Found this book at Goodwill. I read these back in the 70s/80s, and loved them. Zelazny is a great writer with a lot of style, and always a pleasure to read. Get it on Amazon
A storyteller without peer. He created worlds as colorful and exotic and memorable as any our genre has ever seen.” —George R.R. Martin
One of the most revered names in sf and fantasy, the incomparable Roger Zelazny was honored with numerous prizes—including six Hugo and three Nebula Awards—over the course of his legendary career. Among his more than fifty books, arguably Zelazny’s most popular literary creations were his extraordinary Amber novels. The Great Book of Amber is a collection of the complete Amber chronicles—featuring volumes one through ten—a treasure trove of the ingenious imagination and phenomenal storytelling that inspired a generation of fantasists, from Neil Gaiman to George R.R. Martin.
Been a slow week for me, and that’s about all I’ve got for today. Read books, they’re good for you, and fun.
Why you should read everyday
Because it actively engages your brain, reading is one of the healthiest hobbies for your mind. Not only is reading educational and informative, which is beneficial in itself, but it also rewires the connections in your brain, leading to many benefits.
Stress reduction. Studies show that reading can help relax your body by lowering your heart rate and easing the tension in your muscles, with a reduction in stress of up to 68% in people when silently reading a literary work for only six minutes.
Mental stimulation. Research suggests that reading can slow the progress of Alzheirmer’s disease and dementia by keeping your brain active and engaged, especially when reading out loud.
Memory improvement. Reading has been shown to slow the rate of memory deterioration and even improve your memory and thinking skills.
Vocabulary expansion. Reading is one of the best ways to learn new words. That’s why many researchers advocate for more reading experience in schools.
Better focus. Researchers have found that, compared to using social media, reading helps improve concentration by increasing the capacity for longer attention spans.
Improved brain connectivity. Studies have revealed that reading a narrative improves the connections inside the left temporal cortex of the brain—the area which is associated with language reception. The increased connectivity lasts for a few days after a reading session.
Stronger analytical skills. When reading fiction, your brain takes notes of all of the details and gets into critical thinking mode to try to figure out what happens next, a practice that is useful not just when reading but in day-to-day life and work.
As playwright and novelist Somerset Maugham put it, “to acquire the habit of reading is to construct for yourself a refuge from almost all the miseries of life.” And yet… So many distractions, so many series to watch, so many podcasts to listen to. Finding the time or the motivation to read can be hard.
I am basically a shut in. I can’t drive, I don’t have an ebike, which I’m not sure I could use anyways (maybe an etrike), and winter around here is not the best time for those anyways. So until recently I was having to wait on being able to get a ride somewhere. What i figured out this week is I don’t have to do that. This is actually a great time to be a shut in. No seriously. It is the best of times, if you can’t get out of your house, not like 15/20 years ago. I think a lot of it is fall out from the whole covid business, but it’s true. You can have groceries delivered, either via the store itself, or many of the services like uber__, or grubhub. Take out delivery from your favorite restaurant? No problem. Lowes, Homedepot, Tractor Supply, Walmart, Walgreens, they all deliver. Sometimes it’s free, and sometimes they charge a fee. Some places don’t deliver, but you can get your items shipped to you fairly quickly. Also check your city for bus schedules, to see if they have buses, or ride shares for disabled people.
This all is not as relevant for people who live out in the countryside. Same day delivery is probably not an option for groceries, and delivery fees would probably not be cheap. But there are still some options,I’m sure.
Hi there. Here’s another Monday musings. Sorry I missed last week, I was sick all weekend and couldn’t put one together, but I’m back.
Some of you may have noticed I haven’t posted here, or on Instagram, or Facebook, about my graphic novel I’ve been working on for several years. Well I came to an impasse where I didn’t know how to continue it. I kinda script as I go, and ran out of steam at 25 pages. So I started work on something else that I didn’t script at all, and an actually almost finished , just need the last few pages figured out to stick the landing. (It’s a normal sized adventure comic, so not a “graphic novel.) Anyways, 25 pages was the end of the first act, but any ideas for the second act didn’t thrill me. I’ve finally figured out the way into the second act (basically a change in POV), and also the third and final(?) act. Now to flesh them out and get writing and drawing.
On to other stuff.
Who’s creating the unicorns popping up around Providence?
Their less than two-inch stature makes them easy to miss. But locals are finding the figurines seemingly everywhere.
