People's Choice Award of Virginia

For the sixth year in a row, The Library of Virginia is sponsoring their People's Choice Award for the best work of fiction and nonfiction written by a Virginia author. The finalists were all chosen from books on the nominee list for the 12th annual Virginia Literary Awards. This year's nominees are:

Fiction:

Divine Justice by David Baldacci
People of the Book by Geraldine Brooks
The Legal Limit by Martin Clark
The Fire by Katherine Neville
Tomato Girl by Jayne Pupek

Nonfiction:

The Republic of Suffering by Drew Gilpin Faust
The Hemingses of Monticello by Annette Gordon Reed
A Voyage Long and Strange by Tony Horwitz
Because the Cat Purrs by Janet Lembke
The Place to Be by Roger Mudd

This is a great way to showcase local authors, or at least some of the bigger names of the literary community in ye' old commonwealth. My only regrets about this campaign are that they didn't make a People's Choice category for poetry (although the Virginia Literary Awards itself has a pretty diverse sampling of poetry) and that voters can't write in their own choice. To place your own vote you can visit your local public library or vote online. Voting has already started and will be going until June 30.

I get around

A couple of weeks ago my car made it past 200,000 miles. Although not the first car I've pushed this far, it's extra special because I put all the miles on myself save the first 35,000. The mileage crossed over at a very appropriate spot, right on the Woodrow Wilson Bridge. For anyone outside the area, the Wilson Bridge crosses the Potomac River, connecting the commonwealth of Virginia and the state of Maryland. It's a very appropriate spot for me these days, since I cross the bridge every time I go back and forth to work on my 62 mile commute.

Right now I'm sporting a 1994 Mazda Protege. Not exactly a car that turns heads, but it's been the most reliable car I've ever had. It's taken me as far north as New York City, as far south as Memphis and as far west as Cleveland. The only times it's stranded me were times I should have known better----times when battery died when I knew it was getting old, for example. Although I plan on keeping this car going for at least another year, I am starting to think about what the next Heb-mobile will be. With thinking about the future, I of course think about the cars I used drive around town and what part they played in my lives. These pics, btw, are stock photos. Not the actual cars I owned.

My very first car was a 1970 Dodge Challenger. Three years older than me, it was bought new as my dad's car and he held onto it for me until I could drive. It was fast but heavy, making a strange combo that didn't turn very well but was still way too much fun to drive for any 16 year old. The car lasted me through high school, taking me on all kinds of camping trips, runs to 7-11 and lots of hours of cruising around with my friends Big Ed and Jimbo. But the summer between high school and college the brakes needed about $2k in repair work and my dad and I decided it just wasn't worth it to keep it going. We used to spend a lot of time together working on the engine even before I could drive it, so giving it up hurt more than just giving up a fun car. It was a big turning point in our relationship and we really don't spend time together like we did at those moments banging our knuckles and burning our fingers keeping that sucker going. If I ever get rich, my big F-U car will definitely be a restored Challenger.

My next car was cut from pretty much the same mold. A silver 1982 Camaro Berlinetta, it not only hauled ass but had the bonus of a T-top. One of my favorite things to do was take the T-top off in the middle of winter, blast the heat and drive really fast down deserted roads in the middle of nowhere. It took me through probably the most emotionally turbulent times of my life, which is probably why I spent so much time taking it into West Virginia and sleeping in it in random parking lots. But the day after graduation I carted my first car full of crap from Harrisonburg,Va. to Fairfax County, Va and got hit from behind at a stoplight by a 16 year old girl on a learner's permit driving a van by herself. It's amazing I didn't get hurt, because the van's front bumper ended up on top of the back seat----I remember reaching back behind me in a bit of a daze, and touching the bumper while still sitting in my front seat. Needless to say, the poor things was totaled. I went almost four years without a car, until I got my current set of wheels.

What do these cars say about me? I have no idea, but I'm sure there's a pattern. As I think about the next car part of me craves something that just soars down the road but eats gas like the new Dodge Challengers, or something more practical that gets really good gas mileage. I guess I need something that just says, "Hey, that guy's a librarian...he likes to read and write, but still manages to have fun." I don't know what it will be, but when I see it I will know it right away.

