I Haven't Stopped Blogging Yet...

(Sung to the tune, "I haven't stopped dancing yet"...)

Here's another regular in all blog/ livejournals/ xangas what-nots, the inimitable link dump. This time it's "interesting quotes" for a hundred dollars.

1. A great article by John Barth on the parallels on Italo Calvino and Jorge Luis Borge:

Both Jorge Luis Borges and Italo Calvino managed marvelously to combine in their fiction the values that I call Algebra and Fire (I'm borrowing those terms here, as I have done elsewhere, from Borges's First Encyclopedia of Tlon, a realm complete, he reports, "with its emperors and its seas, with its minerals and its birds and its fish, with its algebra and its fire.") Let "algebra" stand for formal ingenuity and "fire" for what touches our emotions (it's tempting to borrow instead Calvino's alternative values of "crystal" and "flame," from his lecture on exactitude, but he happens not to mean by those terms what I'm referring to here).

2. An interesting interview on Holly Philips by the inestimable Matt Cheney (I haven't read her stories yet but they're alluring enough):

I've always read widely, not just in fantasy, but there is something about the joy fantasists take in purely imaginative work, and something about the way that imagery and metaphor are made literal, concrete, in fantasy and all the speculative genres, that has always fired my own imagination. I think Sean (Stewart) once called it "opening a window on the numinous," which I think is a beautiful phrase.

3. Jeff Vandermeer (again) points out an interesting thing about writers: the "I write because I have to" syndrome (and curiously enough, the whole post seems strangely Lovecraftian to me).

It begins to become the mantra of the indoctrinated, the litany of the rosary-bead-counting priest, the tick-tock of some literary clock. I-write-be-cause-I-have-to. And the gears lament their way through another mechanical rotation of the inevitable. (I sure didn't write that sentence because I had to. Unfortunately, you had to read it.)

4. I'm sure this has been spread over the internet but this was the first time I saw this: three French graduate students' tribute to Jim Henson, lord and master of all muppets. An intense, sad yet creepy film. (Might take time to download.)

5. I missed this one but Neil Gaiman responded to a local girl about being spotted here in Manila. He also says he wants to see the Philippines thanks to the fans. (Courtesy of Anansi girl.)

Hi Neil,There's a rumor going around town that you were at a bar in Manila a few years back. A friend mentioned this to me because we were talking about the possibility of you coming to Manila for a book signing, as you mentioned in your blog a few days ago. I was wondering, have you ever been to the Philippines? Regards,Tania

Nope, never been to Manila. Never been to the Philippines either. That's why I was interested in coming (also because of the enormous numbers of people who come in to this blog from the Philippines, and the people from the Philippines who seem to show up at almost every signing to let me know that I really ought to visit the Philippines).

(As a general rule, established over years of doing this blog: if ever you meet someone in a bar or on a bus or hitchhiking or in an internet chat place who claims to be me, it's not me. Really it's not. I still can't figure out why people like pretending to be me, or why the people they are telling this to don't ever ask them to produce some kind of ID. But it's not been me so far. I don't do chat rooms, and if I'm actually in a bar I'll probably be in the corner with a notebook.)

6. And one of the best sites EVAAH. (Sorry, couldn't resist. Check out the other pics.)

Wala lang.