Shaken & Stirred

Minute Detail

Blake Gopnik is doing a series of five articles for the Washington Post, focusing in on elements of paintings in the Phillips Collection:

A morning in a special exhibition is a fine thing, but it forces you to spread your affections among too many works. Better to spend that time on one room in a permanent collection. Or on one work. Or, best yet, on a tiny corner of one work.

He begins today by discussing glassware in Renoir's "Luncheon."

(I also quite liked his piece on the Guggenheim's Kandinsky exhibit, which was the only touristy thing we managed in New York. It was lovely.)

Monday Hangovers

• It's official: van Gogh was kind of a drama queen.
• Paging Dave Schwartz: Do you already read The Urban Pantheist LJ? If not, here's an elephant-full post for you.
• Via Deb Coates, a pointer to Kristin Nelson's end of the year post in which she reveals her agency got 38,000 queries last year. It's no wonder Colleen Lindsay is making wise resolutions about balance and fun and boundaries, because, wow. That's a lot of aspiring writers out there.
• Ed Park has some fun reviewing the Peter Straub-edited American Fantastic Tales: Terror and the Uncanny.
• Christa Faust writes about crime fiction's obsession with the woman in distress. (via Sarah.)
• Elizabeth Genco establishes The Lost Symbol Drinking Game.
• Over at Jacket Knack, Julie Larios picks her favorite children's book covers of the year, and Carol Brendler does likewise.
• Finally: Preach it, J.L. Bell: "Originality is overrated. ... Or, rather, our literary and artistic culture has, probably since the Romantic period in literature and for over a century in the visual arts, valued originality more than highly competent reworkings. If we look back on the art and literature of previous centuries, we see artists and writers unabashedly exploring the same topics and tales. The competition among artists over the same ground fueled both technique and creativity." Execution is (nearly) everything.

Sidebar

We saw Avatar, which I enjoyed for the most part but don't plan to talk about in depth. So pretty, and yes, some of the visuals really did remind me of Nnedi Okorafor's fabulous novel Zahrah the Windseeker, which I highly recommend if you haven't read it. Anyway, my favorite in movie moment came near the end during protag's rousing speech*:

*NOT A SPOILER BECAUSE THERE IS ALWAYS A ROUSING SPEECH. OR FIVE.

ME: This speech is pretty weak.

::on screen crowd rouses to frenzy::

CHRISTOPHER: The translator is improving it.

Holiday Hangovers

Hey y'all--it's true! I still exist. And am back from the tundra-like, cannibalism-inducing conditions that struck Manhattan on Saturday. I hope everyone I like there is still alive and was not taken down by the zombie horde that was clearly set to emerge based on the tenor of the local news reporting. I kept an eye out for demons and shufflers at the Jersey airport, but mostly it was just desperate people looking to get home, with the occasional cute companion animal to add a little visual interest. By the way, those Jets fans? They like to drink on the train out to Secaucus. (Why am I not surprised that spell check doesn't recognize the word Secaucus?) I'm just saying.

So, a few teensy hangovers, since I've been remiss. Really, I've been remiss all year. But all this will change next year, when I vow to start posting again, especially more recommendations.

• Laura Miller on quotation markless fiction, something that I must admit does usually make me want to strangle: "What, exactly, does anyone gain aesthetically from the chore of sorting out lines of dialogue? If the intention is to make the thing harder to read, why not disemvowel it and really give 'em a good workout? Notwithstanding such avant-garde stunts as Georges Perec's "A Void" (written so as to avoid using the letter "e"), the proposition that you can improve the literary quality of a text by arbitrarily cutting out some expected element to reduce its readability is, when baldly stated, just plain silly." YES.
• AL Kennedy on rewriting in the Guardian: "No one can teach you how to write, or how you write or how you could write better – they can assist you in various areas, but the way that you learn how you write, the way you really improve, is by diving in and reworking, taking apart, breaking down, questioning, exploring, forgetting and losing and finding and remembering and generally testing your prose until it shows you what it needs to be, until you can see its nature and then help it to express itself as best you can under your current circumstances." Also, YES.
• Margo Rabb has a new piece in the NYT, this time about book thievery and how it hurts indies. She has some additional thoughts at her blog. My own misspent youth book thievery has been chronicled elsewhere; Liz, you should probably not follow that link (I know! I'm sorry!).
• Some don't miss thoughts on what the past decade has meant for children's lit (and more broadly for the whole literary world): from Betsy Bird and from Monica Edinger. Perhaps I will do a ponderous post; it seems as if a decade is worth mulling, and I so enjoyed reading these thoughtful ones. At any rate, I declare that the next decade will be excellent. How can it not be? The century was just getting warmed up for the past ten years, right?
• "I am a teenage elf" essay. (Via Jenny D.)
• A typically brilliant and hilarious post from Dana about her father's list of "People He Would Kill if He Discovers He Has Only Six Months to Live." Let me know if you're taking requests, D.
• Alan DeNiro on the present and future of the interactive novel (Choose Your Own Adventure now style).
• Jackie Dolamore's delightful debut fantasy novel Magic Under Glass (Amazon | Indiebound) is just out today. So now you know what to do with your gift cards.
• Baby tapir. Don't say I never gave you anything.