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Balticon '09

This past weekend I went to Balticon. For the uninitiated Balticon is one of the better sf conventions in the DC/Batimore area. While many sf conventions seem to focus on t.v. and movies Balticon focuses on the book side of the industry. In the years I've attended it I've heard talks and readings by James Morrow, Catherine Asaro, Brenda Clough, Neil Gaiman and tons more I'm just not thinking of right now.

The panels were all pretty strong; I took in talks on diving into an author you might not fully understand, new publishing trends, ways to rejuvenate your blog, religious themes in modern sf.....and an absolutely fantastic reading by Gene Wolfe. I felt kind of bad for him, because counting his wife there were only 15 people in attendance for a guy who published some of the best novels I've ever read. But the intimacy was fantastic and he approached it all with the right humor.

But really the thing about this year that really hit me was how many people are just getting their work out there no matter what. Having trouble finding a publisher for that novel? Well, do an audio version and put it up as a podcast. Can't find anyone interested in your short stories? Make them available in an ebook format. I met three authors this year who used methods like these to build up an audience and used that as a selling point to get a publisher for a new project. One of this year's guests of honor, horror author and podcaster Scott Sigler, did this as well. The overall feeling is that if you have a good idea, get it out there. If you like it someone else probably will, too.

I'll be digging through all the fliers and notes I took over the next few weeks. As I find real gems I'll do my best to share them here.

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Cover to Cover

Yesterday at work we were pulling books for a book club----their choice for the upcoming month is the wonderful short novel by Thomas Mann entitled Death in Venice. Something about the cover was bothering us for some reason. It looked familiar but we couldn't figure out why.

Later in the day, one of my co-workers said, "Here it is!" He was holding a completeley different book, Cross by James Patterson. Cover that looks startlingly similar.

Now we are used to seeing books with similar covers, but they are usually part of the same series or at least by the same author. But we've never seen anything quite like this.

My first thought was that they are by the same publisher and that publisher owns the rights to the photograph used on both covers. But the Patterson novel is from Little, Brown while Mann's is by Harper Perennial. So I have no idea, unless this image is in the public domain. Today I'm going to try to find out more info on the photo and where it comes from. It's supposed to be nice today, so I'm expecting it to be a bit slow at work. Having a harmless mystery like this will help the time go by.

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Review: Local by Brian Wood and Ryan Kelly

Easily one of the best things I've read in any format over the last few weeks is the comic book series collection Local, written by Brian Wood (DMZ, Demo, Northlanders) and illustrated by Ryan Kelly (Lucifer, Northlanders).

The series began as an experiment for Wood and Kelly; they wanted to write a limited series with each issue set in a different city in North America. They avoid the major cities like New York and L.A., focusing on mid-sized cities that offer lots of color and personality. To help with the local flavor they partnered up with artists in each city to get sketches and/or photos of key places---Bryan Lee O'Malley, for example, contributed a bit to the look of the chapter set in Halifax, Nova Scotia.

Megan McKeenan---a punky twenty-something woman with wanderlust----works as the thread tying the twelve issues together. Each year she moves to a different city, and we watch her life as she finds a job, makes friends, searches for love, and tries to find herself. In the beginning Megan is primarily a device. She's the focus of the opening story, but for several in a row she functions as a secondary character.

I was intrigued by Local but not really wowed until chapter 3, a story called "Theories and Defenses". The chapter looks at a successful rock band that started in Richmond and what happens to them after their own success drives them apart. The band members return to their hometown and we see how each band member deals with their new state in life. This chapter not only displays lots of local landmarks that I know---southern row houses, the Fan, Plan 9 Records---but it really nails all the personalities you get with a band. There's the cocky lead singer who wants to do a solo album, the bass player who just wants to go out and get laid every night and the guitarist who seems perfectly happy tackling the coffee shop scene with his acoustic guitar.

But by chapter five Wood and Ryan return to Megan full force and the story becomes solely about her. She works at a historic movie theatre in Halifax, changing her name every day to confuse the patrons. In Minneapolis she develops a relationship with an odd guy who breaks into her apartment every day and leaves her a polaroid photo of himself. Later Megan has her life stolen and put on display by an art student in Toronto. As someone who switched jobs several times and spent way too many hours in my early twenties soul-searching, Megan's awkwardness, confusion and even anger come across to me as very real.

Kelly's artwork is a great match for Wood's story; the black and white indie look equates with the vagabond spirit of the story. If you are familiar with the city in a particular chapter, you will definitely see landmarks that look and feel like the real places. I also really like how he does faces; each face, be it a main character like Megan or someone who just walks by, has their own unique personality and they come across very well.

