Joy

A party snap, thus the bad lighting. I don't care, since every time I look at this moment captured, I can't help smiling at the joy of motion, its spontaneity – not that I can think of anything to say about the dance itself.

But plenty could, and not only do they talk about dance if it relates to them, but the process of thinking about what goes into making a dance if it relates to them, and being and becoming a dancer if it relates to you know w**. Luckily, Wendy Perron at Dance Magazine has just jumped in with a performance piece that should be seen by everyone.

Blogging about the process of choreography—Ugh!

3000 steps today
Oddly enough, she compared these bores to writers, I can't imagine why.

after exertions

her official silhouette

This isn't a real silhouette, which takes great skill. Fine cut-outs, first called silhouettes by snobs with no taste, are an artform perfected in China 700 years ago and kept alive by non-bloggers there. There are many other national and regional styles of cut-out art, from the Polish which looks somewhat like "Pennsylvania Dutch" to the lacy puppets of Indonesia. Paper isn't the only material. Leather and wood have been used, and all of this inspired ironwork, even to, thanks to Napoleon, the gorgeous lacy gold-free iron jewellery called Berlin iron.

This brings me to an artist whose name could be Joy, so much does it suit not only her "work" (Ugh, do I hate that word when related to creations. Oh, Mrs Jones! What a beautiful work. Is it a boy or a girl? ) Ignore that sidestep. I was just getting to the point of recommending the art of Kathleen Jennings. Though I first noticed her spectacularly detailed silhouettes, she has a very nuanced line and shade in all shades of black and white. See, for example, Heavy.

I am keenest on her monochromes because I prefer the emotional directness and depth of shades in darkness and "empty" spaces, or something. I just love India ink, charcoal, pencil in all its hardnesses and edges, the texture and colours of white paper, cutouts and silhouettes. But Jennings is an artist in all colours, for all ages and many tastes. She is unfortunately, over-endowed with talents and skills, being a writer of note too, as well as–I can't go on, as it's too much for one person.

And she does manage, with all this against her, to run a model blog. This is one place where the process is described and it is fascinating, down to boards that aren't boring. This blog inspires and teaches: Its curious name is Errantry.

Steve Aylett: the cure for scurvy

"A camel cannot be impressed."

— Steve Aylett, in The Velocity Gospel

Mental scurvy is rife now. I recommend anything by Aylett as the cure, though even a small dose could cause death from immoderate laughing. Masochists will enjoy their ulcers' liveliness, and people who think "fuck" is a punchline and furthermore, like their fiction smooth and thoughtless will be left clueless, their gums flapping.

This curmudgeon is my favourite living author, and even in his slimmest volume, the best deal per page.

The Complete Accomplice, just released, is a bargain of bargains. 386 pages— all four of the "Accomplice" books (Only an Alligator, The Velocity Gospel, Dummyland, and Karloff's Circus) published by Scar Garden Press in one volume, revised, with an intro by Michael Moorcock, and new Preface.

"Lucifer is a black glove we wear to hide our own fingerprints."

— in Karloff's Circus

I hope that this omnibus is the the first of more to come. In an earlier post, I recommended Lint and everything that has collected around this character, whose immortal tackiness even seduced me to put an animation on my site. (Lint has a film coming soon, too.)

Aylett never wastes time plastering words on the page to intimidate or provide a cover for no meaning; nor does he remove the fibre and acid from a story till it's genre.

Sure, his books (and comics) are hilarious. But he's got stuff to say. In every page, almost every sentence, he shakes off observations about society like water off a dog that's just rolled in washed-up salmon.

See his site for a load of stuff that is good and bad for your health, including The Caterer.

But before you go there—

"You make more difference to the world emulsioning a wall than you do writing satire."

— Aylett, in The Velocity Gospel

Prove him wrong.
Buy The Complete Accomplice.
Here are some outlets.
Amazon USA
Amazon UK
Amazon France

Moving forward with Global-summit fiction

Need some intentional fun? Your wish is my genre ~

The rarefied air of Coprahaagendas swirled and separated into zones, like vinegar whisked into milk—an acrid miasma that puffed and seeped from the great building atop the hill.

