Slimejam
A personal weblog written by Christopher Miles, an author and website developer living in Melbourne, Australia.
Regular topics include books and publishing, technology and the internet, parenting, and Doctor Who.
Doctor Who: Coming of the Terraphiles by Michael Moorcock
The History of Hell by Alice K. Turner
Hell in Contemporary Literature: Western Descent Narratives since 1945 by Rachel Falconer
Grimsdon by Deborah Abela
Worldshaker by Richard Harland
(Alice) had many friends among the children of the village, for she was bold and quick-witted… She was often punished… but she took her whippings as a proud child does, as the inevitable conclusion to a fine adventure.
The Midnight Zoo by Sonya Hartnett, page 55
Is there a sultan of Bruny Island?
So was I in the midst of that dark land /
Pure, bracing ventilation they must have up there at all times, indeed
“Stranded in exile
Branded… a threat
He leaked state secrets
On the internet…”
Fascinating insight into the work of a library conservator, one of the unsung heroes repairing papers and books and photographs so that people like me can get their grubby hands on them.
Music by Tobacco, The Russian Futurists, Kylesa, Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti, Weekend, Nymph, Maserati, Seeland, Violens, Buke and Gass, Avey Tare, Porcelain Raft, Fangs of a TV Evangelist, Gun Outfit, Secret Cities, Glenn Richards, Electric Sunset and Girls, among others.
Kraken by China Miéville
Off the Page: Writers Talk About Beginnings, Endings, and Everything In Between by Carole Burns
Australians and Egypt, 1914–1919 by Suzanne Mary Brugger
The Mummy’s Curse: Mummymania in the English-Speaking World by Jasmine Day
The Kingdom of Ohio by Matthew Flaming
Mr. Thundermug: A Novel by Cornelius Medvei
Luke Slattery in The Australian on the troubles facing the Australian book industry, in particular the discounted prices offered by online retailers and the commercial realities facing Australian publishers.
The point was brought home to me recently when a distinguished Australian writer took the manuscript of his next book to his preferred publisher. The publishing director pronounced it an excellent work but added one caveat: he would have to run it past the sales and marketing people […] Marketing calculated the book might sell a mere 3000 copies. That’s a lot more than many of the masterworks of European modernism sold in their first editions. But it was not enough to interest the publisher to give the book a life.
I retailed [sic] this story to the representative of another Australian publishing house and he responded by pointing out that all such decisions were made with a view to commercial reality. Fair enough. But publishers should not complain if book buyers adopted the same hard-nosed criterion when making purchases, in which case they surely would opt for the best online deal.
Music by White Denim, Friendly Knowledge and Nymphs, among others.
C by Tom McCarthy
The Cheeky Monkey: writing narrative comedy by Tim Ferguson
The Creative Habit: Learn It and Use It for Life by Twyla Tharp
Continent of Mystery: A Thematic History of Australian Crime Fiction by Stephen Thomas Knight
…there it was, reflected back at him: the inside of his belly, etched in blocks and lines of black against the fluoroscope screen’s sickly calcium-white, suspended in a void that detached it from anything and everything. Organs, tubes and bones quivered and oscillated against each other awkwardly, like animals — reptiles, molluscs, nether-dwelling creatures — who, crammed together in a space too small for them, bristle with aggression towards one another yet understand, through some vermicular, primordial instinct, that the survival of each depends on that of its unwanted neighbours.
Just had to clean up a urine spill (in a wardrobe, no less), in the course of which I stubbed my toe on a xylophone shaped like a dog.
I knew I shouldn’t have crossed that peccary with that armadillo. I have too many peccadilloes as it is.
My daughter and I are playing superheroes. She has a sequinned cape, kneepads and a sword; I have a pink shawl and a handbag with a toy spanner with it.
Dr. Troy Franklin, ‘anti-occult expert and Baptist demon exorcism specialist’:
Whether it be the challenge of exorcising demonic possessions or simply the act of shooing away a gaggle of neighborhood Druids eyeing my cat, Milton, with perverse hunger, I have answered the Lord’s call to engage in Spiritual Warfare against Satan’s minions, and my answer is: “Bring it on!”
Music by The Orbweavers, of Montreal, Deerhunter, Boston Spaceships, J. Tillman, Dungen, Super Wild Horses and Grass Widow, among others.
Going Bovine by Libba Bray
Friday on Our Minds: Popular Culture in Australia Since 1945 by Michelle Arrow
The refrigerator had been moved from its usual place, and I was vacuuming up great banks of dust from the space that had been underneath, worried about whether the dust would fit inside the vacuum, and I noticed the kitchen floor had crumbled away in parts, revealing an enormous, humid cavern beneath the house, where conical mounds rose from the muggy depths, and to the sides of these mounds clung hundreds of larvae that looked like bright green beans, writhing in some advanced stage of development, and I feared that a swarm of locusts was breeding beneath the house, and then I saw perched on one of the mounds what must have been the queen, she was huge and steel-grey in colour as though plated in metal, and at the moment I observed her I saw her wings twitch and she rose from her station, and I reached for a can of insect spray which I knew to my distress to be only half-full, and surely not enough to repel an insect overgrown to such a scale, but I shot a jet of spray into the air as she buzzed toward me, and the bright green larvae twitched and curled as the spray rained down upon them, and the queen of the locust-things twisted her body in bitter distaste as the cloud of spray enveloped her, and I was safe.