As the series develops we slowly learn the reasons why Megan moves every year, what she's searching for and what she's running from. For something that started as a quirky experiment in comics, by the end it develops into one of the more emotionally effective stories put out over the last year.

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New Directions

I've been thinking a lot about this space over the past month. What I want to do with it, and even if I want to keep it going. I've decided that my sporadic postings are due, at least in part, to a real lack of focus or structure in what I write about. To help combat this I'm going to lay in some more purposeful structure to what I put here.

To start with, I'm going to pick an author and deal with his or her full set of novels and/or story collections, one at at time, in the order they were published. I considered a pretty big number of authors: Gene Wolfe, Jonathan Lethem, Jeanette Winterson, Jane Bowles, William S. Burroughs, David Mitchell, and on and on. I even considered some long-running comic book series like Y the Last Man and Cerebus. In the end I picked Paul Auster; he's a writer I enjoy and respect, but have only read about a third of his published fiction. I own his first two books, and the others are pretty readily available at the library I work at. I also have a feeling there might be an interesting progression throughout his work.

Auster's first book is a set of three novellas; originally published separately they are now sold as his New York Trilogy. The goal right now is to have something written about the first novella on February 1, and follow with the other two novellas over the following two weeks of the month. We'll see how it goes.

I still plan on reviewing newer material and interspersing it with my usual rants, but I'm hoping this will make things more interesting for both me and the readers out there.

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Review: Humpty Dumpty in Oakland by Philip K. Dick

Best known for his psychedelic, mind-bending sci-fi, Philip K Dick wrote all kinds of stories early in his career. Humpty Dumpty In Oakland is a rare realistic novel of his written in 1960; rejected by his publisher and finally published after his death in 1986 by UK publisher Gollancz, it became available in the US this past fall.

Set in San Francisco during the late 1950's, Humpty gives us the story of used car salesman Al Miller and his elderly landlord, Jim Fergusson. Miller's view on life quickly descends when Fergusson decides to sell his land and open up a car repair shop in the developing suburbs just outside the city, leaving Miller to fend for himself and search for a new way of life. Miller also fears Fergusson will be ripped off by the shady businessmen putting the deal together, so Miller tries to uncover the truth to protect his friend. Instead Miller bumbles into and backs out of a job in the recording industry, causes Fergusson to have a heart attack and makes the final move that ends his marriage with his overbearing wife. Despite the grim plot PKD works in some odd touches of dark humor, particularly when writing about the pop culture of the day.

This is far from a perfect novel, and not anywhere near PKD's best or most interesting. With a story that flip-flops between Miller and Fegusson, it's hard to tell whose story PKD is trying to tell here. Honestly, anyone new to PKD reading this probably won't get the cult following around his books. But people familiar with his Sci-fi will see a lot of familiar ideas. Like with many of his novels, Humpty looks at a society on the cusp of change and tries to show how this change will shape the lives of ordinary, everyday folks. Instead of contact with an alien race or the rise of androids who want to live their own lives, Humpty looks at the more down-to-earth issues of Suburbanization and the growth of Corporate culture. There's probably a paper in this somewhere, looking at PKD's major themes and doing a compare/contrast in how he deals with them in his realistic work vs. his imaginative work. But I'll save that for an industrious English major to tackle.

Excelsior.

Grandpa's Secret Stash

The last few weeks have been all about moving. Moving boxes, moving furniture, moving little knick-nacks and finding places for all these things in our new apartment. Things are getting more solidified---all the furniture's here, we're starting to put artwork on the walls and are even talking about a house-warming party next month. We still have have a bunch of random things in a storage unit we need to go through---mostly a combination of wedding presents we haven't touched and boxes of books----but we are well on our way to being finished.

Combined with our own move, Miss L and I worked a lot with my dad last week to move my grandpa. We're moving him out of his retirement home into another place where he'll get better care for his dementia and be closer to family. While packing up all his stuff---like me, he mostly has books and music----I stumbled across something I never thought I'd find. Tucked away in the bottom corner of a bookshelf, sandwiched between a book of geological maps of Wisconsin and a biography on HItler, I found his stash of dirty books. Most of them were of the artsy variety---a book of Ingres nudes, a set of Picasso line drawings on pocket-sized cards, and an abbreviated version of the Kama Sutra. But what's sticking in my mind for a variety of reasons are volumes one and two of a series called, quite simply, Female Photographs.

