Flaming Zeppelins: The Adventures of Ned the Seal by Joe R. Lansdale

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


Ever have a six year old tell you a story? ("We got in my fire engine, which was a space ship, and went to the moon and a gorilla fought a dragon and then we had cookies!") Well, these two related novellas seem to have been written with the same principle in mind. In the first one, "Zeppelins West", Buffalo Bill (or rather his disembodied head -- long story) takes his Wild West show to Japan as part of an undercover mission to rescue Frankenstein's monster and ends up on the Island of Doctor Moreau, while in the second, "Flaming London", Mark Twain and Jules Verne find themselves fleeing from an invasion by H.G. Wells' Martians. Oh, yeah, and the connecting character in both pieces is a superintelligent seal. Now I won't deny that these stories have a certain ADD-addled charm, due to their author's insistence on throwing in every steampunk trope he can think of, but at the same time, I'd be hard pressed to say they ultimately added up to much beyond their rather feverish name-checking.



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Boardwalk Empire: The Birth, High Times, and Corruption of Atlantic City by Nelson Johnson

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Admittedly, I picked this book up because of the tv show, since I was curious to find out just how much of it was based on actual fact. After reading it, I can say that the producers have generally stuck to the spirit, if not the letter, of the historical record, and although they've taken a fair bit of dramatic license with the material, it's not because Atlantic City's history lacks drama. From its early days, when it was planned as an upper-crust health resort (something that went by the boards pretty quickly after speculators realized they could make more money catering to the desires -- legal and otherwise -- of day-tripping blue-collar workers from Philadelphia and New York) to its boom years (roughly from the Gilded Age until the Second World War) as America's Vice Capital to its near death during the 60s to its recent resurgence since the legalization of gambling there in the late 70s, it's not a place that has ever lacked for colorful characters, certainly not as Nelson Johnson tells it (special bonus: Johnson really, really, REALLY doesn't think much of Donald Trump), and while the show's decision to concentrate on the years of Nucky Johnson's (fictionalized as Nucky Thompson in the series) reign as Atlantic City's political and criminal boss in the Roaring 20s makes for some great drama, this book proves that there are plenty more stories here to tell.



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Edible Stories by Mark Kurlansky

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


Kurlansky is famous for his "micro-histories" like Cod and Salt that take a seemingly mundane subject and expand on it to reveal its pivotal place in human history. Here he attempts the same approach to fiction with somewhat more mixed results. A novel in the form of sixteen separate short stories about a loose collection of people linked by coincidence or consanguinity, it ranges from Anne Beattie-like minimalism to borderline magical realism, held together by a persistent tone of low-key wistfulness, with food -- unsurprisingly, given the author's previous work -- serving as a running focus of or link between its characters (for instance, the bag of "red Hawaiian sea salt" that gets passed from person to person like Stevenson's Bottle Imp). Not bad for what it is, but it made me hungry for more of Kurlansky's nonfiction.



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Zero History by William Gibson

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Following up on its immediate predecessors, Pattern Recognition and Spook Country, Zero History, once again revolving around the machinations of bleeding-edge marketing guru Hubertus Bigend as he manipulates a motley assortment of oddballs into tracking down what he perceives as the Next Big Thing -- in this case the designer of a line of clothing so exclusive no one knows their identity. Various characters from the previous books reappear, such as former rock singer-turned-journalist Hollis Henry, now ex-junkie translater Milgrim, and someone I can't name without ruining the surprise, but the book is less a sequel than a sort of remix or variation on a theme.



The book has the brisk pace and convoluted plot of a techno-thriller, which may seem like overkill given that it's basically about dungarees -- a decided come-down from the near-apocalyptic stakes of Gibson's earlier novels like Neuromancer, but damn if the guy doesn't pull it off. His gift for language is as strong as ever, with his patented mix of world-weary noirish romanticism and keen eye for the way technology informs and permeates contemporary life (this is a novel about people who interact via iPhones and Twitter as though there's no difference between that and "meatspace" contact") honed to an edge as sharp as one of Molly's razors.

[Note: I would be remiss in not pointing out that the novel's fictional clothing line, "Gabriel Hounds" is taken from the same piece of British folklore as my nom de blog.]



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A Man of Means by P.G. Wodehouse

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


An early (1916) effort from The Master; it's only barely a novel, being cobbled together from six related short stories about a hapless schmo who repeatedly lucks into money, is beset by parasites and con artists hoping to separate him from it and by sheer dumb luck emerges from each scrape richer than before. Entertaining in its own right, but worth reading because you can see him working out the plot mechanics that would drive his later works.



