Are British Sea Power the most eccentric band in the country?

Quite possibly; I think you could certainly make an argument to that effect. They certainly make a compelling racket on stage and on record, as well.

I took about three hundred shots during the three songs I was allowed to shoot in. I got about eight pictures that were of even the vaguest use. There’s a homily about life in that, I’m sure.

Another homily about life in general that I’ll interject briefly before the usual “what I’ve been doing” entries is the old one about best laid plans.

This week was going to be my marathon catch-up-on-stuff and clear-the-decks week, making good use of my time off from the day-job … suffice to say that events conspired to prevent me from getting anywhere near as ahead as I had planned.

Writing about music

What I have done a great deal of this week is writing about music. Mostly record reviews, clawing ahead on my schedule for The Dreaded Press. It’s inevitably a game of attrition, though - just when you think you’re sorted, an album turns up on your doorstep that needs to be reviewed by Monday, as happened this morning.

But even so, it’s been a crazy week; I’ve been to two shows as a reviewer (British Sea Power, as above, and Explosions In The Sky, who were absolutely fantastic) and done one interview (with Scott from British Sea Power).

On Sunday I’m off to The Wedgewood Rooms again to interview and review Stone Gods, who are basically (and literally) The Darkness minus the pint-sized falsetto-ing egotist frontman.

Writing about books

For reasons already hinted at above, I’ve done little or no concerted writing about matters literary. I hope (but don’t promise) to redeem this state of affairs over the weekend.

Other busy-work

I don’t feel too bad about not having cleared as much writing work as I’d hoped, as I have managed to transplant my rather precarious “stuff it in a pile/box/cupboard” archiving system to a fully organised GTD-style filing cabinet. Go me!

It took about twelve hours in total, but it’s a huge weight off my mind, and should enable greater productivity in future.

Other miscellaneous trickiness, aka - MidPhase Hosting sucks

[Readers uninterested in rants designed as revenge for poor customer service may wish to scroll down approximately one screen-length straight away.]

The main source of my problems this week has been Futurismic, which regular readers may have noticed has not only been running sluggishly of late but also suffering intermittent down-times.

The hosting company where Futurismic was located, MidPhase, had been repeatedly telling us that our WordPress installation was using CPU resources in spikes of 40-50%, and they had suspended our service a few times as a result. This is fair enough - on a shared server, one site caning the CPU isn’t fair on the others.

However, MidPhase’s tech support people were unable (or, as I suspect is more likely, unwilling) to share the reasons for these CPU spikes, instead supplying us with advice on how to enable a site to survive “the Digg effect” - which, given Futurismic’s rather gentle traffic levels (500 visits a day, 1200 RSS subscribers handled by FeedBurner) and lack of Slashdottings or similar, seemed a little pointless.

But we complied; we activated caching plugins and SQL query caches, and deactivated a number of perfectly normal plugins that thousands of Wordpress users employ on a daily basis with no trouble at all.

And yesterday the CPU use spiked again, so MidPhase killed our account.

So yesterday I upped sticks (or files, rather) and moved Futurismic to the server where VCTB and TDP live. It’s already running faster and smoother than before.

I suspect MidPhase were either trying to up-sell us to a bigger package, or had overstrained the server which Futurismic was parked on (either by overstraining cheap hardware or not realising there had been some sort of compromise or attack elsewhere). Whatever they were doing, or thought they were doing, customer service it was not.

So, please tell everyone you know: if you’re thinking of changing your hosting provider, and you want one that will actually work with you to resolve problems rather than simply cut and paste passages from a set of standard responses, do not host your website with MidPhase.

MidPhase hosting sucks. ANHosting (the same company) also sucks. Both MidPhase and ANHosting suck. And, for SEO purposes, I will repeat it once more:

MIDPHASE HOSTING SUCKS.

We now return you to your scheduled programming*.

Books and magazines seen

Interzone #214 has arrived, yay**!

My seemingly-never-ending F&SF subscription rolls on relentlessly, with the March 2008 edition arriving a mere week behind the February. [shrug]

The Orbit people sent out a fantasy doorstop***, a Tom Holt (who I’ve never really gotten onto, though he’s not bad), the obligatory vampiresexdetectiveOMG novel, and:

The Serrano Succession by Elizabeth Moon

Elizabeth Moon is one of those names I hear quite often, but whose writing I’ve never actually experienced. Anyone care to suggest whether I’ll like her work?

