Ravenswing 2009

Maybe I'm biased, because I've been going to Ravenswing since it was a once-a-month craft & zine fair in a smallish room at the Jack Purcell Centre, but I still think Ravenswing is astonishing.

From virtually nothing, Sean and all the other people that have gravitated towards the Ravenswing collective have created something that grows visibly every year, that gets better and better, and that hasn't yet lost its totally refreshing anti-corporate, local, indie, DIY feel. Ravenswing is a carnival: diverse, colourful, celebratory, and playful.

The crowds at this year's fair were easily double that of last year. And people have begun to realize that you can come and just hang out in Minto Park that day, catch the bands, do some workshops, and stroll around talking to the artists and crafters. This year, too, the organizers scored a stage, which really enhanced the sense of 'occasion' and brought more people up to the stage to listen to the bands. As usual, the bands ran a little later than the printed schedule, so that the last band went on at 4:00, when the fair was officially supposed to be wrapping up... but everyone still had their stuff out and no one seemed eager to leave. It was just too nice to be in the park with all the cool people. 

Girls on roller skates handing out the program, too? NICE touch.

I was broke at this year's fair, so I only walked out with a couple of things. One gem was a stunning photograph by Ian McPhail of a statue in the Art Gallery (she's either Roman or a Baroque copy, I think) which also came with a great story about how he managed to get a camera into the gallery and get the shot in the first place. 

Another good one was Paula Belina's zine/comic about being in Oregon on Election Night 2008, with nifty complex art and a tone that totally captured the crazy swell that happened to a lot of people that night, from semi-cynicism to an outburst of collective, charged celebration that - in her story - had people dancing into the intersections on the "walk" cycles in Portland, for hours. (She threw in her one-pager mini-zine on how to cross the border, too.) She's looking for other people's election  night stories - send them to funisfreepress@gmail.com.

I also had very little to sell this year, so I was free to ditch my table and go off looking for workshops to get involved in. I sat in on the prayer flags workshop (a little explanation of what those colourful flags are that you see hanging around people's houses, the Buddhist temple on Heron, and Crystal Dawn, plus a lot of time to cut out and design your own, nontraditional prayer flags: mine involved a few Norse runes and some gorgeous copper-coloured fabric paint.) I also had been looking forward to the breaking/locking dance workshop for days, so I had to join that one: my legs still hurt from the crouch-squat pose... must dance more!)

I was happy to see more than just jewelry and clothes at the sale too - nothing against jewelry and clothes, that's what I brought, but having Rockalily Burlesque there with their pasties and hula hoops was a nice touch. The same with the Henna tent and the table selling all-natural makeup.

And if this year was this good... how awesome is next year's Ravenswing going to be?

In a Thousand Years We'll All Be Brown

I didn't know this was even happening until a friend posted a link today to this article by Nalo Hopkinson on race and gender in SF, and I started following up. And then I found this community on LiveJournal. So yeah. May 18th, 2009. A day to sit back and ask, why is the future so full of white guys?

Look at the new Star Trek film, even. Sure, they didn't want to go switching up such well-loved characters (as the writers at Battlestar Galactica did when they made Starbuck a woman) so maybe they're bound by the old casting. But the fact remains that the bridge crew still only has one Asian, and one black, member. And Sulu's played by a Chinese guy, and Uhura's still the Intergalactic Receptionist (thanks to Nalo for that phrase.)

It's true, isn't it? The future's full of white people. Maybe not as much as it used to be, but still, you read science fiction and you'd be forgiven for assuming that at some point a global catastrophe struck 85% of the planet, wiping out all but Europe, because there are all those blond, blue-eyed spacefarers in their shiny ships. And not only that, but they all interact with the world through a pretty white, Western, Judeo-Christian lens, don't they?

