Under the Bridge

Link here to see the Wordle page.

 I found a website that takes chunks of text and makes these fascinating collages/word clouds out of them. I couldn't resist plugging in a very short short story I wrote at the Dusty Owl Play Date a while back and was particularly pleased with...

Doing this kind of thing can be a mindless exercise along the lines of flipping through photos of yourself in your Facebook gallery, or it can give you some ideas. In this case, I think the image I got gives me a strange disjointed look at the story's atmosphere. It's like an automated version of the exercise where you cut up the words of a text and reshuffle them: which I've tried, like meditating, without ever getting to something I'd call enlightenment. Maybe you just need to take more time doing it, or maybe I'm a slave to syntax. In any case, this little applet does remove any compulsion to make sense out of words and shows me a bit about how I went about building the story's feel. 

And it looks cool. 

Call for Submissions

I've decided to start reposting calls for submissions etc here, so keep an eye out for more of them to come!

Vagina Dentata, the Carleton-born feminist mag, is looking for submissions. You don't have to be female to submit, but check them out for the kinds of stuff they want.

They say: "The submission deadline for the next issue of Vagina Dentata has been extended to November 1st. Continue sending your poetry, stories, articles, and artwork to vaginadentatamag@gmail.com. Thanks to everyone who has already submitted something!"

What I'm Reading

Okay, okay, I could be reading all kinds of stuff in preparation for the Writers Festival. All kinds of stuff that I don't actually have time to read because I'm busy preparing for the Writers Festival. I could be reading Linden MacIntyre's The Bishop's Man (which is sadly, oddly, topical right now.) I could be reading Where Am I? by Colin Ellard and getting my inner neuroscience nerd psyched. I would be reading David Byrne's Bicycle Diaries if the office had a copy yet.

But I could not resist. Dracula: the Un-Dead, by Dacre Stoker. Bram Stoker's great-grandnephew. (And Ian Holt, who doesn't seem to get much of the press attention.) It came in two days ago, blood-red cover and all. 

I started out sort of amused at the 25-years-later state of the main characters (Dr. Seward's a crazy morphine addict running around hunting vampires, Harker's a drunk, Mina just hasn't aged much a la the One Ring and is still carrying a torch for Dracula, and their son is dreaming of a career in the theatre while being forced through law school, and has never been told anything about the whole vampire incident his parents went through back before he was born.) All that's kind of entertaining, in the same sort of way that Anno Dracula was. I could even deal with the bits with our (apparently) new vampire foe, Elizabeth Bathory, although something bothers me about a Dracula sequel where you get to see the inner thoughts and memories of the vampire. Ah well.

But now, a few chapters in, I've just been completely blindsided by the sudden appearance in the narrative of Bram himself, and a theatrical production of the novel Dracula. What the...?

Quincey Harker (you may or may not recall, depending on your nerdiness, that the Harkers named their first son after Quincey Morris, who dies in the final battle of Dracula) runs into Bram Stoker in a theatre in Paris, points out that his parents are Jonathan and Mina Harker, then goes off and gets a copy of the novel and is only slightly disturbed by the fact that it's all about his parents - he's more interested in playing the part of his father in the production. And then we go back to vampires stalking the streets. 

Lesbian vampires, of course. I guess I was expecting that. 

I'm just confused enough by the weird metafictional quality of the Bram character that I think I've got to read on - something really interesting might be going on here... or it might be a driverless-ghost-carriage-wreck waiting to happen. We'll see.

Baned Books Week - Last Day!

Here's the last random post from the Banned Books Week map:

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It's been interesting posting these: more because of the memories that they've brought up for me, since most of these cases involve books in schools, where people have the impression they should be able to control what other people read. Parents that don't want their children reading books with dragons in them think that they have the right to tell all the other kids in the class that they shouldn't read books with dragons in them. And there are whole committees and procedures that school boards set up in order to validate those parents and "give it due consideration." There is a complaints process, and therefore there are complaints. Chicken and egg? Who knows?

I'd like it if the ALA's map covered other cases outside the schools and libraries - like what about books stopped at the border between Canada and the USA because of content (as happened to Little Sister's bookstore in Vancouver, which had a shipment of books held at the border, because of charges that the books were pornography)? I think that counts. 

As a parting note - look for an article coming out in a couple of weeks by Cory Doctorow about sex in teen novels. (Google it, I don't remember the title or where it's being printed.) He mentioned it at one of the schools we visited this week, when someone asked if he'd ever had complaints about his book Little Brother. He told them that yes, he had - a parent had complained because the main character loses his virginity (and "nothing bad happens as a result.") 

Oh, yeah, that's what you want to be teaching kids: that sex inevitably ends in suffering. That'll arm them for their future lives and relationships. Personally, I think Marcus and Ange (the kids in Cory's book) are a great model of a healthy, functional, equal, respectful, mature partnership.