These two little books date back to 1968, and are filled with 80 or so pages of black and white photos of pin-up girls in their undies. Their raciness lies somewhere between Playboy and Penthouse. The back pages are filled with ads for "marital aids" and a strange catalogue of books put out by the same publisher: With Open Mouth, The Talking Jewels, Scientific Curiousities of Sex Life, and on and on. This is old school stuff seems quite quaint and even funny by today's standards.

Now some people may not understand this, but finding grandpa's secret stash makes me feel a little bit closer to him---albeit in an odd manner. In some ways he raised me more than my dad did and I've always put him on a bit of a pedestal. Finding something like this makes grandpa seem more human, more approachable, more real. It makes me feel that despite all my shortcomings maybe I too can live a pretty happy, full life if he managed to.

Back to reviews and other fun things soon.

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Moving Woes

Miss L and I are getting ready to move from her studio apartment in downtown Baltimore to a slightly larger place in Catonsville, a suburb of Baltimore just south of the city. It's a one bedroom with a decent-sized living room, a small kitchen and something sold as a dining room---but it's really a wide hallway outside the kitchen we'll probably use as a home office space.

So the last ten days or so has been spent buying some new pieces of furniture, moving some of our things from storage or our current place, and figuring out how much of our stuff we can actually have in the new space. Not surprisingly, the big thing for me are all my books. My mom has four of my large bookcases, each roughly 70 inches tall and holding five shelves each.

While I can leave some things at my mom's house, it becomes an issue of what I want to keep on hand. What titles and authors do I absolutely have to have in the apartment, and which ones can I leave behind.

So far I've prioritized it like this:

1. Necessary reference books (an unabridged dictionary, different writing style guides, grammar books) just because you never know when you need them.

2. Art history and literary theory books. Although I don't read these all the time, I do read through them at random points to nudge my brain a little. I probably wouldn't look for them if they weren't sitting on my shelf.

3. Books by some of my all-time favorite authors: Murakami, Philip K. Dick, Paul Auster, John Bellairs, Kathy Acker, Stanislaw Lem, H.P. Lovecraft, Poe, Samuel Delany, Lance Olsen, Ray Bradbury.

That's as far as I've gotten so far. Just this bit makes up seven boxes, and I probably have another 15 or so to go. Next I'm thinking necessary literary "classics", followed up by all my literary mags and graphic novels. After that I have no idea. I'm pretty much making this up as I go.

Although I am culling some things out, it's hard. Everything I don't want I plan on either selling on Ebay or donating to the library, so hopefully everything will still manage to find a nice new home.

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NaNoUpDate

By NaNoWriMo's standards, I was a success this past month. I ended up with 52,580 words, just over the bottom limit for what they consider a "novel".

Skimming through things this morning, I saw lots of great moments: an origin, fun little battles, and making new friends and enemies everywhere he went. But the whole doesn't really add up to anything. I guess that shouldn't surprise me. Writing this way, where word count trumps everything else, doesn't really leave much time for editing or reflecting. Just go, go, go ninja boy. And overarching plots have never been my strong suit.

Now I guess the real work begins. Playing with it, developing it and seeing if it can be transformed from a pile of nonsensical scenes into a coherent story. Miss L and I are still talking about doing it as a webcomic. I think I'll start with his origin tale and see where adapting that takes us. It's a concrete mini-storyline with good guys, bad guys, an obvious conflict and would probably take up about the same space as your standard monthly comic book. We'll see what happens.

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Me and Catherine Jinks

I've been reading little but young adult books the last three weeks for three main reasons. They tend to be short, fast reads. They are almost always fun. And the disjointed mess I'm writing this year for NanoWriMo is probably best described as Young Adult and I felt like it would help keep me going (it has).

I've read a lot of good ones. The political parable After by Francine Prose. The surprisingly complex dark fantasy Sabriel by Garth Nix. But the one that's been sticking with me the most is the one I expected the least out of: Pagan's Crusade by Australian Catherine Jinks. Not because I thought it would be bad, but because I don't often go for historic fiction. Set in Jerusalem during the Crusades, the book focuses on Pagan, a young man who tries to escape his gambling debts by becoming a Squire for the Templars. Except for some of the battle scenes towards the end it's all pretty tongue-in-cheek and a pretty fun read. Here's the opening paragraph:

A big man in brown, sitting behind a table. Big hands. Big chest. Short and broad. Head like a rock, face scarred like a battleaxe. He looks up and sees---what's this? A street urchin? Whatever it is, it's trouble. Trouble advances cautiously.