There are exceptions. William Gibson's Rastafarian orbital colony in Neuromancer was a nice touch, gave a minority group a place offworld. I like that everyone swears in Chinese on Firefly, and that when I was but a wee RPG player, the games Cyberpunk: 2020 and Shadowrun both incorporated a street argot cobbled together out of Japanese, Spanish, Russian and Swahili. (Yeah, at the time, we all thought we'd all need to speak Japanese in twenty years...) If you want to include fantasy in this discussion (and I do) then there's an interesting case in Neil Gaiman's book Anansi Boys, one of the first I've ever read in which the only time a person's skin colour was mentioned was when they were white... because otherwise all the characters were black. And British.

SF, for me, is not about the future, but it's so often set in the future that it's hard not to think in those terms. Even if it's not, if, as in so many of Ursula Le Guin's books, the story happens somewhere among people who are furry, or hermaphroditic, or otherwise not bound by human biology and ideas about human biology - even then, we tend to think about it as happening in a time with roots in our own. 

I wrote science fiction as a kid, and having read so damn much Le Guin, I found I kept reminding myself about this sort of thing as I wrote. All people are not blond like me, English-speaking like me, all people don't have my experience or background. It's the same for all fiction, but in SF, because it is thought to predict the future, it matters more.

Sure, my main character in these stories could be blond and blue-eyed, could be a girl just like me from the eastern side of Canada if I really wanted (and probably should be - I don't feel qualified to adopt the voice of, say, someone from Uzbekistan), but I kept remembering, each time I came up with a new character and described her, that, for one thing, by the time we humans actually make our way out into the universe and start colonizing other planets (if we ever do), we will not be blond. The vast majority of people on this planet are not. By the time we go out there, I hope, we'll all be kinda brown. With epicanthic eyes, and probably spirally-curly black or brown hair. Genetics says, brown eyes trump blue, dark skin trumps pale. Usually. Maybe there will be the occasional throwback, who'll look like me, and be really weird.

I also had to remember that it's far too easy - too knee-jerk - to associate physical traits with character traits. Isn't the evil emperor usually black-haired, bearded, saturnine? Isn't the big guy usually stupid, for that matter, and the small guy brainy but weak? Orcs have black skin, elves are fair. (Even the more heroic and handsome hobbits are lighter-skinned, and taller, than the rest.) What do Flash Gordon, Buck Rogers, Starbuck (the original), Captain Kirk, and Luke Skywalker all have in common? Look at Klingons. Even the original ones that didn't have all the bony forehead stuff going on. They were a pretty swarthy bunch, weren't they?

So I'd stop, and catch myself decribing something with that received-knowledge viewpoint - that I had to describe those characters that don't look like me, but not the ones that do. And that certain descriptions can be taken as shorthand for personality traits.

I still do stop and rethink: I recently revived one of those high-school SF plotlines to go back and visit, and play. And I discovered that the universe I was creating is still a pretty diverse place, and the humans are still mostly brown, and they're are still about 50% female, like always, and the tough girls still like to cuddle sometimes, and the big guys don't have to be dumb, and if there's an enemy, it's not because they're 'just evil', and planets don't have only one culture/language/climate, and there is still stupidity and prejudice and selfishness (because if there wasn't, what kind of story would there be?) and in a thousand years, or a few hundred, no one will be speaking English in any form we'd recognize (so don't get comfortable, fellow English-speakers), and out among the stars we'll have to count time in something other than years .... and it's a whole lot of work to stop and remember all that, while I'm really just trying to have fun playing around with my SF space-opera.

But Le Guin and my parents told me: SF is the absolute last place you should fall back on those insidious assumptions that have become part of the genre by accident or through laziness and old habit... Because what SF is talking about is what it's like to be human, and being human is a whole hell of a lot broader than being young, thin, fit, straight, male, Christian and white.

Henry V at GCTC

I just got back from seeing the preview show of Third Wall Theatre's production of Henry V at the GCTC main stage (directed by Charles McFarland, playing till the 16th.)

It's not often that I can come away from a play with such a mixed review. There are some serious strengths in this production, and in Third Wall's newly formed Shakespeare ensemble - and there are some serious flaws. It all leads to me walking away having enjoyed the play thoroughly, even though there was a lot that bothered me about it. I'll try to explain. 