Also arriving this week was the production-run version of Stross’ Halting State, reminding me that despite having received an ARC nearly six months before, I’ve failed to write my review of it before it’s publication date. Bah.

Coda

So, not much clever or interesting to say here, having burnt out my verbosity in informing the world that MidPhase Hosting sucks****.

There’s still much to be done before kicking off back at the day-job next week, so I shall bid you all a fond farewell and hope you have a good weekend. In the meantime, I’m going to skip out and fetch The Friday Curry - because some traditions never take a holiday.

Hasta luego, people.

[* I always knew that I'd find a use for my reasonable PageRank and a bit of SEO knowledge one of these days. Chew on that, shysters. ]

[** I've now had a chance to re-read my Iain M Banks piece as it is on the page, and (unusually for me) can find less things wrong with it than I had thought there would be, which is rather gratifying. ]

[*** I don't complain or feel guilty about these any more, having discovered that I can send them on to my mother who appreciates them greatly. Thinking about it, perhaps I should encourage her to review them for me - it'd save me time and bring me traffic ... ]

[**** Every iteration counts. ]

I took this shot at the show I went to review on Monday; thanks to the bizarre lighting set-up at the venue, it came out far better than the shots I took of the band.

Those of you who haven’t subscribed to the RSS feed yet (ahem!) can read my review of the From Autumn To Ashes set over at The Dreaded Press, of course.

Writing about music

As seen above, I reviewed From Autumn To Ashes on Monday night, and had a chat with their prodigal bass-player also. It’s nice to get out of town for shows every once in a while, but it’s a pain when the venue is only near to a local-route train station and you have to leave before the end of the night to get the last train home.

I was supposed to interview Yan from British Sea Power on Tuesday, but their drummer screwed up his back on the eve of their tour, so they were too busy rehearsing with a replacement to do interviews. So I’ll be talking to them before the show on Monday instead (which is much more convenient for me, anyway).

And on Wednesday next week I’m off to Brighton to watch the incredibly awesome Explosions In The Sky play the first date of their tour - which will be a super night out, I’m guessing.

Add to that a growing stack of CDs to review, for TDP and elsewhere, and things are bustling on the music front.

Writing about books

Polished and re-submitted my Debatable Space review.

I’m probably a mere twenty pages from the end of Swiftly, so the note-writing stage will be next.

Still haven’t gotten round to writing a Halting State review (see section above); hope to remedy that situation over this weekend.

Books and magazines seen

No new books this week, though I suspect one (or even both) of today’s “you were out” cards from the Post Office may well be book related. It’s been a busy week for magazines, though.

First of all was February’s F&SF - I honestly think they’ve failed to take my name off the list or something, because I’m sure I received and ignored a renewal note back in the autumn. But still they come. Go figure.

Obsessed With Pipework #41 appeared mid-week, which is my fresh poetry intake sorted for a while.

And then the latest BSFA mail-out arrived yesterday, so that’s one Matrix and one Vector - the latter of which contains my review of Morgan’s Black Man, if you’re interested, as well as more material of a much more erudite nature from a horde of other contributors.

Notable by its absence, naturally, is Interzone #215. Posted last Thursday, and no sign of it here*.

Holiday!

Right, enough ranting. I should be in a mellow place, as today has been the first of a run of days off from the day-job**.

There’s no shortage of non-day-job work to be done, though - the next week will see me attacking a pile of tasks that I’ve been meaning to do for ages.

Included are a reworking of VCTB’s theme, the basic framework of my nameplate/portfolio site, a concerted effort to get ahead of myself on the album reviews … and something else that is still currently a secret project***.

Coda

But (as the advert used to go), it’s not all work, work, work. I went for lunch with my mother today, for example. And I bought a new bed - because that, ladies and gents, is just how rock’n'roll I really am.

And hey, guess what - STILL NOT SMOKING.

Indeed, almost everything has been going extraordinarily well so far this year, albeit with one notable exception that throws the rest into sharp contrast. But hey, nobody’s perfect - not even me.

