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I knew I forgot something

January 4, 2012 /
Love Is Not Constantly Wondering If You Are Making The Biggest Mistake Of Your Life

This is the other book I read in 2011 that pierced me like a lancet: Love Is Not Constantly Wondering If You Are Making The Biggest Mistake Of Your Life. It took me a couple months to get to the point where I could write about it, and I am still well aware that I am not doing so from an objective platform.

I noticed it on a shelf at my friend Harry’s house when I went over, a couple days after the breakup, still a bit reely. “Oh,” he said, “yeah. Yeah. You should borrow that.” I later learned he’d only received it from our mutual friend Jackson a few days before; this makes sense, as Jackson is part magical creature. I did borrow it, took it “home” to the couch at Matt and Erika’s, and read it again and again.

It’s structured and formatted like a Choose Your Own Adventure book, down to the ink-sketch art style and fonts. The conceit is this: the page numbers are ordered chronologically, so if you read it according to the instructions, you’ll skip back and forth in time. Sometimes you’ll get into loops. Sometimes, unexpectedly, you’ll reach the end. This gives you the sensation of making choices, but of course the story never changes. You are as wrapped up in the illusion of choice as the protagonist. None of your decisions make any difference in the final outcome, and neither do his.

It’s the best marriage of form and fiction in any book I think I’ve read, and I am a known weakling for narrative tricks with time, but of course that’s not what really got to me. The book is about the beginning and slow end of a relationship between a nerdy guy who doesn’t drink and his beautiful girlfriend who does. The second half even takes place in Portland. Reading it was personal and cathartic, though I don’t mean to say that our stories are parallel: his lasts eight years, for one thing; for another, Anne in the book is an alcoholic and Kara is not. But that’s how catharsis works, right? You read the bigger story to move through the pain of your own small one.

I haven’t talked much about breaking up with Kara here, a trend that will continue, but I suppose this is an opportunity to mark it in the record. It was a sad and probably good thing, and it took too long, the problem being that we were happy together until the end. You can see it in the pictures I posted from our trip to Ireland, just a month before I moved out. It was a good trip. I have few regrets.

For a somewhat more distanced (but still very positive) review of LINCWIYAMTBMOYL, see Alison Hallett at the Mercury.

January 1, 2012 /

My favorite book of 2011 was Constellation Games, which I am going to start writing about tomorrow, but I got more reading done this year than I have in a while and I’m glad. Much of it was crammed into fall and winter, during my Ireland trip and after my breakup, when I suddenly had a lot more time on my hands. I’m speaking specifically of Lois McMaster Bujold, whose work I’d never read before mid-September; I finished the fifteenth of her fifteen Miles Vorkosigan books at 9:00 on New Year’s Eve, because I really did get that obsessed. There’s plenty written about Bujold, you don’t need me to tell you she’s good, but: she’s good.

I already talked about Tinker Tailor. Listening to Tina Fey read Bossypants to me was a delight, and I finally backed up my assertion that I love Martin McDonagh by reading some more Martin McDonagh. Comicswise, I got on the Atomic Robo train, I snuck through Matthew G’s copy of Hark, A Vagrant because nobody can keep it in stock, and everybody is right about Anya’s Ghost.

I’ll read more in 2012. Goals: more le Carré, get back into Atwood, back up my assertions about Tiptree by reading more Tiptree, and finish at least three books I own but haven’t read (starting with Mindy Kaling, Jedediah Berry, and Iain M. Banks).

The Social Network and Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy

December 31, 2011 /

They’re both stories about white guys sitting down and quietly talking. They also both made a tremendous impact on me: one by reminding me that I must yet reckon with Sorkin, the other by making me aware that le Carré is not just another popular novelist from before my time but an outright craftmaster.

There are other similarities. Everyone is glib, but in Sorkinland people use their flip lines to express their deepest feelings, whereas in le Carré glibness is a rigid fencing match of protocol that may mean nothing or everything. They’re also both stories about a dangerous little man who doesn’t understand women, and about betrayal. But now I’m stretching the parallels out for no particular reason. Le Carré doesn’t sound like Sorkin, he sounds like (he must have been an influence on) my favorite prose stylist, William Gibson.