Some things have been done with this show that just seem intrusively stagey. It's Henry V, after all - the temptation has got to be wellnigh unbearable to take one of the most affecting studies of leadership and war in the English language and push it into one modern or historical context or another. As a result, the Henry plays have been set in every imaginable wartime. But ... Afghanistan? Really? 

Shakespeare has a wonderful conceit in the Chorus, that returns throughout the play: he tells the audience that of course you can't fit the story of a war onto a stage and into a few hours, and that it's the audience's job to fill in the "unworthy scaffold" with their imaginations. So, the set here is stripped down to where you can see the wings and the props pushed up against them, and in the middle is a large industrial scaffold (which can be wheeled around, separated into two pieces, and generally manipulated. So far so good, if not the most original staging ever. I'm willing to work with that, even if the scaffold was creaky and wobbly enough that it made the set changes really intrusive. Hey, the Chorus has already told us - this is the audience doing the work. That's cool. 

But, then there's the inconsistencies. Along with more than a few grating accents (the French characters, as a whole, reminded me too often of the mocking Frenchman from Monty Python and the Holy Grail, and David Holton, as Flewellen, manages to turn a Welsh accent into a vaguely North British or maybe Scottish, more than vaguely Pythonesque parody) there's the weirdness of them - if this is supposed to be Iraq or Afghanistan, as suggested by the modern desert-camo uniforms and guns, then why are the opposing armies speaking with French and English accents, and why, for that matter, are there opposing armies? 

My companion speculated that setting it in Iraq was really just about questioning anyone's reasons for going to war - what are soldiers dying in Iraq for, and what were the English dying at Agincourt for - but if so it's an uneven comparison on all counts. We like Harry. Harry's clearly meant to be extremely cool. So, no comparison between leaders being made. There's no opposing nation in Afghanistan or Iraq. There were no insurgents or guerillas in France. And now I'm stuck trying to figure out what the comparisons and contrasts are supposed to be, and I'm missing the play, because I'm trying to figure out what's with the sudden interpolation of modern battlefield footage into Agincourt. Seems like you could talk about the human issues surrounding going to war without bringing in the images, context and political issues of a specific war that's far too close to us to be useful for metaphor. 

It's true. Clever staging for the sake of being clever just winds up being confusing. 

The staging could also have been far smoother - the sound in particular. The incidental music that came up between scenes was anything from rock to choral to instrumental, none of which seemed to tie in with the whole Iraq/Afghanistan thing, and in the battle scenes there were plenty of explosions, which would then cut off instantly so that the actors could yell their lines as though they were still yelling over the gunfire.

But, I have to say this for the new Shakespeare ensemble - they've got some very strong actors. As long as we were just watching the actors, and listening to Shakespeare's great writing, all those other issues became much less important. This cast has really worked on the language. They don't much rely on showy physicality on stage; there's much less dashing about the set than some productions would have. Bravely, they let the words do the work for the most part, and it works; you really start to hear how damn good Shakespeare was.

Some of them, to be sure, shout all their lines, switch poses between chunks of monologue, and insist on speaking all that rhetoric of Shakespeare's as though the character was searching for the metaphor and then coming up with it all of a sudden (you know what I mean, you've heard it... "So the Prince obscured his contemplation under the veil of wildness; which, no doubt, grew .... like [like, like what? Ah! I've got it!].... the summer grass, fastest by night, unseen....") And I'm not sure what was up with Steve Gilles Arnold as the Dauphin. I'm sure he was going for impulsive and hotheaded. But it looked to me like he was going for Jim Carey as The Mask; cartoonish and weird.

But some of them are really quite good. James Bradford, although he stumbled over his lines a lot, was surprisingly funny as the Archbishop. His long rambling geneaological proof of Henry's claim to France was well timed and well said, and he transformed almost completely to become the much older, wheelchair-bound King of France, and radiated defeat in the final meeting with Henry. Scott Wilson was solid as the Duke of Exeter as well - his one moment to really shine was an emotional report from the battle that was quite riveting. 

