Got an acceptance from an anthology I’d forgotten I’d subbed to. Trunk Vol II: Blood. And the wonderful folks at Dog Horn are putting out another volume, Dreadful Daughters. So I’ll be in that. And just saw my name on Ellen Datlow’s honorable mention list. Sweet!
I finally got to see Dead Snow (dir Tommy Wirkola), and from start to finish, it could not have been more fun. Nazi Zombies, creepy-horny med students, Ski-Doos, out-house gross-out. Lots of intestine.
Four guys in one car and three girls in another head out to a cabin in the Norwegian alps. The forth girl, Sara (Ann Dahl Torp), dating the token cutie (Vegar Hoel), has gone on ahead, and, unbeknownst to her friends has met a grizzly end. The gang settle into the cabin—cue snow-fights, beer-guzzling, and a truly disgusting sex-in-the- shitter scene—to wait for Sara to join them. One dark and stormy night, a grizzled hiker calls by and tells them a tale of Nazi torture and pillaging in years gone by. Although played for laughs, the subtext for this scene, like that of the entire movie, is the brutal German occupation of Norway and the country’s spirited resistance.
Heil to the yeah. The undead platoons close in on the cabin, picking off the students by one in a frenzy of flying limbs, buried war chests, and dead-cherry snow. Did I mention bowel? Lots of bowel. The action scenes are tight and the Nazi Zombies are fully sick in their SS drag. Upside-down teeth, Francis Bacon eyes, green skin. The kids are good too, more realistic than your average Hollywood fare. Chubby, boring, and inarticulate. One’s allergic to blood, another has a thing for erotic asphyxiation. Your typical med students. But in their own way perhaps more interesting than the interchangeable paper dolls we’ve come to expect in US B-ville fare. So, you know, we almost care when they get bit.
Yeah, you can drive a Panzer division through some of the plot holes, but the Colonel Klink Zombi (Orjan Gamst) is a trip, and some of the shots are superb. A hoard of trench-coated undead push through the surface of the snow like crocuses in the devil’s garden. Spring-time for Hitler? Some memories will never die.
Welcome to the first installment of a new series called WOW (Writers on the Web), a title so bad it’s not even good, which is good enough for me. It will cover what some writers are doing and saying on and around the web. This week, Stephen Graham Jones, Kris Saknussemm, Ian McEwan, Chuck Palahniuk, and Darwin. Some line-up
LitReactor previews Ten Obvious Truths about Fiction, an essay on craft by the category-defying Stephen Graham Jones.
Really, any scene that’s only getting across what’s happening on the surface of that scene—two guys loading boxes into a truck, say—then that scene’s dead. Instead, let those two men load boxes, but only one of them knows the other’s tranquilized pet is in one of the boxes. It changes everything, for the better.
Annie Murphy Paul at The New York Times finds fiction readers have better brains.
A 2010 study by Dr. Mar found a similar result in preschool-age children: the more stories they had read to them, the keener their theory of mind — an effect that was also produced by watching movies but, curiously, not by watching television.
But even more interestingly, or obviously, this article offers a scientific explanation for why we sometimes remember fictional characters as real. To our brains, they are.
There is evidence that just as the brain responds to depictions of smells and textures and movements as if they were the real thing, so it treats the interactions among fictional characters as something like real-life social encounters.
Back to LitReactor, and Zanesville author Kris Saknussemm joins an illustrious line-up of instructors for a workshop starting in April. Saknussemm, fresh from his Reverend America Tour tackles place, a subject dear to the heart of this oft-displaced writer. Tell him I sent you.
Over at The Cult, Chuck Palahniuk is offloading the faux Yin Yang table from The Fight Club to raise money for a Portland Dog shelter. If you live in Portland, he’ll even come over and help you assemble it, so get out your Allenkeys, people.
And finally Ian McEwan at The Guardian draws parallels between science and literature over issues of originality, not nearly so much an anachronism in this digital age as you’d think.
[Darwin’s] reluctance to upset his wife Emma’s religious devotion, or to contradict the theological certainties of his scientific colleagues, or to find himself in the unlikely role of iconoclast, a radical dissenter in Victorian society, all were swept aside for fear of another man taking possession of and getting credit for the ideas he believed to be his.
Rear view mirrors of the mind.
