme in interviews about your SCCardenio experience:

Renaissance Scholar as Playwright:

Working on a play with Chuck was perfect for me because I am interested in cultural mobility. That is, I am interested in what happens when materials get recycled – what happens when things are moved from one place to another, from one culture to another, or from one mind to another. Chuck happens to be a genius at that kind of recycling.
[Cultural mobility] interests me because of its strong links to my lifelong pursuits as a Shakespearean. Shakespeare was perfectly capable of inventing stories. He did it, for example, in A Midsummer Night's Dream and in The Tempest. But most of the time he preferred to rip somebody else off. Whether he was working from an ancient source or a contemporary source, he clearly loved moving texts into his own sphere and seeing what he could do with them. I'm a scholar of the Renaissance, a word that means rebirth. That's another way of saying cultural mobility.
 

From Lake Como to Cambridge:

Chuck himself posts all of his work on the Web without copyright restrictions, so that people can adapt and transform his plays as they wish as long as they acknowledge where they got them. It was liberating for me to see that this process wasn't about a magical ray coming down from the heavens onto one isolated individual, but rather about the recycling and circulation of materials.
 

From Lake Como to Cambridge:

For me this whole process has been about the idea of cultural mobility – what happens when materials are moved. One of the things that thrilled me when I first started reading Chuck's work was that I realized he's the cultural mobility meister. His work is all about what happens when you move material from one place to another. Since Chuck left me with a lot of unspent grant money, I'm using the funding to provide theatre companies around the world with translations of our play and translations of the source materials we used [Theobald's The Double Falsehood, which is the 18th-century adaptation of Shakespeare's lost play, and Cervantes' Don Quixote]. I tell the companies that they can't perform our play because I want to see what happens when they adapt and transform the materials to their own theatrical and national cultures. I'm going to have all these plays translated back into English, so we'll have a sophisticated version of the old elementary school telephone game in which you see what happens when a message is passed around. There has already been a production in Japanese in Yokohama and one in Bengali in Calcutta. And there's one coming up in Croatian in Zagreb and one in Spanish in Alcalá, which is rather touching because that's the city of Cervantes' birth.

The ARTblog has also gotten into the act, with two entries so far presenting this challenge:

As part of the Cardenio project, Stephen Greenblatt has given support to companies around the world for them to produce their own adaptations of the Cardenio story from Cervantes' Don Quixote. If you were to adapt the story, what would your play be?

I want to say one word to you. Just one word:

Plastics.

No wait, that's not it...

Fanfic

If you're interested in "cultural mobility," then you want to be studying what's happening in the realm of participatory fandom.

Adaptation and transformation... Circulating and recycling... Moving texts into another sphere and seeing what can be done with them...

That's one of the more accurate descriptions I've seen of fanfiction and vidding.

So if you want to study an active culture where these actions are taking place, you really ought to take a closer look at fandom.

Because, to quote the old commercial, Fanfic? You're soaking in it!

Let me know if you're interested, and I'll try to provide an introductory tour.

If you'd prefer a more scholarly source of information on the subject, allow me to point you towards Henry Jenkins, a professor at that other college in Cambridge, who is one of the leading experts in the field.

PS: Given the fact that Charles "posts all of his work on the Web," that you're encouraging adaptations, and are providing other theater companies with your play and the source material, how can I get a copy of your script?

Because, I'll confess, you've got me tempted to take a stab at it...

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http://www.osmond-riba.org/lis/journal/2008_05_11_j_archive.htm#8834351428365480721

In my regular review, I mentioned I had further criticisms with Greenblatt & Mee's Cardenio, but couldn't elaborate without revealing major plot details.

So, this entry is intended to address those issues.

Consider this An Open Letter to the Playwrights.

As it stands, the play is flawed, but still salvageable.

My intentions are to pinpoint specific areas in need of improvement, that might assist in the revision process.

Here there be spoilers:

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http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/000673.html

One of my favorite mail-based items arrived today in my post office box: a death packet!

"Death Packet" is my little nickname for one of my BBS Documentary packages that heads out to a foreign land (in this case, the United Kingdom) and then makes its way through a variety of customs agents and mail systems, until finally getting the Big Bounce from someone at the end or nearly the end, at which point it sadly tromps its way back to me. Eventually, it ends up in my little PO Box, sadly awaiting pickup from the fellow who sent it out.

In this case, the postmark from when I sent it out is October 27th, 2007. It got to its destination somewhere in the November 10th period, at which point it got put into a "Nobody Wants This" bin, then sat there until February, and then slowly came back at what I assume was horseback, arriving here in May, 2008. So that's a seven month journey for the little guy.

Not surprisingly, the package came back with the little nuggets inside totally safe and untouched. Normally, if someone's going to break open the package and watch the films (this does happen), then it gets to its destination. I think opening stuff then sending back the dead husk must set off specific alarms, because I've not experienced that yet. But what amazing marks this one has all over!

