Another nice review of Deb's A Book of Endings is up at Strange Horizons. Be warned, it contains a couple of spoilers.

A Book of Endings is about the liminal places where consensus reality breaks down, and about people who wake up to that fact; but crucially it is about many different such places, and many different such consensus realities—and it depicts all of those storied worlds as having space in them for failure. Intellectually, then, this is a sharp collection; stylistically, it is gentle but complex, offering deeply readable prose which feels more often than not pitch perfect—lean but pregnant, full of memorable and arresting moments and images.

I was particularly pleased to see the new stories get some good comments, and especially Problems of Light and Dark, which was one of the stories that underwent the longest journey and ended up being one of my favourites

Anyway, if you haven't bought it, go buy it.

Okay, I forgot about these for a while! Where was I? Oh yeah.

April

The contenders:

James Rabbit	Perfect Waves
The Church	Untitled #23
The Boy Least Likely to	Law of the Playground
Bat for Lashes	Two Suns
Del the Funky Homosapien	Funk Man (The Stimulus Package)
The Dears	Missiles
The Thermals	Now We Can See
Aceyalone	Aceyalone and the Lonely Ones
Bill Callahan	Sometimes I Wish I Were an Eagle
Diana Krall	Quiet Nights
Madeleine Peyroux	Bare Bones
Cassandra Wilson	Closer to You
Eliane Elias	Bossa Nova Stories
Camera Obscura	My Maudlin Career
Art Brut	Art Brut vs Satan
Crystal Stilts	Alight of Night
Woods	Songs of Shame

Ben's picks:

Untitled #23... The Church

One of the difficulties I have with albums by The Church is that they're always growers, and so I often find myself overlooking them in the immediate period of their release, and then growing to love them later. This album at least had the benefits of being released in April, but I feel like even now, almost a year later, it's still growing on me. Does that make it a lesser album or a better one than more immediate but less enduring albums? Personally I like to have both kinds of music in my life. I'm not sure what to say about this album, other than it's a Church album. Not sure it's one of my favourites but even an average Church album is more interesting than most things I hear during the year.



(unofficial video)


Aceyalone and the Lonely Ones... Aceyalone

I'm not the biggest hip-hop listener in the world, but this album has my vote for hip hop album of the year. Aceyalone has given this album a  great retro feel, maybe a fifties or sixties vibe to the backing. I'm not a good enough music historian to pinpoint the era he's pastiching but I definitely recognise it. This album just has a great, feel-good vibe to it. Possibly the best washing-up album of the year, it's a great party record.



Art Brut versus Satan... Art Brut

This album sneaks in during a somewhat weak month. In truth, I got tired of it after half a dozen listens, but it does show the group developing, becoming a little smarter and a little more interesting than just a joke band. The sung-spoken self-deprecating and humorous lyrics are still the focus, but the band are quite strong musically too. I dunno, some days I think Art Brut are running with a trick that ran out of steam some time ago. But other days I think they're growing and they still make me smile.

Ben's top ten songs of Feb 5 1989

1. If I Could... 1927
2. Open Your Heart... Europe
3. Give the Kid a Break... 1927
4. How She Threw It All Away... The Style Council
5. Sallie-Anne... Spy V.Spy
6. That's When I Think of You... 1927
7. This Masquerade... (not sure)
8. Living On a Prayer... Bon Jovi
9. Healing Waters... Mr Mister
10. Congratulations... Traveling Wilburys

On Wednesday night I watched the episode of ABC's rock and roll history series dealing with stadium rock. It was interesting watching the flow through bands like Kiss, Springsteen, etc through to Bon Jovi, who the documentary painted as something of a crass commercial extension of Springsteen. Of course, in my own life, I experienced the whole phenomenon backwards. Bands like Bon Jovi, Europe and Whitesnake were the rock music that defined my teen experiences, and bands like Kiss or Springsteen would appear later as followers in their genre.

All individuals, I guess, experience history in their own time-travelling fashion.

Night night Kage Baker.

I didn't know you, but your stories always felt warm and made me happy.

Rather than research where I was up to I renamed the segment. I don't really think I remembered to do it more than twice last year anyway.

