Glass Book of the Dream Eaters

I was approached by Penguin both via the Woolamaloo and the FPI blog about a new Victorian fantasy, The Glass Book of the Dream Eaters by G W Dahlquist. A hardback of the book is due in early 2007, but before that it will be coming in a rather more unusual (for this day and age) style: a serialisation. Aping the old 'penny dreadfuls' of the Victorian era when books as diverse as Varney the Vampire (also known as the Feast of Blood) and many a Dickens tale were serialised in weekly or monthly installments, the book will first be available only from Penguin's special Glass Book site (which is quite lovely and well worth a visit).



5, 000 subscriptions are available (the deadline is 6th October) and subscribers will receive one part each week for ten weeks, complete with tales of daring-do and thrilling cliffhangers. I was lucky enough to be given a set and they are all printed in a faux-Victorian style; it is a quite lovely way to do a limited edition book and as we are just entering the longer, darker nights here it is perfect timing for sitting by the fireside of an evening enjoying a ripping yarn mailed right to your door. There is a competition to win a signed set - subscribers will automatically be entered and if they should win will be refunded, so go and have a look.

Fragmentary glimpses

As you move around Edinburgh you often come across scenic views being revealed to you. Walk one way along, George Street, turn and there is the Castle framed in the line of the next street. Pass the junction of George Street and Hanover Street and your eye is drawn down the regular line of the New Town streets (so different from the jumbled architecture of the Old Town) and suddenly you realise you are looking at the wide estuary of the River Forth with the Kingdom of Fife clearly visible on a good day. Little views like this open out all over Edinburgh, like little presents that the architects, the landscape and the city itself have conspired to give to residents and visitors as if to remind them to lift their heads from the everyday cares for a moment each day. Even sitting in the window corner of the faculty offices of my old college, glance out over the grounds and there, glinting redly in the sunlight the diamond humpbacks of the Forth Brig like an steel sea monster, a metallic, Victorian cousin to Nessie perhaps.

Travelling on the top deck of a bus through the city you also get these views, but snatched in fragments, glimpses as the bus stops or passes one junction - a sudden view down an adjacent street, quickly gone as the bus moves on. This morning it was wet and a curious mixture of cool autumnal morning with last bursts of summer warmth; the bus smells of wet wool, droplets of rain still visible on the coats of those who have just boarded. Through grey clouds there are bursts of brilliant blue sky as the schizophrenic weather battles it out to decide what the day will be.

Crossing North Bridge from the New to Old Town, spanning the long valley carved out by long-ago glaciers, gently spreading out into a 'v' as it heads from the city out to the coast. I raise my head from my book for a few seconds and the city rewards me. The volcanic hulk of Arthur's Seat rises in the weak morning light and the struggle between cool and warm weather generates scattered low clouds, drifting lazily around the peaks looking like wooly airships, as if someone had inflated giant sheep and set them floating. The effect will not outlast the morning but the low clouds wrapped around the summit makes the peak look far loftier for a brief spell, as if they were the great peaks found further north or the higher mountain it would have been itself, long, long ago before epochs of wind, rain and the great glacier which give our land its character wore them down to a smaller but still impressive fortress of rock, nature's counterpart to humanity's Castle on its sister peak. I love living here; the city talks to me when I remember to listen.

Security dog

Love this story on the BBC about a woman who couldn't get her car to start, calls out her breakdown service and finds out that her dog had swallowed the immobiliser chip, which has to be in close proximity to the key. Put the dog in the car, turn the key and the car started... Brilliant. I've heard of hotwiring a car but never hotdogwiring a car...

Debt mountain

According to the news today the average personal debt in the UK is double the European average, although our continental cousins are rapidly catching up with our spend now and pay later ways. Predictably the news pieces focussed on credit card debts, personal loans (I blame that Carol Voderman myself - "do you need a personal loan?" Yes, to pay off all the other loans Carol has persuaded me to take out!) etc and yet none of them considered fitting it into the pattern of British history.

Consider the fact that modern Britain was built on a system of credit and debt; it was this system of credit which financed government and military expansion and upgrade, instrumental in defeating other European powers and also the resulting expansion of the British Empire until it was the largest in world history (hey, don't save up for all that pink paint to re-colour the map, just buy it on credit, easy terms available!). In one famous 19th century example Disraeli (the Victorian prime minister, not the comics artist) borrowed directly from the Rothschilds to finance the immeadite purchase of the Suez Canal. So there you go, it isn't just our free-spending consumerist ways, it is a part of our culture. At least, that's what I tell myself as I desperately juggle those bills...

Talking with Mike Carey

I posted an interview with top writer Mike Carey over on the FPI blog today. Mike has written for a wide range of comics, from independent small presses (including the charity comics Just 1 Page I mentioned here a while back), 2000AD and now the major publishers of DC, where he had a great run on Hellblazer, adapted Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere and wrote the Eisner-nominated series Lucifer, which followed the First of the Fallen after he quite Hell in the Sandman exploring concepts of free will and determinism while for Marvel he's been allowed to play with the Fantastic Four, Ultimate Elektra, X-Men and more.