The star, though, was Michael Mancini as Henry. I'd go see him in pretty much any Shakespeare production. Whatever the failings of the show, Mancini was totally watchable and compelling. I knew I was going to have fun watching him when he jumped down off the scaffold to answer the Dauphin's insulting tennis balls, with a low, controlled, quiet anger. "We are glad the Dauphin is so pleasant with us. His present, and your pains, we thank you for..." he says, softly, pleasantly, and it's scary. And then his threat gets more and more expansive, until eventually he's literally got the emissary by the balls, and you believe that he would burn a country down over the insult.

Henry gets some barn-burner speeches, and Mancini's control of the emotional swells and ebbs was impressive. He also inhabited the part enough that you forgot he was acting. My favorite subtle moment was in the last negotiating scene, when France agrees to all the terms, and he turns around, being all kingly, and I saw a tiny look exchanged between him and Sarah Conn, playing the Duke of Clarence. A little, conspiratorial, 'we-got-em' look. 

There were other moments as well - although the lighting was pretty straightforward through the play (strong spotlights featured heavily, as did a smoke machine that pumped the theatre full of inexplicable haze) there was a moment at the end of the battle of Agincourt when the soldiers carried a coffin off the set. The lights died until the only one was a bright light pointed out at the audience from the back of the set, which the soldiers walked toward, so that eventually everything was obscured but the flag on the surface of the coffin. A really nice piece of lighting.

Not sure about the choice to have CBC radio personalities as the chorus (tonight it was Rita Celli from Ontario Noon, and apparently they've also got Adrian Harewood from All In A Day to share the part with her) except that I guess they're supposed to look like newscasters, helped by the fact that they're well-known CBC people. But - lose the clipboard with the script on it, Rita. Memorize the lines. And if you must be miked, carry the mike and look like a newscaster. 

So, that's it, a review as uneven, probably, as the play. There were some wonderful performances, and I'm eager to see what else this ensemble will come up with, because they've clearly been working hard on performing Shakespeare. The stage direction was wonky and clunky, but the language won through for me. I want to see what else they can do. As You Like It is coming up next season.

And I still think I'd probably go charging into battle behind Harry, given the chance.

He's just that kind of a king.

Books by their Covers

I heard a great interview on Q the other day with Chip Kidd about book cover designs, and I had to cheer when he said he didn't really think Kindle and its ilk had caught up with the traditional oldfashioned book because "it only comes in one typeface, I mean, come on." Hooray! I hadn't thought of it like that, but go Chip. It's true, I'm among the ranks of those for whom the design of a book really matters. No, I don't think that's shallow or disregarding of the content of the book... I just think that the content can be visually, um, assisted.

Anyway, I also just came across this article from examiner.com on typeface - talking to a few leading designers about fonts and what they mean. How you learn their nuances and how they can be used and misused. Fascinating. 

I know there are those of you out there that change the default font on your computer because it works better for what you're doing. I know you're out there. I'm one of you. 

Night and Day

I've spent the last week taking authors to schools around Ottawa, and I've noticed a few things. One - it's really hard to see the tiny street signs they have in the suburbs when you're stuck behind one of those gargantuan SUVs. Two, if I never had to be anywhere near Woodroffe, or make another one-handed U-turn while getting directions from a school secretary on my cell phone with a nervous out-of-towner in the passenger seat, again, I'd be okay with that. Three, and perhaps the most important: there are oceans of difference from one school to the next, and it has absolutely everything to do with the teachers.

Children's authors take note. This is a story about one item on my Santa Claus list of naughty and nice schools.

My first school on Monday morning, driving around YA author Lesley Livingston (a wonderful person, who, I think, HarperCollins believes is a very hot ticket, maybe the next Melissa Marr or even the next Stephanie Meyer) was Bridlewood Public School, in Kanata.

