Baby's First Fanmix

...ie, one not made by me. Chadwick Ginther, author of the incredible McNally-Robinson review of A Book of Tongues, passed it on to Brett Savory who passed it on to me at the SF Contario ChiZine launch. I was amused to discover that not only does the number of tracks exactly mimics the book's number of chapters (though the songs themselves don't seem to match each chapter's subject-matter, necessarily), but a couple of the tracks are ones I'm very fond of (though I don't necessarily associate them with Book..., necessarily--"Ash" by Murder by Death, always a "Sown From Salt" song for me, and Marilyn Manson's "Apple of Sodom", which probably would come attached to the pending Blood From The Air soundtrack). At any rate:

A Book of Tongues Fanmix, by Chadwick Ginther
1. "One More Notch", Murder by Death
2. "Hangman's Boogie", Cowboy Copas
3. "Where Evil Grows", the Poppy Family
4. "Devil's Waitin'", Black Rebel Motorcycle Club
5. "It Runs in the Family", Amanda Palmer
6. "Kiss With a Fist", Florence + the Machine
7. "Cocksucker Blues", Beasts of Bourbon
8. "Six Sixty-Six", Frank Black and the Catholics
9. "I Won't Back Down", Johnny Cash
10. "Fire and Brimstone", Link Wray
11. "Ash", Murder by Death
12. "Judas Touch", Mark Lanegan
13. "Earth Died Screaming", Tom Waits
14. "Stabbed in the Heart", Jim White
15. "Dimension", Wolfmother
16. "Eye for an Eye", UNKLE
17. "Apple of Sodom", Marilyn Manson
18. "Ain't No Cure for Love", Leonard Cohen
19. "Who Do You Love?", George Thorogood and the Destroyers
20. "Give Me Back My Bullets", Lynyrd Skynyrd
21. "If You Want Blood (You Got It)", AC/DC

Tomorrow I'm hoping to clock some serious words on Seventeen, which closes with a pivotal conversation done in side-time. Always good when you have friends that can do that, or even enemies. And try to keep on feeling better.

All ya can do, really.

How to Tell Stories

Lawks-a-mercy! Actual practical standards set for Gender Equity in [Narrative--TV shows primarily, but it can certainly be transposed], here (http://ivanolix.livejournal.com/199285.html?format=light). Said standards could probably also be cross-purposed to deal with representation of any non-default character types, or even several different ones at once.

Otherwise, yuki-onna's been hosting an interesting post about meta/deconstruction. Which are concepts I actually have problems with, mainly because I'm not academic, so the language/jargon defeats me: Why's it gotta be so stiff?, as the fool in Venia's Travels complains. Then I dig a bit deeper, and realize that in fact I'm often playing with the same things that make up this quote-quote "genre"...unreliable POV and narration, for example, reading between the lines and playing with lacunae, all techniques which arguably form the backbone of literary horror.

(I also totally agree with her observation that unless you establish at the outset this is a parallel universe with no horror culture, there's really no excuse anymore for having characters who can't parse the whole Hey, whoa, the DEAD are coming back to LIFE, maybe that means these things are those things known as zombies. How do we deal with zombies? Yeah, let's do that, shall we? equation. See also vampires, werewolves, any other sort of cross-culturally understood monster; personally, I've never understood why people insist on telling the cops Oh fuck, there's a vampire in town!, as opposed to just saying Oh fuck, there's a guy who THINKS he's a vampire in town! One gets you help, the other gets you kicked to the curb--I sure know which one I'd choose.)

Okay...back to the war. 1,000/2,000 words, here I come.

Watch!

Michael Rowe and I look like we know what we're talking about in our Toronto SpecFic Colloqium lecture on "Queering the Genre": Part 1 is here (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cyd0FWXygj8) and Part 2 here (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VONDRdx4Hkg).