Year / 2007

by Edward Champion

Best American Fantasy 2006

The entries for this year’s Best American Fantasy have been announced. To whet everybody’s appetites for this interesting and variegated collection, I’ve provided links to all of the stories that are online:

“A Hard Truth About Waste Management” by Sumanth Prabhaker
from Identity Theory

“The Stolen Father” by Eric Roe
from Redivider

“The Saffron Gatherer” by Elizabeth Hand
from Saffron & Brimstone (M Press)

“The Whipping” by Julia Elliott
from The Georgia Review

“A Better Angel” by Chris Adrian
from The New Yorker

“Draco Campestris” by Sarah Monette
from Strange Horizons

“Geese” by Daniel Coudriet
from The Mississippi Review

“The Chinese Boy” by Ann Stapleton
from Alaska Quarterly Review

“The Flying Woman” by Meghan McCarron
from Strange Horizons

“First Kisses from Beyond the Grave” by Nik Houser
from Gargoyle

“Song of the Selkie” by Gina Ochsner
from Tin House

“A Troop [sic] of Baboons” by Tyler Smith
from Pindeldyboz

“Pieces of Scheherazade” by Nicole Kornher-Stace
from Zahir

“Origin Story” by Kelly Link (excerpt)
from A Public Space

“An Experiment in Governance” by E.M. Schorb
from The Mississippi Review

“The Next Corpse Collector” by Ramola D
from Green Mountains Review

“The Village of Ardakmoktan” by Nicole Derr
from Pindeldyboz

“The Man Who Married a Tree” by Tony D’Souza
from McSweeney’s

“A Fable with Slips of White Paper Spilling from the Pockets” by Kevin Brockmeier
from Oxford American

“Pregnant” by Catherine Zeidler (excerpt)
from Hobart

“The Warehouse of Saints” by Robin Hemley
from Ninth Letter

“The Ledge” by Austin Bunn (excerpt)
from One Story

“Lazy Taekos” by Geoffrey A. Landis
from Analog

“For the Love of Paul Bunyan” by Fritz Swanson
from Pindeldyboz

“An Accounting” by Brian Evenson
from Paraspheres (Omnidawn)

“Abraham Lincoln Has Been Shot” by Daniel Alarcón
from Zoetrope: All-Story

“Bit Forgive” by Maile Chapman
from A Public Space

“The End Of Narrative (1-29; Or 29-1)” by Peter LaSalle
from The Southern Review

“Kiss” by Melora Wolff
from The Southern Review

by Edward Champion

Roundup

  • First off, there are two stories pertaining to the Los Angeles Times. After the Martinez fiasco, the Times has decided not to rely upon guest editors. This is a pity, because I was really looking forward to Uwe Boll guest editing the opinion section, offering his thoughts on why film critics are more evil than investment bankers and why violence (specifically boxing) is the only possible response to detractors. And the LATBR has, as previously reported, merged its section with the Sunday opinion section. That’s Sunday instead of Saturday, which means that Sunday morning routines won’t shift nearly as much as loyal Times subscribers feared. There will apparently be more book reviews throughout the paper, as well as heightened Web coverage. So it appears to be more of a general journalistic shift rather than a complete capitulation. And I’ll reserve judgment on all this when I see the results. (First link via Callie)
  • Regrettably, due to diabolical sleet and snow plaguing the East Coast a few weeks ago, I did not get to talk to John Banville. But Minnesota Public Radio did. The interviewer, I’m sad to report, appears to have not read the book. But Banville is a gracious subject and, as such, the clip is worth your time. He’s also big on Donald Westlake, which should tell you all you need to know. (via Banville Booster Prime)
  • The Arizona Republic talks with Max Barry, who confesses that his current reading is a transcript of a Raiders of the Lost Ark story conference. I’ve heard stories about this meeting between Kasdan, Spielberg and Lucas, but I had no idea that such a transcript existed. A Google search has proved fruitless. So perhaps it’s one of those documents one must locate in the UCLA Film & Television Archive.
  • The Guardian‘s Kate Kellaway talks with five first novelists about their labor.
  • Also at the Guardian: an interview with A.L. Kennedy. (via Maud)
  • Sasha Frere-Jones on Against the Day: “It’s the Columbine teen in him, the voice saying, ‘Everyone is a philistine! Nobody understands REAL writing!’ and urging him on to all his drastic signification and tortured plotting. I take no pleasure in being defeated by Pynchon, and I don’t think he’s full of hot air; I just think we have very different pleasure principles.”
  • The problem isn’t that bloggers are stealing from other bloggers, it’s that people have been blogging for several thousand years now, and blogging in earnest for several hundred years, and at this point in time we’ve just run out of original stuff. Our collective unconscious has to recycle old ideas and find new links because we’ve used up all the fresh ones. Basically, it’s summer reruns for the mind. And it all means a better Technorati ranking and plagiarism to boot.
  • George Murray is launching a book of poetry! He plans to use an ancient catapult, well-oiled by many of his Bookninja minions, to eject his tome into a magically airborne parabolic arc, where it will land on a random Canadian’s laundry lines and the resultant collision will bring forth protracted litigation that will leave Mr. Murray a broken and financially crippled man. Nevertheless, a big congrats to Mr. Murray.
  • Has the time come for a change in Australian literary studies?
  • Another excerpt from On Chesil Beach. If you missed the New Yorker excerpt in December, read here. Given that the book is a mere 176 pages, at the current rate of excerpt releases, we should have the entire book online before pub date.
  • The good Prof Fury reveals the last time Captain America died.
  • Jeffrey Ford on giving blurbs. (via Gwenda)
  • Open questions to the Typepad Virtual Book Tour people: Outside of free books, do you remunerate your participants? Or do you still expect them to pay the $4.95/month for the privilege of devoting their blog to book shilling? A form of shilling, I might add, that Six Apart is profiting from. Look, if you’re going to shill, shouldn’t you be disseminating the monies, not just a copy of the book, which any Jane Friday reviewer can request of her own accord? Paid content is one thing, but when there is no clear separation between content and advertising, and when the bloggers, in turn, are still paying their monthly Typepad dues on top of any shilling, it strikes me as unethical and quite exploitative.
  • Harlequin needs REAL men!
  • Regarding yesterday, I hereby propose that the sentence, “I don’t like Mondays,” be removed from everyday discourse.
  • Derik Badman continues his ongoing examination of comics, unfurling a close study of the first page of Jaime Hernandez’s “Files on the Ceiling.” Derik, for the love of comics, please get a book deal. This is the kind of analysis that will help people to take comics seriously. And it’s been thirteen years since Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics. The time is ripe for another consideration.
by Edward Champion