So, time for me to sign off and head out in search of The Friday Curry and leave you all to your weekend pursuits, whatever they may be. Have fun, ladies and gents - hasta luego.

[* I suppose I should cut the Post Office some slack - after all, Velcro City is a bit of a provincial backwater, what with us only having one of the major sea gateways to the continent to set us apart from any other remote one-horse hamlet ... but seriously, eight days? For a magazine to travel across the birthplace of the penny post and the heart of the industrial revolution, a country that is dwarfed by  most American states? Twenty-First Century, anyone? Sheesh. ]

[** They got tired of gently reminding me that I can't carry my entire leave allowance into the next tax year, and suggested it was high time I used some of it. The timing was opportune (I have a lot of things I need to sort out), so I took it. No day job for me until Monday 28th! w00t! ]

[*** Yeah, look at me teasing again. I'm such a tart. And it's actually two something-elses, too. Heh. ]

Well, would you believe it - I actually did some photography over the last seven days!

Of course, deciding what artistic merit it has (if any) must be left as an analytical exercise for you, the reader:

I’m a sucker for the underside of South Parade Pier, principally because I like industrial decay as an aesthetic … and nothing says “industrial decay” in quite the same voice as the rusting underbelly of a Victorian-era pier.

Plus there are lots of repeating shapes and surfaces, angles and lines and so on.

So, yeah. Rusty stuff FTW.

Writing about music

Not a whole raft-load of actual music-related writing this week, but a crazed flurry of organising for music-writing-related things to happen has taken place.

Which means I’m off to Southampton on Monday night to talk to the guys in From Autumn To Ashes, and on Tuesday I’ll be on the phone to those quirky chaps from British Sea Power.

Plus a clutch of CDs to write about, and other assorted tasks and jobs to do … as I predicted last week, I’m back up to breakneck pace again!

Writing about books

I sent off (and received a commented and edited version of) the first draft of my review of Debatable Space for Strange Horizons, and I’m planning to have that squared away by the end of this week.

I’m currently reading the ARC of Adam Roberts’ Swiftly. It’s a pretty good story so far, but one of the most terrible examples of typesetting I’ve seen in a long time, so I hope some considerable copy-editing has been done on it before it goes to press. I need this read and reviewed by the end of the month.

In the meantime, I need to get my thoughts on Stross’s* Halting State put together for your perusal right here on VCTB.

And there is a copy of Severian Of The Guild (an omnibus edition of Gene Wolfe’s Book Of The New Sun, a title I’ve been meaning to attack for a couple of years now) making its way slowly across the ocean from Canada, so I am informed …

… which I guess I’ll need to finish off before the Great Baroque Cycle Reading Group (or should it be Reading Cabal?) kicks off around March.

Writing about other stuff

There has been some, but I can’t go into details right now. I can say that it’s not freelance work as such, and that I should have a fairly big announcement to make once some things have become confirmed and sorted out.

For now you’ll just have to call me a big nasty tease. Or ignore the issue completely, of course - which I guess is more likely, not to mention sensible.

Books and magazines seen

No fresh materials this week, although my production-run hardback copy of Iain M Banks’ Matter turned up from Orbit. It’ll look lovely next to my signed ARC, I’m sure. :p

Speaking of IMB, you’re all doubtless looking forward to my interview/article in the imminent issue of Interzone, aren’t you? Jolly good, I thought as much.

Coda

There goes another week in the rock’n'roll lifestyle of the scruffiest man in science fiction fandom. Cheerleaders for health and common sense will doubtless be keen to know that I am still off the cigarettes (and still finding it easy so far).

However, they will be less pleased to know that I’m now heading off to obtain The Friday Curry Of Justice, which I’m told (by people who know such things) is probably just as likely as cigarettes to cause heart attacks in my future.

To those people I say: a man needs a vice or two. I’m not ready to become a Buddhist monk quite yet. If you hear a loud noise in the next few hours, it’ll be my arteries clanging shut joyfully.

That’s me done for the day, folks. I hope you all have a great weekend doing whatever it is you like to do*. Hasta luego, amigos.

[* Why no 's' after the apostrophe for Roberts, but an extra 's' for Stross? Couldn't say for certain, but I guess it's aesthetics - they just look right that way. Go figure.]

