“Inelegant compromises amidst a climate that wants us gone”
Australian dark fantasy author Deborah Biancotti, guest blogging at Poe’s Deadly Daughters, confesses to something she suspects “will never be fashionable”: hating the Australian landscape.
I stopped pretending I found the landscape anything but creepy and revolting. The sweaty, swollen rainforests that threaten, in my memory, to tip into the thin wedge of playgrounds. The vast brownness of some places, the spindly silver trees, the ungenerous scrub by the sides of roads, wild grasses that whip the edges of beaches. Strange powers control those spaces. Indifferent powers.
And later, an emphatic condemnation of Dorothea Mackellar’s famous poem, ‘My Country’:
Man. Has anyone ever written a more banal poem about a more fatal place?
Marcus Clarke famously expressed a sort of pre-Lovecraftian counterpoint to the kinds of empty platitudes that would later lodge themselves in the Australian consciousness:
The Australian mountain forests are funereal, secret, stern. Their solitude is desolation. They seem to stifle, in their black gorges, a story of sullen despair. No tender sentiment is nourished in their shade. In other lands the dying year is mourned, the falling leaves drop lightly on his bier. In the Australian forests no leaves fall. The savage winds shout among the rock clefts. From the melancholy gums strips of white bark hang and rustle. The very animal life of these frowning hills is either grotesque or ghostly. Great grey kangaroos hop noiselessly over the coarse grass. Flights of white cockatoos stream out, shrieking like evil souls. The sun suddenly sinks, and the mopokes burst out into horrible peals of semi-human laughter. The natives aver that, when night comes, from out the bottomless depth of some lagoon the Bunyip rises, and, in form like monstrous sea-calf, drags his loathsome length from out the ooze.
With literary precedents like this, it’s not surprising that Australia has lately produced such excellent writers of dark fiction — what’s surprising is that it hasn’t happened sooner.
(poesdeadlydaughters.blogspot.com)
Grimaldi and other good eggs
Clowns International, whose headquarters are at Wookey Hole in Somerset, England, claims to be the oldest clown society in the world. Whether or not this is true, Clowns International can certainly claim the most unusual approach to copyrighting a clown’s image. Each new member can register their individual make-up with the society, whereupon (according to Wikipedia) an eggshell is decorated as a miniature version of the clown’s head and added to the ‘Egg Gallery’
.
Artist Luke Stephenson was given the opportunity to photograph a representative selection from the famous Egg Gallery (properly known as The Clown Egg Register), including the eggs belonging to such well-known names as Joseph Grimaldi, the Fratellinis, and Pimpo The Clown.
Okay, so ‘Pimpo’ mightn’t exactly be “well-known”, but neither am I making it up. Would I yolk about something as serious as clowning?
Web standards and workflows for e-books
Joe Clark on web standards and workflows for e-books in the latest A List Apart:
The canonical format of a book should be HTML. Authors should write in HTML, making a manuscript immediately transformable to an E-book [sic]. A manuscript could then be imported into that fossil the publishing industry refuses to leave behind, Microsoft Word.
Yes yes yes, a thousand times yes. This should have started happening about five years ago. (The section from which this quote is taken is about halfway through the article.)
HTML is a pretty good language for describing the contents of a book (it would be even better if it had a decent way of captioning images) — and in my opinion it’s easy enough to learn that authors (or the editor, or production manager) could render the first draft as a machine-readable document at the beginning of the production process, rather than at the end.
I also learned something new reading this piece: namely, that Unicode has a specification for different width spaces. Colour me the colour of a person who has just found out something they didn’t previously know.
A paragraph per page makes Don a focused writer
Kevin Rabelais uncovers an interesting feature of novelist Don DeLillo’s writing process in a recent interview for The Australian. A decade into his career, DeLillo began the practice, when he came to write a new paragraph, of loading a fresh page into his typewriter.
“It helped me see more clearly what was on the page … Instead of being confronted with a page of 350 words, it might have 50 words, or 100, and I could focus more clearly on words and sentences.”
Apparently DeLillo continues to use the technique. Entire forests tremble with fear every time he begins a new book. (Luckily the new one is a novella.)
Killing the hive mind
The New York Times reviews Jaron Lanier’s You are not a gadget, declaring it “necessary reading for anyone interested in how the Web and the software we use every day are reshaping culture and the marketplace.”
I’m intrigued by Lanier’s comments about books in particular (“If the books in the cloud are accessed via user interfaces that encourage mashups of fragments that obscure the context and authorship of each fragment, there will be only one book”) and find myself in sympathetic agreement with his suggestion (hardly unique to him, of course) that pop culture has “entered into a nostalgic malaise”.
