HSU IT Department

Writer and poet Christopher Buehlman (whose alter ego is the hilarious Christophe the Insultor) turns in a hair-raising Southern gothic horror tale of ancient curses and undying evil as his debut novel. Something evil lurks in Megiddo Wood near the little town of Whitbrow, Georgia, dating from the days of the wealthy but sadistic Lucien Savoyard and his murder at the hands of his plantation slaves seventy years ago, shortly after the end of the Civil War.

I got a signed copy of this for Christmas and tore through it in about four hours. Literally could not put it down: I ate dinner with a fork in one hand and the book in the other. I wanted to go slower to savor the writing -- as lush as Southern kudzu and as intense as its humid heat -- but I couldn't control my desperate need to find out WHAT HAPPENS NEXT?!? The tension begins almost on the first page, and gets cranked tighter and tighter as the body count rises and the creeping horrors loom ever closer. There were plenty of twists and turns, and I'm glad I didn't know anything about it beforehand. Do yourself a favor and don't read anything with spoilers in it -- it packs more punch if you're as confused and terrified as the poor doomed residents of Whitbrow.

Buehlman's poetry is pretty good, too. He won the Bridport Prize for "Wanton," which I liked very much (reminiscent of "The Girl with the Hungry Eyes" or Waking the Moon) but "Bear Attacks" (written from the bear's point of view) is superb, both frightening and melancholy:

...come to the park tomorrow (on foot, please),
and armed with only a camera,
which I will not damage
so that all of them will know my face
and know that my god is greater than theirs,
who will not come when they scream for him...

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Hope everyone had a satisfying (please check one):
[ ] Christmas
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[ ] Kwanzaa
[ ] Hanukkah
[ ] Other _______________

Holy cow, did I get books for Christmas!! Spouse went onto my GoodReads "To Read" list and shopped from that. Brilliant :D I have three Sheri Teppers (the Jinian trilogy) and a Patricia McKillip (The Throme of the Erril of Sherril with a bonus short story about an ice dragon), the seriously creepy (I know because I already ripped through it Christmas morning) Clockwork by Philip Pullman, two books on witchcraft in medieval Europe (recommended by ennyousai), Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses which I've wanted to read forever, and Dorothy Sayers' The Mind of the Maker, about creativity/creation.

Best of all, a signed copy of Those Across the River!! This is a Southern gothic horror novel by Christopher Buehlmann, whom we know from the Ren Fest circuit (his alter ego is Christoph the Insulter LOL!). The book's gotten all kinds of stellar reviews and is already being turned into a movie.

I also got lots of chocolate. So I know what I'm doing all week. But what to dive into first?!?

Watched "The Book of Eli" this weekend. Astounding movie. I'm predisposed to like post-apocalypse tales for some reason, just like I read post-apocalypse novels and I knew this would be one. But I didn't expect the twists and turns, nor did I remotely expect the ending. I need to see it again, perhaps several times, to get all the nuances out. I highly recommend it, and if at all possible try to see it without knowing anything about it ahead of time. There are at least two or three scenes where if you know what's coming it will be spoiled. And the end -- well, as a librarian and archivist, let's just say I approve wholeheartedly.

Voting for Challenge 15 is open at deatheaterdrabs - go here to read the lovely vignettes and vote :)

My reactions to Silverberg are somewhat uneven. I absolutely love the creepy yet alluring The Book of Skulls and the dystopian The World Inside but have never been able to get into, let alone finish, any of his Majipoor series which he seems to be so well known for. This one left me ambivalent. I think sometimes he tries a little too hard with his social messages -- in this case, I suppose, the value of love (published in 1971, surprise, surprise).

The main character, Kinnall Darival, is a member of the upper classes on a world settled several thousand years ago by religious fundamentalists (specific type not mentioned but one suspects a virulent strain of Puritans). The original settlers built into their world the Covenant, a socio-religious structure that requires people to keep their private joys and sorrows -- indeed all their emotions -- strictly private and bother no one else with them. This suppression of the self is so extreme that the words "I" and "me" have become obscenities and the greatest sin/crime is "self-baring."( more, including spoilers, behind the cut )

I give it a resounding "Meh."

