review – the vesuvius club

One of the more fascinating things about the cleverly written The Vesuvius Club by Mark Gatiss is that the story’s protagonist, Lucifer Box, is a renaissance man extraordinaire.  Forget that the story takes place in Edwardian England, or even that Lucifer is a second-rate portraitist and secret agent; note, rather, how his inhibitions and peccadilloes know no gender.  That the reader will start the adventure around Box’s womanly indiscretions and lead somewhere…else…is simply the sheer flippancy of such a piece of fluff, as subtitled by Gatiss. Box is perhaps an anachronistic anomaly, parading around and performing his HMS duties in a spirit of glam that would make David Bowie proud.

Said somewhere else covers a time and place when audiences weren’t surrounded with formulaic, contrived villains trying to conquer and/or destroy the world.  No, The Vesuvius Club is something different. Box’s work for His Majesty’s Service is more of a satire of what Bond and Bourne were combating when things were simpler, when your average villains had something smaller and more bizarre in their sights, like say, a volcano.  Apart from the setting, Gatiss excels in his descriptions of eerily misty London cemeteries and runaway hansoms, hazy and writhing opium dens and slightly off antagonists.  From London to Naples, the reader is carried swiftly in bewilderment in an overly witty, bizarre, and humorous adventure.

corporatizing copyright

Ursula Le Guin has some stones.  This whole Google digital books settlement is a bit complicated, but it boils down to something more than opting in and out for the authors.  It’s about signing away your authorship, and forcing companies like the great and powerful Goog to negotiate with you before you do so and not after they’ve been caught.  Le Guin says it better:

The “opt-out” clause in the Settlement is most disturbing:

First, it seems unfair that, by the terms of the class-action settlement, authors can officially present objections to the Court only by being “opted in” to the settlement and thereby subjecting themselves to its terms.

Second, while the “opt-out” clause appears to offer authors an easy way to defend their copyright, in fact it disguises an assault on authors’ rights. Google, like any other publisher or entity, should be required to obtain permission from the owner to purchase or use copyrighted material, item by item.

…

The free and open dissemination of information and of literature, as it exists in our Public Libraries, can and should exist in the electronic media. All authors hope for that. But we cannot have free and open dissemination of information and literature unless the use of written material continues to be controlled by those who write it or own legitimate right in it. We urge our government and our courts to allow no corporation to circumvent copyright law or dictate the terms of that control.

Google has some stones as well, dictating the terms of their own settlement to authors of works they’ve digitized without consent.  Perhaps Google is trying to claim some sort of perverted sense of fair use by chumming with libraries to assist in their digitization without bothering to negotiate with authors and forking out the dough to buy the item they want to scan from Amazon or AbeBooks.

review – cosmicomics

A perfect exposition of science fiction, Italo Calvino’s Cosmicomics is a tender and dreamlike weaving of stories that touch upon the sheer wonder both the universe and consciousness itself. Calvino begins each story with an established scientific conjecture, thereafter placing an anthropomorphic and wildly fictitious annotation of the universe at various stages or for lack of a better word, times. Narrating from entities personified through equations and representations, predominantly through the central character Qfwfq, Calvino wistfully describes the universe through fleeting instances of love, attraction, loss, creation and change.

The stories range from the concrete to the fluid, including a time when reaching the moon is as simple as climbing a ladder, the astronomical paranoia induced from simple messages sent from distant observers and millennia, where a dinosaur ponders the significance, perhaps even the power of its own extinction, to the familial colloid particles, uncertain of their new inertia, being torn apart in the creation of matter and planets. Though all have a human feel, it is a joyous exposition of the unfathomable, alien events we cannot ponder enough.

The sentience that Calvino gives to the entities persisting and changing throughout Cosmicomics is an appreciation not only of the scientific beauty of the universe, but of the beauty of his fiction.

free stuff sells best

What with the Kindle being the super number 1 product on Amazon, it initially appears that the clamour of preferring ebooks over their physical counterpart is slightly a bit disingenuous or at least misguided.  After all, it appears that of the titles bought for the Kindle, more often than naught are, shall we say, priceless:

And how much money is Amazon making? How much money are authors and publishers making? When GalleyCat examined the Kindle Store bestsellers, they found that 64 of the 100 bestselling eBooks, the majority, were, in fact, free, including the number one bestseller, “Midnight in Madrid”, by Noel Hynd.

It’s question of cost, and the chilly reception from publishers who probably never thought the iTunes effect would be superimposed at great length upon their industry:

But publishers have ignored this demand. In response, several conglomerates have aggressively moved to protect their legacy. Macmillan recently announced a plan to delay the publication of e-books and offer enhancements that will justify a higher price. This tactic is aimed at Amazon’s policy of trying to set $9.99 as the expected price for an e-book. Most are priced much higher — but that’s beside the point. Amazon and publishers are fighting over this fiction, not the reality. Because Amazon’s customers have made it clear that $9.99 is still too high for their taste. Most titles in the company’s list of top 100 Kindle bestsellers are priced below $9.99, and the most popular price point is $0.00. But publishers can’t hear this, because they’re a little distracted right now.