Not content with this and a large slate of upcoming work Mike has launched his first two prose novels, Devil You Know and Vicious Circle, which follow Felix Castor, a freelance exorcist in a London which is almost the one we know except the dead are returning in ever increasing numbers. Styled like supernatural Noirs (Hellblazer meets Raymond Chandler perhaps) the cases being invesigated in both books are quite engrossing, but there is also a building of detail and a sense on building story arc running through them, which Mike confirmed in the interview. They're quite excellent and I highly recommend them; don't just take my word for it, award-winning novelist (and fellow comics scribe) Richard Morgan has praised Devil You Know, which doesn't surprise me since I know Mike's Lucifer series features on Richard's top ten favourite graphic novels (so there's another recommendation for you). You can read the full interview over on the FPI blog.

What did she say?

Was the big news story from the Labour Party back-slapping... Sorry, conference, the final speech by Blair before he (finally) steps down (before being pushed down)? Nope. Was it Gordon Brown's "I know I have the charm and charisma of a miserly hermit trout but I so want to be Prime Minister" speech? Nope. It was Cherie Blair and her famously big mouth (in more than one sense of the phrase). Did she really comments "lies" as she saw Gordon Brown speaking about what a privilge it was to work with Blair? And if she did, did she mean the Chancellor was telling porkies or did she mean she knew it wasn't a privilige to serve under a spin-obsessed war criminal? And perhaps the Bloomberg reporter didn't hear her correctly - after all there is no recording so it is one woman's word against the other (although Cherie has a brilliant record of putting her foot in it). So if she didn't bad-temperdly mutter "lies" what did she say?

She was actually complimenting the Bloomberg reporter's figure "nice thighs"

She was thinking out loud that it was John Prescott who beat her to the buffet table "who ate all the pies"

She was wondering what birthday present to get for Tony's great uncle and concluded "a couple of silk ties"

To sail on an infinite sea

Yvonne drew my attention to this new crop of stunning images from the NASA and European Space Agency's Cassini mission and the gorgeous images it is bringing back, including discovering a new, faint ring around Saturn.

Yes, it is a picture of clouds - so what, you may ask? These are clouds on another world as the distant sun dawns above them. Sunrise across the clouds of Saturn. Think how many centuries astronomers have spent peering through telescopes at this huge, ringed world but they have never seen this sight until now.
And look at this; the shimmering rings of Saturn, glittering like a necklace of precious gems in the light from our sun. And that little dot, above and to the left of the rings. That little, blue dot. One tiny, little insignificant blue dot which harbours the deepest oceans, teeming with life, enormous mountains which birds soar around; roasting deserts and dense forests both, long, low, rolling plains, sculptures of ice and rock and covered with creatures which swim and walk and fly in every niche of this rich little dot. Welcome to Planet Earth, next exit ramp on the right after the service station at Mars.

It doesn't look like anything special by planetary standards; it isn't especially big and although it may seem ancient to us it isn't by the standards of the cosmos. And yet everything every single person in our shared history has even been, right back through the millions of years to our most distant ancestors, from ape-men to humans, from the smallest child in Nairobi to the scientist being awarded the Nobel Prize, from making notches on animal bones to Shakespearean sonnets, from a modern city like New York to ancient Sumeria, from the flint tool to the internet, from the T-Rex to the domestic pussycat and every single person you've ever known or loved, every single soul there's ever been. Absolutely everything. All on that one little dot, adrift on a black ocean so vast it may as well be infinite and here we are taking the first tiny, little steps out of that cradle, raising our little sail and preparing to set out just like our distant ancestors did on reed rafts thousands of years ago on the oceans of this blue dot.

It reminds me of the 'family portrait' NASA had Voyager take (largely at the insistence of the late Carl Sagan; boy we could do with Carl today to fight the corner of reason against ignorance, he's badly missed). As Voyager left the last of the planets on its astonishing mission the tiny probe turned its cameras around to take a view of the whole solar system; Earth was the smallest dot, barely a pixel on the image; like the Earthrise photo taken by Apollo 8 astronauts when they first circled our moon, coming out of the shadow of the dark side to see the whole Earth rising above the moon it is a picture which can change your perspective. They were at that point the furthest away from home any humans had ever been, three men alone in the dark until the same sun we see shining through the rings of Saturn brought them out of the deepest, loneliest dark and illuminated the entire world before their eyes.



It was, as Al Gore points out in An Inconvenient Truth, the first time the human race saw the whole Earth from a distance, seen first by three men thousands of miles from home in a tiny, primitive spacecraft with less computing power onboard than a modern cell phone has. How anyone can look at such images and then still pollute our little dot is beyond me. How anyone can look at such images and want to kill another person instead of embracing them as a part of the most incredible thing in existence is beyond me. Being insignificant and being everything at the same time? No, that's not beyond me; that I get, it's eternity and a grain of sand and the infinitely large made of the infinitely small and all filtered through our perceptions; we're nothing and we're everything at the same time. Wow. I think I just got high with no drug assistance. I think 2001's stargate just opened in my head and it was one hell of a ride. Try it.

Brian Ruckley interview

I've posted an interview with Edinburgh author Brian Ruckley about his debut fantasy novel Winterbirth, which is just about to hit the shelves in a couple of weeks from Orbit. I was lucky enough to get an advance manuscript a few months back and really enjoyed it (especially some of the historical influences), so with the actual publication coming up soon it seemed a good time to have a chat with Brian, which you can find over on the FPI blog here.

