Ever just get into your car and drive around, doing what you enjoy but with no apparant reason other than looking for something to steer your fancy? That's where I am with reading right now; it's not that I'm disconcerted or bored, I just can't seem to find a direction of sustained interest. This is quite unusual for me. Books are like stepping stones through uncharted waters, but now they are all around me and I do not feel any intuitive pull to the far shore.

In the morass of this irresolution, I am alternating between 3 Stephen King short story collections: Nightmares & Dreamscapes of 1993, Everything's Eventual of 2002, and Just After Sunset of 2008. This seems to be the perfect nod for these spectulative times. Loosely based in Horror, the stories step out in all directions, from updating Lovecraft--"N." from JAS--to Crime fiction--"The Death of Jack Hamilton" from EE--to Science Fiction--"The End of the Whole Mess" from N&D.

My photography, however, is taking just the opposite tack. Those Who Move Around At Night are circling into a formative collection heading for release into a themed calendar. Of the 12 images necessary, half of them have been formed in the last two weeks, mostly from my daybreak hikes in Sabino Canyon. Conclusion appears on the perceived horizon, but what's next? More stones?

This Easter/Spring Break week will now be officially known as The Malaria Hoodie Week of 2010.

It started off innocuous enough. Tol, along with 7-yr old son Trey & girlfriend Jessica arrived first. A day later, I drove to Mesa and loaded Erin, Tim & 11-yr old Elle fresh from Missoula. The whole family was now under one roof. The following day Tim, Jessica, and myself trekked Picnic Canyon/Rattlesnake Valley/Sabino Canyon enjoying dawn in the desert and an incredible full moonset dropping into the Tucson Mountains. Breakfast with everybody at the Club. Disregarding the offal and awful eggs like stones and the unpleasant chainsaw de-landscaping in our ears that are now obvious to us as harbinger of things to come, we thought the week was springboarding into Heaven.

Then, the Malaria Hoodie rose up over our nest like the Grim Greeter.

On Monday, Tol fell like the Twin Towers into a sickness of voiding both ends, non-stop. It was so sudden and so scary that Ter took him to the hospital in the middle of the night, arriving home at 5am. It was proclaimed not gastro-intestinal but virus/flu. On receiving this news, Jessica dizzied then fell victim to the Hoodie. The three of them missed their flight home to Seattle on Wednesday, flying out the following day, clutching their stomachs with crossed fingers.

Next to fall was Erin, followed by sweet, cute, darling Elle. With the house full of moaning, sobbing, pleading, the week rolled on. Who was next? Why did this Plague strike our home? On Saturday, the remaining survivors missed their flight, rebooking the following Wednesday. Meanwhile, regulated to the House of Stinking Bodily Fluids, bad movies were watched, boring video games were played, and an occasional paragraph was read. After two days, Tim was rewarded with a just-released I-Tablet for not falling sick. We suspect he'll burn his real book library once he arrives home.

Egg Sunday found the remaining 5 of us standing and well. Disregarding the earlier portents, we celebrated with lunch at the Club. I received unedibile shoe leather disguised as corn beef. That night, amid the strained posterings of Julia Roberts and Clive Owen on DVD, warm-hearted, cuddly Elle entertained us with some projectile vomiting from the living room couch. Fortunately, she did not transform into Megan from The Exorcist and we were able to finish the film.

Days later after the plague had passed and all the kids were back north in their respective burrows, I was lamenting the extra lucre extorted by the greedy and uncaring airlines--rate structures and dis-allowances encourage ill people to get on the plane thereby increasing missed flights and hasty re-bookings by considerate, suddenly-sick people which increase the airlines' revenue--and sifting through the family pictures of that disastrous week, when suddenly it became clear who had brought this malady into our happy household.

Behold, The Hoodie revealed.

