Now I’m completely obsessed with electrotango instead. I mean, yeah, this makes a little more sense than my earlier bhangra obsession because tango originates in a place I’ve lived and a quick check at my last.fm tells you I listen to Thievery Corporation more than anything else except TMBG, and I’ve liked Gotan Project for some time as well. But I didn’t know there was more than Gotan Project. I thought Gotan Project was an outlier, a lone band kind of doing its own thing. Turns out there’s a whole genre there! And I LOVE it.

So in the last month, I’ve been listening to tag radio on last.fm. A tag radio is a series of tracks that have all been tagged by users with the same tag. It’s a good way to get a solid mood listen, when you need a certain consistency in what you’re listening to. Or when you’re obsessed with a certain sound.

The tag I’ve been listening to is electrotango. I LOVE this stuff with intense singlemindedness. Tanghetto, Bajofondo, Supervielle, Federico Aubele, Bulevard Tango Club, San Telmo Lounge…I could (and do) listen to it all day. I wish I’d known to look for this stuff when I was in Buenos Aires last year.

The electrotango radio was in heavy rotation during the composition of both “Kenosis” and “Mi Buenos Aires Querido” and I believe they are better stories for having that musical backdrop. “Kenosis” in particular has been liked by almost every critiquer who has read it, and that sort of thing never happens to me. By and large, my stories are not well-liked, and never universally. (Some might wonder why, in light of that, I continue to write them, but that would be a question for another day. This is not the writing angst post. This is the electrotango is fantastic post).

The pinnacle of my obsession is “Perfume” by Supervielle. If you have a Last.fm account you can hear it; it’s one of their free tracks. I love the lyrics, so dramatic and intense. You can rely on “Like water seeks thirst” being a blog title at some point. Listen, do you hear the tango? The sea? It sounds like Buenos Aires, that weird mix of nostalgia and anticipation: the wind and the water and the memories. Say it: “el impulso antiguo y sutil del eco de tu perfume”. Feel it in your mouth. It’s totally lovely and wonderful to say.

Right, I did say I was obsessed?

Ok, a music post deserves a scorekeeping update:

• 2 points Sunjunkie
• 2 points Jerm
• 6 points Lanfaedhe
• 2 points Dave Lartigue

WTG, Lanf, leaving all the other participants in the dust! But it’s not too late for folks to catch up, so keep playing.

If you’re wondering what the scoring is about, I give two points to the first person who comments with the line following on the one I give in my blog post title, when my titles are lyrics (which is often, though sadly, not today). There are unclaimed entries since I started the game back in July, if you’d like to dig through the archives and play along. Some day there will be a prize. I don’t know what and I don’t know when, yet. But it will be fabulous, in the style of the prizes awarded in Dave Lartigue’s leaf bag contest. I promise. (BTW, Dave, you are the first link under a google search of leaf bag contest. You must be so proud!)

I wish Annalee Lewitz, of io9, was their scriptwriter, because this, even with its problems, would have been so much better than what we saw.

Yay, new BSG soon (April 4). Won’t it be weird having a tv show to watch again?

Let me also state for the record my BSG good episode axiom: BSG episodes are good in direct proportion with the number of toasters that appear in that episode. The very worst episodes have no toasters in them at all. And no, humanoid models do not count for this calculation, which is why I say toasters and not cylons.

For now I’ll call this feature: good short story, go read it.

And my first great short story, go read it for the year is Ekaterina Sedia’s “Zombie Lenin” from new print anthology Fantasy.

I loved it for its Russian flavor and all around weirdness. Let me know what you think.

Another of my favorite people there, Suzanne Palmer, just had the story “He’s Got Skeletons” published online. It’s delightful and funny, you should go read it. I think she still owes me a story about three-legged camels in the Aztec jungles, though.

And speaking of three-legged camels, the person who wrote the most wonderful story I read while at VP as well as a really promising but frustrating and inconsistent story (giving birth to my diatribe about the three-legged camels) has just published a beautiful story at Clarkesworld. So now you can enjoy her poetic language too.

I first fell in love with Ambergris when I read your story “The Cage”, in The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror, Volume 14. What a gorgeous gem of a story. Shivery and magical and so, so strange. I was thrilled to have found the story, and thrilled to have found you. I followed that up with Secret Life which was truly an amazing book with some stunning stories in it. Some of those images are still with me.