Signups for the latest round of deatheaterdrabs is open until 11:59pm. Signup information is here! Hop to it, it's only a drabble. Only 200-500 words, surely you can manage that? And with the DE of your choice!! Come on, you know you want to...

Stolen from ladyoneill who apparently stole it from pfeifferpack!

1. Egg Nog or Hot Chocolate? Egg nog, the noggier the better. We use my great-grandmother Mamo's recipe which has whiskey, rum AND bourbon. Mamo was quite a woman.

2. Does Santa wrap presents or just sit them under the tree? Wrap, always. No fun without the mystery!

3. Colored lights on tree/house or white? Spouse likes colored and I like white, so we alternate years.

4. Do you hang mistletoe? I would if I could but it seems hard to find around here.

5. When do you put your decorations up? Usually no later than the end of the first week of December (we put the tree up last night and are decorating tonight).

6. What is your favorite holiday dish? See #1 above. Also my grandmother's homemade fudge, which I make every year. So sweet it makes your teeth ache but soooo chocolatey good.

7. Favorite Holiday memory as a child? They all sort of run together, but I do remember when my brother and I were little Mom would put us to sleep in the same bed Christmas Eve and we'd lie awake wondering and guessing what the morning would bring.

8. When and how did you learn the truth about Santa? No clue.

9. Do you open a gift on Christmas Eve? Yes, the rule is it has to be the smallest one, unless the giver says "No, that one's too expensive, pick a different one" LOL!

10. How do you decorate your Christmas tree? Lights, ornaments, gold fluffy rope. We also buy one ornament together each year and label that with the year; those get special attention. Then there are the falling-apart pinecone reindeer etc. from when each of us were kids.

11. Snow! Love it or Dread it? LOVE IT!! (Given where I live, I'd better...)

12. Can you ice skate? I did once and it was OK.

13. Do you remember your favorite gift? OK, sit down for this: I actually got a pony one year. Best. Present. Ever. Unfortunately I also had a violent case of the stomach flu that year and every time I left the horizontal position I barfed, so I didn't get to actually see it until Dec 26th!

14. What’s the most important thing about the Holidays for you? Family, no question.

15. What is your favorite Holiday Dessert? My mom used to embark on enormous holiday baking orgies: snowballs, thumbprint cookies, sugar cookies, gingersnaps, fudge, divinity, homemade peanut butter balls, chocolate drop cookies...I don't think I could choose.

16. What is your favorite holiday tradition? Our tree decorating. We haul out the three tubs of lights and ornaments, plus the Christmas pillows, the Christmas pictures, the Christmas tableware, the giant mildly creepy-looking Santa and the jingle bells for the door. Then we put on our Santa hats, make a giant pot of hot chocolate with generous lashings of peppermint schnapps, and decorate while watching National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation ("Save the neck for me, Clark!").

17. What tops your tree? Gold light-up star.

18. Which do you prefer giving or receiving? Giving.

19. Candy Canes? Yuk. They get instantly sticky and attract dog hair, cat hair and assorted colors of lint. (Wow, what does that say about my housekeeping...)

20. Favorite Christmas show? How The Grinch Stole Christmas and The Little Drummer Boy. And Rudolph.

21. Saddest Christmas Song? The Gift, sung by Aselin Debison. I completely lose it every time I hear this.

22. What is your favorite Christmas song? O Come All Ye Faithful, if it's in Latin. In English, Good King Wenceslas. Alternatively, just about anything played by a brass ensemble. I loves me some horns.

Hey, that's only 22 questions! There should be 25. I will add three more:

23. Christmas morning: up at the crack of dawn, or sleep in? As long as it's light outside, I'm good to go.

24. Do you send actual paper Christmas cards? Yes! For me this is one of the best parts of Christmas. If I have time (which I haven't the last few years) I make my own. (I know, how Martha Stewart is that? But give me scissors, glitter, felt, ribbon, and glue and I go wild.)

