Boots and Bibles

Don't Forget - They're Called Elves for a Reason

Well, it's Xmas eve. I hope you're all completing your feats of strength.

Anyway, about this time last year, August Wahnsinger sent me a message about the goings-on near the North Pole. It inspired a certain blog post.

Simply put, I'm always amazed that we spend so much time talking about Christmas elves, but never really applying this notion to its logical conclusion!

That story is worth re-telling, both this year, and every year that I see fit. So here once more is "The Yuletide Awakening"!

August Wahnsinger: It's the Real World That Scares Him

My friend August (I get to call him "Gus", but not in public, he chided me after that last blog entry), as many of you know, is perenially haunted by visions. He claims these visions come to him from alternate dimensions and that he must put these visions into writing in order for them to stop clouding his sight, memory and imagination. He sees some strange things, August does, but in the due course of his existence he has become used to him. Our unusual is his blasé, our supernatural is his normal, our exotic is his humdrum, etc.

When he called me yesterday well and truly freaked out, I knew something was wrong – normality was happening to him. But it wasn't the happy normality according to August – oh, no! – it was the kind of normality that's destroying everything good in this world. It surrounds us but somehow lays just outside our vision. It was this kind of vision that haunted him. It wasn't vampires, aliens, robotic hive-minds or even the question of what precisely that plastic sort of odour is coming from his used gym-socks. August has had delusions of reality...

You can read about it more if you want to click through here.

Black Wednesday Really Sinks In

Anyone following the writing and publishing blogs has certainly read about what is being dubbed "Black Wednesday", which I alluded to in yesterday's first post to some extent. Now, all of this "bloodletting" in the publishing industry sucks for anyone with literary aspirations, or even simple fondness for those odd, archaic things we like to call books. But as I was thinking today, it hit me like a tonne of cow manure...

...Bantam Dell is being swallowed!

Soon it occurred to me that as a result, something else is happening...

...Bantam Spectra is also being swallowed!

As I stopped to consider this information, it hit even harder...

...the publisher of some of my favourite new books this year, not to mention the retainer of some of my favourite authors, is about to be swallowed and possibly dismantled by its parent company!

At this point, my eyes grew wide with terror, thinking back on how peculiarly impressed I have been with this imprints' recent acquisitions. In a time where it feels like very little is moving forward in the realms of fantasy and science fiction, the editors and staff working at Spectra have really shown themselves noteworthy.

Now, no layoffs have been announced at Random House/ Doubleday/ Bantam/ Etc. other than a couple of top editors – but you've gotta' know that it's not going to stop there. Restructuring as a money-saving endeavour is always done with the intention of halving staffs; it's foolish to have two people doing the same job at the same company, after all. So what of all the Bantam Dell imprints, now? According to the New York Times, they are presently "reviewing their staffs". Hopefully, if the review goes well, and Random House's HR department has a brain, they will keep the same editors and staff on hand that have lately proliferated such impressive works.

Troublingly, my faith in corporate America (and the shenanigans of the publishing industry, in particular) is not exactly stellar.

August Wahnsiner: Peddler to the Masses

I do not like Twitter. I find Twitter to be the natural, albeit lamentable, consequence of a centuries-long degradation in communication, particularly in written works.

We began many moons ago with books – luscious, thick, long, wordy books! Then we moved into the realm of tracts and pamphlets after the advent of movable type. Slightly less long, slightly less thick, but in the right hands, just as luscious (perhaps more so because of the medium's brevity). Soon came newspapers, which were like regularly updated compilations of mini-pamphlets. Breadth and quantity made up for the lack of depth and quality in newspapers, but they still informed wide audiences in an admirable enough manner.

After another couple hundred of years and a few world-changing inventions later, the blog appeared as the new medium par excellence of the literary... errm... not elite... what would I call them? The literary avant garde? In a strange, bastardised sense, I suppose that works. Blogs (individually, at least) cut out the breadth of the newspaper, and due to the immediacy of the medium (coupled with a lack of editorial supervision) didn't do much to make up the quality, either, but the beauty (so it is believed) is that anyone can participate. Web 2.0! Democracy for the masses! Voyeurism and bitter rants, all vaunted as the great liberators of thought and discourse! Huzzah!

But that's all irrelevant now; we have Twitter. 140 characters or less to convey ideas, feelings, expressions, candid glimpses into one's personal life... Twitter makes perfect sense in light of Western man's cultural plate-tectonics.

I Don't Belong Here

"Poseur."

I'm walking down the halls, and I hear the word over and over in my head. I nervously take my seat at my desk. I keep my music turned down as low as possible.

"Poseur."

I smile when everyone else walks by. I greet them with my "voiceover" accent. I rush past as I step through the halls. I hope no one sees the tattoos when I fold my arms.

"Poseur."

I don't follow their magazines. I don't listen to their music. I don't like their clothes, their sports, their haircuts, their suburban living or their armchair patriotism. I don't believe in the political establishments they put so much faith into. And the economics system that they live their lives to support? The more I learn about it, the more I detest it.

It's really simple. In the narrow and over-lit hallways of American finance where I currently eke out a wage, I am a poseur. Meanwhile, in the tattoo shops, the record stores, the hardcore shows, and the history-battered streets of Brooklyn and the Lower East Side, I find a perfect home. Where other baldheaded miscreants attack each other for sport, I feel a sense of scum-class pride. When singing choruses in homage to North London's finest or the vulgar heritage of New York City's streets, my heart feels warm.

Nothing makes me feel cold and alone like dealing with corporate BS.