Harlan sues (again)

Author Harlan Ellison is no stranger to controversy or to legal proceedings. News spread out over the comics web community this week that he is once more suing someone, this time Fantagraphics comics (Gary Groth of Fanta and Harlan have a long and well known animosity between them). Harlan says that using his name on a recent Comics Journal Library book on writers invades his privacy and is also suing for defamation over the reprinting of an article from decades ago which in turn was itself subject of a legal tussle. The language Ellison has used to describe Groth has not exactly been restrained or terribly legal; in fact it seemed rather distasteful to me. I'm not going to say too much other than reporting the case, just in case his legal harpies are loosed in my direction, except to say two things.

First, given that Harlan was only a few weeks ago lambasted on many SF sites and blogs across the world for his disgraceful behaviour at the Hugo awards where he groped fellow author Connie Willis' breast I'd have thought he'd want to keep a lower profile for a while. He did issue a form of apology but then later issued more which seemed to infer he wasn't that guilty and that 'jerkwad blogs' were blowing it all out of proportion and didn't sit to well with his first posting. Second is that Fantagraphics is probably the best indy publisher in comics and beloved of readers because it is run by people who do it because they love the medium, not because they are trying to make a quick buck. Attacking them is unlikely to prove popular with the comics community and since Harlan has another volume of his Dream Corridor graphic novel coming up in the near future pissing off the comics fans is unlikely to help sales.

Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers

I've been following this for a while on the FPI blog - a stop motion animated film of the great Gilbert Shelton's Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers classic underground comics is in the works at the moment. John at comics blog Down the Tubes has news of a new YouTube vid 'pilot' of the movie which "isn't quite finished" as we follow the Freaks on a stoned-out trip which includes glimpses of works behind the animation. I do wonder, when it is finished, if this is going to be one of those movies like Yellow Submarine which is best viewed when stoned? I posted an interview with Tony Bennett who runs Knockabout, Gilbert's UK publisher and a man who has spent a lot of time in courts fighting censorship

Marianne joins the blogosphere

My Australian chum Marianne de Pierres, author of the excellent series of novels featuring kick-ass heroine Parish Plessis, has started her own blog, Echo Beach, so stroll down and have a visit.

US Homeland Gestapo send Josh back to jail

Boing Boing carries news and a link to a final video diary by Josh Wolf before his bail is revoked and he is returned to prison once more. This entire ridiculous case has smacked of deliberate and malignant persecution (for instance Californian laws protecting journalists were bypassed by the gestapo making this a federal case - this was justified by saying the police department involved gets some funds from federal sources; yes it is that plain and weak an excuse). Now with this revoking of his bail it is even more clear that the US authorities are determined to stamp down on anyone who stand up for their civil liberties when it doesn't suit the bastards in charge. Land of the free my fucking arse. Why don't these arseholes just put on jackboots and bloody armbands and have done with it? Apologies for the crude comments, but this makes me bloody furious. Travelling V blogger Amanda Across America has a recent interview with Josh online.

The twisted bastards who run American think nothing of sacrificing countless lives to bring 'freedom and democracy and liberation' to Iraq are the same ones stamping all over individual freedoms for no other reason than they feel like it. Wake up, Americans, before you end up being arrested for taking a photograph of your family in a national park and find the federal gestapo seizing you in case those pics of 'lil Hank and Missy frolicking in front of Redwoods with Ranger Bob smiling in the background are a threat to national insecurity. Folks in charge are as terrified of the freely expressed thoughts of ordinary citizens over the web as their counterparts were of the easy availablity of books after Gutenberg's moveable print, or as scared as when the Bible was translated out of Latin and into the ordinary language of the people. They are scared of us. As Alan and David put it in V For Vendetta, the government hasn't really heard the people's voice for years and they've forgotten how loud it is.

Governments and large companies (as I know to my cost) don't really like individuals having free speech because of the potential power that gives them (no matter how much they profess to be committed to free expression). You've got a voice. We've all got a voice. We've all got a choice. We can bleat in the flock like sheep or we can use that voice. And since we're all linked that voice can be a chorus. Read. Think. Speak. Don't just assume, hey, this is nothing to do with me. Do that and you'll still be thinking that when your DNA sample is on government records along with the ID card with your every detail, retina scan and daily movements logged from a mesh of CCTV, cell phone calls and GPS and your opinions noted, analysed and filed in the name of security. Subversives might be our last best hope for democracy.

New Who Earthbound

Disappointing news - Russell T Davies has announced that the third season of the new Doctor Who will remain resolutely Earthbound. He says this is mostly for budgetary reasons, with alien world sets being so expensive and refusing to do as the old show did and simply use a quarry pit as an alien world. I can understand not wanting to use the old quarry locations because, frankly, they are crap. But I refuse to believe they can't figure something else out on a reasonable budget. After all the BBC, several years ago, created an incredibly realistic 'documentary' of prehistoric life in Walking With Dinosaurs. If that can be done then surely we can have a few scenes in a couple of episodes of alien worlds???

Russell went on to say that the few episodes which did use alien settings were ones which didn't do so well and got poorer reviews. Hmmm, I don't think it is fair to blame a location for the poor reviews of an episode, more likely the story and dialogue methinks. And much as I enjoyed the new Who I have found, especially in season two, was very hit and miss with a few clunkers in there and one real stinker of an episode. And even in the episodes I enjoyed I found when they were over and I thought about them several were quite lacking in any real substance but I hadn't noticed while it was running because the pace was so snappy. But a show needs more than snappy pacing - on repeat viewings I've found several just don't stand up, which isn't good.