His compassion radiates through the screen as he promotes positivity, belonging and “library joy.” In a country faced with a dire literacy crisis, coinciding with regressive and discriminatory book bans and attacks on third spaces from conservatives, Threets’ work to make reading more accessible is needed now more than ever.
And another artist to end the day with. Hazem Harb is a Palestinian artist working in the UAE.
Dystopia is not a Noun #14, 2023
Tabari Artspace modern and contemporary Middle Eastern Art Gallery in Dubai
This is what it looks like out there this morning.
Here’s some books for you.
Fiction. Sharply strange and eerily familiar. Absurdly funny and terrifyingly serious. Surreal, fantastic, gritty, real. The stories in Matthew Cheney’s Hudson Prize-winning debut collection range across various styles, modes, genres, and tones as they explore the worlds of family, love, memory, and loss. BLOOD: STORIES reprints work originally published in such different venues as One Story and Weird Tales, and it includes four new stories that travel from contemporary New Hampshire to historical Prague to might-have-been Mexico to a future world where no reality stays real for long. Reality flows through these stories, even at their most surreal and lyrical, because reality is more than just what is or even what might be: reality is whatever gets beneath our skin and into our blood. The pages of BLOOD: STORIES not only take an axe to the frozen sea within us–they make a course for the heart.
Started reading this book of short stories, loving it so far. Not only is he a short story writer, but he has written introductions to several of one of my favorite writer’s books, including:
Which is a book of SF criticism.
Samuel R. Delany’s The Jewel-Hinged Jaw appeared originally in 1977, and is now long out of print and hard to find. The impact of its demonstration that science fiction was a special language, rather than just gadgets and green-skinned aliens, began reverberations still felt in science fiction criticism. This edition includes two new essays, one written at the time and one written about those times, as well as an introduction by writer and teacher Matthew Cheney, placing Delany’s work in historical context. Close textual analyses of Thomas M. Disch, Ursula K. Le Guin, Roger Zelazny, and Joanna Russ read as brilliantly today as when they first appeared. Essays such as “About 5,750 Words” and “To Read The Dispossessed” first made the book a classic; they assure it will remain one.
Examines the evolution of multinational corporations, from the military-industrial complex of the postwar period to the present world economic crisis, and evaluates the economic and political impact of such entities on the American and international economic systems
The other book is Cory Doctorow’s The Internet Con. which you can get at various places:
The platforms locked us into their systems and made us easy pickings, ripe for extraction. Twitter, Facebook and other Big Tech platforms hard to leave by design. They hold hostage the people we love, the communities that matter to us, the audiences and customers we rely on. The impossibility of staying connected to these people after you delete your account has nothing to do with technological limitations: it’s a business strategy in service to commodifying your personal life and relationships. We can – we must – dismantle the tech platforms. In The Internet Con, Cory Doctorow explains how to seize the means of computation, by forcing Silicon Valley to do the thing it fears most: interoperate. Interoperability will tear down the walls between technologies, allowing users leave platforms, remix their media, and reconfigure their devices without corporate permission. Interoperability is the only route to the rapid and enduring annihilation of the platforms. The Internet Con is the disassembly manual we need to take back our internet.
Cory has more of a solution to the problem than Fuller, which at this is more historical than something you could use in this era,and the book is highly recommended.
I’ve given you links to 2 versions of the books that you can get as EPubs. Some of you may not know how to read these on a kindle. Well it’s fairly easy, here’s the page on Amazon that explains it. https://www.amazon.com/gp/sendtokindle/
That’s it for me this week. Don’t forget to put pants on when you go outside.
Let’s talk libraries. What are libraries beside book warehouses. They are community hubs that have programs for kids and adults alike, They are used for research, information and quiet studying.
Gen Z seems to love publiclibraries. A November report from the American Library Association (ALA) drawing from ethnographic research and a 2022 survey found that gen Z and millennials are using public libraries, both in person and digitally, at higher rates than older generations.
More than half of the survey’s2,075 respondents had visited a physical library within the past 12 months. Not all of them were bookworms: according to the report, 43% of gen Z and millennials don’t identify as readers – but about half of those non-readers still visited their local library in the past year. Black gen Zers and millennials visit libraries at particularly high rates.
