small change

I have to admit that I am… well, sometimes I fail the English major challenge. I hate some classics. Just HATE them. Ethan Fromme: Edith Wharton unmedicated, and sadly in need. Tess of the d’Urbervilles: Thomas Hardy’s cross-dressing fetishes unleashed. Little Women — well, I can’t even formulate a pithy single-sentence indictment of that disaster. Suffice it to say I hated all of them, even as a little girl who was given those books to read as the only type of fiction that was presentable, because it was litt’riture. With that specter before me I have no idea why I became and English major. Anyway, all this is to say some idiot is making things worse… Now we have Wuthering Heights: in manga. Obviously, Heathcliff and chibi Cathy are the puce icing on the nauseas cake.


Strange drift lately… read two stories on two different science fiction ezine pages, and ended up following links to two different literary erotica websites. What’s that about? Probably because my brain’s attuned to A.I. nowadays, thanks to D.’s researching that direction… gotta admit, I hope University of Maastricht, the school that alleges robot sex will be happening soon isn’t on his list of schools to check out. Sometimes, philosophy seems full of pointless questions — but this!!? The guy says the minute someone in Cosmo says “I had sex with a robot,” everyone will jump on the bandwagon. Right


Christmas this year is a scab to be picked. If I can’t have home, I don’t want anything. And I can’t have home: it’s too expensive, and anyway, nothing has changed there, and there really isn’t any point. (You can be brainwashed with holiday hype tripe in any country. If you find one where you can’t, take me with you.) And people keep asking what they can send, our Anglophilic friends enviously thinking of us at evensongs and rounds of holiday parties presided over by hearty, pink-cheeked Wenceslas lookalikes. And I stand on floor five of our fourth floor flat, looking down from the windows, wondering if I cut myself and bled on the passers-by, they would look up. Merriment and joy to all, of course. I hate this city. I hate cities in general, but this one is frozen filth.

I think the worst thing about being here, away from the me that was, is that I thought I’d grown up. House: check. Car: check. Life:…check. So, I thought it would be an adventure to go away and be elsewhere, and surely everyone else thinks its an adventure; that’s all I hear is “aren’t you so lucky.” Problem is, wherever you go, there you are. You try and do what you want, give up on all the boundaries you’ve placed and just let yourself be, but all you do is end up eating your bodyweight in Cheetos or something, and wake up lying on the floor in a squalid house with your hair sticking to your face. The need to regress implicitly tangles with the yearning to evolve — leaving one stuck in the middle where we stay. It is astounding how all of our houses of cards crash when we get down to the gears and metal of ourselves. No illusions: we hate ourselves. We hate the world. And it isn’t even winter yet.

I see why there are more places to drink here than there are grocery stores.

It’s clear today, though. And the sunset — at 3:39 p.m. — is tinged with silent peach.

EDIT: 12/12 – Again — the robot sex. WHAT. IS. UP. WITH. THAT.

Monday, Monday

A rare, gorgeously clear day brings us to the treehouse, a bit cold, but optimistic. Saints & Spinners wants to know which A.A. Milne character you are. I’m pretty sure personality-wise most people tend to hang between Eeyore or Owl, but my favorite character is the unsung Roo. However, I think most adults will end up being Kanga, won’t they? I mean, who would admit to being an unstrung manic like Tigger?!

I’m feeling a bit cranky about the L.A. Times article by staff writer Scott Timberg that derides Robert Heinlen as being a has-been and his work as not being anything classic to stand the test of time. “‘When an emerging science-fiction writer’s work earns him comparisons to Robert A. Heinlein,” Dave Itzkoff begins a 2006 New York Times review, “should he take them as a compliment?'” OUCH. I disagree — if I, as a YA writer had a YA science fiction novel compared to Heinlen, I would be beyond pleased. I love his books, and reading about tough, wary, narrow-eyed young people who, with steely determination, go out and take on the perils of the universe. Admittedly, I haven’t read that much of his adult fiction but Have Spacesuit– Will Travel is like the best combination of a frontier space western novel, ever. As a writer, I look at his work and see archetypes and the Hero’s quest written in all kinds of interesting ways. It’s a good exercise to mimic his style, for those who want to write adventures. No matter what anyone says, I can’t imagine that his YA novels, anyway, will ever really be unpopular (as long as no one else makes movies out of them — When I realized Starship Troopers was based on a novel of his? It just proved my point about YA novels and movies. BAD).

Cluck Roosterman is guest blogging at Bottom Shelf Books — promoting Punk Farm’s latest gig, their fundraising raffle. For only five bucks, you can buy in to a raffle to maybe win a painting of your favorite Punk Farm rocker. The money raised is going to the Central Massachusetts Arts Assembly, and to cover a few band expenses (band stuff — you know, instrument tuning, etc.). Check out the portraiture — punk rockers don’t sit still for their portraits, man. They make MUSIC. More awesomeness for a good cause.

Via Bookshelves of Doom, probably the most inappropriate YA book of all time is being celebrated by Jezebel, and with it the bygone YA literary trope of The Parent That Had to Die. (Remember them?) Ah, the 8O’s. One ten year span, one thousand percent awful…