Russell also claims that alien-set stories are 'not prime time'. Sorry, Russell - appreciate what you have done with resurrecting the series, but in that respect you are talking rubbish. If it is well written an alien episode can be just as good as an Earth set one as a number of high-rated SF shows illustrate (and so did the old Who despite poorer effects, quarry location and cheap budget). From these comments I'm getting a strong vibe that the main reasons we are going to be stuck on Earth for most tales yet again is because he has no real desire to do otherwise, simple as that. And frankly that annoys the hell out of me, because by the third season the show should be evolving and changing - yet another story set in bloody London (even if most of the time it is Cardiff made to look like a London street - for god's sake if we must be stuck on one planet can't we see more of the place?) is a bit dull and shows a certain lack of imagination. If he's going to do that then it really isn't Doctor Who and they might as well have created a new show from scratch rather than reviving Who. I'm starting to think they are frightened of having too many aliens or other worlds because then mainstream viewers might realise that - gasp! - it is a science fiction show.

Man marries goat

Spotted this on the BBC today - man in Sudan caught shagging his neighbour's goat is forced to marry the animal and pay the owner a dowry! Brilliant.

The Monday Weirdmail

Monday morning, start of the week and in my inbox at work is a message from Jeff VanderMeer; attached as a 'p.s.' were a couple of paragraphs. Readers of VanderWorld will know that amidst his raft of promotional work for Shriek in the US, Jeff has suddenly been struck by the mushroom muse to write a new Ambergris story and this was just a few paragraphs, wonderfully disturbing and even odder taken out of context. What a great way to start the week - thanks, Jeff!

Deacon Brodie

One good thing has come out of all the expense caused by having to redo the cobbled Royal Mile (it was done just a few years ago but they made an arse of it, so on again local taxpayers fund the work to be redone while businesses nearby are losing trade - good work, Edinburgh council, nice to see our huge tax bill is used so effectively). But it has been a chance for archaeologists to literally dig up some of the city's history, including finding the old Tolbooth, which is at least 400 years old and is the place where Deacon Brodie was imprisoned and later hung.

Brodie was a highly respectable member of the community - ironically he is said to have funded the gallows on which he later ended his life - but by night he was a gambler, drinker and robber (gee, glad we don't have such two-faced public figures today, eh??). This split personality is part of the inspiration for a later Edinburgh writer, Robert Louis Stevenson, and his immortal tale Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (although Hogg's Confessions of a Justified Sinner is also a major influence). The remains will be wrapped in a protective sheeting before being reburied and the site marked with copper lines once the new surface is put down, just as the site of the old gallows is. Funny to think as you walk down the Royal Mile these innocent looking little copper markers in the stone actually point out where many people, from heretics to robbers to bodysnatchers, witches and even cannibals (Sawney Bean and his family); now it is a tourist site.

Everyone's a critic

Okay, Dizzy was less interested in a critique of my book than she was in attacking my Dr Who bookmark with nice kitten-baiting tassels on it:

Toy nostalgia

Following a link from Boing Boing I came across these old ads from the 70s for kid's toys tied to shows and movies (yes licensed merchandise did exist before the Star Wars toys). This ad for the Lone Ranger series of toys brought back nosatlgic memories for me because I remember having the him, Tonto and their horses (but not the waggon or the bad guy).



This site has old adverts for the 70s Star Trek dolls and superhero dolls; again I remember having some of these during the 70s and loving them, but being annoyed they were in a different scale from Action Man. In fact I remember being in the large toy department on the upper floor of the old Goldberg's store in Glasgow and being treated to the Spider-Man doll for getting a good report card at school. And how well I recall the Six Million Dollar Man doll; there was a hole in his head (literally) which let you look through his skull to a magnifying lens in his eye, to simulate his bionic vision, while one arm had rubber skin which rolled up like a condom to reveal bionic bits you could take out of the arm and lose while the rubber 'skin' ripped. Oh the fun. And that cool red jumpsuit!



Of course it wasn't just dolls of popular show characters, a boy in the 70s had other fun items to fiddle with, from big, orange space hopper and showing off your chopper (titter ye not) to playing TCR: Total Control Racing. Yes, kids, the racing set which lets you have total control by changing lanes because it was 'slotless' racing. Except half the time the damned contact brushes would come off the power lines and your car would come to a halt in-between lanes. Ah well, there was always the ever-reliable old train set. Toys are great and I still love them. Any of you have warm memories of favourite toys from childhood?

Papal bull

We all know Popes often talk bull. Okay, technically they issue bulls, but you know what I mean. Fair to say I am someone who dislikes organised religion in general and the more conservative old-man leadership especially (almost as bad as fundamentalists of any and all creeds as far as I am concerned). And I certainly have little time for the Aryan Herr Pope who has some tremendously backwards ideas of society, gender and other areas. But I did feel the reported furore in the world media about his alleged comments was designed to help promote a sense of crisis and outrage as opposed to cooly reporting the actual facts - even the BBC wasn't terribly good on this score.

It seemed obvious even to someone like me who has no time for the Uberpopenfurher that reporters had seized on a couple of quotes which were clearly quotations from a much older source being used to demonsrate how attitudes from the church to Islam used to be expressed, not what he was saying himself. In fact he made mention of persecution and the sword not being acceptable for the religious. But, no, these few quotes were plastered across the world instantly, without any analysis or proper contextual reporting, which looks like the sloppy misinformation a lot of the media seems to indulge in so irresponsibly, uncaring of the consequences.