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Star Island by Carl Hiaasen

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


I've always thought of Carl Hiaasen as the Raymond Chandler to Elmore Leonard's Dashiell Hammett -- while Leonard may have set the template for the breezy Florida-set caper yarn, Hiaasen took it in a more baroque, overtly satirical direction. In addition, his genuine outrage over the various predators and parasites who he sees as destroying his native state's culture and natural beauty grounds his narratives and saves them from being simply exercises in outrageousness for its own sake.



Nevertheless, in this novel, which revolves around the kidnapping of the "undercover stunt double" (read: actress hired to impersonate her whenever she's too wasted to appear in public) of Cherry Pye, a Britney Spears-like trainwreck of a pop singer, one can't help thinking that Hiaasen -- whose novels have previously targeted corrupt politicians, venal developers, and rapacious businessmen -- has gone after some very low-hanging fruit. Especially when one considers that a fondness for classic rock is the one true constant in all of Hiaasen's work: if a guy (and it's almost always a guy) likes, say, Creedence or the Beatles, you know he's unquestionably one of the Good Guys; likewise if a woman too young to have known the glories of Boomer Rock first hand likes it upon being exposed to it, you can bet she's just passed the audition to be the current book's Designated Love Interest. There's much that's eminently mockable about today's tween-pop, but Hiaasen's dislike, which often curdles into sheer contempt, too often has a "get off my lawn" quality to it, which gives the satire a certain tone-deafness, right down the name "Cherry Pye" itself, which would be a tad over-obvious for a second-tier porn actress, let alone a supposed teen idol.



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Awww - I bet you say that to all the boys ...

I write like
Raymond Chandler

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

If you're looking for a quick ego boost, follow the link above and plug in a sample of your prose.

Holmes on the Range by Steve Hockensmith

My rating: 4 of 5 starsThe first of a series, about Gustav "Old Red" Amlingmeyer, a cowboy in 1890s Montana who decides to take up "deducifyin'" after discovering Sherlock Holmes, told by his brother, Otto (aka "Big Red"), who's drafted into the role of his Watson, partially because he's the only one of the two who can read and write. The brothers get their first shot at cracking a real-life case when folks start turning up dead on the ranch they're working on. The book shows a considerable amount of charm, with well-drawn characters and some nicely-observed period detail. I look forward to reading other novels in this series.
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Occult America: The Secret History of How Mysticism Shaped Our Nation by Mitch Horowitz

My rating: 4 of 5 stars A highly readable and very interesting, if somewhat scattershot, examination of the esoteric tradition in America, from the Shakers, Quakers, Masons, and the like that played a part in the founding of this country, to the increasingly nutty offshoots that are with us even today as the foundations of the Self-Help movement, Horowitz makes a lively and occasionally compelling case for the idea that America is not so much a Christian nation as so many would claim, but and "occult" one, at least if one defines "occult" as as ragbag of assorted beliefs, ranging from the delusional to the scholarly to the outright fraudulent, with many stops on the road between. View all my reviews >>

Severance Package by Duane Swierczynski

My rating: 3 of 5 stars Slick and well-paced, but not exactly deep. It's more like a comic book or a B-movie in novel form than an actual novel, which is hardly surprising, given that the author is a Marvel Comics writer. I'd recently read his most recent novel, EXPIRATION DATE, which struck me as more ambitious overall, so I'm willing to cut this one some slack as being a warm-up exercise for what I hope will be an interesting career. View all my reviews >>

We have nothing to fear ...

Much as I admire President Obama, I'd feel much more confident if he were saying stuff like this.

All Dialogue Verbatim

This was an actual conversation between a father and his daughter that I overheard while having a beer at Rolf's. The images are of course from Luc Besson's film, Leon (The Professional in the U.S.), starring Jean Reno and a very young Natalie Portman, and were altered using plasq's Comic Life program.

"Sita Sings the Blues"

"Sita is a goddess separated from her beloved Lord and husband Rama. Nina is an animator whose husband moves to India, then dumps her by e-mail. Three hilarious shadow puppets narrate both ancient tragedy and modern comedy in this beautifully animated interpretation of the Indian epic Ramayana. Set to the 1920’s jazz vocals of Annette Hanshaw, Sita Sings the Blues earns its tagline as 'The Greatest Break-Up Story Ever Told.'"