May seemed to be the month of book gathering, but not much reading, as Clockers proved to be a very difficult followup. I completed Charlie Huston's Sleepless--a nebula award contender--but without enough retention to write a worthwhile review. Summary-wise, it takes place in a Los Angeles ravaged by a pandemic of sleeplessness occurring a coupla months from now. It is a fascinating sketch of a once-cohesive society slipping into madness and chaos, but it suffers character fatalities. The LAPD protagonist, Parker Haas, is sliding undercover to plug the leak of the very expensive, prescription and anti-insomniac drug Dreamer onto the Black Market while his wife and baby die from lack of sleep. This setup becomes so maudlin, it detached me into feeling manipulated. On the other side of the character arc, there's Jasper. He's a hit man put on the Dreamer trail that starts out so cryptic and unbelievable, I thought he was a comicbook-like figure mysteriously transcended out of the video game that the sleepless excel in: Chasm Tide. I mean, this guy makes Duke Nukem look like Mike Myers, dude. At any rate, Sleepless boasts a wonderful, crumbling backdrop, but with unworthy characters. The ironic origin of SLP, however, feels ever so real and probable as a designer pesticide to help feed the hungry that ends up "a species-killing prion" (p.292). This is a teeter-totter read: when it's good, it's real good, but when it's bad . . . well.

Next was A Short, Sharp Shock, a novella from the only famous writer I kinda know--Kim Stanley Robinson. Back in the Seventies when I was living in Davis, CA, Stan worked at Orpheus Books while gathering up Literature degrees. I'd come in and we'd goof around and talk Science Fiction until the owner Bob would kick me out.

But don't judge Stan's talent from this ditty, as A Short Sharp Shock is a short, sharp daydream I fell out of before solving its reason-to-be. I was half-way through before my impatience for grounding caused a fly-off. Sorry, Stan. I'll try The Gold Coast next. (I still think Icehenge is tops, even if nobody else does).

When I'm between novels, I like to read short stories. I never expect much out of them, usually just the perchance to dream. But every now and then I get shivered in the sheets, or that pondering glaze comes over me like a sleep mask when I dissolve into a fascinating wordstream. There's nothing quite like the experience of a really moving short story, and unfortunately, just like their big brother, there's not many in the meld.

So, I've decided to herd some of my more memorable short reads into a loose corral called Sweet Dreams Little Prince. I'll start off filling the list from my past perusals, but the main objective is to note them as I discover them. Just follow the title link . . .

On November 15th, my aunt from my mother's side of the family, Margaret Stewart, passed on at 89 years of age. I hate it when obituaries don't list the cause of death. So, Aunt Maggie fell in her own hallway and broke both her legs, which finalized into a dilaudid coma less than a week later. She was an acknowledged mover and shaker in her lifelong community of Upland/Ontario, California, and the hands-down sparkplug of the Stewart family. Her influence will never be forgotten and everyone in her sphere has to feel the world a little less doable with her parting. Yeah, she did things, important things. And she helped others do things. If she'd been a Democrat, Bush would never have been elected—either one of them.

During the funeral, I realized I was not crying for Maggie, but for myself. Hers was a life well lived, full of love, accomplishment, and generosity. Mine paled in comparison. Even from the grave, she was encouraging me to do more, to give more, to search for more wonderments.

One of these days I hope to stand next to her. I still have a little time left.

http://www.dailybulletin.com/ci_16623617

12/10/2010

12/25/2010

Okay, I'm on an end-of-the-year bounce these days. As noted by the last posted books above, I'm still reading short stories. But I'm dragging through word molasses with Barron's Occulation, Joel Lane's The Lost District, Hjortsberg's Odd Corners, Wright's Bone Soup, Elizabeth Counselman's Half in Shadow, J.G. Ballard's Short Stories Best Of, and even Elizabeth Hand's Saffron & Brimstone (sorry, Liz, "Cleopatra Brimstone" is a riviting read, but I just don't get why the phantasmagorical element is necessary). I'm trying to get a handhold back to novels, but Melanie Tem's Wilding isn't doing it (up to page 49 and drowning in melodrama). Now thinking cheeky, I'm getting a nostalgia rush for the ol' sleazeballs of early pulpbacks, so we'll see if there's anything past those thumpin' technicolor CGA covers.

