moving house

It's been fun, but I am itchy for new digs. So I'm giving wordpress a whirl over here.

Mammoth Book of Best New Horror #20

The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror #20, which includes my story "These Things We Have Always Known," is out--I received my contributors' copies yesterday and its release is being celebrated in a book launch signing at British Fantasycon today (even as I write this, I believe. Hurry over there! Free glass of wine with each copy purchased!), where I would like to be right now, but despite all my cursing and rending of garments, a box of cash did not in fact materialize where none had been before, so instead I'm watching the rain outside my window in Athens, Georgia. Which, you know, is not so bad, as these things go.

Anyway, Best New Horror is a reprint anthology of editor Stephen Jones's picks for the best horror stories of the year. (That would be 2008.) While you can buy it at Amazon, Amazon UK, and all the usual suspects, the UK cover pictured above is much prettier than the US one, although the maggoty grinning demon on the US cover does have a certain retro-80s charm, I suppose.

This is my third appearance in a volume of Best New Horror, an anthology series I've been reading since its inception, and I'm always happy and honored to be in such fine company:

Stephen Jones – Introduction: Horror in 2008

Peter Crowther – Front Page McGuffin And The Greater Story Never Told
Simon Strantzas – It Runs Beneath The Surface
Lynda E. Rucker – These Things We Have Always Known
Neil Gaiman – Feminine Endings
Gary McMahon – Through The Cracks
Tim Lebbon – Falling Off The World
Paul Finch – The Old Traditions Are Best
Ramsey Campbell – The Long Way
Michael Bishop – The Pile
Tanith Lee – Under Fog
Christopher Fowler – Arkangel
Ian R. MacLeod – The Camping Wainwrights
Reggie Oliver – A Donkey At The Mysteries
Steve Duffy – The Oram County Whoosit
Stephen King – The New York Times At Special Bargain Rates
Sarah Pinborough – Our Man In The Sudan
Mark Samuels – Destination Nihil by Edmund Bertrand
Albert E. Cowdrey – The Overseer
Pinckney Benedict – The Beginnings Of Sorrow
Brian Lumley – The Place Of Waiting
Steve Rasnic Tem – 2:PM The Real Estate Agent Arrives

Stephen Jones & Kim Newman – Necrology: 2008

Vincent Chong did that nice cover art on the UK edition.

Homeless Moon Chapbook 2

Once again (twice in one week! Lordy!), I'm interrupting the peaceful, meditative silence of this blog, this time to point out that my compatriots over at The Homeless Moon (aka Erin Hoffman, Jason S. Ridler, Justin Howe, Michael J. DeLuca, and Scott Anderson) have released a second chapbook, which you can download for free or order in hardcopy at a nominal price. I suggest you check it out. I bet you won't be disappointed!

Moon Landing Monday

Happy Fortieth Anniversary, Apollo 11 Moon Landing!

Check this site out: We Choose the Moon, a real-time re-creation of the mission.

Scientific American has a big moon special happening on their website, but I particularly enjoyed an article in the July print issue, "From the Moon to Mars," by Harrison H. Schmidt, the only geologist--in fact, the only scientist--to do field work on the moon. Right now, I'm reading Kim Stanley Robinson's Red Mars and really, really digging it, so the prospect of going to Mars "perhaps in the mid-2030s," as the article mentions, has me all excited.

Last space-related PSA of the day: If you haven't already, go see Duncan Jones's Moon. It's one of the best science-fiction movies I've ever seen (frankly, good science fiction films are truly few and far between), and Sam Rockwell is amazing in it. I used to worry about what would happen to a kid named Zowie Bowie, but it turns out he'll grow up to be Duncan Jones and do very very well for himself indeed.

those who sleep under the sun, the soil and the olive trees of spain

A moving video about the seven surviving International Brigade volunteers who traveled to the Spanish embassy in London this week to receive honorary Spanish citizenship, seventy years later. Veterans recount their experiences and speak with pride of their service.

