strange radiation: the pool of radiance archive
Adventures with an unreliable narrator.
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Jan 31 05: shun-SHENG duh gao-WAHN.
Everybody knows about Firefly, right? Brilliant and predictably short-lived space western created by Joss Whedon, the man behind Buffy? If you don’t, you should run-do-not-walk and go get your hands on the DVDs. Funny, exciting, and inventive, it was a serious good time. And so it, like my beloved Farscape, met an untimely death so that its host network could broadcast reality series and other such tripe. Fie upon them all. Fie, I say! Fools!
Wait, where was I? Sorry. One of the nicest touches of Firefly’s world-building was that its mainline humanspace culture sprang from an Earth-that-was where Chinese traditions had achieved equal ubiquity with that of the West. People were casually bilingual. Bao were served in the galley, if you were lucky. Emergency klaxons warned of life-support failure in English and Chinese; commercial signage used either orthography or both; clothes fused elements of both traditions. Best of all, all on-camera insults were delivered in inventive and brightly colored Mandarin. The DVD commentaries sometimes clue you in on the more metaphorical bits as they go by. Most amusing.
Inevitably, some jing-tsai entity has produced a complete Firefly Chinese pinyinary. Every utterance, every episode. If you’re curious about how to call somebody a ‘stupid, inbred pile of meat’ in Mandarin, now you have somewhere to go. (It should help you while away the hours until the movie comes out in September. Oh boy oh boy!)
Thanks to Patrick Nielsen Hayden for the tip.
Jan 27 05: the eye of arrrrrgh
Hoo boy. One upon a time there was a vanity press that insisted it was a Traditional Publisher, despite the fact that it behaved like nothing of the sort and seemed to exist only to suck the cash out of people desperate to have their bad novels see the light of day.
This vanity press became notorious among people who write for a living, not just for the generally abysmal quality of the work it published but for the way it wrung money out of people who really didn’t deserve that kind of treatment, no matter how deluded they were. The vanity press insisted it did nothing wrong, that it picked promising works from the inbox and helped them achieve the greatness for which they were destined. For a reasonable fee, of course. For several quite reasonable fees. So shut up, you, or we’ll sue. You’re just jealous and/or elitist, anyway.
The cranky observers wondered: was it even possible to have your book rejected by this vanity press? How bad did a novel have to be before this vanity press started to make decisions that resembled those of a Traditional Publisher?
So a bunch of authors hatched a plot to write the worst book ever in human history, as a collective project, and send it out. Thus was born Atlanta Nights, by Travis Tea. Here’s the message board that has the report on what happened. Here’s where you can buy the book, and also read some very funny reviews thereof. Here’s the book’s entire text if you want to read it online (in rich-text format). In the words of one reviewer, it’s the literary version of Plan 9 from Outer Space. It’s bad, it’s bad, it’s bad. It’s truly breathtaking. It’s bad in all the ways a book can be bad, plus a few more ways that had hitherto applied only to war criminals.
I must have a copy. It’s so bad it hurts. Your brain tells you to stop reading, but you can’t take your eyes off it. (It’s also rather smutty, so the full text should be labeled as Not Safe For Work.)
Thank you to Teresa Nielsen Hayden for spreading the word on this one.
Jan 22 05: show, going on
For anybody who was wondering: no, the blizzard is not going to cause the cancellation of tonight’s Brahms concert at Carnegie.
At first I was skeptical. I mean, I left the house on just the other morning and they were saying one to four inches over the weekend. Whyfor the panic? People were acting like it was going to be fire snow or something. (You know: some of it catches in your eyelashes and you burst into flame; rivers of lava oozing down the streets and into the storm drains. Fire snow.)
This, though. This is a storm. Visibility is, oh, under a quarter-mile from our bedroom window. Four blocks, maybe. It’s nice. It’s quiet and insistent and it makes you feel like curling up on the bed with a comforter and a book. We’ll be wearing our boots as we head to the hall, and changing into concert shoes once we get there. Hope to see you at Carnegie.
Jan 16 05: hello world
If you can read this, the upgrade to MT 3.14 has gone successfully.
UPDATED: Okay, it seems to have worked. If you see anything odd going on, feel free to make some noise.
Jan 15 05: metropolitan
Tom and Genevieve are in town from Ithaca for the long weekend. As such, we got to have the sort of Manhattan day today that we locals only seem to get when we’ve got somebody visiting from out of town.
