A horse with a lung on its face walks into a bar. The barman says “Why the lung face?”.
(It turns out the horse is a method actor preparing for its lead role in the motion picture biography of Lung-Face, The Alcoholic Horse.)
A short lavatorial farce (in three acts)
Two Players: a parent, and child
Act I
First Player: “I intend to make use of the lavatory. Dost thou wish to make use of same, afore?”
Second Player (offstage): “No.”
Act II
(First Player embarks upon stated assignment.)
Act III
(Pause, sufficient for first Player to have gained admittance to lavatory and made necessary preparations for stated assignment.)
(Pause, sufficient for first Player to have partially achieved stated assignment.)
(Pause. [Brief.])
Second Player (offstage): “I need to do a poo!”
Curtain
Things I’ve been reading (1 August to 30 September 2011)
The Brain-Dead Megaphone by George Saunders
Elliot Allagash by Simon Rich
What I’d Say To the Martians: And Other Veiled Threats by Jack Handey
Story by Robert McKee
My micro life (12:04pm, 20 September 2011)
Just witnessed the least surprising sugar meltdown since the Acme Nitrocellulose Film Co. moved its storage facility to Jamaica on the very same day that its sister company Acme Budget Fireworks sponsored the Caribbean’s first and only Guy Fawkes celebration.
My micro life (1:30pm, 19 September 2011)
My latest parenting revelation is that you shouldn’t ask someone if they’ve wiped their bottom unless you’re prepared for an immediate, demonstrative browneye.
“As if Leonardo da Vinci had painted a speech bubble on the Mona Lisa in which she explained her state of mind”
Every generation must lose its innocence, must see the brightly painted nursery wall smashed away by the wrecking ball of betrayal to reveal a blighted landscape. For our predecessors, it was the Somme, the Great Depression, the Holocaust or Vietnam; for my generation, it was The Phantom Menace.
David Mitchell compares the launch of J.K. Rowling’s exhaustive Harry Potter website Pottermore with George Lucas lifting the veil of myth from the pre-story to his original Star Wars films and filling in all the detail like, as Mitchell puts it, ‘a tedious nerd’.
Found object: 7:44am, 18 August 2011
It’s good to see Hollywood finally recognising the dramatic potential of a movie about co-operative shadow puppetry.
“You don’t need to write a novel in tweets to write a novel about the experience of living in the age of Twitter.”
(W)hat we can expect from books is what the internet has always given us. More. More of everything. But what of taking in continuous prose, in the form conventionally known as “reading”?
Yes, it’s another article about ‘the death of books’ and dwindling attention spans, but Sam Leith seems less anguished than most, and in this piece for the Guardian he touches on an interesting aspect of the rise of digital books — namely the way in which traditional book formats have come about by ‘cultural accident’, and whether emerging formats will have as profound an effect on the nature of prose narrative as have the physical constraints of conventional books.
“No one chooses to be a geek”
There was no such thing as ‘geek chic’ in my day. There were no fashion spreads featuring models in tweed jackets and glasses. Now hipsters buy specs with clear glass in them as fashion accessories, made by Tom Ford or Yves Saint Laurent.
Stephen Merchant (and others) on the awkward years of adolescence. If you’ve heard Merchant on the Ricky Gervais podcasts (or the earlier XFM radio shows) then some of his anecdotes about life as a ‘teenage geek’ will be familiar to you. As they also might if you’ve ever made the mistake of pretending to be something you’re not.
Things I’ve been reading (1 June to 31 July 2011)
Born digital: understanding the first generation of digital natives by John Gorham Palfrey
You are not a gadget: a manifesto by Jaron Lanier
Landscapes and seasons of the medieval world by Derek Albert Pearsall
Malcolm & Juliet by Bernard Beckett
What’s pink and round and wobbly and has an enormous crack?
Salmon, a ball, jelly, a noisy duck.
He’s a blackguard, that Black Guardian
It’s a long-established rule of fantasy that the more powerful and ethereal a being is, the more freely he can indulge his latent transvestism.
That’s Gary Gillat describing the evil (no, really?) Black Guardian from Doctor Who, in his 2009 review of the ‘Black Guardian Trilogy’ DVD box set.
Martin wants, Douglas wants, Carolyn wants, Arthur wants, Nancy wants
A new series of the BBC Radio 4 sitcom Cabin Pressure began earlier this month, and in his blog post introducing the first episode, writer John Finnemore shares a page from his notebook, offering a fascinating glimpse into the process of constructing a half-hour comedy. I especially like the emphasis on what each of the main characters wants, the ‘value at stake’ and the ‘question’ of the episode.
Incidentally, John Finnemore was a guest last year on an episode of the Rum Doings podcast, which features an agreeably geeky and rambling discussion between Finnemore and hosts John Walker and Nick Mailer on the subject (mainly) of British sitcoms.