There is only this one building in Coprahaagendas, but the singularity of this temple-high structure makes up for its loneness, not just by its prismatic colours that exceed our vision. The structure defies architecture. Figures and symbols cover it, as uncountable as they are unstill. They cling to, spring from, crawl over and maybe are every wall, ceiling, column, cupola, dome, grate, doorway, step and arch. Arms, wings, hooves, snouts, breasts, cunts and priapuses do everything imaginable, and more. Beings humanick and otherwise fuck and slaughter; lust and leer; look out and inwards, reach down and upwards—making and remaking this stupendous edifice into an evermore impossibility of unfathomability, to us.

Not that we would ever see this building, let alone Coprahaagendas. Our leaders have only just left Copenhagen.…

continued (with art by Marc McBride) in

"The Eye of Nostradamus Summit"

at Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine.

and yes. I plugged this story the other day, but I'm doing so again, hoping that someone in that incredibly connected ScienceBlogs community will pick it up. Otherwise, my story will be doomed to be read only by the usual few people who read fiction—those who say "I'm a writer" or would like to—and this post will only be seen by my sometime two visitors max, or the stray person who finds this blog by asking questions. The best question of the past week is:

What is the percentage of men who don't eat bananas in public?

If only I were a scientist! I could study this and publish my results in PLoS. My mouth waters at the possible reward: an Ig Nobel.

The study would have to take into account men who don't eat banana cream pie if anyone's looking, men who blanch at forking the banana slices in a fruit salad, and men who are too shy to answer a question about b *****s — whether those b's be fat, stubby, blushing Lady Fingers or the longest, most symmetrically curved Cavendish. This question is not silly at all, because the supermarkets in Australia refused much of the crop this year because the bananas were too big. First, who complained? And what percentage of Australian censors were offended by the size and shape of these banned bananas?

Like mongrel dogs, unpedigreed fruits are more delightful

"The fruit here is fresh and brandless. With no pedigree to command a premium or warrant the protection of a soft package, the strains on offer sold for less than a song. I asked the price of this bunch in warm red. Three ringgit (US$0.93), said the lady. Peeled, the flesh within bore a slight hue of blush and melted into sweet mush in the mouth, helping to wash down the pungent strength of savoury Durio pulp."
— Budak, in another delish post, with pictures of exotics that must be seen to be believed. These fruits are certainly not supermarket plastic.

Redskins

Is ScienceBlogs worth saving?

If you have followed ScienceBlogs, I hope this paragraph sums up the past days well enough:
A communications company is in hiding because it doesn't communicate, while its most valuable asset – the contributors to ScienceBlogs – are dropping out faster than bricks in the grip of a cloud. The indispensable PZ Myers is now On Strike, trying this painful tactic as a salvage operation. There is much talk of trying to get funding to then build a new community of science bloggers – one where words aren't rubbing column shoulders with ads or worse—the ultimate sin that started the stampede of bloggers out, that Pepsi "nutrition blog" that SEED (the corporate communications-company sponsor of ScienceBlogs) stupidly foisted on a community of people with antennae and sensitivities to spare, then removed with a disingenuous apology that only added to the outrage.

So ScienceBlogs is now falling apart, as important commentators like Bora have just written their farewell posts. The saddest aspect of ScienceBlog's crisis now, is that the world really needs its clout and vigour now to save the irreproducible Vavilov fruit and berry collection.

Oddly enough, Bora stated best, three of the six best reasons for keeping ScienceBlogs going, if at all possible.