Space Shuttle Monday

Weather permitting, the space shuttle Atlantis launches at 2 p.m. today. Part of their mission will be repairing the Hubble Space Telescope, which over the past two decades has given us astonishing images such as the ones you can see here. You can follow the launch progress over at NASA TV.

This week's New Yorker has a story from JG Ballard, "The Autobiography of J.G.B."

This article from the Guardian wonders whether, as the worldwide economic crisis takes its toll, emigration will once again become a way of life in Ireland.

And elsewhere in the Guardian, a piece on George Orwell's writing of 1984. I first read this book when I was about eleven or twelve, which was kind of traumatizing but also insured that its ideas became a seminal part of how I view the uses and abuses of power and the deployment of propaganda. After a chilling reread back in late 2007, I became pretty sure that the administration which was in power at that time had adopted some tactics straight from Orwell's dystopia.

I didn't mean to end on such a depressing note. Check out those pictures of the universe again; they have a way of putting the petty deeds of humans in perspective.

rainy Monday links, or -0p[rq1,mmEDdde

The alternate title of this post is courtesy of my cat, whom I just found sprawled comfortably on the keyboard when I returned from getting more coffee. He obviously thinks there's something to it, so it stays.

There's a soft tropical quality to the late spring and summer rains here I'd forgotten about. My window's open and everything smells alive. I love it.

Without further ado, what I've enjoyed reading this rainy Monday morning:

Going Dutch: How I Learned to Love the European Welfare State Grabbed from a friend of mine who posted it on her facebook page. How the Dutch combine capitalism and socialism. Yes, it can be done.

Bright Lights Film Journal gives a thoughtful, favorable review of Charlie Kaufman and Hollywood's Merry Band of Pranksters, Fabulists, and Dreamers. You know you can still buy your copy in the US, the UK, or anywhere else Amazon's tendrils reach--although naturally, you should purchase it from your local brick-and-mortar--preferably independent--if at all possible.

Despite the Maoists' rise to legitimate power in Nepal, the government is still in crisis, the streets of Kathmandu still fill with protesters. Aside from the fact that outside of Nepal, being a Maoist has got to be a pretty lonely position to stake out these days, transforming from a revolutionary to a politician is almost never easy, it seems. Vaclav Havel did all right but I think he's a bit of an exception.

Happy May Day!

photo by Derek Hill

One year ago today D and I marched through Malaga, Spain in the May Day parade. The sun was hot and the sky was a flawless blue. This is my favorite picture of that day. Workers of the world unite!

Best New Horror #20

Last week I learned that Stephen Jones is buying my story "These Things We Have Always Known," which appeared in Black Static #8, for this year's volume of The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror. It's the twentieth appearance of the anthology and my third time to be selected, and, as always, I'm very excited to be included. I've been reading this series from its beginnings and quite a few writers I admire have made their way into its pages over the year. The book will be out this fall.

a little light reading

Here are some links I've been meaning to post for a few days:

The New Yorker has a really interesting article on Edgar Allan Poe--and the economy of horror fiction.

Shortly before his death at 96, British union leader Jack Jones talks about his time in the International Brigades during the Spanish Civil War.

The Guardian has published J.G. Ballard's last short story.

ballard

J.G. Ballard wrote what I have long thought one of the best opening lines I've ever read:

Later, as he sat on his balcony eating the dog, Dr. Robert Laing reflected on the unusual events that had taken place within this huge apartment building during the previous three months.

That's from his novel High Rise. If I had to pick a favorite it would probably be the weird post-apocalyptic imagery of The Crystal World. But I've probably only read about half of his total output. Reading Ballard was never a comfortable experience: those bleak assessments of humanity and the modern world, his savage extrapolations of our love affairs with technology, his brutal near-future dystopias (sometimes as near as the day after tomorrow, it seemed). His essays and the interviews he gave were at least as intriguing as the fiction he wrote.