What I do is to send out a message to the school boards to let them know that the Writers Festival will be bringing children's authors into town to read free at schools, and all they have to do is get back to me to say they're interested, and I'll try to get to as many schools as I can. Someone at Bridlewood got in touch with me, and said they'd love to have an author, and I booked a time with her over email. So, we hoisted the box of books and the popup banner, and headed in. 

When we walked into the office, the secretary looked up. "Hi," I said, "I'm with the Writers Festival, and this is the author who's supposed to be speaking this morning."

"Oh," she said. "I don't know anything about that. I'm subbing today."

There was a sort of weird silence. "Well," I said, "We're here... from the Writers Festival..."

"Who were you supposed to be looking for?" she asked. I told her. She looked at her list of contacts. 

"Oh," she said. "I don't have a number for her."

There was a sort of weird silence. "Um," I said, "can we maybe talk to the principal?"

She turned around in her chair. "Their doors are closed..." she said, and sort of trailed off. The weird silence came back. 

Finally I gave up, and decided to go check in the library. The woman in there seemed to have a notion that there was something going on, so I waved Lesley in, and we said hi. I set up the banner and we moved some tables and chairs to make room for the kids to sit on the floor. Eventually the principal came in and shook our hands and said hello, but then she left again. We stood around as the students - grades 7-8 - filed in and sat down. Chatted a bit with the kids, who wanted to know if we were sisters, because we really do look like we could be related. Then a teacher came over and introduced himself, asked if we were writers, and what this whole thing was about, with the Writers Festival and all. I explained that Lesley was actually the writer, and that I was here with the 'Think Ink' program of the Festival. Yes, I did write myself, as well as work at the Festival, but Lesley was the one who was really here to speak.

He was the one that introduced us. "Good morning everyone" - or something like that - "We're very lucky today to have these two ladies with us from the" - he turned to check the poster - "International Writers Festival, and they're authors. So they're going to talk to you about writing and their Festival and what they do. So I want you to be good listeners." And then he pretty much left to go sit down. 

I glanced at Lesley, and then stepped forward, and pointed out that I worked for the Festival, and yeah, I did write, poetry, but that I wasn't going to be talking about writing, Lesley was going to do that. I gave my usual spiel about getting to meet a living writer, introduced Lesley and let her go. 

She was great. She's comfortable with audiences and with teens, so she did fine sitting on the table swinging her legs, reading, answering questions. But the kids got squirmier and squirmier, and started getting louder and louder. Lesley had to ask them to settle down a couple of times, and the teacher next to me just sat there, zoned out, staring at the wall across from her. Like all the rest of them. One teacher in the back raised his voice to tell people to settle down and remained on his feet; the others all sat there and abdicated for an hour. 

The question part got out of hand. Some of the kids asked good questions, but then things started going downhill. A long and tedious series of questions about whether she had [insert mythical creature here] in the book eventually devolved into these two lanky, belligerent, self-important boys in the third row, asking "So, are there any good authors coming to the Writers Festival this year? Like, is Robert Munsch coming?" and "Can you tell me how the book ends, cause I'm not going to read it."

No one said anything to them. To my shame, I didn't either. But what do you say? And shouldn't the teachers be doing something about this? But no, they were still just staring off into space, thinking about their bills or whatever. 

Eventually the questions petered out, and none of the teachers had made any moves to wrap things up, so Lesley said something like, "well, I guess, um, I guess that's it, and if you want to get a copy of the book Kate's selling it, and you guys have been great," and then got up. I came over, the kids sort of clapped, and then they sat there until eventually the teachers roused and started desultorily getting everyone together to leave the room. Some of the kids came up to talk to Lesley, but then someone bellowed, "If you don't have any money for books, then get out!" and they cleared out, leaving us with about six very interested kids, some of whom got together the money for books, and one of whom was a very earnest, serious writer who got some great advice from Lesley about agents and the market. 

