Animals Belonging to the Emperor

So the last time around I mentioned my quirky and highly subjective system of organization for my bookshelves (and, indeed, other shelvable media as well). As it happens, last week Elly threw down the gauntlet for bookshelf pr0n posts, so this seems like as good an excuse as any to take a tour of one small corner of my library. So, then: Mah buks. Let me show u them:

This is the bookshelf most focused on straight-up prose fiction in my office (as opposed to reference books, graphic novels, or art books), so it seems like a natural one to showcase for you library voyeurs. Moving in closer:

The Datlow and Windling Year's Best anthologies were what restored my faith in modern fantasy back in the early 90's. My shelf fits exactly volumes one through eighteen; I don't know if that's a sign to stop, or to get different shelves. Also featured here are Thomas Monteleone's Borderlands anthologies, which are delightfully weird and dark, and a couple of Chaosium Mythos collections. (Frodo sculpture by Big Tony; and yes, the sign on top is from a Borders, though I confess I came by it through entirely legitimate means.)

Here we have New Weird, Old Weird, slipstream, and horror. The first third is classic weird fiction in more or less chronological order: Lautreamont, Chambers, Machen, Dunsany, M.R. James, Blackwood, and Lovecraft. In the middle are my personal favorite Lovecraft heirs, William Browning Spencer and Thomas Ligotti (and I don't use phrases like "the gem of my collection," but if I did, I'd say it about the hardback copy of Ligotti's Teatro Grottesco there at center stage), followed by the often Ligottian Darrell Schweitzer, Brian McNaughton, Jeff VanderMeer, Jeffrey Thomas, and Mark Danielewski. From there we have different sorts of all-out deconstructive weird fantasy: K.J. Bishop, Jay Lake, China Mieville, and Scott Lynch. Floating above are the unclassifiable Robert Aickman, more Mythos anthologies, the multi-talented Ramsey Campbell, and Hal Duncan's Vellum, which has kicked my ass every time I try to pick it up. (The Thing in a Jar there behind my tavern pipe was a 33rd birthday present from Spyder, and you're probably happier not seeing it any closer.)


And here is a whole bunch of urban fantasy and the genres adjacent thereto, all sort of circling around the Big Block o' Neil Gaiman in the middle, with some high fantasy and space opera thrown in for good measure. Hiding behind the hip UF and tie-in novels on the right, Fritz Leiber's Lankhmar books are keeping thematic company with Ellen Kushner's Riverside mannerpunk. From there I've got Patricia McKillip's Riddle-Master (probably my favorite Tolkienian fantasy that isn't actually very much like LOTR) and Gaiman's novels and collections, followed closely by Alan Moore and Mike Carey, likewise comics writers-turned-novelists. The rest of the shelf is filled out (to bring things full circle) with the sort of fiction the Year's Best anthologies made me fall in love with: Susanna Clarke, Kelly Link, Elizabeth Bear, Ekaterina Sedia, Cat Valente, and some wonderfully pulpy dark urban fantasy by Jim Macdonald and Stephan Zielinski. Outliers include more eBear, Iain M. Banks' Culture novels, Guy Gavriel Kay, Cory Doctorow, the first Liz Williams Detective Inspector Chen book (which I'm now reading, and is delightful), and, of course, John Crowley's Little, Big. Just below you can see a tantalizing hint of the next shelf down, which is All Clive Barker, All the Time (and which I'm going to have to find something creative to do with when he gets around to the next Abarat book).

(There's actually more to this bookcase as well, but it's sort of behind my laundry basket, and no one wants to see that.)

And just to show what a ridiculously obsessive completist I am, I've gone and made sure that everything in the above photos (along with a great deal more shelved elsewhere) is in my catalog at LibraryThing, which is a relatively new addiction for me and so I haven't actually added everything I own. Give me time.

An Old Day Now

(Finally, this, as promised last time, only lightly altered for current continuity. Wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey, and so on.)

So a little over a month ago I turned 34, as the inevitable and inexorable progression of numbers would have it. At this point, I'm no longer in the least surprised that as I stumble on towards my status as venerable graybeard (a designation increasingly literal these days, for good or ill), I still don't feel in the least like a grownup. So it goes, and frankly all for the better; being grownup remains an overrated prospect.

However, just to put this in terrifying perspective: Those of you who have known me for a long time, and maybe remember that unfortunate incident I was subjected to on my 17th birthday? The thing with the cheesecake and the uncomfortable car ride?* That was now officially half my lifetime ago.