I knew he was quite ill yet somehow news of his death still comes as a shock. He was writing to the very end and I think that's the sort of thing we all hope for (whatever it is that you do with passion). But he was one of my favorites and he was an original and I think he is a voice that we need, but of course those voices always fall silent eventually.

J.G. Ballard 15 November 1930 - 19 April 2009

promises, promises

A couple of days ago I bought a bag of chips (that's crisps for my peeps back in Ireland) which not only claimed to be "Tuscan Three-Cheese" flavored (okay), but also promised, in writing across the front of the package, that they were "a Mediterranean vacation in a bag."

The chips were pretty tasty, but I'm sorry to report that, much to my surprise, they did not in fact transport me to the sunny shores of Catalunya.

Hm. If only those Lays brand jamón-flavored potato chips you can get all over Spain were available around here--I'm sure that would do the trick.

six weeks

Six weeks ago we rolled out of bed in our Dublin hotel, popped a protesting kitty back into his despised Sherpa carrier, and caught a taxi to the airport. As we sat in the airport, as our departure time neared, the thought of leaving Ireland, and Europe in general, weighed upon me more and more heavily. I felt like I couldn't breathe. We boarded the plane, it trundled down the runway, and tears gathered in my eyes and spilled down my face.

Now, there are some wonderful things about being back in the US for us, don't get me wrong. The weather in Athens is lovely and sunny and warm right now (except for that little matter of seven inches of snow last weekend, but we'll just pass right on by that anomaly). The cost of living is considerably cheaper when you're living off US dollars and salaries (although of course the dollar is now worth more against the euro than it was the entire year we were over there--grrr!). I love love love the old house we found and that we both have quiet private spaces to work and our big backyard and being reunited with our books again (although as one might expect, we're finding that we did make a few mistakes in The Great Book Purge of 2008). I'm really excited about seeing old friends again and doing a lot of travelling here in the Southeast and along the East Coast. And did I mention the Mexican food?

Having said all that, now that the chaos of the last few weeks has begun to slowly recede into something resembling normalcy (I said resembling--there is, for example, a stack of unpacked boxes next to me as I write this and nowhere to put their contents, because furniture is scarce at the moment)--I am missing our friends in Ballinamore and I am missing something indefinable about the way people treat one another in Ireland. And I'm missing Spain and walking on the beach in Barcelona, which we were doing this time a year ago, and--I'm just missing it, being over there instead of here.

And yet I sound mournful but I'm not. I know mournful--I know all too well that feeling when the wanderlust lodges itself somewhere under my ribcage and just hurts, when I have to make myself stop reading or even thinking about other places because I know I'm not going travelling anytime soon and it's sort of like a phantom limb, the pain of absence and loss, of something that should be there and isn't and aches so unbearably. I don't feel like that. What I feel is a happy anticipation of what's ahead, of travels to come and going to places old and new.

I've got wandering on the brain, though, and to that end I've added a new link on the sidebar, travel and expat journals I like a lot. Some of them, like the two Spain journals, I've only discovered in the past year; others, I've been reading for a while and Wired 2 the World the longest of all, for a good 10 years, since the couple took their round-the-world journey. The travellers and expats that write them are singles and couples and families; they are different ages and write from a number of different perspectives, but they're all lively and interesting and engaged in the world around them. Check them out. Plan your own journey. See the world. Be alive.

Uncle Monty's cottage

Twenty-some years after its making, I'm not sure if we can yet refer to Withnail and I as a classic film, but certainly another decade or so will do it. At any rate, I noticed a few weeks ago that Uncle Monty's cottage had been listed for sale. Now a fellow's bought it, one who sees the place as a cultural treasure and wants to restore it (though, one presumes, not too much!), preserving even the graffiti scribbled about the walls that fans of the film have left behind over the years. He's talking Wordsworth (it is the Lake District, after all). We can only guess how Mr. Wordsworth would feel about being spoken of in the same breath as Bruce Robinson's black comedy, but you can tour the cottage with the new owner (graffiti included) here.

higgledy-piggledy!