Then those kids left, and we looked at each other. Even the librarian was gone; we were alone in the library. No one came up to say thanks, or to attempt to walk us out. We packed up our stuff, commenting to each other on how freaking bizarre the whole thing was, and then stopped in at the office to tell the secretary  that we were very sorry we hadn't had a chance to thank the principal in person for having us (loudly enough that she could hear us in her office.) And the secretary sort of grunted, and we left. 

"Well, that was ... strange," Lesley said as we headed for the car. 

"You could even say it was wondrous strange," I said, and we got in the car, checked the directions, called the next school, and compared notes about the apparently drugged teachers and the rotten kids and the general lack of welcome or interest or spark of intelligence at Bridlewood while we headed over to W.O. Mitchell.

Now W.O. Mitchell, not a ten minute drive away, was a whole other situation. We got in and checked in with the teacher, who came out to the office to find us, invited us back to the staff room where they were still on lunch, set us up at a back table, got us some drinks, and introduced us to the other teacher who would be responsible for the readings (two sessions back to back, for two different groups of about 100 students each.) She'd already sent all her students to check out Lesley's website, and had been reading chapters of the book with her students already in class. We got set up a little before the bell rang, in the gym, with a microphone hooked up and the divider screen scrolling out to close off the space so it wouldn't echo too much. 

The kids were great. They asked really good questions, and sat rapt through the reading, and afterwards they came up and mobbed Lesley to sign their shoes and notebooks and hands and backpacks and books and bits of paper.  After the second session, the teacher who'd met us came back: she was apparently also the art teacher, and had made a gorgeous ceramic gargoyle for Lesley, which a couple of the kids presented to her. It turned out that Lesley collects gargoyles, so she was overjoyed by the gift. 

A few kids stayed behind to talk about the writing industry with Lesley, who has really good solid advice for kids who want to write - stuff about avoiding scam agents and how to find out about query letters. Solid stuff. 

We were walked out, thanked again, and I left my email address so that the kids who didn't have money could order more copies of the book. The teachers themselves bought about four copies. 

The moral of this story, without even getting into Kathy Kacer's horrible experience at the same school the next day: Bridlewood School should be avoided at all costs. The Writers Festival sure isn't going back there. And good teachers - the ones that care, that put something into it, that show in their own behaviour that they're interested - make the difference between a terrible school and a brilliant one. 

Why Poetry Antimatters

I will probably miss this event, as it's one of our noon Masterclasses and I'll be in schools all day every day that week, but I really wish I could make it to "Why Poetry Antimatters: Metaphor, Entanglement and Particle Physics" with Jeramy Dodds and Matthew Tierney on the 30th.

Apparently they'll be presenting in lab coats. That's ... nerdily awesome.

Anne Michaels

I think I counted about 250 people at Saint Brigid's tonight to see Anne Michaels. That's the biggest fiction audience I've seen since... Michael Ondaatje?

I really enjoyed getting a chance to hear her tonight. It's always nice when someone who is a beautiful writer can also read their own work well. (I also think that the sound is getting better and better at Saint Brigid's, as the sound guys get used to the space - I was sitting way at the back and she came through clear as a bell.)

I know I've read a couple of articles that made it seem like she would be a bit of a ... prickly interview, but I think maybe the interviewers may have contributed as much to any awkwardness as she might have. At least, she certainly didn't seem as standoffish as some of the reviews have made her out to be. 

And wow - hard to believe the Festival starts next Wednesday. I'm going to have to get busy deciding on the Al Purdy poem I'm going to read at the Al Purdy fundraiser on the 21st - and then it's full swing into the Festival, with the Earth Day vernissage kicking the whole thing off at 5:30 PM on Wednesday. Deep breath before the plunge, folks. I will attempt to write stuff during the Festival, but you know how it is. The Writers Festival's Discussion Board has a couple of Festival bloggers who will also be posting things, and I may sign myself up to do that as well. Assuming I'll get a couple of moments to blog as things are tearing along. 

Linketty linketty

I've been creating posters, spreading event announcements, and whatnot for the Writers Festival Spring Edition this week. It entails a lot of surfing around on the web following links and finding out some neat stuff (being on Twitter for the Festival also helps.)