[** With the exception of arguing about Battlestar Galactica on the Eastercon Mailing List; because, frankly, there aren't enough hours left before the heat-death of the universe to waste them on talking about television***.]

[*** IMHO. ]

As should be apparent already to regular readers, I get sent a lot of CDs these days. Here are just some of them:

That’s about a third of the albums I’ve been sent to review in the last year - the third that I’m actually interested in keeping, naturally. The others will be migrating their way to second hand shops some time in the new year.

I’m quite astonished at myself, really - if you count pieces pending publication, I’ve written well over 200 pieces of music journalism in the last year. Crikey.

As the above isn’t really a very creative photograph, you can have a bonus shot from the gig I went to last Sunday (I know, I’m too good to you):

That’s Ash from Southampton pop-punk band Not Advised, who is probably most unimpressed by me not only capturing a great gurning moment, but plastering it on my review of the show at The Dreaded Press.

There’s an interview with the band, too. Not my normal cup of tea, music-wise, but a damn fine live act and a lovely bunch of lads to boot.

I remember being that full of enthusiasm once - perhaps if I hang around young musicians more I’ll rediscover the secret!*

Writing about music

I’ve pre-empted some of my music hack news above, but it’s been a busy week nonetheless.

Work continues to gather for The Dreaded Press, which is great news - I’m immensely chuffed that tomorrow (at very short notice) I’m interviewing the infamous Ginger, frontman of The Wildhearts and pathological side-project creator. Which is going to be awesome.

Hey, my interview with David Yow went live, in case you didn’t notice. I’m rather pleased with it (though Morrissey’s lawyers may be less so) - here’s a teaser quote:

“That’s the thing – I can handle eating nothing but baked potatoes and baked beans for a week, if that means that every night I get to get totally f*cked up and sleep with some slut who I never met before and will never speak to again, y’know?”

There’s no slacking for me next week either - Monday sees me reviewing Minus The Bear, and later in the week I’m interviewing Benedict Hayes of Enochian Theory for The Dreaded Press.

That last one is a bit of a cheat, in that I know Ben of old (local chap, lovely fellow, very tall, Cornish, mad), but his band are doing the brave new “start your own label and go it alone” thing, and I think it’ll be interesting to talk about the hows, whys and wherefores.

Still waiting on the replies from Henry Rollins, and just entered into negotiations (read as “pleading begging emails”) to arrange an interview with Bob Mould (Hüsker Dü, Sugar) some time early next year.

Writing about books

Haven’t actually done any reviewing of books this week, having been instead concentrating on actually reading books instead, which has been very pleasant - I’d forgotten what it’s like to read a book by choice.

However, it appears the note-taking habit is now thoroughly ingrained … so my ARC of Stross’s Halting State is now festooned with post-it markers, as has become my tradition. I think I’ll probably review it anyway - it’s a strong novel with some good talking points, and it’s not like there’s any shortage of places to publish it.

Writing about other stuff

Also minimal. My excuse here is that I’m still doing the self-tuition thing with XHTML and CSS, which is a slower and more frustrating process than I’d like. But hey, when was learning something worth knowing ever easy, right?

Books and magazines seen

Only one confirmed literary arrival this week, namely my latest assignment for Vector in the form of Swiftly by Adam Roberts**, which I’m pleased about - Roberts is a challenging read, but that’s half the appeal for me. Although this is one of his works that bolts on to a literary classic - in this case, Gulliver’s Travels - which leaves me in a bit of a bind.

Yes, I’m ashamed to admit it, but I’ve never actually read Gulliver’s Travels (though I know a fair bit about its content by inference). Methinks a trip to Project Gutenburg is in order if I want to do this one justice.

There may be more titles that should have arrived this week - if the “you were out” red card from the Post Office is anything to go by - but as it’s the (allegedly) festive season, I can’t go and check until tomorrow because they’re busier than usual. Selah.

Coda

Another high-velocity week has hurtled by. As much as I loathe [the holiday that shall remain nameless], I’m looking forward to having some downtime just so I can recover from what has felt like twelve months of relentless acceleration. Having discovered that my mother now has wi-fi at her house (w00t!), I should be able to finish up a lot of back-burner stuff in time for the new year.

