Monday, April 27, 2009

Lovely little bookies

The two books I want to share today were birthday presents from BSharp, all the way from old Amsterdam. The first one, Tight Fit (edition one) is a full colour saddle stitched A5 zine, with fine production values, and even finer pictures. Put together by Sarah Lippett (www.crayonlegs.com) and featuring the work of 9 other contributors, this little book is a brief, stylish, lighthearted, visually confident and silly exploration of the beard (well facial hair, but mostly beards). My favourite part is the section on 'literal facial hair'- with pictures of a man with actual mutton chops perched on either cheek, bicycle handlebars as mustouche.. you get the idea. The colour is fun and this with the slick and 'now' illustration style makes it very readable and easy to engage with in a way that B&W, 'made on the work copier' publications often don't manage (though I know old skool zinesters would think me missing the point of the genre for saying so).

The next little book is It is hard for thee to kick against the pricks, a slightly smaller than DL sized art book with no words, each page featuring a colourful monster face. The images look like they've been done with water colours and maybe gouche and are deliciously contorted and full of character. I like the detil in the faces andthe way that they look a little awkward and unslick. The detail and use of colour in each image is really quite beautiful. Sourced to www.billdunlap.com

Friday, April 24, 2009

Fast books: would you like a glass of wine with that?

I just found this exciting article about a new machine that prints books while you wait. Ok, look there should be a law that they can only ever use recycled paper. But - how cool it that? I just imagined a whole new world for the bookshop. Maybe the big chains will keep a front section display with all the lastest chick-lit, Ian Rankin, South American magic realism pastiche and Irish poverty porn novels. But in the back will be a couple of these beasties, with nice LED-touch screen displays, where you can surf through millions of books and - voila! your own copy. It would be an awesome way to get hold of journal articles, proper peer-reviewed research, and academic work, too. Gawd, a potential antidote to the endless circular arguments on the internet which relay he said/ she said nonsense without any real research or fact finding. Oh frabjous day. Imagine if you were studying in the outback and you had one of these babies and an internet connection in town? Imagine if you can get them into kids community centres in remote areas, for printing picture books or exercise books? What about in Kabul, Bagdhad, Nairobi? I guess the database must come from laborious digitisation of old issues.. this has been going on for some time now, I think the NSW state library is fairly heavily involved. A truly wonderful thing.

Tuesday, April 14, 2009

Attention span of a goldfi...

Not getting through any books at the moment, which is sad. I want to read something but can't decide.

Have the following three in rotation:

"It's A Boy: Women writers on raising sons" by AJ Buchanan (Ed).
This is a collection of short prose by a variety of types of women (from all girl families, with difficult fathers, women who had suffered from difficulties conceiving etc), with all sorts of pre-conceptions about what having a son would be like (from those who were *sure* they were going to have a girl, those who had father issues...), about a wide variety of boys (those who are afraid of the dark, those who love purple velvet until they get teased about it at school, those who get led astray by the neighbourhood bullies, those who start playing shoot-em-up games despite their parents being pacifists). Interesting book to read in fits and starts.

"Blubberland" by Elizabeth Farrelly
Not sure if I will finish this one. Basically about overconsumption. This is a topic I've thought about deeply for a few years, and don't feel I really need to read about. (Got the book as a freeby at a conference last year. Anyone want it?)

"Up the Duff", by Kaz Cooke
Pregnancy refresher course. Still pretty funny second time around.

Also reading:
"Cosmos" magazine - which is great, and I got a subscription for xmas. Highly recommended. I plan to leave all my old copies in my obstetrician's waiting room, so we don't all have to read pregnancy, house decoration, or golfing magazines (surely other people like science mags too?)

Monday, April 13, 2009

G is for Gumshoe – Sue Grafton

My mum introduced me to Sue Grafton, and it’s been great, because we’ve read them at the same time and been able to swap, give them to each other as gifts, and talk about them. For those who don’t know, she (Grafton, not my mum) has written a series titled in ascending order through the alphabet. ‘A is for Alibi’, ‘B is for Burglar’ etc.