It's March already! And it's been so long since I've posted, I'm just gonna jump right in here, and it'll get better from here on out.

1. Apologies to anyone local or faraway who I've been neglecting. It's not you, it's me. It's been a really difficult, chaotic move. I mean, not bad or traumatic or anything, but high on the pain-in-the-assedness index. It's only the last few days I've started to catch my breath and sort of feel like myself again.

2. I've been catching up with some movies I missed while I was away, via Netflix. My favorites so far are also among my most-anticipated: Woody Allen's Vicky Cristina Barcelona (although I was mildly annoyed by the fact that characters kept mentioning Catalan culture and identity but no one seemed to speak Catalan--including the purported Catalans--and the culture seemed wholly Spanish, not Catalan. But otherwise I loved it) and Persepolis, a film adaptation of Marjane Satrapi's graphic novel about growing up in post-revolutionary Iran. I have more to say about both of these films, but who am I kidding? I'll probably never get around to saying it here. Or maybe I'll surprise myself.

Also, Let the Right One In, which I was actually able to catch at Athens Cine, is one of the most moving and horrific horror films I've ever seen. Every time I think there can't possibly by any stretch of the imagination be any life left in the vampire trope (life left? vampire? get it? sorry...) someone proves me wrong.

3. My friend Dave Schwartz got nominated for a Nebula for his first novel, Superpowers! This book came out right around the time I got to Ireland and I tried to get the Ballinamore library to order it, but they never did. See, they should have, because now it's a Nebula nominee. Come on, Ballinamore library!

4. Speaking of Ballinamore, I've been having strange dreams in which various residents of Ballinamore appear in the usual unlikely dream situations.

I've been daydreaming, on the other hand, about Spain: just the other day I closed my eyes and I was back in the Plaza Larga on that sunny afternoon we sat on a bench people-watching, Spaniards and Romanys and hippies and junkies all going about their business and I said something like, "This would be a good place to disappear," which is exactly what I went on to have my poor character try and do in the story that will someday appear in the Apparitions anthology over there in my sidebar.

I remember those moments sitting in the plaza as among the most perfect of my life, as a part of those jeweled moments of absolute awareness and contentment that travel gives me every once in a while. They are usually mundane, utterly unremarkable, completely magical.

And one year ago today, we touched down at the airport in sunny Barcelona from rainy London.

5. February wasn't bad but it was....(hm, already used chaotic. Google a synonym for chaotic and get: anarchic, disordered, disorganized, every which way, harum-scarum, helter-skelter [yikes!], higgledy-piggledy (best word of all!), rampageous [I am not familiar with this word but I like it and will use it in a sentence as soon as I am able], riotus, topsy-turvy, tumultous, turbulent, upside-down. Yes, yes, and yes, it was all these things.) I'm planning on having a much better March.

status update, usa version

We're doing well. It's sunny here. We have a deposit down on a gorgeous house. The kitty traveled well and is busy taking things over at my mom's house. We miss the hell out of our friends in Ballinamore, and frankly, the "security" at the Atlanta airport almost had us booking the next flight right back. Once we realized, as D pointed out, we don't have to live at the Atlanta airport, we settled down a little bit. (But we'd like to officially apologize on behalf of our xenophobic government to all you poor foreign visitors who have been treated like criminals flying in to Atlanta. If it makes you feel any better, they don't treat citizens much better. What a horrifying intro to the land o' the free.)

One thing many people probably don't know about me is just how dear to my heart the town of Athens, Georgia is. I never thought I'd live here again. I'm really happy to be here now. The sun has been shining for days! I need sunglasses! But I still wish I had a tardis so I could step through space and time and into McGirl's this weekend.

