To Link is Divine

Cleaning out the bookmarks...
  • Meghan McCarron dared to dive into the treacherous waters of the question "Why aren't more women published in SF magazines?", and the results were, as she says, more a brainstorming session than a debate.

  • Dan Green on Kafka and detective novels.

  • By the way, I'm currently reading the new Kafka biography that Dan references in his post (via Steve Mitchelmore), and it's easily the best literary biography I've read since Hermione Lee's bio of Virginia Woolf. It's so much more than just a chronicle of the events of Kafka's life -- it weaves in fascinating discussions of all sorts of different things, from the various uses and meanings of personal correspondence through the ages to how the advent of the telephone affected people's relationships, to previous critics' interpretations of Kafka's relations with his family and friends and lovers to the exact circumstances of Kafka's daily life. Extraordinary, and remarkably gripping for a book so full of data.

  • Speaking of things giving me pleasure these days, you do know about the new Dresden Dolls DVD, right? Christopher Lydon MCs it. The real Christopher Lydon. That's not the best part, though. The best part might just be the drumming on the song "Half Jack". Or the video for "Coin-Operated Boy" (yes, I know it's online, but I don't have a fast connection, so never watched it till I got the DVD). Anyway, I owe Sonya Taaffe for a lot of things, but especially for introducing me to The Dresden Dolls, a great source of (admittedly perverse) (and often coin-operated) joy. (And they have a blog.)

  • (Book deal of the week: You can own But I Digress: The Exploitation of Parentheses in English Printed Verse for only $121!) (Follow that link!) (While supplies last!) (Buy copies for your entire family!)

  • Kameron Hurley pointed to this article about a gallery in England removing a picture of a nude man and replacing it with a picture of a nude woman because they'd gotten too many complaints about a nude man being such a tasteless thing to display. Huh. I have an almost-lifesize painting of a nude man (full frontal) hanging quite prominently in my apartment, a birthday gift from the painter (she knew I liked the painting, and she had just broken up with the guy who was her model, so instead of burning the painting she gave it to me, which I thought was both reasonable and generous). It's been there for about four years, and in that time has provoked some interesting comments, but I have yet to be asked to replace it with a woman. Maybe because a few feet away hangs a poster of Duchamp's Mona Lisa...

  • Glenn Hirshberg on Denis Johnson's "Emergency".

  • Nick Mamatas on short story collections: "In the genre model, one writes a bunch of short stories and sells them to small publications that seem large only because genre authors live at the bottom of deep wells. Then one writes a novel, and then another, and another, and they come out every year or every six months and they generally all stink because one writes in the same way one makes McDonald's toadburgers, and then one gets famous (because people love to put diseased shit in their mouths) and then one comes out with a collection of short fiction for one's fans."

  • "A Myth of Innocence" by Louis Gluck.

  • Coalescent on Tiptree.

  • Jonathan Stahan's favorite short stories of 2005 (My only big disagreements, at least among the stories I've so far read, are that I would have picked Joe Hill's "My Father's Masks" over "The Cape", and I think "There's a Hole in the City" by Rick Bowes absolutely belongs on any best of the year list. But that's my personal list, not Jonathan's. And you'll hear more about mine sometime in January, because I have to write an article about the year's short fiction for Vector. (See Niall, I haven't forgotten!)

  • Undead in Appalachia? (Elizabethan English, that is.)

  • The Worst Album Covers of All Time. (via Buzzwords Blog)

  • Stay tuned, kids: Barring strange connection troubles or something, tomorrow I'll be posting an interview with Joe Hill.

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