On Twitter

I have attempted Twitter and I can’t say that I’m happy. It might help if there was more of a payoff. You see, I had thought this was some kind of social networking application, but aside from a kind friend invite from someone named “hephatitssundae,” who seems, based on her user profile, to be a pleasant pink-haired individual who I will likely never meet, my online ramblings, as far as I know, have been received by deaf ears. Perhaps I’m not meant to communicate in shorthand. Perhaps I’m simply too old.

140 characters? Hell, I can just barely get in a haiku within the box. What possible significance can I offer with such a diminutive limit? I may as well “type” a text message into my phone. At least I know that my text message will go to someone I know and that it will have some actual content value, such as conveying where the hell I am or telling someone I’m running five minutes late or describing a rather strange place I happen to be in. But if I’m typing every thought and I don’t have unlimited space to consider depth or nuances, then the Twitter people are almost ensuring a kind of Sturgeon’s law effect. I could be in the middle of a perfectly fantastic sentence, only to be warned that I have 20 characters left, and then where will I be? Spreading it out across a vast chasm of other text messages? That’s inconsiderate to the other users. That’s ineffectual communication. The problems may very well be mine, since I’m sort of a long-winded guy. But Twitter’s approach suggests that “long-winded guys” aren’t part of the constituency, which suggests, in turn, a kind of conformity masquerading as community.

And that’s just it. Aside from quibbles over meaningless messages, I don’t feel like conveying what I am constantly doing or thinking to random strangers, particularly since I don’t know if this content is being aggregated or data mined or sifted through by a server farm. I feel that the whole Twitter exercise is less of a social experiment and more of a way to rifle through anything I have to say so that people can sell me things somewhere down the line or so “friends” who are less concerned with who I am and more concerned with what I can purchase can form some kind of deranged impression of who I am. I have no proof, of course; only instinct. I do know that Twitter was set up by Obvious Corporation, a corporation led by one-time Blogger head man Evan Williams, who once worked at Google and who likely learned some inside information about how Google keeps track of user data (see, for example, the cookie set to expire on January 17, 2038).

I’m wondering if he is familiar with F. Scott Fitzgerald’s mind set shortly before his death. After all, what do you do after you’ve given the world Blogger? Perhaps this is another case of the time-honored tech equation:

1. Twitter
2. ???
3. Profit!!!

Twitter is gaining apparent steam right now. Obviously, this is going to cost bandwidth. And obviously, Obvious is going to need some way to recoup their investment. I can imagine the pitch to advertisers: “You think Google AdSense provides context? Well, not only do we have a user base revealing their immediate impulses online without fear of any of it coming back to bite them in the ass later. But we’re building a community to keep them addicted to this confessional impulse. We all know that nobody cares about privacy anymore and our user base demonstrates it!”

To be fair, Twitter has given you a Trash icon to get rid of your messages. But let’s say that you get on a roll and you have hundreds of messages to sift through. Who’s honestly going to take the time to go through them? A blog is one thing, where you can single out your thoughts by categories and the like. But Twitter offers no easy way to sort through your messages except chronology, which implies, in addition to the meager 140 character cap, that thought isn’t part of this new form of communication.

Of course, it’s very possible that some smart people, perhaps inspired by David Markson’s books, might find a form of free association and interesting expression with this tool.

But without thought and with an ostensible attitude and an interface that collides against the idea of thinking before writing, I’m afraid I have serious reservations against Twitter’s possibilities.