Neil Gaiman interviews the brains behind Gorillaz.
You also seem inspired by horror movie imagery. Why are there so many zombies in your videos? ALBARN: Well, because everybody on TV's a fucking zombie, right? I mean, watch a 50 Cent video where he's in the middle of a club, and he's just surrounded by zombies. The Gorillaz cartoons seem more real to me than the actual people on TV. Because at least you know that there's some intelligence behind the cartoons, and there's a lot of work that's gone into it, so it can't all be just a lie. HEWLETT: Yeah, I'm much more at home with Daffy Duck than I am with a real person. But the whole zombie thing is an obsession of mine. I love zombie films. Once, I looked out the window where I work and realized that everybody was walking around in circles with their mobile phones attached to their heads - it reminded me of that scene from Dawn of the Dead in the car lot. That was a big inspiration. ALBARN: These are the seeds of the future, aren't they? You need to identify them.
Julie Benesh reviews Lisa Glatt's The Apple's Bruise in a much deeper way than I could have. So check out the review and then go buy the book.
A new group blog has formed, Storytellers Unplugged. It's a collection of dark fantasy and horror authors talking about writing and genre and anything else that seems interesting. Some very cool posts so far especially in the last couple of days, You know you're a writer when... and Where Does It Hurt?.
Mark Morford hopes Disney won't screw up the first of the Chronicles of Narnia. Of course, going by their track record, I'm not overly confident. I have the full set in my bookshelf and I'm going to start reading them to the kids. I think it's about time for that.
Ben Hammersley puts yesterday's Grokster ruling in the proper perspective:
While developers in the US are being hamstrung by their courts, and their counterparts in Europe are about to have software patents kick the chair out from under them, the developers in the warm and cheap places are getting busy. If you really care that your software was written in the US, then the Grokster case is quite a big deal. If not, you just shrug and move on. The rest of the world's a big place. They make software there too.
Nice little piece about T.C. Boyle. He has another collection of short stories coming out in September. Hopefully I'll have made it thru Stories by then.
I'm reading a few stories at a time and trying to break them down somewhat to understand how they were put together. I guess it's the next best thing to heading to USC and taking his classes. [via]
Tod Goldberg gives a peek into his mind as a new story gets ready to be written:
For the last several nights, the thoughts have become words and images, bits of dialog, remembered conversations, smells, sadness, anger, hilarity and something I can't clearly quantify, only to say that it feels like electricity. And so when I finally talked about my ideas with my wife and my agent, the stories I attempted to distill into cute little loglines were both largely incoherent ramblings: words, images, bits of dialogue etc. "I'm not sure exactly what the story is," my agent said, "but I trust from your inability to articulate it that you do." Ah, sweet success.
Jeff Mariotte is writing a mini-series of Angel comics which will take place after the TV show ended. The first issue comes out Wednesday. I'll be checking it out then!
Lambda the Ultimate asks how people read technical papers. Some really good ideas can be found in the comments.
John Richards gives a peek into his thinking for his next novel. I like the idea of individual chapters being short stories able to stand on their own as well as the threads for the main characters being a novella if they were stripped from the rest of the book. Should be an interesting read once it is done.
Lou Anders gives both a history lesson and a review of Batman and Batman Begins. Very impressive!
Things have been in various degrees of craziness lately so posting here hasn't been my top priority. I have plenty of tabs open so hopefully posts will happen shortly.
Very interesting interview with the celebrated Japanese author. I've read his short story collection, After the Quake and I hope to eventually add his novels to my TBR pile.
He wrote "Kafka" in six months, starting, as he usually does, without a plan. He spent one year revising it. He follows a strict regimen. Going to bed around 9 p.m. - he never dreams, he said - he wakes up without an alarm clock around 4 a.m. He immediately turns on his Macintosh and writes until 11 a.m., producing every day 4,000 characters, or the equivalent of two to three pages in English.
As someone who as lived in the midwest and now lives in SoCal, I couldn't agree more with John Scalzi's analysis of the difference between the two burger places.
Also, a note to all mid-westerners who persist in trying to compare White Castle to In-N-Out: Stop. Just stop. There is no comparison between the two; it's like trying to compare potted meat food product to kobe beef. I wouldn't feed White Castle to my dog. Every time to you try to suggest that White Castle and In-N-Out are even in the same phylum of edibility, you embarrass yourself, and show your ignorance of what a hamburger should be. I beg you. Stop. Now.
Last night, I went to see Lisa Glatt read from her latest book, The Apple's Bruise, a collection of short stories. She read the story, Soup, which can be found in the latest issue of Swink. That is the story I read which made me want to pick up the book and attend the reading. The reading went well and I thought some interesting questions were asked.
A definite small-world experience happened both before the reading and then after I got home. Pinky from Pinky's Paperhaus was there. I would not have known who about her blog unless I read Kevin Smokler's blog yesterday.
Also, an upcoming YA author named Cecil was there and sounded like her first book was getting some really good reviews. It turns out that yesterday at some point, I had opened this interview in a tab to read later. I didn't read until last night and of course it is with Cecil.
The world can definitely be a cool place.
Kevin Smokler has put together an interesting collection of essays called Bookmark Now. It's about writing and reading in our current time from writers who are young. He's given some interviews around blogland:
with LAist
How do I find time to read? Location location location. I have one book on my nighttable, one next to the toilet, one in my car, another in my backpack. Whenever I'm sitting still in any of these places, I read 5 pages. Then on the weekends, maybe an hour or two at a stretch. You'd be surprised how fast you go through books. Second, how do I select what to read? I have trusted sources (friends, blogs, book review sections) whose opinions I trust. Also, when I finish a book I do two things. Write about it in a notebook and on my blog and "tag it", so Sherman Alexie's Ten Little Indians might be "contemporary, short story collection, native american." The next book I read can't have any of those same tags which keeps things as diverse as I can manage.
and with Booksquare
In the introduction, I write about the NEA’s “Reading at Risk” report which, yet again, argued that people my age and younger don’t read because we’ve been lured away and drugged by television, video games and the Internet. I turned the accusation around and said that perhaps we’re doing a lousy job of making books as sexy as those other options and that we have the opportunity to turn the fortunes of of publishing and books around with a little imagination and lot of hard work. Anger is a fabulous motivator.
Kevin and some of the LA-based contributors will be giving a reading at Skylight Books on Sunday, the 12th. Unfortunately, I won't be able to make it since I'm heading there tonight for the Lisa Glatt reading.
PopMatters interviews Steve Almond...
failbetter.com interviews Sam Lipsyte as does Suicide Girls...
Over a month ago, I got an email from Greg Wilson asking if I would be interested in reviewing his new book, Data Crunching. I obviously said yes because it dealt with issues I face all the time, basically how to deal with data that might be in a variety of locations or formats.
I've read the book and found it very, very helpful. I've gone back to it a few times in the last week or so as I'm dealing with data.
I plan on putting together a bit more formal of a review but for now, just go buy the book.