And the consequences in Muslim countries were pretty predictable, stirring up the protesting crowds, burning effigies and all the usual refined and thoughtful repsonses people in these countries show to news they don't like. Mind you, I couldn't help but think, is there any story that doesn't grossly offend the Muslim world these days? Mention a quote from 500 years ago and it is an outrage... Print a cartoon and it is an outrage... Invade another country and it is an outrage (oh, hold on, actually you can have that one). I think some people just wait around in large crowds with general purpose effigies and a tin of petrol waiting for something to be outraged about and shoot AK47s in the air. Now if they were outraged at the bad reporting which caused them to get the wrong end of the stick and waste a good effigy I could understand that.

Yvonne has a good post on the whole thing on her blog. The funniest thing about this is that how many times has a public figure caught out saying something they shouldn't used the lame excuse that they were 'quoted out of context'? "Yes, I know I said you should round up poor people and use them for medical experimentation, but I was quoted out of context. But for once it actually seems to be true.

Autumn sunset





It's that time of year, long autumn twilight spilling golden-copper light from the slowly sinking sun. The air takes on a peculiar quality, the 'gloaming', a short period of transition which whispers of magic, the time when the Fair Folk would emerge from the Faerie Mounds in wooded glens and dells. Fanciful perhaps and yet there is something in this autumnal light which could almost make you believe it. The glow the setting sun imparts to the sandstone buildings is as soft and warm as a lover's embrace.



We've had a sudden burst of late summer weather but it can't disguise the approach of autumn; crisper and cooler in the morning and evening now, early morning mists cling to the hills as if the slopes had just awoken, still tangled in gossamer bedsheets. Most of the trees are still lush with well-watered greenery but more and more golden leaves are appearing like grey hairs on a man, heralding the move into the end months of the year. Ripe, juicy berries hang heavy on the boughs, enticing birds, squirrels and humans alike.



Sunset this very evening, scarcely a couple of hours gone; walking home from Mel's it stopped me dead to just stand still and watch it. The trees slowly sink into shadows, merging into one large, dark silhouette as the last few birds flutter overhead calling to one another before settling into shadowed branches for the night.



The sky overhead was the soft blue of a Georgian cameo of the type beloved by many a grandmother, while the horizon around Corstorphine Hill (where my old college lies and which I cycled everyday) is drawn in bands of reds and oranges like the clouds on mighty Jupiter. The orb of the sun has only just dipped below the horizon behind the spire; the contrast from the soft blue to the oranges, reds and terracotta colours was like looking at nature's own Impressionist painting.

The row of lights in the darkness to the right of the spire's base are from Murrayfield, the national stadium for Scottish rugby. In the space of just a few minutes all that was left were a few clouds tinged pink for a short time, then a slow fade into the darkness of night; the well-defined daytime world fades into the darkness, like falling asleep into the realms of dreams and imagination where the sharp-edged restrictions of the day are replaced with an undefined place of limitless possibilities. Only twenty feet from this spot cars sped past on the Approach Road, utterly oblivious to this entire spectacle; they had no eyes to see, souls isolated and walled off.

As Keats described this time of year to a friend "How beautiful the season is now - How fine the air. A temperate sharpness about it. Really, without joking, chaste weather - Dian skies - I never lik'd stubble fields so much as now - Aye better than the chilly green of the spring. Somehow a stubble plain looks warm - -in the same way that some pictures look warm - this struck me so much in my Sunday's walk that I composed upon it." And compose he did, one of the loveliest verses in English poetry:

Ode to Autumn

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness!
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eaves run;
To bend with apples the mossed cottage-trees,
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease,
For Summer has o'erbrimmed their clammy cells.

Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?
Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find
Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,
Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;
Or on a half-reaped furrow sound asleep,
Drowsed with the fume of poppies, while thy hook
Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers;
And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep
Steady thy laden head across a brook;
Or by a cider-press, with patient look,
Thou watchest the last oozings, hours by hours.

Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too, -
While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day
And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue;
Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
Among the river sallows, borne aloft
Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;
Hedge-crickets sing, and now with treble soft
The redbreast whistles from a garden-croft;
And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.

John Keats

Watery ad

I rather like the advert for Hotpoint where the clothes in the washing machine all become animated undersea creatures like a basking shark with its gaping (but fangless) mouth, a jellyfish and a stingray (although no Australian naturalists were harmed in the making of this animation); its a nice little piece of animation. You can see the ad online here.

To Porty by hovercraft

Plans are afoot to test out a service running across the River Forth from Kirkcaldy on the Fife coast to Portobello beach in Edinburgh, not far from where I took the pictures a couple of posts below; the service will be by hovercraft. How cool would that be???

Not a risk

There's a big row brewing here over a case this week where the police in conjunction with prison authorities decided to wait three days before informing the public that a vicious murderer had escaped from prison. Why the delay? Well, the prison authorities told the police they didn't think he was much of a safety risk. Hmmm, let's see: violent murderer who after the act returned to the body to mutilate it and he does a runner; I don't think you need psychological profiling to know that equates to a strong chance of possible danger to the public and for the fuzz and the screw to say otherwise indicates sheer incompetence coupled with utter disregard for public safety. And I am wondering why the hell a convicted murderer was allowed out on a work release scheme anyway? What's the betting no-one in officialdom will get so much as a reprimand or written warning on their record for this?

