A sequel was planned, but for reasons never adequately explained, Signet declined to publish the tantalisingly-titled Who Rogered Professor Murder?
(Uilke)
Found object: 1:59pm, 11 April 2010
Simplifying ‘user journeys’ at the Beeb online
Bronwyn van der Merwe from the BBC online and technology team runs through some of the choices involved in creating a new ‘global visual language’ for the corporation’s digital services. (Also worth a look is the BBC internet team’s post on regenerating the Doctor Who section of the site for the launch of the new series. If only the video content was available outside of the UK.)
My micro life: 9:39am, 15 March 2010
A pair of ladies just came to the door to talk to me about Jesus. They were very nicely dressed. I, however, was not.
As in, not dressed.
Sealed containers made of words
Novelist Joe Hill talking to Rick Kleffel about his new book, Horns:
People turn to fiction to approach questions that they’re almost a little afraid to look at in everyday life. They want stories to ask big questions. I think that we use fiction to approach big scary questions in the same way people will wear lead-lined gloves to handle a radioactive substance.
At the end of his first draft for Horns, Hill realised he was asking questions about the true root of all evil: “We like to blame the Devil for everything that’s wrong in the world… but really we’re bad enough without him. We don’t really need the Devil. The Devil’s more of a spectator laughing at us, and humanity’s pretty good at generating evil on its own.”
That said, Hill talks about the book being a story of redemption, forgiveness and goodness as well. Nevertheless, his reading at the start of the interview is pretty fiery stuff.
Found object: 8:41am, 13 March 2010
“Inelegant compromises amidst a climate that wants us gone”
Australian dark fantasy author Deborah Biancotti, guest blogging at Poe’s Deadly Daughters, confesses to something she suspects “will never be fashionable”: hating the Australian landscape.
I stopped pretending I found the landscape anything but creepy and revolting. The sweaty, swollen rainforests that threaten, in my memory, to tip into the thin wedge of playgrounds. The vast brownness of some places, the spindly silver trees, the ungenerous scrub by the sides of roads, wild grasses that whip the edges of beaches. Strange powers control those spaces. Indifferent powers.
And later, an emphatic condemnation of Dorothea Mackellar’s famous poem, ‘My Country’:
Man. Has anyone ever written a more banal poem about a more fatal place?
Marcus Clarke famously expressed a sort of pre-Lovecraftian counterpoint to the kinds of empty platitudes that would later lodge themselves in the Australian consciousness:
The Australian mountain forests are funereal, secret, stern. Their solitude is desolation. They seem to stifle, in their black gorges, a story of sullen despair. No tender sentiment is nourished in their shade. In other lands the dying year is mourned, the falling leaves drop lightly on his bier. In the Australian forests no leaves fall. The savage winds shout among the rock clefts. From the melancholy gums strips of white bark hang and rustle. The very animal life of these frowning hills is either grotesque or ghostly. Great grey kangaroos hop noiselessly over the coarse grass. Flights of white cockatoos stream out, shrieking like evil souls. The sun suddenly sinks, and the mopokes burst out into horrible peals of semi-human laughter. The natives aver that, when night comes, from out the bottomless depth of some lagoon the Bunyip rises, and, in form like monstrous sea-calf, drags his loathsome length from out the ooze.
With literary precedents like this, it’s not surprising that Australia has lately produced such excellent writers of dark fiction — what’s surprising is that it hasn’t happened sooner.
Grimaldi and other good eggs
Clowns International, whose headquarters are at Wookey Hole in Somerset, England, claims to be the oldest clown society in the world. Whether or not this is true, Clowns International can certainly claim the most unusual approach to copyrighting a clown’s image. Each new member can register their individual make-up with the society, whereupon (according to Wikipedia) an eggshell is decorated as a miniature version of the clown’s head and added to the ‘Egg Gallery’
.
Artist Luke Stephenson was given the opportunity to photograph a representative selection from the famous Egg Gallery (properly known as The Clown Egg Register), including the eggs belonging to such well-known names as Joseph Grimaldi, the Fratellinis, and Pimpo The Clown.
Okay, so ‘Pimpo’ mightn’t exactly be “well-known”, but neither am I making it up. Would I yolk about something as serious as clowning?
Web standards and workflows for e-books
Joe Clark on web standards and workflows for e-books in the latest A List Apart:
The canonical format of a book should be HTML. Authors should write in HTML, making a manuscript immediately transformable to an E-book [sic]. A manuscript could then be imported into that fossil the publishing industry refuses to leave behind, Microsoft Word.
Yes yes yes, a thousand times yes. This should have started happening about five years ago. (The section from which this quote is taken is about halfway through the article.)
HTML is a pretty good language for describing the contents of a book (it would be even better if it had a decent way of captioning images) — and in my opinion it’s easy enough to learn that authors (or the editor, or production manager) could render the first draft as a machine-readable document at the beginning of the production process, rather than at the end.
I also learned something new reading this piece: namely, that Unicode has a specification for different width spaces. Colour me the colour of a person who has just found out something they didn’t previously know.
A paragraph per page makes Don a focused writer
Kevin Rabelais uncovers an interesting feature of novelist Don DeLillo’s writing process in a recent interview for The Australian. A decade into his career, DeLillo began the practice, when he came to write a new paragraph, of loading a fresh page into his typewriter.
“It helped me see more clearly what was on the page … Instead of being confronted with a page of 350 words, it might have 50 words, or 100, and I could focus more clearly on words and sentences.”
Apparently DeLillo continues to use the technique. Entire forests tremble with fear every time he begins a new book. (Luckily the new one is a novella.)
Found object: 1:51pm, 3 March 2010
Found object: 3:50pm, 18 February 2010
Either the photo on the cover is genuine documentary evidence or the art director has an uncanny eye for verisimilitude, because those dudes look exactly right.
My micro life: 6:48pm, 16 February 2010
An enormous homegrown zucchini, excess quantities of cherry tomato and a chance bocconcini acquisition have collided in pancake excellence.
Found object: 5:35pm, 11 February 2010
Found object: 1:29pm, 9 February 2010
“Impress your guests with telekinetic tricks”. Sure, because I’d be massively impressed if my host rendered my spoon useless before I’d even got to the soup.
My micro life: 10:27pm, 7 February 2010
Today I unwittingly took both glass and alcohol to a glass- and alcohol-free event.
My micro life: 5:00pm, 5 February 2010
Singing ‘Poulet poulet poulet pour moi’ to the tune of ‘Lady Marmalade’. In my defence I am actually preparing chicken for dinner.
James Joyce was a four-eyed fart-sniffing tosser
James Joyce was a four-eyed fart-sniffing tosser. Just one of Tim Howard’s make-believe Guardian books blog entries. Check out Tim’s previous effort Sterne for a treasury of postings both erudite and lewd. And there’s nothing finer than the marriage of lewdness and erudition. Mr Howard’s a celebrant all over that shit.
I like your trousers
Mr Larkin, I like your trousers.
Blog. I mean blog.
My micro life: 7:35am, 2 February 2010
To some questions there are no easy answers. For instance, I have no idea why an octopus – let’s call him Henry – would need to wear a hat.