Gone Fishin'

In a couple of hours I'll be on my way to WisCon, so I won't be 'round these parts unless I get a chance to conreport. (Translation: I'm not going to be here until Tuesday soonest.) Coming soon: the long-awaited results and analysis of the author's survey on copyright which I conducted last fall. I wanted to get it up before the con, but things started piling up (and in the case of the pages of The Dogtown Review demanding to be assembled and stapled and folded, I mean that literally).

I'll be reading at the con, on Saturday at midnight:

Addictions and Other Imaginary Friends

Saturday, Midnight-1:15 a.m in Conference Room 2

Group: Dave Schwartz, Simon Owens, Douglas Lain, Elad Haber

Should be fun. Hope to see many of you there!

Say . . . Have You Heard About This One Yet?

The marketing blitz for Say . . . continues apace, with the latest installment of What's It About? featuring yours truly. There's even a pretty nice photograph, which I might just have to steal for my profile. Go read, go buy. How many times do I have to tell you people?

Speaking of Elephants

I know, I know, but they're not giving me enough to do here.

The Elephant Sanctuary in Tennessee has a two-part mission:

To provide a haven for old, sick or needy elephants in a setting of green pastures, old-growth forests, spring-fed ponds and a heated barn for cold winter nights.

To provide education about the crisis facing these social, sensitive, passionately intense, playful, complex, exceedingly intelligent and endangered creatures.

The Sanctuary is not open to the public, but they do provide a webcam where, with luck, you can get a look at one of the residents. You could also donate to the Sanctuary, if you were so inclined.

Also, this site collects many of photographer Gregory Colbert's portraits of animals and humans interacting in unexpected and moving ways. He has a lot of elephant photographs, one of which I've printed up for a bit of inspiration as I work (slowly, slowly) on developing my elephant story.

Just to Let You Know

Dean Francis Alfar (whose wonderful story "L'Aquilone du Estrellas (The Kite of Stars)" was a highlight of The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror collection) has a blog, as well as a story coming up in the new Ratbastards chapbook, Rabid Transit: Menagerie, which I am much looking forward to.

That is all.

Getting This Out of the Way

Besides, I was meaning to do an all-time ten.

1) The number of books I've owned?

I honestly don't think I can count that high. Not without doing a lot more work than I care to.

2) The last book(s) I bought?

Coming of Age With Elephants by Joyce Poole (excellent, BTW); The Astonishing Elephant by Shana Alexander (also good, although I've got a ways to read yet); The Fate of the Elephant by Douglas H. Chadwick; and Silent Thunder: In the Presence of Elephants by Katy Payne. (I'm doing research, can you tell?)

3) The last book I read?

Really, it's the Poole book mentioned above; but before that it was Black Juice. Which, wow.

4) Five books that mean a lot to me: (in no particular order)

Screw five. Here's ten twenty.* I could go for more, but I'd still be leaving some out:

1. One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia Marquez

2. Mama Day, Gloria Naylor

3. Don Quixote, Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

4. The Catcher in the Rye, J.D. Salinger

5. Slow River, Nicola Griffith

6. Hopscotch, Julio Cortazar

7. Seven Gothic Tales, Isak Dinesen

8. Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life, Jon Lee Anderson

9. Black Glass, Karen Joy Fowler

10. Beloved, Toni Morrison

11. The Sound and the Fury, William Faulkner

12. Collected Fictions, Jorge Luis Borges

13. Her Smoke Rose Up Forever, James Tiptree Jr.

14. The Poetic Edda, A Bunch of Dead Skalds

15. On Stranger Tides, Tim Powers

16. Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands, Jorge Amado

17. The Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien

18. The Odyssey, Homer

19. Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, Mircea Eliade

20. Invisible Cities, Italo Calvino

Sports Counselor

My friend and old college roommate Kiljoong (he'll always be Killer to me) moved to Chicago from Seoul when he was thirteen, and he's been a Cubs fan ever since. Nowadays he's part of the sociology faculty at DePaul here in Chicago, and teaches a class called The Sociology of Sports. His story appears in Gene Wojciechowski's new book Cubs Nation: 162 Games. 162 Stories. 1 Addiction, which juxtaposes the games of the Cubs 2004 season with stories of their fans. Killer gets three pages, in which we learn that his sister still weeps at the mention of Leon Durham. He also tells the story of that infamous night in 2003 when the Cubs blew the National League Championship Series:

"I live up in Rogers Park," he says. "A half hour after the game [Game 7 at Wrigley], I was walking home near campus and this guy was sitting outside a bar, just totally devastated--you could just tell. He had a Cubs jersey and he was just completely out of it. So I put my hand on his shoulder and said, 'You know, next spring, we do this over again.'

"And he just started crying."

If you've ever been a fan of any sort, especially of a cursed losing team, this book is worth checking out. (It's also worthwhile if you're just a fan of Kiljoong.)

This Quiz Is Meaningless

You scored as Postmodernist. Postmodernism is the belief in complete open interpretation. You see the universe as a collection of information with varying ways of putting it together. There is no absolute truth for you; even the most hardened facts are open to interpretation. Meaning relies on context and even the language you use to describe things should be subject to analysis. Postmodernist 88% Cultural Creative 75% Existentialist 50% Materialist 50% Romanticist 50% Modernist 44% Idealist 31% Fundamentalist 25% What is Your World View? (corrected...again) created with QuizFarm.com

If Only I Knew How to Pull An Image From a .pdf File. Oh, and How to Post an Image, too. That Would Be Really Keen.

Dogtown lives!

That's right, after an extended break at the dive down the street where the jukebox only plays Patsy Cline and the taps only pour PBR, The Dogtown Review has finally stumbled home. This issue contains fiction from Troy D. Ehlers, Myra Margolin, Marianne Westphal and David J. Schwartz*, Michael Samerdyke, Keith Demanche, and Derrick Lin, as well as a color cover that I wish I could show you (see above) and more art from the aforementioned Mr. Demanche. All for the low, low price of $3. Look for it at WisCon, or at the above website once it is updated (which, god willing, will happen next week--one perk of the online classes is, they teach you a bit o' HTML). Paypal orders also accepted at the profile email. Questions? Questions. I have them too. Don't we all?

*Yes, I am publishing myself. There was soul-searching, there was debate, the end result is am publishing myself. Make of that what you will.