“We need to work up our ignorance muscles”
Sam Anderson in the New York Times discussing information overload, James Gleick’s new book The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood, and the overwhelming inclusiveness of the internet on one hand and the restraint of the traditional almanac on the other:
Like the Web, the almanac aspires to be a total information delivery system – the source of every datum you will ever need. Unlike the Web, however, the almanac aims for exhaustiveness within clearly defined limits. It has a front cover and a back cover. Compared with the Internet, it feels wonderfully contained and stable – it is curated omniscience, portion-control Google. Much of its value comes from the empty spaces around its edges, the missing entries in its index, the silence that descends when you close it.
I’ve been waking up in a pool of sweat
It’s because I’ve got a lot of worries on my mind at the moment. My biggest worry is that one day I might sleepwalk right into our neighbour’s new below-ground “sweat pool”.
Are you going to have another child?
People often ask me this, but I find I’m not usually that hungry after a starter plate of fingers and toes so I just order like a salad or something.
Knock knock something something bum
My daughter has discovered ‘knock knock’ jokes.
I forget jokes quickly, even ‘knock knock’ jokes, but some quick thinking on my part recently meant I was able to entertain my daughter with some rapidly transcribed entries into the canon. For example: ‘Ifor. I forgot my keys’ and ‘Fixyour. Fix your doorbell, I’m tired of knocking’.
No, not exactly Oscar Wilde, but enough to start my daughter thinking beyond the format of:
“Knock knock”
“Who’s there?”
“[Name of ordinary household object within direct sight, eg. curtains, Lego, sock]”
“[Ordinary household object] who?”
“[Repeat original response and append the word ‘bum’, before throwing back head and laughing uproariously]”.
In fact, no sooner had I broadened her horizons with a little meta-humour (“Knock knock” “Who’s there?” “Who.” “Who who?” “What what?”) than she was ready to take flight with something a little more sophisticated of her own.
“Knock knock,” she challenged. Her look said ‘I’m throwing away the rulebook here, and the rulebook is called Caution, and what I’m throwing it into is the effing wind’. But there was something else: uncertainty, fear at her own aspirations, a flicker of hesitation in her eyes. Had she gone too far, too soon? Whatever her punchline was going to be, was it too late to figure out a way of adding ‘bum’ to the end of it?
“Who’s there?” I answered, betraying no sign that I had detected any flaw in her mettle.
“Knock,” she declared, surer now of the strength of her material, a smirk playing at the corner of her mouth as she sensed the full magnitude of the psycholinguistic victory she was about to enjoy over me.
“Knock… who?” I quavered, as though suddenly and hideously aware of the scale of my impending defeat.
“Knock… KNOCK!” she answered.
And she threw back her head and laughed, and so did I, because she had turned the joke upon itself, you see, made it infinitely recursive, twisting it into the form of a pretzel that has been swallowed by a snake that, remaining peckish, then eats its own tail, and nobody had needed to append the word ‘bum’ to anything, and then I immediately dashed to my computer to write down her joke so that I didn’t forget it, which brings us back to my original point about not being able to remember jokes very well; again, somewhat like the pretzel-eating ouroubouros I mentioned earlier.
And that is how ‘knock knock’ jokes are made, always and forever.
Inside the metal ziggurat
My polymathic friend Dino has used a photo I took at the Solstice Celebration event held at Melbourne’s Federation Square as inspiration for a brooding, atmospheric piece for guitar.
“You only had to survive one of your regrets”
Pharmacists live in minutiae… Ask anyone who has ever filled the innards of a tiny gelatin capsule with a drug, and they will know that twenty grains equals one scruple. Three scruples equal one dram apothecaries. Eight drams apothecaries equal one ounce apothecaries, which equals four hundred eighty grains, or twenty-four scruples.
[…] It was funny — a scruple, by itself, was a misgiving; make it plural and it suddenly was a set of principles, of ethics. […] You only had to survive one of your regrets, and it was enough to make you realize you’d been living your life all wrong.
“Chris Miles’ cheeky fusion of fae and suburbia”
My short story ‘The Household Debt’ is among the many tales of fantasy, horror and science-fiction in the latest Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine. Editor Simon Petrie kindly namechecks my piece in his blog post introducing the issue, aptly describing it as a ‘cheeky fusion of fae and suburbia’. It’s also my first full-length speculative fiction story sale.
If you’re not aware of it, ASIM is edited by a cooperative whose members (many of whom are celebrated genre authors in their own right) take turns to oversee the selection of stories for an individual issue. It’s one of the (if not the) most regular print outlets for genre fiction in Australia, publishing local and international authors, and I’m thrilled that my story has found a home within its pages.
I haven’t had a chance to read issue 51 cover to cover, but so far I’ve been very impressed by fellow newcomer Robin Shortt’s ‘Bonsai’, and am looking forward to reading the Keith Stevenson and Thoraiya Dyer pieces.
And if I may be so crass, print ($12.95) and PDF ($4.95) copies of ASIM 51 can be purchased at andromedaspaceways.com.