After being stood up by the superintendent for the umpty-skillionth time (he’s supposed to install a carbon-monoxide detector, and to stabilize the doorknob on the front door), we went out into the cold morning air. We took the subway up to 96th Street and then walked through Central Park to see the Aztec show at the Guggenheim. I know that it’s bad anthropology to say stuff like this, but: what a seriously weird bunch of people they were. The show wasn’t completely satisfying as an art exhibition or as a cultural overview, but it was still interesting. Lots of gold; lots of stern and carnivorous gods; lots of death. (If you’re ever invited to participate in a Xipe Totec festival, decline.) Also a graceful pumpkin of green stone, and a two-foot grashopper carved from carnelian.
Next, chicken soup and grilled cheese sandwiches at some random diner on Lexington Avenue. About which what more could I say? The air was getting colder, the light already fading, and we needed a little something to get us all the way to dinner. It was perfect. And then we wandered a while, and ambled through the racks at Kinokuniya, and then we went home for a bit and put up our feet.
Dinner was Korean barbeque at Dae Dong on 32nd Street, in vast quantities, spicy and garlicky and savory, with fifty little bowls of companion foods crisp and smoky and fresh and pickled. Wrap it all up with a lettuce leaf—shake the water off it first, preferably on one of your dining companions when he’s not looking—and don’t worry about getting the juice all over your fingers.
After that, a dash down to the Village on the subway, and a quick stroll, for dessert at Chocolate Bar. The brownies and truffles are very good, sure; the chocolate-covered patties of peanut butter or homemade-marshmallow-and-banana are quite fine, it’s true; but the spicy hot chocolate is The Thing. Creamy as anything, made with ground chocolate (not cocoa powder) and allspice and cinnamon and ancho chiles and smoked chipotles. Oh my god. I finished the last sip at least an hour ago, and I still feel like I’m radiating a languid sort of joy.
This is a good city, you know? And I am fortunate indeed to be able to partake of its bounty.
Jan 13 05: request
Oh, blast. Anybody out there have Yoon Ha Lee’s mailing address? I did, but now I don’t, and I have something I need to get to her. Yoon, are you online at the moment? Somebody send me a note at andrew at strangeradiation.com…
EDITED: Eureka! Found it. Off goes the mysterious package.
fabulous, baby
Fans of mid-twentieth-century American design and/or history, and/or of Las Vegas, will enjoy an article published today in the Times. It’s a long interview with Betty Willis, who designed the city’s iconic “Welcome to Fabulous Las Vegas” sign, as well as a lot of the other classic neon signage of the day. She’s 81 now and one might describe her as “a real character.” Thanks to CJR for the tip.
Jan 10 05: notice
Have I ever mentioned how insane it makes me to watch people double-click on hyperlinks? Now I have, I guess.
Once is all you need, my friends. The internet can hear you just fine.
Jan 4 05: Will Eisner, 1917-2005
Will Eisner has died at the age of 87, as a result of complications following quadruple bypass surgery. His absence will be felt, but so will his presence—in the form of the tremendous advances he brought to the comics medium, and in the way those innovations influenced American pop culture.
I met him once, introduced to him at a convention by my boss cat yronwode. In addition to being a hugely talented visionary, he was also a really nice guy.
Jan 3 05: attack of the 50-foot floozy
I was thrilled out of my mind when I saw the Trimspa billboard coming down last week. That Anna Nicole Whoozis doing some sort of low-rent Marilyn Monroe thing, looming over Times Square and pitching diet pills? She put me off my protein shake in the morning.
So imagine my delight as I came up out of the subway this morning, fresh from the gym, on my way to grab some food and then off to the office, sailing along sidewalks now blessedly free of the mindbending mobs of tourists. And then I came out of the Jamba Juice, bucket-sized Blue Banana Blast in hand, and there she was. Anna. In a new, even trashier billboard.
Anna honey, let’s talk for a minute. This Trimspa thing was only going to burnish your image so much. I mean, your claim to fame was that you were an exotic dancer who inherited a serious pile of cash from a wizened husband, had a brief fling with a modeling career, and then starred in what is said to have been the nadir of reality TV. (I never watched it, but word gets around.) And now?
Now you’re making faces over 7th Avenue. Please, for the love of god, stop. I mean, queen-of-the-porn-stars Jenna Jameson has her own, bigger billboard half a block away, but you the one who look like a skanky-ass ho.