NYC skyline

I'm not going to comment on events today, but I do want to share this beautiful photograph by my Fotolog chum BeckyBecky. How many times have we all seen this skyline in a movie? As a film fan I've lost count; I've never been there yet know it through the flickering celluloid images. Now even watching older Woody Allen movies with Mel (a favourite pastime) the skyline of New York takes on a different resonance. I re-watch Sam Raimi's Spider-Man movie and think on how they digitally erased the twin towers from the film; significane and symbols can be retrospectively altered. It is odd, I find myself nostalgiac for a now-gone skyline which I never actually saw with my own eyes. In a few years it will be different again.

Dizzy and Mel

I uploaded this short (silent) vid clip of Dizzy the incredibly cute kitty with Mel to YouTube. Quality is pretty low as I am still using the same very basic little digital camera I've had for years which has a low frames per second rate. One of these days I will be able to buy a better one with some decent video capability. Meantime I thought I'd post this for a change from the still images.

Porty beach

Given today's anniversary I didn't feel like writing one of my sarcastic posts, so instead I thought I'd post a couple of late summer pics, taken on Portobello Beach, Edinburgh Riviera (okay, maybe not, but on a nice day it is terrific to have the beach so close to the centre of Edinburgh).









And a couple of last Festival pics for this year, as summer fades into autumn




Harry Potter's mate Ron (aka as actor Rupert Grint) arrives for the premiere of Driving Lessons and has to run the gauntlet of many young girly Potter fans (sooooo many teen girls at a British comedy with Julie Walters, sure it was nothing to do with the presence of one of the Harry Potter film stars...).




"The carnival is over, the fabulous freaks are leaving town"




Remember the pics of folks getting one Fringe venue all ready for the biggest show on Earth I posted in August? Here is the same bit only a few weeks later, all being taken down. The city is still half-covered in fly posters for a thousand and one Fringe shows, redundant now the circus has left town and slowly fading to monochrome, peeling and flaking to fall away just as the leaves will do soon. Autumn is coming; I'm not sad at summer's end though as the long, golden light of Scotland in the autumn is simply gorgeous, warm, luminous. And it means piles of leaves for me to kick! Melanie despairs of the fact that I never grow out of this habit, but I maintain kicking big piles of dried leaves is a sacred ritual of autumn. And I like it.

An Iraq vet interviewed

GNN has an interview with a former US Marine, two-tour veteran of the Iraq war. He comes across as a very well educated and thoughtful person and makes some interesting points (there is a brilliant moment where a fat arsehole in an SUV yells abuse at him in traffic because he had a 'support Kerry' sticker before the last election next to his Marine Corp badge - the armchair patriot shouted at him he was a 'flip-flopper', unaware he was yelling at a two-tour vet. Illustrates the dangers of spin and jingoism).

But it is also dreadfully disturbing; he describes convoy duty and the way it was routine for the Marines to assume any and all Iraqis were enemies and therefore potential targets they could shoot at; seems the charge of being trigger happy which is often levied against US troops is actually their operational policy. I can understand how beleaguered troops get into this mind set, seeing it as basic survival, suspect everyone, be prepared to blow people away when you have no idea if they are armed or not just to be on the safe side. But it doesn't excuse it on moral grounds - other forces their don't operate on that method and since this leads to the repeated killing of unarmed civilians it does make you wonder why the hell more troops aren't being pulled up for war crimes.

It also demonstrates the complete futility of the invasion of Iraq; if your army operates on the assumption that everyone in the country - the people they are there to 'liberate' allegedly - hates you and wants to kill you then how can your operation ever actually work? So all that is accomplished is mass bloodshed and increased hatred on the part of both the Americans who serve there and the Iraqi civilians they've bullied, maimed and killed. Doesn't operating on this principle of all civilians being enemies (they even cheer sometimes when they pass a dead Iraqi) actually become a self-fulfilling prophecy? Since you shoot unarmed civilians repeatedly and make it clear you despise them all is it a surprise you have a population who hate you and want to kill you? And this isn't the nutter fundamentalists who sneak in over the border from Iran to stire up trouble, just ordinary civilians who have come to hate them because of just this sort of attitude and action. No wonder the US didn't dare to criticise Israel's methods in the Lebanon recently. But disturbing as this is, I recommend reading this article; it is honest and pretty thoughtful as well as disturbing.

The colours

An interesting article on the BBC today about colourful pigments found in an archaelogical dig in the south of Zambia, which would indicate (although not conclusively prove) that ancient people used colours in a symbolic manner some 200, 000 years ago. So what, some may be asking. Well the use of colours for such decoration illustrates that human ability we have which is so astonishing and yet most of the time we don't even think about it: the ability for abstract thought. When you can use symbols, colours, sounds, images and shapes to represent real object you open a door to an intellectual revolution, one of the foundations of that amazing ability, language. And with language comes complex communication, the articulation of imagination and the ability to share ideas.