I am now reading Shriek: an afterword. I am not sure how I feel about it yet. Ambivalent, I guess. I do like it, and I will finish it, that much I know. It does some very neat things with crosslinked narrative and editorial comment. It’s very clever, and it makes me think about writing at every sentence. One thing it doesn’t do, though, is open up the reader trance for me. I’m so conscious of reading words someone wrote, and so conscious of the altered manuscript of the story, that I cannot lose myself in any of the narrative threads. I’m not sure that’s a good thing. It’s a daring thing, and an interesting thing, but it’s a hard thing to love, when absorption into books is why most avid readers read. It’s as though you’ve snuck off with my opium pipe and given me methadone instead. I’m not going to get the heebie jeebies without my fix, but man, it’s a weird, weird trip and not as euphoric as I would expect (or perhaps desire).

I don’t like Duncan or Janice at all. I’m ok with not liking them, actually. You threw me a few bones, a few people to like: Sybel, Bonmot, the mother. The only shame of it is that the character I love with all my heart, Ambergris, is made more remote by the self-absorbed siblings’ constant, facile commentary. It’s like being in a crowd where that one guy who feels like he must explain everything just will not shut up. I’ve been that guy, actually. I’ve stood behind myself going “shut up! shut up! shut up! no one cares! no one wants to know!”. But I digress. (Again. Maybe this is why I don’t write to writers. Thoughts squish out in all directions). I might wish that Duncan’s and Janice’s shrieking would mute to a dull roar, Ambergris would rise to the foreground and I would hum with happiness and marvel at the strangeness of it all. There are moments, don’t get me wrong. When she’s scraping the mushrooms off Duncan? Awesome. When father takes him on the underground tour? Riveting. The walk in the woods to the statue? Very nice. The suicide attempt is memorable as well. Lots of bits I like a great deal, but the overall structure creates this cordon of writing, this space, between me and what I really want to get to. So…ambivalence.

There’s one thing which I really love, and that’s how the natives of Ambergris characterize themselves. This is too rare in fantasy, though China Mieville does it well also (and, of course, Borges). In this world, people who consider themselves of a (large enough) city often assign themselves qualities that they perceive all natives of that city have. The city has a character, and its character rubs off on them, or they act as though it does. I think this reflects tribe and human nature, and when I don’t see it in fiction, it bugs me. All the lines stereotyping Ambergrisians make me smile. It’s like something Londoners would say, or New Yorkers, or Portenos.

So because I’m so conscious as I read of the writing of the work, and the layers and fictions overlapping the writing of the work, I’m following every word. You’re getting quite a close reading, and I hope a faithful reading, not a good parts reading (being blocked from the trance keeps me from building a good parts version, I think). Here’s my question: on page 95 of the Tor first edition hardback, there’s a paragraph that begins “Back then, he was a mischievous sprout…” Following? Good, well in that paragraph the line “his bright green eyes sometimes seemed too large for his face” appears twice. At first (I have such faith, see), I thought you did that on purpose. That you were going to start increasingly repeating lines at various intervals, to make some point about circularity or Janice’s complete mental dissolution. But then, it didn’t seem to happen again. So, was it just a mistake? One of those human kinds of mistakes? My second question is about the machine in the underground sequence. See, I checked Secret Life out of the library, so I don’t have it handy, but that sequence…seems repeated. Is it? Did you just rip it out of Secret Life and re-purpose it for Shriek: an afterword? It’s not a problem, or anything, but I was a bit surprised to see it again. When you wrote it, did you have Duncan in your head as the narrator, or did you discover that later? Was it just love for that bit of prose that made you use it again? Also, not a big deal, but I can’t help wondering if the afterword is this extensive, how long exactly is the book? Must be some kind of crazy huge tome.

Oh, one more thing. This line: “And let you, O Lord, serve as a light to him, for we are imperfect vessels and we platitude simile extended metaphor with barely any pauses followed by more repetition. Period.” is so near perfect I wanted to make someone else read it. That whole paragraph is deliriously funny and incisive, actually, but I wouldn’t want to abuse fair use by too extensive a quote. Thanks for writing it, and all the other words, too.