But now, through popular acclaim (well okay, Haines reads them, and I think someone else read one once)

Ben's Top Ten Songs of Jan 15 1989

1. If I Could... 1927
2. Congratulations... The Traveling Wilburys
3. Give the Kid a Break... 1927
4. There is a Light That Never Goes Out... The Smiths
5. Love... John Lennon
6. Best of All Possible Worlds... Bourgeois Tagg
7. Before Too Long... Paul Kelly
8. Healing Waters... Mister Mister
9. He Ain't Heavy, He's My Brother... The Housemartins
10. Love This Life... Crowded House

"When the last autumn of Dickens's life was over, he continued to work through his final winter and into spring. This is how all of us writers give away the days and years and decades of our lives in exchange for stacks of paper with scratches and squiggles on them. And when Death calls, how many of us would trade all those pages, all that squandered lifetime-worth of painfully achieved scratches and squiggles, for just one more day, one more fully lived and experienced day? And what price would we writers pay for that one extra day spent with those we ignored while we were locked away scratching and squiggling in our arrogant years of solipsistic isolation?

Would we trade all those pages for a single hour? Or all of our books for one real minute?"

Dan Simmons, Drood

Great rock journalism cliche counter here.

The Retailers Association said those who falsely claimed illness were "un-Australian bums".

Personally, I did go to work today, but now I wish I hadn't.

Is it just me, or is there something perhaps not-entirely-unbiased about the Retailers' Association commenting on this issue?

Plus, anyone who uses the term unAustralian with no sense of irony is a tool.

Astute and well-travelled readers may have picked up that I seem to have become embroiled in a ruckus in the blogosphere.

I don't intend to comment further than to say that there was no ill will on my part at the time, nor is there now.

That's life, huh.

Had a great couple of Aurealis Award days.

Yesterday we had the judges' lunch at the flash new QWC digs, and got sho put faces to names for all but one of my panel. It's a cool thing, the judges' lunch, and lets everyone share war stories and complaints :-)

Then I spent the afternoon hanging out with Helen Merrick and Sarah Xu, both extremely nice folk.

The ceremony was as swift and well-organised as it always is under FQ, and it was particularly moving to see Kris Hembury being honoured with an award for emerging writers named after him.

I won't try to list all the people I chatted to, because there were simply too many of them. The only shame is that trying to chat to everybody in such a short space of time is impossible.

Today was spent at a more relaxed pace, at the Belgian Beer Cafe, chatting lazily with Jason, Kirstyn, Rowena and Justin after the fliers left.

All in all it was a nice weekend. If I saw you, it was great to see you! Now... that sleep thing...

Thank you for this opportunity to reply on behalf of the Bloomsbury Corporation Machine.

I understand there has been some controversy, recently, over our decision to design a cover for a book featuring a non-white protagonist which features a young lady who might be described - cruelly - as only moderately hued. We're not admitting she's white, okay. We haven't researched her background thorougly. She may have some kind of mixed heritage somewhere back in the day. Lord knows the good city of Bloomsbury is full of intermingled genes these days. Nevertheless, people will assume the worst, and so certain elements - communists, terrorists, crybabies - have complained that this cover may be less than representative of the racial character of its protagonist.

This is typical of leftist hysteria. Rather than patting our corporate machine on its ratchetty, mechanical back and saying "Good job" for producing a book with a not-white protagonist, these critics have to go and spoil everybody's good feeling by focusing on the unfortunate fact that we forced the character to don whiteface for publicity purposes.

Let's all get some perspective here.

We are all - we, the Bloomsbury Cult and you, the passive consumptive - we are all on the same side, here. You want people to buy books in which the protagonsists are not all white, middle class men. Well SO DO WE!!! Not many, I'll grant you. Most such books are confusing, tiresome anecdotal accounts of domestic drudgery or disorienting cultural accounts which can have little relevance to our main, centre, normal culture - what we in the Bloomsbury Indoctrination Pod call our "A" culture. But when we do produce "B" culture documents, out of pity for minorities such as women, or non-white readers, of COURSE we want people to read them! In this we, the producer, and these critics, are actually all on the same page!! 

What critics don't appreciate, is that the only way the mainstream audience will ever accept the lives of anyone other than white male forty-something board-members is through TRICKERY.