Anyway, here in the Eternal Now, I see that I've been tapped with a Meme by Aishwarya, wherein I share six random and unimportant facts about myself. In honor of my 34th year and all the hermetic significance that implies, I'm upping it to seven. Bonus frivolity! So:

1. My very first comic book was a Marvel Conan the Barbarian, sometime around '81 or '82, now long since lost in a move, alas. It was wonderfully Howardian and spooky and weird, and I remember finding it fascinating and unsettling in more or less equal measure. (The Oracle at Google tells me it was #117, "In the Lair of Mullah-Kajar.") This imprinted on me pretty deeply in retrospect, if that wasn't obvious enough.

2. My list of DO NOT WANT Under Any Circumstances foods is relatively short, but hard-boiled eggs are right the hell at the top. If I were ever stranded on a desert island with nothing but a crate of hard-boiled eggs, I might actually starve to death.

3. For about five years now, I haven't listened to nearly any music I own on the original CDs. I have in fact become more than a little obsessive about keeping them pristine and unscratched in their cases while I use burned copies for actual listening. (This is a pretty good example of my particular cluster of neuroses involving Protecting My Stuff, which manifest in a number of amusing ways, though at least I no longer insist on covering my paperbacks in clear contact paper before reading them.)

4. The single biggest influence on any daydreams of rock-stardom I indulge in is without question Ian Anderson, who also gets the blame for why my Platonic ideal of performing music is wrapped up in a great deal of bombast and theatricality. Indeed, my one real regret in my public musical career is that I waited long enough to get serious about it that I no longer look any good in a codpiece.

5. I have an especially quirky and idiosyncratic way of organizing my bookshelves that boils down to "things that would get along well with each other." It's a source of no small irritation for me that I constantly have to compromise this system with the physical limits of the spaces involved.

6. I'm not sorry I didn't pursue theatre as a career, but I'd really like the chance to someday play the Divine Marquis in Marat/Sade. The psychoanalysts' field day's worth of implications of this I leave to those better equipped than I to mull over.

7. I still entertain an occasional daydream of being a radio DJ - not the modern vulgar shouty kind, but the cool 70's Venus Flytrap kind, or a more pretentious version of the guy who does Below the Salt. Preferably on some after-midnight program spinning, yanno, twenty-minute-long tracks in unusual time signatures.

As usual, I'm not tagging anyone in particular, but rather trusting to the whimsical enthusiasms of my loyal readers to pick it up as they so choose. Tra la!

*No, you're not getting any more than that. Not on the Internets, at any rate. I insist I still have my dignity, all evidence and Black Thursday** to the contrary.
**Likewise.

Better Living Through Alchemy

As of right now, after eight years of waffling, I am back on the dried frog pills.

Wish me luck.

Merry Measure

As I write this it is now (for the next couple hours, anyway) ten days until Christmas, and a week until Solstice. I've just about reconciled, though, that those two words mean pretty much the same thing to me.

I am not and never have been a Christian, except maybe in the vague fluffy Unitarian sense of "what Jesus said was so nice, who cares if he was God or not" (and, when I'm in the right mood, the even vaguer and fluffier Alan Moore sense of "the idea of a god is a god," of course); as you can well imagine, the neocon War On Christmas paranoia reads to me like dispatches from Bizarro-World, because from where I sit, Christmas qua Christmas is freakin' everywhere, a cultural default. I've always sort of been of two minds about it, I suppose, because while the assumption that I'm buying into the same theology has made me uncomfortable for most of my life, I harbor a deep and shameless and uncompromising love of Christmas itself. I adore the lights, the decorations, the gifts, the overeating, and, unlike almost everyone else I know, I like to see it all get started just about as soon as October is through. Holly and evergreen and strings of light obviously speak to something profoundly resonant in me, which I suspect is nothing more complicated than the same thing that inspired folks in the northern hemisphere to first want to light fires and quaff wassail in the long nights of the year aeons past: it's cold and it's dark and if we don't do something fun we may give up and die of despair.