Nina Paley, "America's best-loved unknown cartoonist", spent five years creating this epic on her home computer. The entire film is now available online here.

If they ever get organized, we are so screwed ...

From the Los Angeles Times, February 27, 2009:

Octopus floods Santa Monica Pier Aquarium

"It's not surprising that with eight arms and inquisitive nature, the two-spotted octopus is pretty handy around its tank at the Santa Monica Pier Aquarium.

Still, those reporting for work Thursday at the popular beachfront attraction were caught by surprise when they were greeted by water lapping around the kelp forest display, the shark and ray tank and the rocky reef exhibit.

The guest of honor in the aquarium's Kids' Corner octopus tank had swum to the top of the enclosure and disassembled the recycling system's valve, flooding the place with some 200 gallons of seawater...."

Philip Jose Farmer (1918-2009)

Farmer, who died this past Wednesday, is probably best known for his Riverworld series, although as a kid I especially enjoyed his books like The Other Log of Phileas Fogg, where he played mix-and-match with characters from the repertoires of Jules Verne, Arthur Conan Doyle, Edgar Rice Burroughs and other authors, anticipating the sort of exercises in genre deconstruction Alan Moore would later make famous in The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and Lost Girls.

My personal favorite, however, would have to be his short story "The Jungle Rot Kid on the Nod" (available in Ellen Datlow's Alien Sex anthology), which imagines Tarzan, as Lord Greystoke, giving his first address to the House of Lords as if it had been written by William S., rather than Edgar Rice, Burroughs.

If the Traditional Definition of Chutzpah ...

... is killing one's parents and then throwing oneself on the mercy of the court because one is now, tragically, an orphan, then Louisiana governor, 2012 presidential hopeful, and amateur exorcist Bobby Jindal certainly showed some in his response to Barack Obama's address to Congress tonight. I mean, sure, it was, for the most part, pretty standard Republican boilerplate -- The Big Bad Government Only Makes Things Worse, yadda yadda yadda. They've been peddling the same line of blather since Reagan's Alzheimer's was just a twinkle in his forebrain, but you gotta give the guy props for claiming he knows first hand that the government can't be trusted to deal with disasters because back when Katrina hit ... um ... hey look, something shiny!

"Pyelem G Vudhaus"

That would be P.G. Wodehouse to you and me: the spelling above is transliterated from Russian, where there is, oddly enough, a booming market in Wodehouse fandom. The quintessential English humorist, whose works had been banned as "decadent" by Soviet authorities since 1929, was virtually unknown in that country before 1989, when former dissident and self-taught translator Natalya Trauberg began circulating a Russian version of Wodehouse's 1919 novel, A Damsel in Distress in samizdat form (not for fear of official punishment -- the ban was eventually lifted in 1990 -- but because Russian publishers, perhaps not unreasonably, didn't think his stories of dotty aristocrats, upper-class twits, and Jazz Age ne'er-do-wells would sell to contemporary readers). To everyone's surprise, it and subsequent translations became wildly popular (and became even more so after Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie's Jeeves & Wooster television series was dubbed into Russian).

Thus was born the Russian Wodehouse Society, founded by Mikhail Kuzmenko (who writes under the name Sir Watkyn Bassett), and which not only puts on regular banquets emulating the the likes of those thrown by Bertie Wooster's Drones Club, but also maintains a lively and informative website, with a bibliography and an excellent collection of links and articles (in English) as well as discussion boards (in Russian). I highly recommend checking it out.

And should you decide to go to one of their banquets, throw a bread roll for me.

"The Way the Future Blogs"

Frederik Pohl is one of the grand old men of science fiction. He was a founding member of The Futurians, an early SF fan club whose members also included Isaac Asimov, James Blish, Donald A. Wollheim, and Damon Knight, and later served as editor for Galaxy and If magazines. He is the author of numerous novels and anthologies, although my personal favorites would have to be The Space Merchants and Gladiator-at-Law (both written in collaboration with C.M. Kornbluth).

So how cool is it that, at the age of eighty-nine, he decided to start a blog?

A Public Service Announcement

If you're a fan of the Firesign Theatre -- and you should be -- you'll be thrilled to know that some of their best material is now available in podcast form.

"Ouch," he said.

Since just about any schmo can put up a blog these days, it's nice to see an author who can still find a new way to get her work before the public.