Currently browsing: ecstaticist’s Flickr stream

 

The Ansel Adams of Flickr?

Currently watching: Pontypool

Currently listening to: Elliott Brood

Currently reading: Queen Victoria, Demon Hunter

Another routine bike ride home….

I’m glad I stayed late after work to hit the gym and thus didn’t get caught in the latest stabbing spree on my route home. Ah, Vancouver, you always know how to make your own fun.

Last edit of The Warhol Gang

I just finished the typesetting edit of The Warhol Gang. A book always looks so much more real when it’s printed out. We’ve got a cover design as well, so I’ll post that when I’m given the all-clear.

In the future, we’ll all be voyeurs

peep

The Peep Diaries is a very interesting read — and project. The basic lesson: We’re all following you online. And we don’t care about you.

(I wish I’d read this before writing The Warhol Gang. The real world is always stranger than anything I can imagine.)

A writer’s book for writers

seventhlayer

I just finished Kevin Brockmeier’s story collection The View from the Seventh Layer. This is a book for writers, with language so careful and beautiful it’s as if the book was transcribed by monks — fitting given Brockmeier has an angel’s powers of observation. As for the subject matter of the stories, well, think Chris Adrian having coffee with Kelly Link in Italo Calvino’s cafe, and you’ll have an idea. Just a few examples:

  • A man finds God’s overcoat and discovers people’s prayers written on notes in the pockets.
  • Strange silences descend upon a city, and the inhabitants realize the city itself is trying to talk to them in morse code
  • A philosophy student learns why other philosophers stopped writing

I had to think about reading itself in a different way when I encountered “The Human Soul as a Rube Goldberg Device: A Choose Your Own Adventure Story,” and the story about the city’s morse code actually had me learning about morse code to figure out the city’s message. A book that makes you think? Imagine that.

See also Brockmeier’s The Brief History of the Dead, about a city populated by the souls of the dead, who exist only so long as the living remember them — but now there’s only one person left alive on Earth.

A Warhol World

This A Softer World comic is eerily close to a storyline running through my new novel:

virginia woolf scrabble

I knew we should have played Zombies!!!