I didn’t realize until I went back and read the foreword that much of the trade jargon in Tinker Tailor is pure invention, or at least pure extrapolation–a sort of nadsat projected into the past. Now, because language devours itself, some of it has become real jargon. Did you know that the OED can’t find any use of the word “mole” to describe an embedded double agent before le Carré? He doesn’t think he made it up, but then Gibson didn’t really invent “cyberspace” either.

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy is a very good book and you should read it. Then we should go see the movie together.

Technoir

September 6, 2011 /

Matthew is running a cyberpunk story game called Technoir for Harry, Alex and myself. It’s very good, and I’m not just saying that because it cites Brick in its inspirations. Here’s part of the mechanic for healing damage: when your character has been tagged with something that describes permanent physical, emotional or social harm to them, you have to get surgery to implant a piece of cybertech that “replaces what has been lost.”

Left implied is that of course it fucking doesn’t, nothing does, that’s not how loss works. But it is how cyberpunk works, in one elegant sentence that happens to be a functional rule. That is brilliant game design. Well done, Jeremy Keller.

When I cite Stephenson I’m not even counting The Big U

August 1, 2011 /

Okay! Full disclosure: Leonard Richardson and I once spent roughly a hundred hours within three feet of each other. So consider that, then toss it out the metaphorical car window and fasten your metaphorical seat belt, because it’s going to be a WILD METAPHOR.

Leonard has just announced that Candlemark & Gleam will be publishing his first novel, Constellation Games, which contains–as he says–“zero-gravity sex, hive minds, terraforming, paleontology, fine art, warps in space-time, existential horror, and shipping containers… But most of all, it’s got video games.” I got to read the book early, and it’s all true! He didn’t even include the cosplay and limited nuclear exchanges.

I’ve talked to a couple other people who also beta-read it, and preceding each such conversation came a kind of cautious dance, as each of us felt the other out to see if exploding into rapturous glossolalia over a then-unpublished first novel was going to make us look silly. But then we did, and it didn’t. I’m not fucking around when I say that Constellation Games is Leonard’s markmaker: casting about for other writers who came out the gate this strong, I keep coming up with names like Neal Stephenson and Douglas Adams and Kelly Link.

In case you couldn’t be bothered to click either of the links up there, CG is going to be serialized online starting in November, then published in print afterwards. It is an indicator of my nonfuckingaroundness that I am going to create a new category on NFD just for this book, to contain posts discussing the chapters as they go up. I JUST DID IT. ZERO ROUNDFUCKING. I think you should subscribe to the book and follow along with me! You will be rewarded, and besides, you’re going to get really sick of my blog otherwise.

The warning “does not relate to an imminent or specific threat.”

July 6, 2011 /

June 14, 2011 /

I’ve mentioned before, I think, that hospitals contain some pretty potent olfactory triggers for me. So when a daily donation thing for a pediatric palliative care home bubbled up through my twitters, this caught me:

“We’re very cautious about the ‘hospital’ smell, so we have smell patrols,” laughs Simons. “Usually we have brownies baking.”

Okay, Debbie Simmons of Ryan House. You get it. Here’s my wallet.

I lied about Eminem being my spirit animal. Cleo is my spirit animal.

June 6, 2011 /

My favorite comic strips always go away! I am very sad about Bobwhite ending; it will leave a sore and empty socket in the jawbox of my daily comics list. For years it has been the funniest, smartest, most personal two minutes of my morning, and it was a privilege to read.

Unlike the bad old days, though, now when comic creators stop doing one strip they start another! I don’t know if Magnolia’s new Monster Pulse will ever replace Bobwhite in my heart, but I will pretty much follow her work anywhere at this point. The same goes for Kris Straub, of course, and F Chords has suddenly sprinted up to become my favorite outlet of his, with a distinctly more personal tone that echoes a little of what he used to do in Checkerboard Nightmare. So fucking go there already, I’m tired of telling you dicks.

And re-read Bobwhite!