1. The high integrity of posts, and ensuing ScienceBlog discussions "You can hide on your own little Blogspot blog. You cannot hide on a network. My first instinctive and unconscious change, something I only became of aware later, was that I changed the way I made factual statements in my posts. What does that mean? I started thoroughly fact-checking the statements before posting instead of learning the hard way that readers will do it for you. Getting invited to blog here is an honor, and the only correct response is to blog with maximal integrity, even during online fights and kerfuffles that alight in every corner of the blogosphere, including the science blogosphere, with predictable regularity. Every single blogger on scienceblogs.com, even those who I may disagree with 99% of the time, blogs here with strong personal integrity (yes, human beings sometimes make mistakes, but they correct them once the onslaught dies down and it is possible to do it without losing face). And that is one of the greatest strengths of this network - just wander around the Web randomly for a while and you'll see some interesting contrasts to this..."
2. The altruism of interest and ability to foment change "Sustained and relentless blogging by many SciBlings (and then many other bloggers who followed our lead) played a large role in the eventual release of 'Tripoli Six', the Bulgarian medical team imprisoned in Libya. Sustained blogging by SciBlings (and others who first saw it here) played a large part in educating the U.S.Senate about the importance of passing the NIH open access bill with its language intact. Blogging by SciBlings uncovered a number of different wrongdoings in ways that forced the powers-that-be to rectify them. Blogging by SciBlings brings in a lot of money every October to the DonorsChoose action. Sustained blogging by SciBlings forced SEED to remove the offending Pepsi blog within 36 hours. And if a bunch of SciBlings attack a person who did something very wrong, that person will have to spend years trying to get Google to show something a little bit more positive in top 100 hits when one googles their name (which is why I try to bite my tongue and sleep over it when I feel the temptation to go after a person)."
3. The news and opinion source that "is media", as Bora says, to media "The power of the networks of individuals affects many aspects of the society, including the media."

Three more reasons to keep ScienceBlogs going

1. What is, works better than you bloggers realise The stats are so incredible that SEED brags about them here,
2. What is, is already funded, and hopefully will continue be SEED shows prominently on that same page with the stats, other corporate sinners advertisers such as Shell, Dow and Schering-Plough. Many journalists at any time would kill to get the chance to write with such advertising backing that doesn't even direct the content. At this time especially, when media is in a funding crisis with no solution in sight, the preciousness of the ScienceBloggers about ads and what was transparently an advertising stunt "blog" makes an observer question the silence about so much science reporting. Since the funding of studies and research is rarely accounted for in the announcement and coverage of some wonderful discovery or new study, science reporting is often the cheapest and by far the best way for a company to get advertising copy. This bugs me so much that I sometimes write a complaint which is usually unpublished. Here's an example, to a prominent science magazine: "Persistent coughs melt away with chocolate" is a headline that fits a magazine entitled "Wishful Thinking", not "New Scientist". It is only in the body of the article that we find that the study used theobromine, a constituent of cocoa. What if a study finds health benefits in an even larger constituent of chocolate itself: clay? Will you still headline it as cure-by-chocolate?
3. Anyone who thinks that ScienceBlogs' readership can't tell an ad from a post, insults the readers

I hope that PZ Myers will draw the SEED "team" out of their cave and force them to communicate and treat this resource with respect. But I also hope that the bloggers who left will come back to ScienceBlogs – with coolness, passion, and a certain sense of proportion missing at the moment. After all, if we all fell for the fat-busting miracles, we'd look different, wouldn't we? So quit worrying so much about the ads. No payers, no gainers. People like me don't even see ads and we don't consume them any more than an eagle does the grass around a rabbit. We block what we can, and otherwise, our eyes find what we are seeking on the screen even if an ad jiggles or says 'healthy'.

The 7th
Another reason just snuck in (those 7ths are so pushy). More than any "community" on the blogosphere (zounds, do I hate those terms), SB shows that thinking people have a wonderfully diverse, unpredictable assortment of interests, passions, and opinions, not classifiable 'right' or 'left'; yet they can discuss and disagree in a way that is constructive and composed of well-reasoned sentences and cogitated thoughts, not mere reactions or tribal grunts. As both governing bodies and global conferences have become collections of inflexibles, each delegate thinking this the winning stance, our institutions look ever more like fallen concrete statues. ScienceBlogs is, just, alive. Something is ticking, though I'm not qualified to say what.

Sea urchin teeth, and taste

Dentist tomorrow, so this is a good time to post this closeup view of a sea urchin's teeth. No need to go anywhere for scaling, let alone perio- or orthodontal work for these lucky beasts. Not only do their mouths stay healthy, but their teeth are self-sharpening. But wouldn't you know it? Type in "sea urchin" teeth to Google Image and you get not only many better pictures, of course, but Ads by Google, the top one being

Extreme Makeover … Looking 4the perfect smile? Leading … cosmetic dentist …

What's the antonym for liverlips?
The wonders of cosmetic surgery! This minds me of the time when mouths were meant to be so small, it's a wonder words could out. But that was fashion, not to be mixed with taste.

