things and books and things, some of which also involve books

[jazzfish]

Posts I have been intending to write for awhile now, and may or not get to:

• Medialog, Ralph Fiennes's Coriolanus
  
• Medialog, Flann O'Brian's The Third Policeman
  
• Medialog?, Burn Notice S1 vs Leverage S1
  
• What I have been and will soon be up to
  
• On the uselessness of role-playing books
  
• On having a close friend again (mostly by accident, as these things tend to be), and some implications thereof
  
• And a month and a half of linkspam, probably broken up among several posts.

Soon, grasshopper.

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So apparently it's National Book Day? Or at least World Book Day in the UK. Good enough excuse for one of them question meme things, this one via mrissa.

The book I'm reading: Warren Ellis's Ellisian noir Crooked Little Vein, on loan from semilocal J--. Roger Zelazny, Collected Stories v.5: Nine Black Doves. I've had a bookmark in the front of Kushner & Sherman's The Fall of the Kings for months now. I suppose I can be said to have given up on truepenny's Corambis since it's been six months since I touched it. (Too much all at once; binged on the first three volumes and then my brain said "okay done now" around page 50.)

Books I'm writing: um. The last time I looked at "Junkyard Dog" I thought it might actually be a YA novel, or a novella with a YA protagonist. And I don't think "One Only" is a novel but there's one (at least) in that universe. Etc.

The book I love the most: gah. If you held a gun to my head I'd say Heat of Fusion And Other Stories by John M. Ford, at least today.

The last book I received as a gift: Vancouver Special by Charles Demers, an Xmas gift from uilos.

The last book I gave as a gift: Clark Ashton Smith's Red World of Polaris, to uilos for Xmas. She had very nice things to say about the quality of the book. The prose contained within seems to have been, um, for Smith completists.

The nearest book: A large paperback edition of Hesiod (Theogony, Works and Days, Shield), because the Misc shelf (top to bottom: poetry, cooking, Greeks + drama, more drama, lit-crit / writing advice / The Guide To Getting It On, oversized art books) is in the office behind me. If you go with "book that's not shelved," it's Flann O'Brien's At Swim-Two-Birds, which I picked up along with The Third Policeman a few weeks ago.

The book I want someone else to please write for me: I'm still looking for something like "A History of Vancouver, 1960-2010." The Demers book was close but not quite; it's more focused on contemporary Vancouver and only incidentally touches on how it got that way.

---

Links, visual. Videos or comics or images.

The Lumarca: a short film of "a low-cost visualization project." Gorgeous.

This record player reads tree rings instead of LPs.

Darkness: "My roommate is dark... Sometimes you meet people like that, they have one adjective that fits them like a glove."

Old school screensaver.

Some self-assembly required.

Comments

[thanate]

Aw, I miss After Dark! (in that wouldn't use it if I had it sort of way)

[thanate]

ETA-- how did you get a user tag that links to an actual lj account on here?

[jazzfish]

<user name=jazzfish site=livejournal.com> gets you jazzfish. There are a bunch of options for site= but the only ones I've used are LJ and twitter.com (e.g. jazzfishzen).

And, screensavers are relics, but they're such nifty relics!

[thanate]

awesome-- thanks! That is terribly useful.

[jazzfish]

Most welcome! It's often frustrating to think "wait, that known LJ user is on DW?" and then realise that no, it's just crossposted by someone who didn't set it to show the LJ profile.

[sorcyress]

Oo! I remember enjoying Crooked Little Vein, especially since it tilted me into one of those horrific-but-wonderful periods of time where I have to read as much Ellis as possible. Let me know what you thought, when you finish it?

~Sor

[jazzfish]

Hm. Enjoyable Ellisian fluff? I mean, it's very much the same vein as Transmet: "here is all this unbelievably wild and filthy shit, so far over the top that you can't possibly be offended because it's so hilarious." At the same time, Transmet felt like it was *about* something. CLV is... not, so much, it's more about the journey and everything that the protag runs into along the way. And I think that style works better with the visual overload you can get from the images; in text it doesn't quite do it for me.

To the left, he writes damn well. Glad I read it; would read other Ellis novels if they came my way; in no particular hurry to find more.

(Also, props to the protagonist for at least recognizing that a One Penis Policy is a non-starter in his relationship. Would have been nice to see him get just a bit more enlightened on the subject, but still.)

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

Good book to pick for best.

[jazzfish]

My personal "i want to be this good someday" bar is "Chromatic Aberration." The language, the depth of emotion and allusion, the slowly dawning realisation that the narrator is being deliberately unreliable... yowza.