No causal connection has wealthy beginning
In the middle of 1944, a series of apparently innocuous answers in the crossword puzzle of the Daily Telegraph began to cause alarm at MI5. In the space of a few weeks, the words ‘Utah’, ‘Omaha’, ‘Neptune’, ‘mulberry’ and ‘overlord’ all featured as solutions to the crossword. What was significant was that these were all codewords relating to the soon-to-occur (and supposedly secret) Allied invasion of Normandy.
Coincidence? Espionage? Treason? The answer, like the solution to a good cryptic clue, is as appealing as it is obvious.
Literally a new edition of Fowler
Languagehat.com reports on a new edition of H. W. Fowler’s A Dictionary of Modern English Usage. I have a copy of the second edition, so I can’t say if the entry below derives from Fowler or from the equally wonderfully named Sir Ernest Gowers (who revised the text in the 1960s), but it’s a characteristically dry dismantling of a certain misuse of language that I’d assumed was only a modern complaint. It seems, however, that it’s been going on for ages, figuratively speaking. (Or, if it’s an addition of Gower’s, literally decades.)
literally. We have come to such a pass with this emphasizer that where the truth would require us to insert with a strong expression ‘not [literally], of course, but in a manner of speaking’, we do not hesitate to insert the very word that we ought to be at pains to repudiate […] The Prime Minister sat through the debate [literally] glued to the Treasury bench […]
I have to apologise to the student I recently mentored, who used the word in a story I was critiquing. I didn’t exactly quote the above, but I came close.
Nip it in the bud, I say. (In a manner of speaking.)
From the multiverse to the Whoniverse
It doesn’t come as a huge surprise, but I didn’t realise Michael Moorcock was a Doctor Who fan until it was recently announced he was contributing an original novel to the tie-in range currently being published by BBC Books. Here he shares his memories of the original series and his excitement (and sense of nervousness) about his forthcoming involvement with the new incarnation. Too bad Moorcock didn’t write for the New Adventures series Virgin published in the nineties: he could’ve really let rip. Looking forward to this one nonetheless.
The middle-class guide to the galaxy
As the publication date nears for Eoin Colfer’s Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy continuation novel, the Guardian surveys the place of the original work (which is to say, the radio series, novels and TV series combined) in the British psyche. “The Hitchhiker stories make up a sort of folk-art depiction, like on a tribal carpet, of the late-1970s English middle-class cosmic order,” says Jenny Turner.
Going vintage to get things done
Freelance writer Riccardo Mori steps back in time to a Mac running System 7.1 (connected to an old iBook running System 9 as “a bridge between the ‘old’ world and the ‘new’ world” of his regular setup) to avoid the shiny, internet-connected world of distraction that OS X offers: emails, RSS, spur of the moment research on the muddy muddy web. Great photo of his barebones setup; I felt instantly calmed (and envious).
iPhone mockups with Notepod
Gorgeous iPhone sized (60x110mm) grid-lined notepads for mocking up apps and webpages (and jotting down the phone numbers of “hot geeks” if you’re so inclined). Might buy one just to use as a decoy for would-be muggers.
Karl von Frisch’s Decoding the language of the bee
Frisch translated the meaning of bees’ waggle dances, by which a hive compares incoming reports from individual bees about nearby food sources to make collective decisions. According to Alex Wright in his book Glut: mastering information through the ages, other studies have shown that while a single bee can retain a piece of data for up to six days, a hive, through this collective information management enterprise, can retain the same data for up to three months. This page offers a PDF download of Frisch’s 1973 Nobel Lecture on the subject.
Paul Otlet’s “radiated book”
I recently had a flick through Glut: mastering information through the ages by Alex Wright and was intrigued by the story of Paul Otlet, who in the 1930s dreamt up an information retrieval system that seems to foreshadow the modern world wide web.
Behind the Typedia logo design
Not only is Typedia a very attractively designed resource site, the owners and designers have very generously shared an insight into the creation of the site logo. A great example of the professional back and forth that can go on with any creative project.
Christopher Green’s recollections of Clarion South
Australian speculative fiction writer Christopher Green looks back on some notes taken during the Clarion South workshop.
(christophergreen.wordpress.com)
Rewriting as animated GIF
Elizabeth Bear captures the pain and insanity of writing with an animated GIF showing her edits, rewrites and total redrafts of a single paragraph over an hour. Made me feel both elated and depressed; the first because I could take comfort in shared pain, the second because I realised how much of my life I have expended doing just this.
Top 10 magical grimoires
Selected by Owen Davies, professor of social history at the University of Herefordshire. Davies has “written extensively about the history of magic, witchcraft and ghosts”.
Computer reveals stone tablet ‘handwriting’ in a flash
A computer technique can tell the difference between ancient inscriptions created by different artisans.