"I never had a fancy for your nimini-pimini young ladies, with their mouths squeezed into the shape the dimensions of a needle's eye. I always suspect such damsels as having a very portentous design against mankind in general."
—"Bob Burke" in "Bob Burke's Duel With Ensign Brady of the 48th" by William Maginn (1793–1842)

Marc McBride's art and "The Eye of Nostradamus Summit" now online

"And no no one can trumpet like Ganesh."

Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine #44

Many thanks to Nyssa Pascoe who has created this spanking-new website for Andromeda Spaceways; and thank you also to the people who make this cooperative actually function. Specifically for this issue, that includes Felicity Dowker who chose stories and art; Juliet Bathory, who really cares how type is set on the page; and the unflappable Simon Petrie without whom this issue would not be. I will list instead of just linking the Table of Contents when the artists and illustrations are as credited in the ToC and online as the wordsmiths and their works.

Marc McBride's cover-art painting is now online, untrammeled by text, with my accompanying story—

"The Eye of Nostradamus Summit"

Marc is a splendid artist and a writer of magic (his World of Monsters is a collector's item) who I feel lucky to have anything to do with, let alone have a story that goes with his art. I say this deliberately, since he said in public how much he feels for writers who get covers that never gave the fiction the time of day. If only he was the God of Publishing! So when Felicity offered us a chance to have a story with illo, I asked Marc to go back to those golden days of slush, producing the picture as my lead. I'm thrilled that this picture is the cover art.

As with Ellen Datlow, who so inspired with her Lovecraft challenge, Marc's painting was a hot needle to a boil. Ahhhh.

An ass's coat

There is no coat finer than that of an ass — and how I wish we would all return to that venerable word for this intelligent, dignified animal who has a wicked sense of humour, lightning kick, and the most gentle, soft lips and caressing neck. Yes, an ass can hug you with her neck.

Rain brings out the best features of the coat, though any ass will say that dust does—their ears droop in the rain.

Waves appear, in such frothed order that they are positively painterly. The smell of a healthy ass is always more delicate than silvertip tea – better than any bought perfume. If it were bottled, it would be classified as 'oriental'.

I love asses — and this coat belongs to a female of great depth of feeling, and voice. Her needs, lusts, and wisdom were the inspiration for my story "Travels with Robert Louis Stevenson in the Cévennes" that you can read here on Infinity Plus.

Wombat berries & orange bracket fungi

Just for the beauty of these on this winter's day.

The wombat berry vines are not in their prime now, and these berries are out of season, which made them all the more interesting in a quiet way. This vine rests on a piece of handmade paper that I packed out from Nepal some years ago.

The vines themselves are as tough as wire – and so they were a fanciful but practical base for a garland-tiara that I made for a friend to visit the last Medieval Fest. I wove the vine with its dark green leaves and stems. The jewels set into this crown were sprays of grey-green lichens interspersed with my favourite brilliants: orange bracket fungi, only ones taken from small sticks. They grow prolifically here on the flotsam and jettisoned bits of wood in the local forests as well as on other bits of wood, such as our front steps (till the steps were only bits of wood). Actually, I'm an admirer of all bracket fungi. They have such personality. Some, like the birch bracket fungus have been even used as blade sharpeners.

But they are so decorative that I see that I'm not the only bespoke costumer who is besotted with orange fungi in particular. See what Donna Franklin has made, something that looks ethereal but is earthly in the best way: a dress that grows. It's alive!

Here's a little something picked up today, turned over so you can see its underside where the pores are even more brilliant than the colour on the top of the fungus. As there are several species that grow locally and are often confused, I'm going to imitate the Laetiporus and not commit clapping a name to the species below.


You might want to consult Bill Leithhead's Fungi Pages for great pictures and much information.

Israeli judges stage farce, Ha'aretz reports the play

"Israel bans Gaza woman from studying human rights on the West Bank" by Amira Hass, in Ha'aretz.