So I've come to understand that what I'm really celebrating at Christmas is the Yuletide, "older than Bethlehem and Babylon" (as Granpa HPL put it in a much creepier context), and calling it Christmas is a matter of cultural convenience and shorthand. I used to feel weirder about that, when I was first working out my identity as a pagan and aspiring magician and making like the important thing for me was observing the Solstice, but keeping Christmas at a distance never quite took. (Nowadays, I'm still inclined to want some sort of quasi-religious ritual on the Solstice proper, but it's in addition to, not instead of, the presents and revelry of the 25th, and I'm more and more of a mind that it's all part of one big Yule festival anyway.) I am in my heart a syncretist, which I suppose I must irritate alike both the religiously orthodox and the critics of cultural appropriation, what with my pentacle and my Ganesh puja and my heretical DIY patchwork pantheism; but I'm convinced there's a lot of good in the squishy lumper magpie approach to culture, collecting the shiny bits of diverse things together and discarding the parts that don't fit. So it is that I've come to understand that I've been observing the Good Parts Version of Christmas, and all the sanctimonious moralizing in the world about the "reason for the season" isn't going to make my experience of it any less authentic, even if what I mean by "Christmas" is something very different than what They do.

And what's in a name, anyway? Christos means "annointed one"; whether Son of Man or Sun Unconquered, the Mass we enact at the close of December is a crowning - a new day, a new beginning, the Kingdom of the world remade in a better and brighter light. Let Heaven and Nature sing! You don't need a Messiah in order to take comfort and joy in the hope that this time around will be better than the last, or just to be glad that it's only going to get sunnier from here for a while. (Although, while we're at it, you also don't need to believe in miracles in order to honor a great teacher who spent his life trying to convince people that charity and mercy and forgiveness are better than the alternatives, should you want a reason to keep the Christ in Christmas that's less vague and fluffy than mine.)

All of which is to say: Merry Christmas, everyone, whether you keep it for yourselves by that name or not; I trust that a bit of Midwinter cheer and Peace on Earth are things we can all get behind, even all you hard-line Scrooges out there. (And a very happy whatever-else-it-is you may observe around now as well, needless to say.) And here's a Yule cup raised to you as well, for the sake of good company in a dark hour and a warm hearth on a cold night. Gaudete, all; winter is coming, but there's light and green lingering yet, and soon the night will begin to fall back. If that's not reason enough for the season no matter what you call it, I don't know what is.

Spring the Wode New

The Summer Solstice is upon us, moving the hemisphere from semi-official to official summertime and drawing out the daylight to its breaking point. We've had a weird mix of weather here, alternately springlike and unbearably hot; Heaven only knows what the actual summer's going to look like.

For me, the last few weeks have also been marked by several waves of decidedly un-seasonal depression of the frustrated-with-my-useless-life variety, which may be the most fun of all of them. This is one reason for my latest echoing silence around here and in correspondence, not that anyone would have had any fun reading the sort of thing I was likely to write during that time. It's better now, though it continues to come and go. Nonetheless, I think this year, and this last unpleasant relapse in particular, have sent up a red flag for me that something needs to give. I suppose what I'd really like is some new brain chemistry so that being in my nice house with my sweet doggie and kitty and the wife who still seems to like me despite several compelling reasons not to didn't bum me the hell out, but, failing that, I think a couple of things need to happen.

One, I am obviously not equipped to handle the Condition with the tools I have. This probably means it's time for some kind of therapy or other, though exactly what I'm not sure. I had several years of mostly mediocre talk therapy that probably did some good if only by accident, but I think if I'm going to go back to that sort of thing I want it to be as helpful as possible. I'm not sure what's feasibly available to me right now, and there's a phone call or two I haven't yet been brave enough to make, but it's obvious that avoiding it is fast becoming a non-option. (I remain cautious and skeptical about pharmacological solutions, though they're not out of the question; my biggest fear is that the side effects of whatever I take are going to mess with my creative abilities, because, well, see next point. If this is something I can cope with by getting more exercise and better cognitive tools, I'd rather not complicate it with happy pills that run the risk of putting me further into creative limbo than I already am.)

Two, as one of the triggers (or at least the manifestation) of this seems to be anger and frustration about all the writing/music/what-have-you that I'm not doing or not finishing, I obviously need to refocus on some things I've left fallow too long. For one thing, I've pretty much made the decision that I'm holding off on NaNoWriMo until and unless I finish a novel, because it's frankly too tempting to save it all up for November and then let myself burn out on that project and never get back to it. I've done it five times now and proved to myself I can; I think I need new goalposts now. (Also, I'd like to write a bunch of new music, as I'm going through one of those phases where I'd like to play out more but loathe most of my old material, but there are some blocks I need to work through before I get there, one of which is probably to quit beating myself up because I'm not Colin Meloy/B'eirth/Michael Cashmore.)