I was hooked right away. The voice, the humor, the story...I loved it all. The more I read, the more I realized why I liked it so much.

Jinks writes like I do.

Short, focused sentences. Sentences designed to get the point across quickly and not waste time with flowery language. But every couple of pages she nail you with a piece of dialogue or a terrifyingly beautiful description, something that punches you in the gut and makes you stop and think for a moment.

Okay, to be fair I should probably say she writes like I try to write. Her work is considerably more polished than my own. While I see writers I admire and even love all the time, this is the first time I've come across one that seems to approach it in the same way I do. I know I'll continue with the Pagan series at some point soon, but in the meantime I've picked up her novel Evil Genius, a book that was hugely popular at my library this past summer. I'm eager to dig into it and see if her approach stays the same or if it differs book to book.

Until next time...

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Delany's About Writing: Good Writing vs. Talented Writing

The past couple of weeks I've been reading Samuel R. Delany's book About Writing, a book that collects a number of essays and letters that Delany wrote over the past 30 years on the subject of writing fiction. Although he first broaches it in his introduction, a concept Delany returns to again and again throughout the book is what he sees as the differences between good writing and talented writing.

Though they have things in common, good writing and talented writing are not the same (Delany, 4).

He goes on to define good writing as the basics of what we learn in English classes in High School and College: good grammar, avoiding passive voice, creating uncluttered sentence, varying sentence structure, precise word choice, etc. Good writing as he defines it is a skill, a learned craft that functions appropriately in writing forms like journalism, academic research papers, criticism, and---although Delany doesn't mention it---blogs.

Talented writing, on the other hand, uses those skills and rules and moves them into another realm. Delany says:

Good writing is clear. Talented writing is energetic (Delany, 6).
Good writing avoids errors. Talented writing makes things happen in the reader's mind---vividly, forcefully---...(Delany, 6).

Talented writing also "uses specifics and avoids generalities---generalities that his or her specifics suggest (Delany, 7). In other words, metaphors and symbols.

Delany continues by providing examples to show how talented writing uses lyrical phrases and powerful descriptions to deliver new insights to the reader. This form of writing, talented writing, is what's required to create fiction. Or, at least, fiction that stretches beyond simple entertainment and warrants thorough, careful, multiple readings.

It makes sense, though. Writing that really stops me, that forces me to read it more carefully and pay attention to what it's doing often comes through beautiful, precise descriptions and details. These details make you pause and visualize the world the author creates and even think about things in a new way. That level of writing is a very special. all too rare skill.

The good news is that while Delany indicates talented writing is more difficult to achieve, he at no point states that it can't be learned. Through careful reading of the masters, through thorough editing and a lot of hard work it's a skill that's possible to learn, although more difficult than learning how to create good writing.

I guess there's hope for me yet.

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Yalsa Literature Symposium: The Graphic Novel Precon

I've been in Nashville the last couple of days for YALSA's first ever Young Adult Literature Symposium. Things started for me with a special pre-conference called Picturing the Story, which focused on comics and their potential use in education and libraries.

Thanks to a kind invitation from Francisca Goldsmith and other folks at YALSA, I was minimally involved in running the pre-con. I brought some anime short films to show during registration, helped with the setup a little bit and moderated one panel discussion. Considering this was my first time doing something like this I think it went pretty well.

My panel discussion opened the day by focusing on the entire creation process of a graphic novel. Basically how it gets from the head of the creator to the page, from the page to the publisher, the publisher to the library and, finally, the library to the reader. The panelists were Svetlana Chmakova (author/artist of the Manga-influenced comic Dramacon), Kurt Hassler (an editor from Yen Press), Angela Frederick (a librarian from Nashville Public Library), and two teen readers to give us perspective direct from the target audience.

Svetlana was a huge hit. She opened things with a Powerpoint showing her background, some of her early work, and samples showing the illustration process she used in creating Dramacon. From there we moved into questions, and I was really pleased. Everyone on the panel, especially the teen readers, were really thoughtful and entertaining in their answers.