So next time you see a book about homosexuals advertised with a cover featuring Sam Worthington and Rachel Bilsen snogging, think hey! Maybe they (US - BLOOMSBURY) are doing it FOR THE GOOD OF US ALL! Don't leap to the negative conclusion! It's negativity that derailed our intended rebranding of Nelson Mandela's Long Walk to Freedom, featuring the Crocodile Hunter Steve Irwin (I grant you the comparison was not exact, but they are both, I'm sure you'll agree, heroes). Instead, think, Hey! Maybe having a hot white chick on the cover is not JUST making Elvis Bloomsbury and his sons James and Emily rich, maybe it's also causing us all to think a bit more. Yeah? And maybe, by us, at Bloomsbury making a shitload of money, somewhere down the track, not tomorrow, but eleven, twelve hundred years in the future, maybe we'll also change attitudes a tiny bit.

And isn't that what all of us want?

Thanks for your time.

Look there's no reason why a good book can't be self-published.

Just bear in mind you will need to battle to undo the branding done by a gazillion amateur publicists who are obnoxious and insane.

That's all.

I've learnt a lot from training about business process maps. The trick is to skim the important bits.

Here is a business process map for saving the world, for instance:


>Log request to save world

>Assign category of danger

>Send to relevant officer

>Save world

>Send acknowledgement of world saved

>Close file.

New LSS post up here.

I wonder how much different conversations on offence would be if we were better able to divorce them from notions of personal judgement, on perceived notions of who we "are" and how people might perceive us.

The person who takes offence tells the person who offended them that they are offended, and the person who offended them, rather than saying "that is regrettable" and thinking about ways to avoid recurring offence, feels that the offendee is slighting them as a human, and so responds by taking offence.

It's rare that such conversations end up with practical discussion of ways the two parties might more fruitfully interact. More often, it becomes a discussion of who is to "blame". Both parties justify their own hurt and minimise the other party's.

One of the interesting arguments one of the buddhist books I've been reading makes is the notion that the times we become angriest are the times when we feel as though our ego is under attack. We get angry at the other person, not because of what they have done so much as the perception we believe they have of us, of the sense that they are saying there is something wrong with us, that we are bad. That hurts us, so we go on the attack, and try to point out ways in which they are bad, so that we might believe their judgement to be flawed, that we might see ourselves as good again.

In my limited experience, dialogue is always more fruitful when both parties are allowed to be "good". Once the suggestion of "badness" is dispensed with, and the other party is reassured that we're not judging them, suddenly a large part of the conflict dissipates, both sides are more willing to make concessions and reach out, and to alter their behaviour.

Buddhism, of course, takes it a step further. It questions the very idea of an ego to be offended on behalf of. There is no strictly-defined, delineated "us" to defend, or for others to attack. We are constantly changing, and we are as much a part of everything in the world as we are separate from it. When people verbally attack "us" it should not feel any more personal than if they were swearing at a tree.

I'm not saying I'm anywhere near that bodisatva-level of thinking and reacting. I get hurt by what people think and say, and I act out of anger. But I think it's an interesting idea. And I think the more we learn to separate what people say from our perceptions of our "self", the better we are able to deal with criticism in a productive way rather than escalating the conflict.

Or you know, I could be talking a load of bollocks. Either way. Whatever's good for you.

In other news, I went to see Abbottoir 3D

It wasn't bad. I enjoyed the whole visual fantastica, and the story was servicable in a way that Final Fantasy movie distinctly wasn't.

Yes, unobtainium is very very silly, although I found it less preposterous than the whole "Wait... look... it's Mother Nature joining in!" moment.

There was something a littlle bit icky about the way the aliens were presented as really idealised human bodies. I dunno, just made me vomit a little in my coke.

But other than that, it was fun.

Afterwards I ate an iced cream.

You know those songs that you haven't listened to in years, and which have never been a particular favourite song even, and yet oddly get stuck in your head and become one of those songs you find yourself humming years later for no reason?

One of mine is James' Mother.



And here, for no reason, is more James.



Those who find themselves ridiculous, sit down next to me....

The words we choose make a lot of difference in our meanings.

This week "The Realms of Fantasy" magazines announced its intention to publish an All lady issue to some varying reactions.

My first reaction was to defend the magazine. After all, Realms has a long history as a magazine appealing specifically to women.