Traditionally, the receiver has already contacted me and I've sent out a "replacement" by this time. In this case, it may be that someone orders something then leaves the company, or they have it going to a place that doesn't know they'll be picking up their private mail. I've had what appears to be family intercepts, or maybe ex-family intercepts. It ranges, and that part of the story is harder to discern.

All I know is that I'm glad it doesn't smell like fish.

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Cecil says:

The really sexy dog STD, though, is something called canine transmissible venereal tumor, a very rare example of what's known as a parasitic cancer. Unlike most other contagious cancers such as cervical cancer in humans, CTVT isn't spread by a virus but (as recently proved) by cancerous cells themselves. Genetic analysis suggests the tumor originated in an individual wolf or domesticated dog, probably in east Asia, between 200 and 2,500 years ago. This long-dead canid's much-mutated cells are still alive and being passed along during coitus (or sometimes through casual contact) centuries later, making it the longest-lived mammalian cell line known. The disease is now found throughout the world, especially where there are large populations of strays. It can be treated with surgery, radiation, and chemo, but most otherwise healthy dogs recover spontaneously after several months.

Luckily for us, there are no known parasitic cancers in humans, and only two additional ones affect animals. One arose spontaneously in a laboratory hamster around 1960: it's a reticulum-cell sarcoma that can be spread by casual contact, cannibalism (hamsters' souls are a lot darker than you might think), and mosquito bites; the tumor grows in the larynx and eventually leads to suffocation. The other is a condition threatening Tasmanian devils with extinction in the wild, called devil facial-tumor disease. First noted in the 90s, it's spread by bites; the tumors grow around the mouth and eventually cause death by starvation.

Current Music: Lords of Acid -- Crablouse (Roli's "The Body is our Destiny")
Tags: doomed, mutants, perversions, zombies

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http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/CoolTools/~3/293597212/002833.php

http://www.kk.org/cooltools/archives/002833.php

I've been using this 9-tray dehydrator once or twice a week for the last three years to make dried fruit, veggies and yogurt, jerky, dog treats, and dried bread (for bread crumbs). Other uses include re-crisping crackers, cookies, chips, etc., and drying photographs and flowers. Since the thermostat is adjustable (85F - 145F), you can customize your dehydrating efforts. The removable trays allow you to experiment with sizes and quantities, but also let you combine varieties of foods by temperature range. For shorter-termed dehydrated items, you just take out those specific trays and let the other longer-term items remain. This is truly the most flexible unit I've found. Other dehydrators heat from the bottom and much less evenly, requiring you to manually rotate trays, whereas the Excalibur has a fan to help distribute heat more evenly. The Excalibur also has a timer, so it will turn off at the desired time whether you're there or not; and none of the cheaper dehydrators have temp controls. The Home Essentials and Ronco models I own have now been relegated to making dog treats exclusively; I decided to keep the Excalibur for people food. Although it is somewhat noisy (all the dehydrators I've used generate some amount of noise), I keep it in the craft room, where noise isn't much of an issue. It's very easy to clean. I enjoy not throwing out food that spoiled and we always have healthy snack alternatives for us and the grandkids -- and they enjoy contributing to the process as much as they eating the rewards. Since we moved to a property that has a variety of grapevines, we now harvest copious amounts of grapes and make our own raisins.

Bonus tips:

1) You need ParaFlexx non-stick drying sheets for fruit yogurt leathers or items particularly high in moisture content. Excalibur provides a pretty good guide on how to work with different foods.

2) If you buy direct from the manufacturer, it may be slightly more than you can get at other suppliers, but I understand they guarantee the unit for 10 years (or you can purchase a 10-year extended warranty)

-- Chris Lewis

Excalibur Food Dehydrator
$210
(9-tray model)
Available from Amazon

ParaFlexx Sheets
(14"x14")
$16
Available from Amazon

Manufactured by Excalibur

Related items previously reviewed on Cool Tools:

Tilia Vacuum Food Sealer

Let's Grow Mushrooms!

Strange Foods

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http://www.mindhacks.com/blog/2008/05/virtual_paranoia.html

The Royal College of Psychiatrists podcast has a fascinating interview with psychologist Daniel Freeman who discusses his recent study that used virtual reality to study paranoid thinking.

Freeman has pioneered the use of VR in studying paranoia to try and understand how individual psychological differences contribute to suspiciousness and fear.

Of course, it's possible to use real life environments to see how exposure relates to paranoid thinking. In fact, the same research group has studied how patients with paranoid delusions react to urban environments.

Those familiar with South East London might be interested to know that stressful urban stimulus in this experiment was a walk down Camberwell High Street (as a resident of Camberwell it is disconcerting, although not entirely surprising, to find out I'm living in an experimental condition used to induce paranoid reactions).

For a scientific point of view, one difficulty with using real-life environments to study paranoia is that they are constantly changing and reactive.

This latter point is important because people who are very paranoid might, for instance, behave in a manner that other people find strange and that attracts attention, or in a way that sparks hostility in others.

One way of getting round this is to expose all participants to a virtual reality environment programmed to be identical, so any differences in paranoid thinking between individuals are almost certainly related to how they interpret the situation and not how the environment reacts to them.