The rest of the pre-con moved along pretty well. Stella Farris, a school librarian from Austin, TX, presented a good primer on Manga. Somehow the questions from the audience all got steered towards yaoi, but considering all the misconceptions people had that was probably a good thing. Peggy Burns from Drawn & Quarterly, one of my favorite publishers of comics, did a good talk on adult graphic novels that teens might like. Although I've read a lot of what she talked about, there were a couple of titles that I definitely need to look for and check out.

But by far the star of the day was Gene Luen Yang. Although best known as the author/artist of American Born Chinese, the first graphic novel to be a finalist for the National Book Award, he's also a high school teacher. He did a mesmerizing presentation that somehow managed to cover different ideas of what makes a comic, how comics are influencing other media and how comics can be used in the classroom. He's a definite fan of comics and comics culture and his humor and enthusiasm really shined through his whole talk. Someone mentioned they would try to make his Powerpoint and audio from his talk available online; if that happens I'll be sure to put up a link. I was fortunate enough to meet with him for dinner that night along with some of the other presenters. On top of everything else Gene Yang is an incredibly nice and very genuine person.

I'll probably have more conference stuff later, as I go through and properly digest other sessions.

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Where was everybody?

Although I didn't have to be at work until noon today, I played the part of a good citizen and got up early to cast my vote. I was a little nervous about a long wait; all the warnings we've had the last few weeks were reinforced by reports of an hour or more wait on NPR this morning. I even brought my camera along, thinking it would help me pass the time while I waited.

While the parking lot was full the actual polling place---the cafeteria hall in the local intermediate school---was practically empty.There was no one ahead of me and only a handful of people came in behind me. There were more volunteers milling about than anyone else. Maybe I just missed the rush with everyone heading into work---I got there around 9 am---but I hope more people are planning to take off work a little early to cast their ballot. The lack of a crowd was a little disheartening.

I can't predict who will win the election here in Virginia, but I can say the McCain supporters out front outnumbered the Obama supporters 8 to 1. But whoever you support and wherever you live, please take the time vote.

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Prepping

I spent tonight prepping for NaNoWriMo, which starts just over 24 hours from now. Unfortunately, I have to write things by hand first. I don't know why, but it helps me in getting into the right mode. I spent probably more time than I should have picking out a notebook to use, but I wanted to go with something unique. I chose a notebook a friend of mine decorated and gave to me several years ago. I've been saving it for a special project, and this seems as good as any.

After work tonight I stopped off by my mom's house, where most of my books are still living. I picked up a few titles that might help me along the way. Samuel R. Delany's About Writing I plan on reading cover to cover while the writing prompts in Oulipo Conpendium, Lance Olsen's Rebel Yell and Jack Heffron's Idea Book I hope to use at those moments when I get stuck. I also grabbed some short story collections: the Complete works of Poe, Stranger Things Happen by Kelly Link and McSweeney's Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales. Fun stuff, really, to give me mental breaks and help keep me going.

I've got my idea, vague though it may be. I've got my characters, as thin and translucent as they are. I don't know if this story will work or not, or if I even have it in me to write 5+ pages a day for 30 days straight. But I want to find out. I have to know if I can still tap into that undefinable something you hit when writing just starts to flow.

More once the writing commences.

Excelsior.

Review: The Country Nurse by Jeff Lemire

I loved, loved, loved the first volume of Jeff Lemire's Essex County, a little graphic novel called Tales From the Farm that I reviewed last year. The second volume Ghost Stories delved into the family history and turned a sports story---something I don't always like---into a pretty powerful book about a rift between two brothers. The third and final volume in the trilogy shifts the focus a bit to Anne Quenneville, a traveling nurse who cares for many in the rural community of Essex County, Canada.

Anne primarily works as a device reintroducing us to the disparate members of the Lebeuf family. Lester, no longer donning his toy superhero cape, is a little more grown up but seems quite lonely while Jimmy continues to hide himself in his job at the town filling station. Anne decides to help the family heal by urging Jimmy to step forward and finally get to know his young son Lester, giving more formal answers to questions of lineage and familial tragedy that were only hinted at in the earlier volumes.