This dig, if confirmed, pushes back the date for early examples of abstract thought by 100, 000 years. Those ancient pigments could be one of the early steps on the road which lead to the verse of Homer, the Library of Alexandria, Tale of the Genji, art, history, science, myth; the collective culture of millenia of humanity. Now does it sounds like a more important deal? Should we be so surprised that dabbling with coloured paints could lead to such an intellectual blossoming? After all, don't we give young children bright crayons and paints to play with? Don't many children draw and paint images before they have an advanced grasp of the written language? Little steps, big results, some over countless millennia, some within a lifetime. When you step back from the routine of the everyday life for just a moment and think about it (using that power of abstract thought to do so) it is simply amazing. And it links us all right back to those dwellers in a cave in long-ago Africa at the dawn of humanity.

The fantasy of architecture and architectural fantasies

Geoff Manaugh dropped me a line to say he had posted an interview with my chum, fine ale afficianado, defier of wild hogs and ace writer Jeff VanderMeer. Geoff run the BLDG BLOG, which is an architectural site and he and Jeff (Geoff and Jeff, sounds great, doesn't it?) have an absolutely fascinating discussion about how 'real' world (if there is such a thing) buildings and cities (and natural structures) interact with the imagination of writers and readers, taking in Borges, Peake's Gormenghast, Kafka and others and moving from bioluminescent Pacific reefs to the winding streets of Prague and then on into Jeff's Ambergris, the City of Saints and Madmen.

I recall the Fringe before this one just finished where I looked out of the kitchen window at work. The front door of my work is on what looks like ground level but is actually a bridge with buildings almost all along it, with deeper levels of the Old Town below it. So when I go downstairs and look out the rear windows I don't see the street but an alley leading downwards. Even lower down is an underground venue which is used during the Fringe. I glanced out one day and saw several spooky looking mimes sitting on the cobbles below smoking; they finished and silently returned to their subterranean lair. It made me think on the underground dwelling Graycaps from Jeff's books and naturally I had to tell him about it.

I had a vision of a part of Ambergris protruding out of the realms of imagination and into the deepest levels of Edinburgh. Since then I've actually come to think that those mimes/graycaps weren't going back into a literal Ambergris but that Ambergris is a city where we sometimes go when we dream, or even when we daydream or lose ourselves in a book so that we start to realise how elastic our surroundings are, how past and present and history, culture, imagination and perception all constantly alter supposedly solid, fixed streets and buildings of stone. I love the way Ambergris itself flexes and breathes and changes and alters because it is doing what a 'real' city does except most of the time we live in the middle of it and don't notice.

It's one of the things I like about living in Edinburgh, the way you can't help but notice how the city, or even one building, can look different from day to day; how different it is in a long, copper, autumn sunset, brushed with fallen leaves, almost a different place from when snow lies along the battlements of the Castle; the same place and yet constantly and eternally different. The imaginary and the so-called real are both a construct of our senses and our imagination; today I was looking at pictures on the BBC site of three proposed new towers for the World Trade Center site and it struck me that until a new building is constructed it is in a sense still an imaginary, fictional building. Even after construction a building will still always remain partially imaginary because it exists in the perceptions and memories of the people who interact with it, each one of which will be slightly different and change over time.

The point? I'm not sure I have one except to say you can never treat the world on completely literal terms; people who insist on 'sensible' and 'mature' ways of looking at life and the world think they are better than those who indulge in imagination but really they are going through life with one of their senses blindfolded. Books like Jeff's help remove those blindfolds.

V For Vendetta, L for Lloyd

I had a real pleasure this week at work as a great British comics artist and writer, David Lloyd, kindly agreed to an interview, which I just finished editing this afternoon and posted to it to the FPI Blog. David is the artist from a graphic novel which is one of my all-time favourite books, a story which has touched me and inspired me for years and a work I return to again and again and again: V For Vendetta, which he co-created with the bearded god of comics, Alan Moore. David is actually touring in the US to promote his new work Kickback, which he has written and illustrated, but he kindly took time out to answer some questions; Kickback is an excellent tale of corruption and attempted redemption and it's been offered by Dark Horse at a rather good price for an original graphic novel in hardback (and at FPI we add our usual generous graphic novel discount, plug, plug).

It's a damned good read - put it this way, I couldn't wait to try and scrounge a free one from the publisher over in America, so I stumped up and bought my copy myself, so my money's where my mouth is on this one. Rather than expand on it here why not go over and hear what David has to say about it himself.

Cheeky glider

The Edinburgh Evening News has a great story about a tourist who decided to take a dive off Salisbury Crags at Arthur's Seat, the extinct volcano which rears up right inside the city, next to the Parliament and Holyrood Palace. He spent a pleasant ten minutes or so paragliding around above the area before spotting Royal Park Rangers following his movements below and so tried to set off and land elsewhere, coming down near the palace, only to be caught by the police. His friend came out with the excuse that the offending paraglider didn't actually jump, the pair of them had gone to the top of the Crags in full gear to perform ground training when he was caught by a gust. Ahem, yes, highly believable someone would climb up to this great height and lean over the edge of a large drop in full paragliding gear and chute without actually intending to leap off and glide. Presumably a flight of airborne pigs were spotted in the skies around the same time. I'm just annoyed I didn't get to take a picture of it all!

Stan 'the (watch) man' Lee

This won't make a lick of sense unless you are a comics fan, but this site by Kevin is cracked genius: he's remixed Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons seminal graphic novel Watchmen (which Time magazine listed as one of the best novels of the last 80 years) as if it had been written by a very different (but still brilliant) comics god, Stan Lee, with Alan's prose reworked into Stan's hyperbolic style brilliantly.