All this is coinciding with imminent launch of the super secret Apple Tablet so achingly soon. And it’s no coincidence, since I feel that while Amazon has successfully developed and marketed its own niche in the book industry with the Kindle, consciously or not, they are following the Apple iTunes model of providing a platform for cheaper, more widely disseminated content.  That is what consumers want.  That is what authors, especially new aspiring authors, want.

review – motorman

Somewhere between Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities and Cormac McCarthy’s darker roads is situated the powerfully bizarre and intriguing Motorman, written by David Ohle.  It’s not a new work, but it has generated a consistent buzz in terms of the ever popular dystopia-themed literature.  It’s a short offering that provides only glimpses into an utterly improbable world that’s actually quite fathomable when framed from a sense of despairing fabulism.  It’s concerns the flight of a character named Moldenke away from a series of meaningless activities in Texaco City to a safe-haven away from the omniscience of one ever-present Mr. Bunce.  More than his flight though, Motorman is about a vision of a future, or perhaps a dream, in which our conception of time, survival and humanity is greatly accelerated and/or extended.  With the appearance of multiple suns and moons (invented or otherwise) along rapidly moving calendars, it is either a cosmic time-shift or mild concussion upon which the reader must decipher and refocus.  That, along with the buzzing and fluttering of one’s numerous implanted hearts, especially upon an ubiquitous onrush of mindless jellyheads.  Ohle doesn’t provide many answers, but he does depict fragments of a life under continual decay amid continual surveillance. Ohle writes his chapters briefly, often corresponding between characters as if in the middle of a war, though eerily the setting is oddly quiet throughout.  As such, Motorman is a hazy, prescient and disturbing work that bridges our dreams to a fantastic reality.

the war on science (fiction writers)

Ugly incident:

For Peter Watts, life can be stranger than science fiction.

Watts – who has written six such books – was on his way back to Toronto last Tuesday after helping a friend move to the U.S. Before crossing the Blue Water Bridge into Sarnia, American customs officers pulled him over. He says when they began rifling through his car and luggage, he got out. They ordered him back in the car; he asked what was going on.

What happened next has become the talk of the blogosphere: Watts too has waded in on it, posting that he was assaulted, punched in the face, pepper-sprayed and thrown in jail for the night, only to find that he was the one charged – with assaulting a customs officer.

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After the incident, Watts’ friend was arrested and interrogated, but not charged.

Watts, however, spent the night in jail, in the standard orange jumpsuit, and was released the next day on $5,000 bail. He was dropped off across the border at Canadian customs, without his coat – it was in the car, which was impounded – during a winter storm.

tom waits…

genius.

better late than never

Apparently my country is exponentially factual:

The book returned to the New Bedford Public Library in Massachusetts this week wasn’t overdue by a week, a month or even a year. It was nearly a century overdue, and the fine came to $361.35.

“Facts I Ought to Know about the Government of My Country” was supposed to have been returned by May 10, 1910.

why the e-book orgasm is not mutual

Or, why e-books are so “popular”. Random House shrieks “all mine”:

On Friday, Markus Dohle, chief executive of Random House, sent a letter to dozens of literary agents, writing that the company’s older agreements gave it “the exclusive right to publish in electronic book publishing formats.”

Backlist titles, which continue to be reprinted long after their initial release, are crucial to publishing houses because of their promise of lucrative revenue year after year. But authors and agents are particularly concerned that traditional publishers are not offering sufficient royalties on e-book editions, which they point out are cheaper for publishers to produce. Some are considering taking their digital rights elsewhere, which could deal a financial blow to the hobbled publishing industry.

It would seem that e-books are the literary equivalent to reality TV shows: cheap to produce, and therefore generating higher stream of revenues to distribute. But for whom is the question worth asking. Never mind if the reader prefers the physical book.  This is why amazon and such are promoting the hell out of their devices.

review – liver

Will Self’s story cycle “Liver” is definitely anything but a celebration of such a crucially important component of the body. Rather, his surface anatomy of four lobes is a dissection of the extent to which the organ is neglected, abused and in a permanent state of decay. Nay, Liver is not necessarily about the liver at all, but instead a survey of the bilious, fetid human condition; the organ itself is the link that connects the lobules of each character into one stinking gestalt of unpleasantness that, Self stresses, is born completely voluntarily.

Excruciating detail is the rule for this story cycle. The epicenter concerns particular emphasis upon the Plantation Club, a highly distinguished fellowship devoted to the gavage of willfully force-drinking their on-coming death. Secondly, the sojourn of a cold, cancerous woman to Switzerland and her assisted deathbed, though ever unsure whether she will be cured either of her ailment or pestilential daughter. Third, a revisit to the tale of Prometheus, where his daily grind as a highly ambitious advertising agent necessitates the acceptance of a large bird of prey. Though not to be outperformed, finally, by the surprisingly cogent narration of unlikeliest protagonists, observing and deliberating upon an evening soiree of intermingling junkies.

Self doesn’t as much tell stories as he unleashes a highly colorful stream of consciousness, or unconsciousness if you prefer, among his characters and setting, which predominantly consists of the alleys of unkempt London. His rich vocabulary is a gavage unto itself, deliciously force-feeding the reader with “the chronic, the progressive, and the degenerative – a bit like civilization” as he will emphasize. Everyone experiences their own personal sepsis in this work, as Self most intellectually spares no expense describing all manner of bodily fluids and open sores. The reader may take caution, however, as the author’s immense vocabulary and wit make this a slow and sinuous digestion.