Digitised newspapers from the 19th century at the British Library
Two million pages available for searching. Disappointingly, viewing articles requires paid 24 hour or 7 day pass, unlike the equivalent (beta) service of the National Library of Australia.
ReCSS bookmarklet
Incredibly useful bookmarklet that removes the need to reload entire webpages when checking CSS changes by reloading the stylesheet only. A huge time saver (not to mention saving on bandwidth).
Old magazine articles for “dilettants, hacks and the merely curious”
“Designed to serve as a reference for students, educators, authors, researchers, dabblers, dilettantes, hacks and the merely curious.”
(ttp:)
Pah
David Golding is a super brain. Check out his posts on Doctor Who, comics and sci-fi literature. And beer. Yum.
the thinkings of a lili
Lili is terrified of vomit. She also has a lot to say about YA lit and other stuff. Hardly ever mentions vomit.
Email address encoder using HTML entities
Not a foolproof solution to avoiding spam, but a relatively straightforward one without having to mess around with client-side encryption — just good old fashioned HTML.
Digitised copies of Charles Sturt’s sketches and diary
Some beautiful images here drawn by Sturt during his exploration of the Murray, along with Sturt’s notes.
Kick ass Victorian heroines — with some big ass hair
“Picture her with bust rearing beneath beaded dress, diaphanous harem pants beneath, silver sword in hand, with her beer-frazzled hair abundant beneath a fetching helmet.”. Just try to stop me!
The ‘scuttlers’ of nineteenth century Manchester
Like our ‘larrikins’, but with a more honest name. Author of a just released book on the gangs of nineteenth century Manchester and London says he was fascinated by the “unchanging role of dress and personal appearance as a sign of belonging to a gang”. An example is the ‘donkey fringe’ hairstyle, “which required close cropping at the back but an angled fringe at the front, with the hair longer on the right”.
Domai.nr
Something to fall back on when cybersquatters have already nabbed the domain you wanted, or if you just want to craft a really annoying URL for your site.
(domai.nr)
The Dollar Dreadful Family Library
“The Dollar Dreadful Family Library brings you short stories that shall surely entice, engross, and shock you and your fellows!” Stunning recreation of a nineteenth century newspaper, and authentic use of fonts. From a web design and standards perspective, the implementation of rollovers is a bit iffy, and large chunks of text are represented as images. But it’s sure pretty.
The secrets of storytelling
From Scientific American, research into the ways in which stories can “enhance social skills by acting as simulators for the brain” and can help people “make sense of increasingly complex social relationships”
Fixing flat, grey input buttons in Safari 3
I’m not too proud to admit that this problem had me stumped for ages.
Open Library
Another way to access the mind-bogglingly huge archive of full text digitised books at the Internet Archive; very neat site design and great options for refining searches.
Public domain weird fiction at Wikisource
Includes a selection of horror and Gothic fiction, scientifiction, fantasy and sword and sorcery.
Lovecraft jottings (or, jotcraft leavings)
From the man himself: “This book consists of ideas, images, & quotations hastily jotted down for possible future use in weird fiction…” (H.P. Lovecraft). Frightening that any of these mind have found their source in, as he calls them, “casual incidents”.
The best laid plans lead writers astray
“If novels are going to combust imaginatively, shouldn’t they be written spontaneously?” writes Hannah Davies.
Hilary Mantel on the lure of the unexplained
“To many of us, a great deal of what we encounter daily is unexplained. It is possible to have received a good education and know nothing of science or technology.”
Compendium of lost words
A list of over 400 of the rarest modern English words, including a long list of unusual adjectives of relation.
How we work
The habits, rituals and small (and occasionally big) methods people use to get their work done. Includes a number of writers and artists.
The vapour trail
When I was writing my nineteenth century, gross-out gothic horror comedy The Genie in the Dunnycan I tried to immerse myself in the grimy streetscapes of late nineteenth century Melbourne; cultural historian Melissa Bellanta’s Victoriana blog covers that territory and more.
Victorian history blog
I’m a sucker for Victoriana; the juxtaposition of grime and ornament, technology and the primitive, manners and monsters. Here’s a fantastic blog offering glimpses into Victorian life, by an Australian but with a focus on Victorian London.
Fabulating the Australian desert: Australia’s lost race romances, 1890 – 1908
A look at the bizarre adventure-romance novels set in the Australian interior at the turn of the twentieth century, including George Firth Scott’s The Last Lemurian.
London Illustrated News pictures online
The London Illustrated News was the world’s first illustrated weekly newspaper. This image library features a selection of woodcut illustrations from the newspaper dating from the mid-nineteenth century onwards.
Pirates and printers
A brief account of book smuggling in the British Isles in the late eighteenth century.