Fringe pics



You're terminated


Being on the Fringe can go to your head





Fringe office

And its my Asian puppeteering friends from the Fringe Sunday pics I posted a couple of weeks back

Peace out y'all!

I love that this guy wears a shirt and tie when juggling fire sticks




The latest result of Edinburgh council's mismanaged transport policy

As well as being a cool-looking temporary venue this also got rid of the pouting little skateboard kids who habitually haunt this square

This huge purple beast was right across from the Georgian splendour and pomp of McEwan Hall where my graduation ceremony was (many moons ago)

Final Shooting War

At last artist Dan Goldman dropped me a line to say that the final part of the webcomic incarnation of the bloody brilliant Shooting War is now online (poor Anthony writing it while moving into a new home and he still managed to put in topical references including one to recent Isreali attacks in the Lebanon). I was wondering how they would wrap it up without blowing the ending for the print version which is due in hardback next autumn, but they managed to do it in a way which leaves you begging to know more (the webcomic will be about a third of the finished print version I'm hearing).

Its got a good dose of tension, action and politics mixed with dark humour; a fundamentalist terrorist tells how he was about to shoot down the presidential plane years before but Allah appeared in a vision and told him this George Bush would be far more use to the cause of jihad if they let him live to cause trouble - funny but depressingly true at the same time. Its bloody good stuff and if you haven't tried it yet then go check it out, all the earlier parts are still up there on Smithmag.net.

Burger’n’blue

My mum and dad were through visiting tonight and decided we were going to go out for a bite. They’re not the most adventurous when it comes to different dishes; while I love Indian, Italian, Thai, Chinese etc they don’t care for them. All the more puzzling given how amazing a cook (and baker – mmm, those cakes and shortbreads…) my mum is and the different things she’s made for me over the years. So I always have to try and balance going somewhere where they will be okay with the food but I will still enjoy it too. Recently I read a review of a place on the Royal Mile, near the Fringe office, called Wannaburger, which sounded like somewhere I wanted to check out.

I passed it while taking pictures of the Fringe performers on the Mile during the Festival in August, but of course then it was incredibly busy as everything on the Royal Mile is at that time of year. With the Festival over and my folks through tonight it seemed like an opportune time to try it and we had a pleasant meander down the Mile on a late summer evening. A colleague at the Planet had mentioned he’d been in there several times and loved it, so I was even more eager to check it out – boy was it worth the wait!

There are three basic burgers – a big ass Scotch beef, a whole free range chicken breast and for we veggies a home-made beanburger. But that’s just the base – there’s a great range of combos you can have and a whole raft of them are vegetarian friendly. Mum had the basic chicken, dad the beef while I went for the beanburger with blue cheese and salad; they were both delighted with their burgers, both damned tasty and huge. I loved the beanburger with the blue cheese half-melted over the top of it with the salad, it gave the whole thing some bite and we had a couple of bowls of big, chunky fries (not those stupid little lukewarm skinny fries) between us. I’d heard that the shakes were damned good and indeed the chocolate milk shake utterly rocked; ice cream and real choccy pieces, just the right side of thickness so that you have to work to get it up through the straws but not too thick that you can’t quite manage.

The desserts looked pretty good but even I couldn’t fit anything else in, it was a damned good plateful and between the food and the really friendly service we left full and happy for a walk back past evening tourists and folks heading out on ghost walk tours. I’ll certainly be going back there for more (it is temptingly near work). Good meal and a nice night with my mum and dad; the simple pleasures are often the best, aren’t they? On the way back to my place we past where Mr Boni's wonderful ice cream parlour once stood; my mum and dad used to take me there from time to time when they were through visiting. One former colleague in my previous job hearing this commented that he thought it was a bit sad that a bloke in his 30s was being taken for ice cream sundaes by his mum and dad. Why? What the hell is wrong with that? I just told him straight, you just wish you could go for that sort of treat and enjoy it. Miserable bugger. Well, I can and I do! Damned right I do.

Josh makes bail

Some good news - Josh Wolf has been released from the gulag he was thrown into by Bush's Gestapo to protect American Democracy and the freedoms for which it stands from people who might actually exercise those rights. Josh has posted his first main piece on his blog since being bailed.

Some awards

I posted on some awards in the last few days over on the FPI blog. First off one of my favourite writers and a damned decent bloke, Ken MacLeod picked up his third Prometheus Award for his last novel, Learning the World. If you haven't read Ken before this is a standalone novel and a good spot to dip your toes into and with one of the central characters being a blogger it may have more resonance for our online community. On the classic fiction front the Prometheus (which is given for libertarian fiction) added David Lloyd and Alan Moore's V For Vendetta to the Hall of Fame while for the first time ever they gave an award to a film director/writer in the shape of the god-like Joss Whedon for Serenity for its portrayal of "resistance fighters struggling against oppressive collectivism."

This comes on the heels of Serenity winning a prestigious Hugo award at the Worldcon for Best Dramatic Presentation Longform (or movies as they are more often called). And at the same Worldcon in California the Hugo for Best Dramatic Presentation Shortform (usually TV) was not won by one of the big-budget US shows but by Blighty's own little Doctor Who. A great result for the new show and also proof positive that the show appeals to far more than the traditional British audience. It pleased most of the fans of the old show, it pleased younger viewers new to the series and now it is conquering the world. Nice.