Feeling the Love

Okay, so even though I am SLAMMED with pre-NYC stuff*, it is amazing to see everyone sharing their agent love for Agent Appreciation Day, and I am feeling especially grateful for my agent, the wonderful Jennifer Laughran at Andrea Brown Literary, this week anyway because she just sent me notes on my new project. (Yay, new project!) Here are five reasons why she's so great:

1. I have never waited more than an hour to hear back from her on any question or query, and usually it's within minutes.

2. I have told her this before, but she gives truly great notes--it's like getting the reaction of the smartest, best reader in the world. Invaluable. She is fiercely dedicated to her clients and is also incredibly timely at reading and responding to manuscripts.

3. She is always honest and direct. I know her enthusiasm is genuine. And she doesn't yell at me for not being very good at describing whatever project I'm working on.

4. In this one, I lump all the things I can't go into detail about here, but which she knows. Yeah, that stuff.

5. She is a great *person*. I thought Jenn was wonderful way before she ever became my agent or even an agent. She has great taste and she's basically a wunderkind dynamo and hilarious to boot.

OH, I could go on, but I will stop by saying that getting to know some of Jenn's other clients has been a real gift this year. May next year rock hard and often for us all.

---

*Internal Q&A from today:

How do we know so many people in NY? Um, publishing.

Why don't we live there? Because we like it here(?).

There is no way we will get to see everyone, not even close, WAH! So come to the reading, and we will see you there at least.

Hot New Fiction

The truly amazing Melissa Moorer, whose work makes me so happy I could WEEP, has a new story in the latest issue of Hot Metal Bridge, "Falling Bodies to Light." And I snippet to convince you to go read the whole thing (which you SHOULD DO):

We are going to be rich.

And I would probably believe it if I hadn’t heard the same words so many times before. If he hadn’t taken us every time to the malls and stores to pick out what we would buy when: cars and bikes and trips around the world. If he hadn’t kept us out of school working on equipment and equations and debugging endless lines of code that didn’t lead to the next big thing or even anywhere at all. We don’t even have our own house anymore. My brother and I have to share a bedroom in our grandparents’ house because there is room for only one genius in my family — my father — and he takes up all the extra space for his work.

“It’ll make petroleum obsolete. Imagine!” His eyes are wide as he dances around the kitchen table and I feel myself getting excited all over again. It’s embarrassing so I try not to look at my brother, Josh. He’ll just make fun of me. “No more pollution!” My father raises his strong arms dirty with grease to the ceiling and I get giddy with hope, leaping into the circle of his arms.

“And we’ll get rich selling the blue in the sky,” he sings and swings me around the kitchen like I am five again.

Want more after you read that one? Go read her story from the Northville Review earlier this year.

Come One, Come All

Hope to see some of you in New York at the reading and out and about in the days before and after--I have done no calendar-setting though, so drop me a line if you're so inclined. Andy and Christopher are both amazing readers, so this should be fun. Content below stolen from the KGB Fantastic Fiction site!

FANTASTIC FICTION at KGB reading series, hosts Ellen Datlow and Matthew Kressel present:

	Andy Duncan, whose new novelette “The Night Cache” will appear from PS Publishing just in time for Christmas, as befits a ghost story, while his revisionist Appalachian folktale “The Dragaman’s Bride” concludes the new Jack Dann-Gardner Dozois anthology The Dragon Book. Duncan is the winner of two World Fantasy Awards and the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award for best science-fiction story of the year.
&
	Christopher Rowe’s short fiction has been shortlisted for the Nebula, Hugo, and World Fantasy Awards. A Forgotten Realms novel for Wizards of the Coast is scheduled for Spring 2011, and he is hard at work on a fantasy about maps and megafauna, Sarah Across America.

Wednesday December 16th, 7pm at

KGB Bar, 85 East 4th Street (just off 2nd Ave, upstairs.)
http://www.kgbfantasticfiction.org/

Things to Say

I haz them. More specifically, I have things to say about the recent book challenge/banning controversies here in the lovely bluegrass state--well, I have even more, actually, but some pretty lengthy things I have to say about how the idea of classic literature and the canon plays an insidious role in all this are over at The Nervous Breakdown 3.0, where I'm just starting to post again. A snippet:

It's no coincidence that if you examine the arguments involved in either of these cases, you'll come across things like: graphic novels are all for children; Alan Moore is just a pornographer (and a Wizard! or something); books for teenagers can't be literature; teenagers shouldn't be reading about sex/the consequences of sex/gay people/abuse/foul language (my personal favorite). As if teenagers are some sort of delicate morons. In fact, teenagers are at just the right age to begin grappling with extremely polemic works and with much more nuanced ones. They can take it. Trust me on this. (If you mention The Twilight Saga, you lose. An eye.)

(Isn't TNB shiny with its relaunch, btw?)

p.s. Sick. Boo.