25. Strangest place you've ever spent Christmas (Eve or Day, your choice)? On a railroad siding outside Whitefish, Montana. I was on Amtrak, en route to Washington state to see my mom and stepdad and it was so cold the rails cracked. We had to wait for them to be repaired and it took a really long time. Luckily I had my penny whistle so I could play Christmas carols!

Joanna Russ, who died late last spring, is another of my favorite fantasy/sci-fi authors. In addition to her fiction she did a good bit of writing and thinking and speaking about writing: women and writing, women and sci-fi, and so on. This morning I ran across a speech of hers from PhilCon in the 1970s, posted by a Feminist SF contributor, and it's fantastic. It's about taboos -- tabooed words specifically but also about taboos in general, how they're not just inconvenient but actively dangerous:

What is a taboo, really? Is it a magical way of controlling actions? Certainly the taboo on talking plainly about something makes it difficult to think plainly about it, and hence very difficult to do it...make something unspeakable, and eventually you will make it unthinkable.

If there are no words to describe something, that thing falls through the cracks both in your head and in the world; it vanishes because we have no way to hold on to, to talk about it.

( cut for longish longness, read moar here )

Anyway, Joanna's full speech is excellent -- surprisingly pertinent given that it dates from nearly 40 years ago, and as well-written as any of her short stories or books. You can read the whole thing linked from the Feminist SF page above or on Dreamwidth here. FSF also did a four-part series on Russ which starts here.

When Spouse started playing World of Warcraft, I wasn't so much interested in the game itself as I was in how he and other people interacted with it. How did players set rules, enforce them when there's nobody "in charge"? How do guilds evolve norms for their members? And so on and so forth. Yes, it's all very anthropological, and he's been very patient about answering my questions, as long as I allow him to vanish for hours into the Feast of Wintervale, appreciate his reindeer mount and laugh when he sheeps someone.

My involvement with fanfic has been much more, shall we say, "hands on" since I enjoy writing it and reading it, but I've also had a long-standing curiosity about why we write it. Henry Jenkins' Textual Poachers does a good job describing the world of fandom but doesn't really explain the motivations. (It's a great book though and I highly recommend it -- I'm not remotely any kind of media scholar so I can't speak to the accuracy of his theories or analysis, but it was great fun to read.)

So what's the appeal? Why do some fandoms spawn literally thousands of fics and others only a few hundred? Why is slash mostly written by women? More fundamentally, why does this stuff exist at all?? It can't be just that we're bored, or that we're frustrated novelists, or that we're sekrit sex addicts (pr0n evidence to the contrary). And obviously it has NOTHING to do with the fact that I find two particular Death Eaters impossibly sexy *ahem* *ahem*

Turns out it all goes back to the Middle Ages.

( long post of longness behind the cut, possibly not of interest except to other nerdy people like me )

Hmm. Sensing a "heroic gap" and filling it by drawing on existing material, well mixed with your own imagination. Well, if that doesn't sound like fanfic, I don't know what does. So there you go: none of this is new: it's positively medieval. What a nice feeling, to be part of such a long and noble tradition :)

...somewhere tonight: Anne McCaffrey dies at 85. Her books were among my earliest introductions to science fiction and fantasy (not to mention strong female characters therein) along with Sylvia Louise Engdahl, Ursula LeGuin, Sheri Tepper, James Tiptree, Tanith Lee, etc. (gosh, they're all women, imagine that). I'm sure her son is doing his best, but you can't really channel another writer, even if you were raised by them. I guess that's an argument for nature vs nurture.

Given the fabulous dragon in Harry Potter DH2 (and probably in Peter Jackson's Hobbit), dare I hope that someone will realize Dragonflight on film? Perhaps not -- Ramoth's mating flight might be a bit dodgy ratings-wise. But we can hope...