As you can see from the magazine's history, this is a publication targetting female readers.



It is a magazine which says to women, this is a magazine full of stories for "you" (women).

Stories about horses, and feelings, and countryside full of streams. I think I read somewhere that women like water.

Anyway, you might well asked, WHAT MORE COULD THE REALMS OF FANTASY DO TO PLEASE WOMEN?



Although it's ironical, it was in the very act of trying to please girl readers more that "The Realms" made its mistake of not pleasing them the most!

Sure! We men all thought. What are you all complaining about? Are you CRAZY? Here is an example of men selflessly standing aside to let the little lassies have a turn, and yet some of you find this OFFENSIVE? For shame, womankind?

While this response may seem perfectly logical and reasonable to all of you at first, stop and think about it from the point of view of a women.

I know; it's hard. Women's minds are as mysterious as the ways of a natural animal, like a buzzard. You can't think about something like that! But just try.

Is it possible that The Realmses approach was a little patronising?



What the editor, apparently one Douglas Conan, failed to realise is that women are creatures of wild emotion and oversensitive feelings.

You can't talk down to them. In order to patronise them, you have to patronise them carefully.

Perhaps the editor needs to look into his own way of talking to the fairer sex, to think about the terms he uses and use words which make it sound as though women are included, rather than speaking plainly. It may seem like semantics, but the words we use are impotent.

This is what girls mean when they talk about the male gauze. If Douglas were more sensitive, he would have phrased his generous offer in a manner less likely to upset the womens' delicate mental state. That's what being a real "gent"leman means!

Maybe if he does that then The Realm of Fantasy" will finally be reconised as the "Friend of Broads" that it has always, deep in it's heart of hearts, bean.

And yes, I am at home on the net on new year's eve!

After getting back from Sydney only a day or so ago, we were both kinda "feh" about going out again, so we decided to blow off new year's eve!

Can't say I regret it. Lazy couch new year's eves rock :-)

In fact I think the last new year we spent this way was ten years ago, watching the fridge, waiting for it to blow up!

Anyway, happy new year to all!!

May 2010 rock.

March

The contenders:

Cursive	Mama I'm Swollen
Marissa Nadler	Little Hells
Starsailor	All the Plans
Boston Spaceships	Planets Are Blasted
Bonnie Prince Billy	Beware
Chris Cornell	Scream
Yeah Yeah Yeahs	It's Blitz
Petshop Boys	Yes
Condo Fucks	Fuckbook
The Decemberists	Hazards of Love
The Prodigy	Invaders Must Die
Faunts	Feel.Love.Thinking.Of
Heather Nova	The Jasmine Flower
Fever Ray	Fever Ray
PJ Harvey & John Parish	A Woman a Man Walked By
Rokysopp	Junior
Peter Bjorn & John	Living Thing
Say Hi	Oohs and Aahs
Leonard Cohen	Live in London

Ben's picks:

Hazards of Love - The Decemberists

I didn't think Hazards of love worked, completely, as a concept album. It felt too static to me; too many of the songs, lyrically, stand in the one place. But that didn't stop me from enjoying it as a collection of songs. It's the first album I've bought by the band, but I've heard their music before, and to me Hazards of Love came across as more kind of rolling and expansive than previous work. There's a sense of grandeur to some of the songs, while they're still fairly traditional alternative rock songs. The Hazards of Love songset is particularly powerful. I find it hard to listen to the finale, "The Drowned", without feeling moved.




Live in London - Leonard Cohen

Pretty much what it says on the tin. It's Cohen performing a bunch of his best songs. I maybe was a little disappointed he doesn't mix the songlist up a bit, sticking with most of the predictable favourites. But that's a small criticism, when they are such great songs. Compared to his nineties live album, this album shows an older singer whose voice has lost a lot of its deep earthy power. But almost in compensation, Cohen seems to put an extra piece of sincerity into his performance. His on-stage patter is humble and sometimes funny. And oh, did I mention that these are great songs?




It's Blitz - Yeah Yeah Yeahs

The next installment in the developing career of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs sees them consolidating the move they made on their last album away from their punk-rock beginnings toward a more pop aesthetic. It's not a hugely groundbreaking album or a big step, but it is a pretty solid collection of tunes, and one that I found myself listening to for many months.