In this latest VR study, the environment was programmed to be neutral (a simulation of the London Underground carriage) but about a third of participants from the general population reported paranoid thoughts.

Some of the paranoid thoughts reported in the paper are really quite striking: "There was an aggressive person – his intention was to intimidate me and make me feel uneasy" and "One guy looked pissed off and maybe one guy flicked the finger at me".

I've actually been in the simulation, having taken part in a pilot study for a related project, and although it's a bit clunky (as you can see from the picture) it's remarkable how its difficult not to have human reactions to the 'people' on the train.

Interestingly, the study found that anxiety, worry and the tendency to have anomalous perceptual experiences were associated with paranoid thoughts, as was 'cognitive inflexibility' - the tendency to be unable to see alternative explanations for ideas or beliefs.

In the audio interview, Freeman discusses this latest study in more detail and how it relates to what we know about the psychology of paranoia.

Link to RCPsych to podcast on VR and paranoia study.
Link to abstract of study.

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http://www.jeffvandermeer.com/2008/05/19/wiscon-fast-approaching/

http://www.jeffvandermeer.com/?p=1101

I’ve always wanted to go to WisCon, but another year will go by without that opportunity. Still, for those who do go, the programming seems to be more eclectic than most cons. Below, a few examples…

Jeff

Good
Every technology we’ve created has allowed us to degrade and destroy the environment at an increasingly faster rate. And yet many are convinced that technology itself will save us from environmental collapse: from the plow, which was a technological advance that allowed us to feed larger populations but also led to the eventual creation of monoculture farming, loss of topsoil, and diminished biodiversity, to our ubiquitous computers, which while allowing us to write the next great Tiptree award winner and chat on LiveJournal, are also full of toxic metals. Even the current media darling, the compact fluorescent light bulb, contains mercury, which is usually not appropriately disposed of or recycled. What does the future hold for us? Will we figure out a way to reduce, reuse, and recycle, or will we just invent the next great thing to fix all our worries?

Um, What?
How do the characters of fantasy and SF receive their education? On Roke in Earthsea? At Unseen University? Lyra’s Oxford? Hogwarts? Miskatonic U? Saganami Island? Breakness Institute? Stevermer’s College of Magics? Where would you like to have gone to school, and why? If you are an education professional, what’s your critique of the curriculum?

Good
In SF/F—particularly it seems lately in paranormal romance—the protagonist/narrator is meant to be a ‘feisty’ woman, but comes across instead as irritatingly stroppy in attitude, and rather less tough in action and practice than she sounds. Has this become a rather tedious cliché, and what might other, different, models of effective strong women characters look and sound like?

Uninformed (from the description–i.e., magic realism has a clear history and background, so I could see this panel spending most of its time establishing that and not much else)There are great stories being written under the heading of Magical Realism lately. Is it a legitimate subgenre of fantasy, or something else entirely? Does Magical Realism actually exist as a distinct entity, or is it simply a way for academics to study a few select authors that they view as worthy, while keeping the rest of the fantasy genre outside the ivory tower?

Interesting
How is old age treated in science fiction and fantasy, assuming that it is treated at all? Many of us are not as young as we used to be. Can we see ourselves and our concerns in SF/F? And how does SF/F treat aging and illness and death?

Very Interesting
Raymond Queneau described a colleague in the OULIPO, the “workshop for potential literature,” as “A rat who builds the labyrinth from which he or she plans to escape.” Since 1960 Oulipians have been devising strict and arbitrary constraints for writers to impose upon their work. Georges Perec wrote an entire novel without the letter e. Such constraints require you to say things you never would have expected to say in ways you never would have chosen to say them. OULIPO has spawned many groups that apply constraints to composition in music, detective fiction, comic strips, photography, and cooking. Why not sf/f? This charter meeting for OUFISCIPO, the workshop for potential science fiction and fantasy. We will explore existing constraints, discuss their application to SF/F, and come up with new ones.

Also Interesting
Many SF writers live in an essentially middle-class world. Perhaps as a result, SF features relatively few working-class characters, preferring stories about warriors, merchants,scientists, military officers, and mages to tales of carpenters, assembly line workers, day care providers, blacksmiths, nursing aides, service center reps, and spaceship janitors. Do we assume characters doing this work don’t have interesting adventures? That they don’t have interesting thoughts? And if we do write about these characters and don’t have a working-class background ourselves, how do we get it right?

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http://www.jeffvandermeer.com/2008/05/19/carolyn-kellogg-at-la-times-jacket-copy-doing-a-lit-tour-of-the-usa/

http://www.jeffvandermeer.com/?p=1100

As she announced here recently, Carolyn Kellogg of Jacket Copy is doing a literary tour of the country. In fact, I got an email from her today as she was passing through Tallahassee, asking about literary highlights. I turned her on to every working writer’s favorite Tally place to hang out and work, The Black Dog Cafe.

By tonight, she’ll be in New Orleans. Check out Jacket Copy for her posts about her adventures.

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