More soon, once I'm better settled.

one week

photo by Liz Lennon

It's hard to believe that in a week's time I'll be an on airplane headed back to the U.S., even though we've known this for many weeks now. This wasn't part of our original plan. But times and circumstances change, and the best-laid plans, etc. etc.

The good news is, it's been a remarkable year, and we'll be back in Ballinamore soon. That's why the banner in the above photo says Goodbye for now. Our friends here gave us the best of send-offs last night, from the food and drink at Maggie's beforehand to the surprise of McGirl's-turned-disco-bar (!) (sorry, regulars!). Smoke machine! Disco lights! Music! And a farewell banner! There are no words for the kindness of the farewell we've received. You can see the whole night in photos here.

And earlier in the week, Gabriel, whose wife Dee runs a shop up the street called The Forge, took us on a tour of County Leitrim--photos here. I'm going to miss it so much. All the people we've met here--too many to list you all without leaving someone out. The welcome you've all given us. The way you've made it feel like home. We didn't mean to leave so soon. We'll be back as soon as we can. Slán go foill.

snow was general all over ireland

Last night and in the wee hours of the morning the snow fell, beautiful swirling fluffy white flakes, and when I woke up this morning it blanketed the ground outside, even though it's mostly melted now. It made me wish I could recall from memory the gorgeous final paragraph of James Joyce's "The Dead," nine sentences that make up one of my favorite closing passages in all literature...and which have always made me long to see an Irish snowfall:

A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.

3. Blood From a Stone

At the beginning of the summer, my neighbor loaned me a stack of Donna Leon's Venice-set Inspector Brunetti mysteries, and I've been reading my way through a good chunk of the series ever since. With Brunetti, we trawl the seedy underbelly of Venice and of Italian bureaucracy; as in most of the crime and mystery fiction I enjoy, justice does not always prevail. Despite the cynicism, Leon's books are still a bit lighter than much of my usual fare in the genre: Brunetti takes pleasure and refuge in his family (his wife Paola is a left-wing professor of American literature), good food, good wine, and his two friends at the Questura--his fellow policeman Vianello and the indefatigable Signora Elettra, who, in the guise of a department secretary, hacks into systems all over Italy and (sometimes) keeps Brunetti's corrupt boss Patta at bay.

Blood from a Stone begins with the execution-style murder of a vu cumpra--one of the many African street vendors who entice tourists with knockoff designer goods--and wends its way through a web of international corruption and conspiracy. While this wasn't among my favorites of the series, Leon's always satisfying, always entertaining, and always leaves me with a bitter undertaste to counter the mouth-watering meals Brunetti enjoys as he relentlessly pursues his often-hopeless cases.

From the book:

When Rubini showed up more than ten minutes later, a stack of files in his hands, he explained that the delay was caused by his having searched for the file containing all of the photos that had been taken of the Africans who had been arrested in the last year. "We're supposed to photograph them every time we arrest them," he explained.

"Supposed to?" Brunetti asked.

Rubini set a large stack of papers on Brunetti's desk and sat down. From Murano, Rubini had been on the force for more than two decades, and, like Vianello, had moved up through the ranks slowly, perhaps blocked by the same refusal to curry favor with the men in power. Tall and so thin as to seem emaciated, Rubini was in fact a passionate rower and every year was among the first ten to cross the finish line of the Vogalonga.

"We did at the beginning, but after a while it seemed a waste of time to take the photo of a man we'd arrested six or seven times and who we say hello to on the street." He pushed the papers closer to Brunetti and added, "We call them tu by now, and they address us all by name."

Brunetti pulled the papers towards him. "Why do you still bother?"

"What, to arrest them?"

Brunetti nodded.

"Dottor Patta wants arrests, so we go and arrest them. It makes the statistics look good."

Blood From a Stone on Amazon UK

perigee moon

Be sure to step out and take a look at the moon tonight, preferably when it's on the horizon, before it's fully risen in the sky. It's the biggest full moon of 2009. In addition to its brightness and its size, cold weather perigee moons often produce wonderful optical effects like halos.