Banned Books Week: Day Six

jwcurry

Basically, because he said it better, I'm going to quote rob mclennan's quoting of Roland Prevost's plea: and add my own. In a universe far far away, where things make sense, teachers are paid six figures and the army holds bake sales to buy bombers, and patrons take on people whose contributions to art are as important, and as hard to explain to the general population or god help us our current government, as jwcurry's, and they feed and house them, and let them continue to chronicle the development of our collective souls and generally exist for the expansion of our minds and the continued forward trajectory of thought.

So, think about it. Buy something from jwcurry. Or donate. Or subscribe. Or something. The government won't support him. Joe Six-Pack wouldn't understand him. Lots of people would shrug and tell him to get a job. But he's GOT one. It's just not one that our society's set up to support him for, and he needs the help of the artist community every so often. 

 

An urgent note from Roland Prevost: save jwcurry & Room 302 Books! 

john curry, certainly a world class poet living in our community, is presently facing almost certain eviction.

Stephen Brockwell alerted me of this precarious situation, by phone, and asked if I would get the word out, most recently at the TREE Reading Series on September 22, where we were able to scare up enough to cover one of his 5 months’ owed rent & save his telephone service.

curry’s been in constant production of his own and hundreds of others’ work since 1979. he’s mainly ineligible for grants. His bookstore is mainly an unused resource. His archive documenting the growth of avant-garde writing in Canada is one of the key collections in the country. Nicky Drumbolis has said: “curry and his work are the best-kept secret in Canada.”

Since time is of the essence, if curry’s to avoid eviction, there are a few ways you can help:

Start to use his goddamn store!

Room 302 Books is the only bookstore in Canada ever to focus specifically on the avant-garde and “overlooked outsiders,” specializing in concrete/visual/sound poetries (mainly Canadian) with a stock of over 20,000 mainly rare titles, including “elusive ephemera,” and probably the only source of most of jwcurry’s various imprints and titles (which number in the thousands). curry’s current lists finally focus on his own work as artist & publisher, virtually the first time everything that’s (still) available has been made commonly available. You can purchase bookstore IOUs (or set up an account) today in any amount for those who’d like to do that.

Subscribe to Curvd H&z, curry’s serial imprint. “donor” subscriptions (please indicate) of $100 or more get ½ the stash in a sampling of available titles from various of his imprints immediately, the remaining ½ put on account for forthcoming titles.

Donate outright.

I would like to encourage you to donate something so as to keep this excellent bookstore, publisher, archive and artist alive, and at the same time help prevent curry’s eviction from his apartment. For those who’d like to purchase bookstore IOU’s, I’d ask you to write (#302-880 Somerset Street West, Ottawa Canada K1R 6R7) or call him at (613) 233 0417. Please contribute as you can.

Roland Prevost (with collusions with curry)

Banned Books Week: Day Five
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Banned Books Week - Day Four

I spent the day today bombing around talking copyright law, internet privacy, RSS and CMS and many other nifty things with Cory Doctorow, in the service of getting him to two high schools and a couple of media interviews. Fascinating guy to talk to, and I really had a lot of fun. It was also really fun to watch him asking groups of high school students, "So, how many of you have tried to look at something on the Internet that was blocked by your school's sensors?" (Hands go up across the room.) "And, how many of you know how to get around those sensors?" (Pretty much the same number of hands go up.) "Okay, those of you who don't know, ask someone who does." And this in front of the teachers... who are nodding in emphatic agreement. One teacher was asking how to get around the blocks that keep her from using YouTube with her class, and a boy in the fourth row who was probably about 15 put his hand up and told her. She blinked a bit, and said, "Okay, you, we'll talk after. Show me."

AWESOME. 

Keep an ear out, too, for interviews with Cory on Nigel Beale's The Biblo File, (on CKCU and also on podcast at his blog) and on CHUO's Audio Visual tomorrow at 1:00 (to be podcasted later at Apt613.)

And here's your random case, today from Arizona:

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(Yes, but what were the objections to Carlin and Williams? That they're funny?) 

Banned Books Week - Day Three

Interestingly, I'm going to be spending most of my day tomorrow with Cory Doctorow, whose YA book Little Brother has been challenged by a parent recently - not because it incites kids to use countersurveillance, clone RFID chips, and defy the Department of Homeland Security, or because it acts as a handbook for organized dissent. Not even because of the graphic depictions of torture (like the harrowing waterboarding scene at the end...) Nope. Because of the (off camera, consenting and loving) teen sex.

Little Brother also won a White Pine Award (judged by librarians and young readers) and a Sunburst Award for YA Fiction. And was shortlisted for a Hugo Award (arguably the highest SF award in the English speaking world.) Hm.

And, here's your random mouse-jiggled case for the day:

Banned Books Week - Day two
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