Lemire’s mildly cartoony art is more cinematic than ever here, making full poetic use of the wintry Canadian landscapes to force readers to pause and really feel the emotions of the characters. Lemire even makes some bold experiments in page layouts that he hasn't attempted previously. Plot-wise the story includes a side-tale of flashbacks featuring Lawrence, a Lebeuf ancestor who grew up in a desolate orphanage managed by a nun and a gruff caretaker. Although these flashbacks don’t have a direct impact upon the modern-day Lebeufs the past events do bring a deeper layer of history to the family.

The first two volumes worked exceptionally well as standalone stories, but this volume is completely dependent on what occurred in the first two; anyone new to this story will miss a lot of the subtext. In fact it might even work best when published with the other two in a single-volume book. That said, anyone who enjoyed the rest of the trilogy will enjoy the closure this one brings, but anyone new to Lemire should pick up the earlier volumes first. The talent and power he's shown in this trilogy promises years of good work to come and I'm really excited to see what Lemire does with his upcoming project with Vertigo Books.

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Back to Real Life

Miss L and I made through both the wedding and honeymoon in good shape. I won't go into all the details, but things really went without a hitch. Perfect weather for an outdoor wedding, no one got so wasted they had to go to the hospital and no fist fights. What more can you ask?

Things were a little tense---at least for me---at the first part of the ceremony. I was standing up front with my family to my right, my groomsmen holding up the chupah and Miss L's family escorting her down the aisle. Right as the Rabbi was about to speak a group of motorcycles buzzed us, blasting the thundering noise of their engines as they throttled by. It was perfect. After a brief moment of silence everyone laughed and then we went forward with everything without a worry in world.

One of the special things about our wedding was our cake. Based on a series of drawings Miss L did, the cake was created by Charm City Cakes of Baltimore. Working with them was a great process. We came in with the vague idea of a cake with a pop-up book theme and they really ran with it. It came out well, and really speaks to our goofy yet bookish taste. It also tastes pretty good, too.

The only other real literary-related thing didn't come about until our honeymoon. We went up to the Brandywine River Valley in Pennsylvania, a real pretty place to go in the early fall. Along with trips to historic battlefields, old mansions, gardens and museums---yes, we're both big museum nerds---we also had a good time just poking around the stores in Kennett Square.

Probably my favorite shop was Thomas Macaluso Used & Rare Books, a wonderful two-floor store just off the town's main drag. Aside from some wonderful antique maps that Miss L kept ogling, the shop has some real gems like a first edition of WS Burroughs's Nova Express, an early US paperback edition of Joyce's Ulysses and a gorgeous book written and illustrated by the artist Rockwell Kent.

The owner was fantastic. Although I've been in stores with that quality of books before, normally the owners work really hard to make you as uncomfortable as possible if they don't think you're really there to buy something. He chatted with us, told us a bit of the history of the area, and even talked to us about literature. Although we didn't buy anything, he's someone I will probably seek out if I ever want to find a rare or unique book.

But now life moves forward and I have much to ponder. Where to look for a full time job, whether or not to do NanoWriMo this year, what to have for dinner tonight....so many things to consider. But mostly I'm looking forward to finding out what kind of lives Miss L and I will lead now that we've officially joined forces. Until next time...

Excelsior

Marriage

By 7:00 pm tonight, assuming an asteroid doesn't strike the city of Baltimore and I don't get swallowed up by a roving dinosaur, will be married to Miss L. I'll share some photos and thoughts once we recover.

Review: Zeroville by Steve Erickson

It seems the older I get the rarer it is that I'm really grabbed by a book. Oh, sure, I find books I admire, books I like, even books I love. But one that grabs me, that sticks with me when I'm driving, walking, working, even sleeping....those are rare books indeed. Steve Erickson gifted me with one with his novel Zeroville.

Although the concepts in the book are kind of a Pynchon meets Delillo ingested and spewed out via a transliterated chat with Luis Bunuel, the plot is actually pretty straightforward. It's the late 60's and a man named Vikar is booted out of the Architecture program at Mather Divinity College----he made the confounding error of designing a church without a door for his final project. Vikar responds to this letdown by following the lure of his other love---film--by getting a picture of Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Clift in From Here to Eternity tattooed on the side of his shaved head and hopping a bus to Hollywood.

The early sections of the book transform into a guided tour of Hollywood through the eyes of a man who has ingested nearly every bit of film trivia possible. Vikar moves into the Roosevelt hotel---which may or may not be haunted by D.W. Griffith--- and can't help but tell everyone around him everything he knows about the history of film. His architecture background serves him well when he's hired as a set designer at a studio. He gradually works his way up to the role of film editor meeting an odd cast of characters as he learns, lives and breathes the world of film.