And I was putting together the announcement for what is certainly MY most hotly anticipated evening of the Festival... May 2nd. The day I get to meet one of my personal literary heroes, Ursula K. Le Guin. She'll be closing the Festival, right after a Writing Life session featuring Mike Carey (of Lucifer, Hellblazer, X-Men and Felix Castor fame), Jo Walton (author of Farthing, Ha'penny and Half a Crown, books set in a creepily believable fascist Britain), and Kelley Armstrong, Canada's first lady of vampires, witches, werewolves and demons.

And I find that Kelley Armstrong has been writing the Angel comic book lately. Hm, now I suppose I should check to see if Jo Walton has ever written for comics.  It would make for a really interesting conversation when they do their onstage.

I've always been sort of interested in writing for comics, actually. Ever since I read the script that Neil Gaiman reprinted in the back of the trade paperback Dream Country. Doesn't it seem, somehow, that it would be easier to foist the visuals onto an artist - someone who's really good at visuals - and just focus on the story?

But then I think about issues of collaboration. Of 'canon.' Of fitting into a much larger story arc, in some cases - jeez, if Armstrong's taking over Angel, think of the years' worth of the TV series (both of them), and what's been laid out already by the characters' creator and the dozens of writers that have already used those characters and settings, not to mention what the millions of fans have, in their groupthink way, established as rules about the world. (Fantasy and SF fans, in general, are among the world's most encylopedically continuity-bound - any inconsistencies spark mini-tornadoes of debate, speculation, and attempts to find ways of tying everything in to "the canon." But, this can lead to fascinating outbursts of collaborative creativity.)

And I think that's part of what fascinates me about 'genre fiction' - about comics and series in particular - the way the writers and the readers become co-creators, and the way stories spread from genre to genre. They're as fluid as folklore.

Vaguely dissatisfied with the Guardian

The Guardian.co.uk's "Books" reporting has been feeling a little like the Mister Noodles of the lit world lately. At least it leads to good reponses, but the articles themselves... you read them, then realize how little content there actually was.

This is brought on by something I linked to because of the whole social media network thing, which I find leads me to more fairly pointless web content than I should really be putting up with. Take this article on "the top 10 best coffee moments in literature," for example. I don't see how any of these make the cut for really cool coffee moments, or even particularly cool literary moments. Maybe I'm just not reading well because it's onscreen and I've been staring at the screen for a few hours. 

But, but! The Guardian also suggests that I must be better at reading things in depth, (screen or no screen, perhaps) because I'm a woman.  Don't think I'll even get into the pop-psych vacuity of the piece... the funny thing is that it formed the basis for another article on how publishers could "masculinize" books in order to encourage men to read them. (I can point them straight toward Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, and that's without even thinking too hard about it!)

Bookninja.com to the rescue - with a competition that makes me wish I'd thought of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies because it would be awesome... Re-masculate an existing book to make it more appealing to the male market, and win! 

I really need to stop blindly following links. But it's nice to know I can at least wind up somewhere that's clever... regardless of where I start...

Book Clubs and Birthdays

I'm heading out tonight to catch Daniel Cox at the Hard Cover Book Club meeting. . . his first novel, Shuck, just got nominated for a Lambda! He's reading at GayZone, 420 Cooper, at 6:30 if you got a hankering for some retro-90's New York hustlering!

Tomorrow I'm catching the Five Years of Dusty Owl photography vernissage, kicking off a showing at Swizzles. Photos from the last five years of the Dusty Owl Reading Series will be on display and for sale, and there will be wine and cheese! 

Saturday, the inimitable Warren Fulton is ringmastering the annual Pooka Pub Crawl (this one titled 'Mapping Shadows") - should result in interesting drunken poetry and random mayhem. 

And Sunday is the Fifth Birthday Party And Dusty Owl Family Reunion reading at 2:00! Past features will be taking the mike and rocking the house in honor of our five years in our new home. 

When I get a moment, too, I've got to do a little reviewing. I'm feeling the urge.