My latest nervous breakdown is about my mother, but it’s also about monsters, in a good way. Hence the title snipped from Bladerunner:
I think about the instability of polarities, how to be at our most human and alive is paradoxically to resemble an exquisite corpse. Remade at every turn, scarred and burned, and fuck you very much, here I am.
read more, here.
I’m having trouble getting to these posts lately, what with finishing the novel, trying to organize some teaching for myself, updating my writertopia page for the Campbell Award, trying to submit stuff on a regular basis and the usual insomnia. But today is Jules Vernes’ birthday, so happy birthday, Jules. There is a nice write-up here at Wired magazine.
What’s interesting among other things is that the electric rifles used in Twenty Thousand Leagues… were later (1969) revisited by Thomas Cover when he invented the TASER, which is an acronym for Thomas A Swift’s Electric Rifle. Tom Swift (Swift by name and nature!)being the teenage hero of the juvenile scifi book series launched by Victor Appleton (a pseudonym) in 1910, and obviously referencing Verne.
Therapy. It’s a bizarre thing to sit and tell… STUFF…. to someone who doesn’t know you. I think that’s the key. They don’t know you. I mean, I’d like to get to know my therapist, but that doesn’t seem to be the point (although hey, I’d kind of like to interview her just to make sure she’s suitable, that there are some overlaps in our experiences, like once before when I had to ‘see someone’ after a death, and he was a paternal Dutchman with wide streak of empathy who somehow managed to connect with a hysterical twenty-something over the issue of loss). She asks about my husband and kids and I tell her. She is great with names. By the end of the first session she is quoting my best friend almost as much as I do. But she doesn’t know her. Does it matter? If she saw her, would she know her, my best friend, more… or less?
I think should I pass over my phone next time, show her pictures? She’d probably say no. It may be part of her Zen, her Way, to form pictures in her head, the way a reader does with characters in a novel. Takes the pictures home with her, mentally attaches them to my file, the Story of Client, JSB. She watches my gestures. I can see her doing that. Her eyes follow the movement of my hands. I make a lot of fists. Did she note that? She’s incredibly beautiful but not in a robotic way. She doesn’t look like a property agent. She looks real. Wide-eyed and freckled with a smile that’s a little bit country. I also think that she’s very smart. Thing is, she’s young, or younger than me. She looks to be in her mid to late thirties. Is that important? I think that’s partly what I’m in therapy to find out. Continue reading
All this GOP stuff is such a scary joke, isn’t it. Makes me kind of depressed. I know that’s an understatement. But I was reading what Meryl Streep said about how these nutjobs have hijacked the conservative party in the US and it’s true. The debate just isn’t serious any more. Another understatement. But I’m a serious person. I like my nuts to be serious about their politics. Like Jerry Lewis. And Mary Tyler Moore. Not folks like Sarah Palin saying Obama should have had a Christmas tree on his card. That’s not politics. It’s just embarrassing. It’s a kind of psychic terrorism. A terrible numbing dumbing down.
No. Give me Mary Tyler Moore any day. Saw the last show in the series last night on cable. Wow. I don’t think any of us realize just how radical this chick, this show was in its day. Compare Mary’s take on marriage to the reactionary right as espoused by Michele Bachmann.
At the beach the other day, this chick was plucking out her ass pubes with her fingers. What’s with that?
And now it’s raining all the time. The air is cold but humid. I want to wash my hair every day. I felt like a slug at yoga. The animals are going nuts.
A body-swap story inspired by Shelley, not just Frankenstein, but also “The Transformation,” a tale I read a while ago and which really got me by the throat. What I love about the story is that the Doppelganger and the protagonist get all mixed up in the end, bits of one left behind in the other.
Because, you know, it’s not always easy to say which is which—the good self and the bad. Which the harbinger and which the savior?
Pulp never lies.
Anyway, the story is set just outside my home town, a place I’ve renamed Union Falls in previous work, near Moonshine Falls, NY. My friends and I used to hang out at the falls when we were kids. Ride our bikes there and splash in the gullies, wear bright clothing so the poachers’ rifles wouldn’t get us. It was remote and wild and scary as hell. Those were good summers. We’d head out after breakfast and come home for dinner, maybe. Maybe call from a friend’s place where we’d stopped for a plate of whatever their mom had going. Or maybe just grill us some cheese and take it upstairs to where someone’s big brother would be watching TV and sucking on a joint next to the open window. And always the lake.
In my dreams I’m always on Route 90 heading toward that place and the lake is to my left, so I’m heading north, and I always wake up just before I get there.