His career takes some odd turns. Sent to Spain on one job, Vikar's kidnapped by a revolutionary faction that wants to use his talents to create propaganda films to help their cause. Later, he becomes the first film editor to win an award from the Cannes Festival all because no one really understands what he's trying to do. When the late 70's hits like a tire iron across the face Vikar develops a near-violent obsession with punk rock.

Vikar will likely drive some readers batty. He's knocked around by circumstances, rarely making choices or decisions of his own except at a couple of key moments. He's also inexplicably odd. A more traditional author would spend time getting us more firmly into his life and history so we can understand or even feel his mental state. Despite its readability this book is anything but traditional. Erickson more often than not uses Vikar not so much as a character but as an easel to lean his satire, jokes and theories on.

Erickson's writing is highly referential. Classic films and actors fill every section, but he also tosses out bits about cult films, art films, the lives of studio execs and industry business. But the references often blur the lines between real film history and fabrication. One character who continually pops up throughout the novel is a mildly revolutionary script writer/director we know only as Viking. But through various clues dropped throughout the book----that he co-wrote Apocalypse Now and worked on the Conan movies---you can figure out that Viking is probably based pretty solidly on John Milius. Soledad, a sexy actress who never quite makes it, seems to answer the question of what would have happened to Soledad Miranda if she hadn't died at such a young age. Other characters like Dotty Langer, who seems more real than anyone in this hyper-real book, seem to be completely born out of Erickson's imagination.

Criticism and meta-art also play a large role. Several characters---Vikar included---launch into page-long diatribes on the role of film that are both funny and fascinating. Vikar, for example, believes a film and its true meaning exist beyond the constraints of sequential time and we only structure movies that way to make the meaning more easily interpreted. Erickson slyly uses this idea for structuring his own novel by referencing moments that occur at the end of the book as early as page 50.

All of this, of course, is wonderfully funny---and fun---if you have a love of film and film history. For readers who don't it can become a bit like watching a Simpson's episode where you just don't know any of the cultural references. You think the jokes might be funny or even profound, but you really aren't sure because you have no real idea what the jokes are about.

Excelsior

Baltimore Book Fest

Last night Miss L and I hit the Baltimore Book Fest. While we were, of course, there to check things out Miss L was there primarily to promote her new history book on the jewish community of Baltimore. I'm happy to say she sold enough to pay for the space and have a little leftover.

I avoided most of the dealers this year, even the ones like Raw Dog Screaming Press and the Radical Book Fair tent that I know I like. I just don't have the money or the physical space to be buying books right now. So that left me the booths of nonprofits and the performance spaces to check out.

I first stopped at a reading hosted by the Baltimore Playwrights Festival. Actors were reading work from this past years festival. It was a real mixed bag in terms of quality. Some felt like pieces written by undergrads while others were quite good. But with comedies, character studies and absurdist pieces it was nice to hear such a big variety of work.

The so-dubbed Creative Cafe held a reading sponsored by the Art of Conversation reading series/open mic and the Little Patuxent Review. I walked in on the end of one poet reading a nice, rhythmic piece about his father. It was real loving and caring without being sappy. He was followed up by a female poet---apologies to the poets for not writing your names down---who read a powerful piece entitled My Letter to Michelle Obama. It really cracked open the complicated dichotomy of her being beloved as a black woman in her position, but also concerns over her recent re-packaging to make herself more palatable to conservative, white America (ie straightening her hair and being dubbed the black Jackie O). Although the piece was a little long, it was certainly provocative. I definitely want to check out the reading series once I get a bit more settled in B-more. If these two poets are any indication of the quality of work, it should be a good time.

Aside from the performances, I talked a bit to some folks with the Maryland Writers Association and Baltimore Science Fiction Association. The area seems really rich with literary groups and outlets and I can't wait to learn more about them.

It's a shame D.C. doesn't have an equivalent to this. While they do have the National Book Festival---which is an amazing event for all the national and international stars it continues to get----there is nothing this large in D.C. that promotes authors whose reach is more regional or local. Perhaps there is one and I'm just not aware of it...and if so please let me know.

Baltimore Book Fest runs the rest of the weekend. So check it out if you have the time.

Excelsior