Scribbledehobbledehoyden: The Magpie's Eye: Page 151

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A candle, a flame made from a scrap of label from a certain cola, and a slogan suggested by one used to sell expensive wine.

I think this is self-explanatory.

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Another Bookstore Bites the Dust

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Sometimes it seems like I've spent my entire life watching bookstores close.  I came to Philadelphia in the winter of 1973 to discover that a landmark bookstore (I thought it was Leary's, but Wikipedia tells me that closed in '69) was giving away all its books free just prior to closing its doors forever.  For a time, my favorite bookstore was Middle Earth Books, but the owner finally had to shut it down and go into business rehabbing houses.  For years, Hourglass Books was the focus of the science fiction community in Philadelphia.  But then Fred Fisher concluded that he could do better things with his life than run an SF bookstore.  There was a great little bookstore on Main Street in Manayunk, where I discovered Amos Tutuola's fiction.  It didn't last.

And so it's gone.

I dropped by the Borders in Bryn Mawr today to buy a couple of books and witness the beginning of the end.  This store closing is particularly painful because between them the Borders and Barnes & Noble chain put the vast majority of independent bookstore in this country out of business.  And now, for reasons Marx mapped out over a century ago, the one has imploded and the other isn't looking very healthy.

Every time a bookstore closes, it feels like a friend has died.  I came home feeling unhappy and a little angry at impersonal forces that are beyond anybody's control.  The only consolation I have is that the chain didn't die because of anything I did.

God knows I spent enough money there over the years.

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Scribbledehobbledehoyden: The Magpie's Eye: Page 150

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This one reads:  This page unintentionally left blank.

It might help to remember that I write on the right-hand pages first, and save the left-hand pages for supplemental thoughts,   So yesterday's page was a commentary on this one.

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Coming Soon to an Inter-Tubes Near YOU!

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I'm in e-print again!

Well, almost.

First things first.  Brand-new up is a podcast of my story Ancient Engines at Drabblecast.  "Ancient Engines" is a particular favorite of mine because it's based on a a story that my late father-in-law used to tell on himself, about going to view a locomotive in a science museum.  It lost the Hugo and Nebula Awards and the Locus Poll as well. But it won the Asimov's Readers Poll, so all in all it did pretty well by me.

You can find Drabblecast here.  Or you can go straight to the story here.

My other piece of e-news is that the story which won me my first major award (a Sturgeon), The Edge of the World, is scheduled to be re-e-printed (if that's actually a word) in Fantasy Magazine on August 22.  Or you can buy the entire issue in downloadable format for just $3.99.

All of which can be seen or done here.


Above:  A very nice cover for Fantasy Magazine.  But you already figured that one out.

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Scribbledehobbledehoyden: The Magpie's Eye: Page 149

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An upside-down sentence.  It says:  The other page page unintentionally no verb.

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Scribbledehobbledehoyden: The Magpie's Eye: Page 148

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A collage.

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The Weird Art of Christiaan Zwanikken

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Maybe it's just as well I lost my notes.  

I went to Jinxed Gallery on Friday to see the new Christiaan Zwanikken exhitbiion and, quite frankly, I loved it a lot.  Zwanikken is a Dutch kinetic sculptor who combines robotics and (often) dead animal parts to create sculptures that are dark poems made physical.  As you can see above, they're a little bit Goth, a little bit steampunk, a little bit influenced by Survival Research Labs.

I liked pretty much everything on display.  I scribbled down the (rather long) titles.  And somehow, rather mysteriously, every scrib of those notes disappeared into the black hole of my notebook.  I just can't find them.

In one sense, it's a pity because Zwanikken's titles are clearly meaningful.  The talking hare pictured in yesterday's blog had a title something like "A Dead Rabbit Head Explains Art."  Which was a response to "How to Explain Art to a Dead Rabbit Head," a piece of performance art by Joseph Beuys.  So, yeah, I'm definitely missing out on something here.

On the other hand, look at the video above.  Or the one below of two ram's skulls.  They work better freed of verbal expectation, dreamlike, afloat in their own wordless mythic realm.

Tomorrow, almost certainly, I'll write about the piece of his which really hit home for me.

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