Kinsey Milhone is the main character in this series. I love her as a protagonist because she’s a little bit standoffish, a bit world weary, and a bit reluctant to get close to people. Her relationships are short lasting, and unpredictable, she tends to hook up romantically with people who are ultimately unavailable. She is dogged and takes risks more out of stubbornness than courage. She is also very happy in her tiny apartment space, local neighborhood, and there is much routine and familiarity in the same old characters and same old places in each book.

“I opened my trunk and checked my spare, which was looking a bit soggy in itself. I wrestled it out and bounced it on the pavement. Not wonderful, but I decided it would get me as near as the nearest service station, which I remembered seeing a few miles down the road. This is why I jog and bust my hump lifting weights, so I can cope with life’s little inconveniences. At least I wasn’t wearing heels and panty hose and I didn’t have glossy fingernails to wreck in the process.”


“On the far side of the road was a cafĂ© with a blinking neon that said EAT AND GET GAS. Just what I needed.”


This was a great Kinsey mystery, with an out of town trip to a dustbowl trailer park land, interweaving of two stories - one from now and one from decades before, a threat on her life and the first encounter of the hot and heavy kind with Dietz. Does this all sound like Mills and Boon with guns? It's not, really, it's, you know, nuanced, and funny and standoffish and cool. Really.

It’s a mystery


So I think I have confessed before to my love of the trashy crime fiction. Love it. I love it because elements of the form are so predictable. I love it because I can read one in a day or two, especially if that day involves long baths, being sick on the couch, or flying places and spending time in airports. The main characters are so beat up around the edges. The stories are so earthed in physical realities like meals eaten, whiskey drunk, rooms surveyed, draws rifled through, bruises healing, trashy motels slept in, car chases had. Detail, these are stories heady with nouns. My earliest detective fiction loves were Nancy Drew, and Miss Marple. I wanted to be both of them. Sneaking around with a hunch and a trail of clues. As I got older I read more Agatha Christie, had a brief dalliance with Mary Higgens Clark (what can I say, I was a teenager, my taste hormones were unpredictable), discovered Raymond Chandler in my twenties (and stuck with him exclusively), and have in the past few years had serial monogamous reading relationships with Sue Grafton, Ian Rankin, Janet Evanovich (a blind date / casual fling that ended up a long term relationship), Kerry Greenwood, Andrea Camilleri, Lisa Scottalina and even Alexander McCall Smith (though he is a bit squeaky clean and pompous, kind of like having an affair with a well spoken Oxford tutored beige wearing history teacher, no offense).

Mysteries I’ve read so far this year (errm, to the detriment of all those other books on the to read list - oops):
G is for Gumshoe – Sue Grafton
High Five – Janet Evanovich
Hot Six – Janet Evanovich
Seven Up – Janet Evanovich
Hard Eight – Janet Evanovich
To the Nines – Janet Evanovich
Ten Big Ones – Janet Evanovich
Eleven on top – Janet Evanovich
the Right Attitude to Rain - Alexander McCall Smith
Moment of Truth – Lisa Scottaline
Dirty Blonde – Lisa Scottaline
Legal Tender – Lisa Scottaline

Quietly Sure like the Keeper of Great Secret – Jo Dery

This book was a present from Miss Snapdragon and Tall Boy Tamegoshi, when they visited San Francsico over the summer. They found it at a store called Little Otsu a ‘small press shop’. On the site they say about this book “Things start off with the dispersal of some vicious seeds and wind their way through six stories of new discoveries, things gained and lost, new partnerships, and lessons learned.” It is mostly pictures and speech bubble text. The book, and much of their stock, sits in the realm of that very modern, awkward, flat and whimsical graphics style. The book itself was mostly intriguing and felt just outside the realm of understanding for me, which can be lovely. Little Otsu has the kind of website and products that make me want to turn into points of light and creep in between the leaves of web page and snuggle up for a strange, stylish, otherworldy nap.