To glimpse what he means, one need only dip into Frederick Wiseman’s epic and inspirational three-hour-and-seventeen-minute documentary
Ex Libris, a picaresque tour of the grandest people’s palace of all: the New York Public Library system, a collection of ninety-two branches with seventeen million annual patrons (and millions more online). Wiseman trains his lens on the quotidian (people lining up to get into the main branch or poring over books), the obscure (a voice actor recording a book for the blind), and the singular (Khalil Muhammad discussing the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture), and without saying so explicitly (the film is unnarrated), he shows the
NYPL
to be an exemplar of what a library is and what it can do. Here we see librarians helping students with math homework, hosting job fairs, running literacy and citizenship classes, teaching braille, and sponsoring lectures. We see people using computers, Wi-Fi hotspots, and, of course, books. They are white, black, brown, Asian, young, homeless, not-so-young, deaf, hearing, blind; they are everyone, which is the point. If you want to understand why the Trump administration eliminated federal funding for libraries in its 2018, 2019, and 2020 proposed budgets, it’s on display in this film: public libraries dismantle the walls between us.This is by design. A statement issued by the Public Library Association in 1982 called “The Public Library: Democracy’s Resource” said:
The public library is unique among our American institutions. Only the public library provides an open and nonjudgmental environment in which individuals and their interests are brought together with the universe of ideas and information…. The uses made of the ideas and information are as varied as the individuals who seek them. Public libraries freely offer access to their collections and services to all members of the community without regard to race, citizenship, age, education level, economic status, or any other qualification or condition.
Free access to ideas and information, a prerequisite to the existence of a responsible citizenship, is as fundamental to America as are the principles of freedom, equality and individual rights.
And they have become a place where homeless people can find shelter during the day, and help via in house social workers.
On a bitterly cold Friday this February, the final day of the 2023 event, vendors in the exposition hall upstairs were busy hawking everything from book-moving services to exotic animal visits. Former Toronto mayor David Miller sat alone at the University of Toronto Press booth, surrounded by copies of his latest hardcover, while a buzzy line formed down the aisle for signed copies of a picture book about a giant beet. Downstairs, in the corporately neutral confines of meeting room 202D, a full house had gathered to talk about one of the burning issues at the heart of the modern public library.
Rahma Hashi, a social worker with a bright smile and a beige head scarf, began the session. Over the past decade or so, in response to the waves of vulnerable people arriving at their doors, many North American libraries have begun hiring in-house social workers. Hashi was one of Toronto Public Library’s first. Part of her role, she explained, was to make partnerships with shelters, with the idea that the library should always be a welcoming place for everyone but the real work of providing service to people who are homeless should be handled by the professionals.
They are the last bastion against the rising tide of book banners. People (on both sides of the aisle) who think that they have the right to ban books for having something in them that they disagree with.
Books predominantly get removed from school libraries, with only a small percentage of book bans impacting classrooms specifically. Most books are removed pending investigation, meaning that a book is removed whenever there’s a challenge for review.
Many of these books are removed from student access before due process of any kind is carried out, according to PEN America. In some cases, books can also be removed without challenges for review. These books often end up being unavailable for weeks or months.
And of course capitalism is making it all got to shit anyways.
In the long term … I don’t know. The biggest obstacle I see is neither patrons nor libraries, but publishers. Libraries ultimately have service goals, and some libraries already have a secondary platform (even if OverDrive is the dominant one by far). But corporate publishers have only profit goals, and I imagine OverDrive’s lure of a giant stream of marketing data would continue to be compelling, even if their monopoly was successfully broken.
Alternative platforms already exist: one promising place to start might be the Palace Project and the associated Palace Marketplace, which right now mostly seems to let libraries buy ebooks and audiobooks from indie authors, and access out-of-copyright classics. The company behind it, Lyrasis, is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit; that doesn’t mean it’s immune to mismanagement, but it’s a better legal framework than a for-profit B corp. And its board is teeming with actual career librarians, instead of one token librarian and a handful of investors and executives, like OverDrive. The Palace app is designed to combine content from multiple vendors, including OverDrive, which could help with transition. But the Palace Project so far has relationships with less than 5% of US libraries.7
I don’t have a neat solution to the fact that OverDrive has a functional monopoly in the space, or that it’s now owned by vampires. All I know to do is point at the dead canary and yell as loud as I can.
I asked my reporter friend how I might go about getting a real journalist to write about it, and she regretfully advised me that she didn’t think it was a big enough story yet to get any professional interest. Once public libraries have actually been devastated by private equity, it’ll be a story.