Anarkey

• 1 The Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien
• 5 A Wizard of Earthsea, Ursula K. Le Guin
• 10 Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury
• 11 The Book of the New Sun, Gene Wolfe
• 12 A Canticle for Leibowitz, Walter M. Miller, Jr.
• 26 Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, J.K. Rowling
• 27 The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams
• 29 Interview with the Vampire, Anne Rice
• 30 The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula K. Le Guin
• 33 The Man in the High Castle, Philip K. Dick
• 42 Slaughterhouse-5, Kurt Vonnegut
• 43 Snow Crash, Neal Stephenson (though I liked The Diamond Age better, to be honest)

• 2 The Foundation Trilogy, Isaac Asimov
• 3 Dune, Frank Herbert
• 6 Neuromancer, William Gibson
• 9 The Mists of Avalon, Marion Zimmer Bradley
• 37 On the Beach, Nevil Shute
• 41 The Silmarillion, J.R.R. Tolkien
• 47 Stormbringer, Michael Moorcock

• 4 Stranger in a Strange Land, Robert A. Heinlein (am I the only person on the planet who really dug The Puppetmasters and not much else Heinlein?)
• 21 Dragonflight, Anne McCaffrey

• 23 The First Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever, Stephen R. Donaldson
• 48 The Sword of Shannara, Terry Brooks

• 8 Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Philip K. Dick
• 20 Dhalgren, Samuel R. Delany
• 36 The Rediscovery of Man, Cordwainer Smith
• 45 The Stars My Destination, Alfred Bester

• 16 The Colour of Magic, Terry Pratchett
• 19 The Demolished Man, Alfred Bester
• 22 Ender’s Game, Orson Scott Card*
• 28 I Am Legend, Richard Matheson
• 32 Lord of Light, Roger Zelazny
• 31 Little, Big, John Crowley*

• 14 Children of the Atom, Wilmar Shiras
• 15 Cities in Flight, James Blish
• 17 Dangerous Visions, edited by Harlan Ellison
• 18 Deathbird Stories, Harlan Ellison
(to be fair, I totally met my Ellison quota, because I read the mammoth retrospective tome)
• 24 The Forever War, Joe Haldeman
• 25 Gateway, Frederik Pohl
• 34 Mission of Gravity, Hal Clement
• 35 More Than Human, Theodore Sturgeon
• 38 Rendezvous with Rama, Arthur C. Clarke
• 40 Rogue Moon, Algis Budrys
• 44 Stand on Zanzibar, John Brunner
• 49 Timescape, Gregory Benford

• 7 Childhood’s End, Arthur C. Clarke
• 13 The Caves of Steel, Isaac Asimov
• 39 Ringworld, Larry Niven
• 46 Starship Troopers, Robert A. Heinlein
• 50 To Your Scattered Bodies Go, Philip Jose Farmer

It may seem weird to you that I’m not all that sure what I’ve read. This is part of my impetus toward better record-keeping. I forget what I read. I’m also pleased to see how I’ve loved most of what I’ve read, and hated very little of it. Even the two haters were instrumental in their way to my adolescent self. Before I read them, I read anything, uncritically. It took stories I hated to make me see not all stories are worth it. So, not counting the five I may or may not have read (they look familiar, but if I did read them it was over ten years ago and I can’t exactly remember), I’ve read twenty three of the fifty. Not quite half, but close. Some of the most loved ones I’ve read multiple times.

I’m not saying I don’t have a problem with it that makes me reluctant. I do. It’s the Cylon’s plan that’s giving me trouble. I’m not convinced they really have one. Or rather, I’m not convinced they really have one that makes sense beyond being convenient to the overall plot. I know the beginning of every episode tells me they have a plan, and since these guys are robots they must be governed by logic, but they’re acting like idiots, and each new idiocy makes it less likely that the show’s creators are going to be able to stitch the thing together in a way that will click for me.

Please, this is not an invitation for you folks in season 3 of Galactica to tell me in great detail how much sense the Cylon’s plan makes. For one, you’re not going to sway me that way, and I’ll abandon the show completely if it’s spoilered for me. However, if you want to reassure me that their plan isn’t colossally stupid without ruining the whole show, you may do so. I’m just saying, from where I’m standing, getting rid of those last 50,000 humans ought to be a piece of cake, and I can’t figure out why the Cylons keep botching it. If getting rid of that last 50K isn’t the plan, then whatever the alternate plan is, it better make sense. No, really.

I’m not giving up yet. I still enjoy watching it when I have time. I’ve watched three more episodes in the last week, in fact. Up to about show 8 or 9. I like a lot of things about the show, more things than I roll my eyes at, that’s for sure. It’s just that I’ve been burned by the everything-will-ultimately-make-sense handwaving back in the X-Files days, and I’m suspicious.