And what better place to start this faded-paged and broken-spined shuffle down mean streets than Missoula, Montana, the home of the late, great James Crumley. Once again Christmas with Tim, Erin, and Elle was a delight. A foot of snow, hundreds of home-made sugar cookies, a loved-crazed weiner dog with a potty problem, single-pane windows that don't quite close to teen temperatures, re-living Stubby's essence in every bar-b-que bottle; then Santa's visit leaving sleigh tracks, a half-eaten javelina cookie, and some weird, orange-colored droppings, plus an X-Box w Kinect which led to massive Red Dead zombie slaughter marathons.

I had two notable moments; milestones, if you will, of a 21st century life going to seed: an Allegiant stewardess threatened to throw me off the plane, and, as I sat my threescore-old body into a chair in a shopper-packed mall and had apparantly cut off a 13-year old muppet from doing the same, was called by her a "Stupid Old Man."

GOODBYE 2010

As the year progressed, lounging became more and more important. My Mother's estate matters demonized by the IRS herded me into a limbo land of waiting for the pitchfork to stick. Photographically, I revived enough to take some decent images (follow this link to start this year's calendar selections) and made me want a better IR camera. I have still not tackled the technical battle to printing them, however. Reading-wise, I concentrated more on short stories and surprisingly found a bevy of authors fascinated not with the hairy-scary or thump-hump, but on the supernatural wonderments that fester and grow in your gut like a tape worm hungry for further acuity. I turned pages on about 40 books this year, finding myself drifting away from Science Fiction and the more traditional Fantasy romps. Classical and Mainstream reading remained low and curiously unappealing outside of the 20th Century. I discovered these new authors to explore:

1. T.E.D. Klein

2. Robert Aickman

3. Joseph Payne Brennan

Sub-totaling to Crime fiction, these guys bellied up to the bar:

1. Richard Price

2. Dennis Lehane

3. Charlie Huston

And some usual suspects visited as well this year:

1. China Mieville

2. Dan Simmons

3. Sarah Langan

4. Mary Gentle

Then, of course, there were the demi-gods:

1. Arthur Machen

2. Stephen King

3. Richard Adams

4. E.L. Doctorow

The exemplary read of the year was:

Watership Down

Following—not counting the other demi-gods' work—were:

1. Dark Gods

2. Clockers

3. Audrey's Door

Summarizing 2010 with regards to fantasist literature is probably best illustrated by the major award winners for best novel.

The Nebula was won by Paolo Bacigalupi for The Windup Girl.

The Hugo by Paolo Bacigalupi for The Windup Girl.

The World Fantasy Award by China Mieville for The City and the City.

The International Horror Guild Award was discontinued in 2008, but we still have the Stoker, which was staked out by Sarah Langan for Audrey's Door.

Across the pond, One by Conrad Williams rode off with the British Fantasy award, The City and the City by China Mieville took the checkered flag for the British Science Fiction award, as well as the Arthur C. Clarke award. PBOs were distinguished with a win for Bitter Angels by C.L. Anderson and special mention to Cyberabad Days by Ian McDonald for the Philip K. Dick Award. And last, Paolo Bacigalupi bagged another win with The Windup Girl for the John W. Campbell Award.

The sleeper this year has gotta be—even though I love China dearly—Paolo's Windup Girl/Calorie Man brainblower. Is there any doubt cereal companies will replace the oil cartels in its economic stewardship of the world someday? I have read it and been impressed by it, but haven't written a review, meaning I'm fence-straddling and need to read it again before committing myself.

Thematically, that wraps up 2010: committing meself.

To what? They ask.

Yeah, exactly.