It will also be too late.
I’ll leave you with this:
Please support you local library. And actually use it once in a while.
Just finished this book, which has 2 long form interviews with Moebius, and a couple of shorter ones, and some other biographical stuff, and more.
This is definitely a book for the hardcore Moebius/Gir fan, and most people wouldn’t find it quite as interesting. It’s mor than just about his comics, it is in fact a biography written through interviews. It deals with his childhood, time in Mexico, his many Mentors/father figures, his drug experimentation, his philosophy, and also how he came to work on his various comics.
I found some of it tedious, but the parts I found so, might interest other people more. I think it came mostly from the interviewer trying to wring out all the juice from certain times in a couple of “cults”.
All in all it was a fascinating look at the life of one of the greatest comics artist who ever lived.
Artist Janice Lowry regarded the notebooks as “126 chapters of a memoir.” Her life’s journey, chronicled in her diaries, ended Sept. 20, 2009, when she succumbed to liver cancer.
Archives of American Art
When Janice Lowry turned 11, inspired by reading The Diary of Anne Frank, she began keeping a journal. Not unusual for a young girl. What’s unusual is that throughout her life, Lowry—who died of liver cancer this past September at age 63—kept up her diaries.
From childhood on, Lowry filled small notebooks with daily musings and drawings. Then, in the mid-1970s, she moved to a larger format, 7 1/2- by 9 1/2-inch notebooks. For almost 40 years, Lowry—an artist best known for her intricate, three-foot-tall assemblages—filled the roomier notebooks with jottings and sketches. The pages contain everything from original drawings, collages and rubber-stamp images to observations about herself and the world, including the commonplace “to-do” lists many of us make: “pay bills/make plane res/get asthma med/Judi birthday gift.”
RIP Wayne Kramer
Wayne Kramer, the guitarist who co-created MC5 – of the rawest, most influential and politically engaged bands in US history – has died aged 75. His Instagram page announced the news: “Wayne S Kramer. Peace be with you. April 30 1948 – February 2 2024.”
That’s it for this Monday. The week is yours, use it wisely.
Well I thought a nice bit of color and niceness would go over good. Spent the weekend in the hospital getting IV-antibiotics for a foot wound, and am home now doing great. My shortest hospital stay in a long time. Today is for being home and making a grocery list (haha). But you all should watch the nice videos, and look at the pretty art, hopefully it starts your Monday nicely.
Teacups” (2023) – Written & Directed by Alec Green & Finbar Watson, Voiced by Hugo Weaving For almost half a century, Don Ritchie would approach people contemplating suicide at the edge of a cliff near his home.
Sometimes all it takes is someone to listen, and a cup of tea.
“I enjoy the process of freely imagining myself, following the inspiration I get from everyday life. It is a process of forming new creations by connecting various ideas and images encountered in the process of work, like solving a guess or puzzle. Exploring this infinite world of imagination and feeling energized through this process fuels my passion for my work, and I find unique and vibrant traces in the results.”
From a commencement speech at Harvard by Charlie Munger (How to Guarantee a Life of Misery):
My third prescription for misery is to go down and stay down when you get your first, second, third severe reverse in the battle of life. Because there is so much adversity out there, even for the lucky and wise, this will guarantee that, in due course, you will be permanently mired in misery. Ignore at all cost the lesson contained in the accurate epitaph written for himself by Epictetus: “Here lies Epictetus, a slave, maimed in body, the ultimate in poverty, and favoured by Gods.”
The newly discovered Barbenheimer Star exploded in a supernova billions of years ago, leaving behind a cloud of unusual elements in its wake.
(Image credit: University of Chicago/SDSS-V/Melissa Weiss)
Scientists have discovered evidence of a massive star from the early universe that does not fit with our current understanding of the cosmos.
Epic: The Musical is a loose adaptation of Homer’s “The Odyssey” by Jorge Rivera-Herrans, who wrote the music and lyrics and also orchestrated and produced the tracks. His song clips and process videos have gone viral on social media with over 60 million views across TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube. The yet-to-be-released musical also has an active Discord fan community of over 30,000 people who share fanart, memes, fan theories, cover songs, positive affirmations, and tattoos of the lyrics.
Free to listen on Spotify, or get the ones that have been released on Bandcamp:
A link filled Monday, of stuff that interested me this week. Not much musing going on is there. Just wanted to share good stuff. We all need that don’t we. See you next week.
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