Third - well, this is the tough one. It's hard for me to even write it, because it's more vulnerability than I'm usually comfortable with even here, and because it feels so... selfish. But it's become clear to me that much of my problem is tied up with good old loneliness and need for attention. This is probably one of the reasons I'm prone to spending a lot of time on the Internets, even if it's a pale and second-rate stand-in for the kind of socialization I wish I was having. I suppose it should be no real surprise to learn that my angst is, at its heart, the angst of a six-year-old: I have all these wonderful toys, but no one to play with. I doubt there's any real solution to this, since going out and trying to meet interesting people in the usual ways leaves me more frustrated and sad afterwards than I started, as I'm hoping for a miracle every time. I probably need to more or less suck it up and make peace with solitude, lest I descend into the kind of puppy-eyed desperation I surely gave off during my single days, and no one will want to hang out with me at all.

Jeebus, I sure didn't intend this post to be quite so self-indulgent. Um, happy Solstice! Next time I'll try and write about something other than all Me. And about damn time, too.


(Image curtsy I Can Has Cheezburger, natch.)

Dialogue, Duologue, Diatribe

Memes again! This one's what might be described as "self-tagging." If any of my faithful readership want to carry on with it, here's how it works:

Leave me a comment saying, "Interview me."
I respond by asking you five personal questions so I can get to know you better. If I already know you well, expect the questions may be a little more intimate!
You WILL update your journal/bloggy thing/whatever with the answers to the questions.
You will include this explanation and an offer to interview someone else in the post.
When others comment asking to be interviewed, you will ask them five questions.

Me, I've volunteered to be interviewed by the sharp and eloquent Belledame, who it was my pleasure to actually hang out with in person during Spyder's birthday celebration a few weekends back. (Yes, she is also wicked cool in the flesh.) Anyway, here follow the results:

1) Who's your favorite Gaiman character?

Starting right in with the easy ones, I see.

There's a lot to choose from here, but I have to say the one I was always happiest to see come around in the pages of Sandman was Hob Gadling. Hob is, for my money, a really fine example of Gaiman magic - he's frequently arrogant, self-absorbed, opportunistic, and full of his own sense of entitlement, and at the same time he's genuinely charming and witty and even (eventually) compassionate, and very human in spite of all the weird things he sees over the centuries. (I love how, even after hundreds of years and all his changes of fortune, his self-image is still of a scruffy 14th-century freeman commoner.) He's almost always a grounding force in the Sandman storylines, and that's not an obvious trick to pull off with a character who's immortal. Plus he gets a lot of the best lines, especially at the Ren Faire in "Sunday Mourning" ("You should spray 'em with shit as they come through the gates").

And I have to say that his storyline was ballsy in a lot of ways. He gets wiser and sadder, yes; but he doesn't learn any kind of stupid lesson that the value of life is that it ends. He learns that, despite everything, given a chance, the more of life he gets the more he wants more of it. There's something very honest and true about that, and using fantasy to say honest and true things is pretty much what I read Neil Gaiman for.

2) If you could play any musical instrument that you can't already play, what would it be?

I'd love to play lute and/or harp, the two emblematic instruments of the musical heritage I identify most strongly with. Actually, what I'd really like is to have the patience and dexterity necessary to learn those techniques, because I'm really crap at arpeggios and fingerpicking, to the extent that I sometimes wonder if there isn't some kind of actual learning disability at work.

On the more reasonable end of my capabilities, I'd really like to learn the hurdy-gurdy.

3) Favorite epoch for clothing?

Again with the easy questions. Damn.

Well, forced to narrow it down to a reasonable timeframe, considering that I'm fond of pretty much everything from cowls and liripipes on one end of the timeline to cavalier coats on the other, I'd have to say the 16th century. (Raise your hand, everyone who's surprised. Yeah, that's what I thought.) Say what you will about ruffs and pumpkin pants - and as far as over-the-top frippery goes, I'll take those in a heartbeat over a lot of other sartorial excesses - there's just something about a well-fashioned doublet that's pure style and cool. Plus, rapiers. And codpieces.

4) Name an actor or public figure you think is the hawtness.

I'm hardly unique in this, I'm sure, even in the switch-hitting dork set, so it will shock exactly no one to learn that Aly Hannigan and Alan Cumming have occupied honored places on my Freebie List for some small time now. I mean, hello.

5) What makes you happy?

The seasons changing. Moonlight. Starlight. Having a house full of people I love. New books. Traveling. Coming home. City lights. Trees. My puppy and my kitten. Staying up late. Getting up early. Sleeping in. Good food and drink. Smart pop culture, and having conversations about it. Music. Finding other people who are in my tribe. Knowing someone loves something I've created. Going to the movies. Having quiet time to read. Being friends for ten years and counting with the person I'm married to. Making things up.