Of course, we all know the saying about best-laid plans, so I’m not going to make any bets just yet. If I can just get some fiction writing done and develop a pre-emptive stock of Friday Flash I’ll be a happy man. Anything else will just be gravy. Mmmm. Gravy.

And talking of gravy, my tongue pines for the taste of cumin and other Eastern spices, which means I should be making tracks toward the Temple Of Culinary Delights and make my obeisance at the altar of The Friday Curry.

So have a good weekend yourselves, ladies and gents, and stay warm. Hasta luego!

[* Or get arrested on suspicion of more dubious motives, maybe.]

[** For which the rather fetching jacket art is seemingly unavailable online as yet. Sorry.]

What a rotten week for weather, eh? It’s turned quite clear today, but there’s been little opportunity for taking pictures outdoors in the last seven days.

So, it’s lucky I got some half-way decent shots at the Electric Eel Shock show last weekend, isn’t it?

Yes, they’re as endearingly crazy as they look. If you like your rock and metal music - but don’t take it so seriously that you can’t stand to see it spoofed - you really must see Electric Eel Shock play live.

A friend who I took with me described it as “the most hilariously enjoyable gig I’ve seen this year”. It’s a fair description. More shots available if you’re interested.

Writing about music

As the above should make plain, I have a review of the last show of Electric Eel Shock’s European tour for you to read over at The Dreaded Press … but of course, as you’ve all subscribed already, you’ll already know about that, and the handful of other stuff that’s appeared over there in the last week or so.

The really good news is that there’s much more to come. I’m very pleased to have gotten myself onto the mailing lists of five PR outfits already. That’s small beer for the big players, but not bad going for a one-man-band site that’s two months into operations, as far as I’m concerned.

So, I’ve got a stack of material with forthcoming release dates that I need to get reviewed, which means I’ll have to start incrementally pulling back on the writing I do for other sites. Which is kind of a shame, as I’ve become rather fond of the discipline of doing it .. but onwards and upwards is the way.

I’m off out again this Sunday to a local show by a young band called Not Advised, and I’ll be interviewing them also. That’ll be my first face-to-face interview off my own back for my own site! Yay!

In the pipeline (sometime after the New Year passes) will be a chin-wag with Justin Broadrick, formerly of Napalm Death and Godflesh, currently of depleted-uranium-shoegaze-metal band Jesu - I’m looking forward to that one, I can tell you.

Other interview news - I’ve sent off a batch of questions to Sir Hank of Rollins, and am eagerly awaiting the responses. The PR sent the first draft back, because I included about three times as many questions as he’d have the time spare to answer …

Writing about books

I’ve been shown the preliminary typeset PDFs of my Iain Banks article, and I have to say I’m fairly pleased with it. You lot will have to wait for the next issue of Interzone before you can give me any feedback, of course …

Otherwise, no reviewing to report this week, as I’ve been busy wrangling with music deadlines. But for the first time in ages I have no outstanding or pressing deadlines of a literary nature, which has given me the chance to (gasp!) read a book just because I wanted to.

I’m not complaining, because I love my reviewing work, but it’s strangely liberating to walk up to your shelf and think “hmm, what do I fancy?” The [holiday which shall remain unnamed] break (which I will be spending in the tranquillity of the Yorkshire countryside) promises to be a catch-up reading binge of truly satisfying proportions. wh00t!

Of course, in the meantime I need to figure out how to deal with the Interzone reviews section in light of the seasonal postal delays …

Books and magazines received

No hay libros o revistas esta semana. Apesadumbrado, amigos.

Coda

Well, if (comparative) brevity is a virtue, this is one of the more virtuous FPBs of recent times. It always feels odd to have little to report, and somehow a little disappointing … what that says about my personal psychology, I have no wish to know in detail.

I’m working on this “content to be myself” thing right now, and at the times it fully clicks into gear I can see why people who are good at it make a point of recommending it. Practice will (hopefully) make perfect - or as near to perfect as is possible in an imperfect universe, eh?

Enough blather - I have things to do, and I expect those of you who are still reading this far down the page probably have things to do as well (no matter how well you may have convinced yourself otherwise).

So, before setting off on the traditional jaunt to collect The Friday Curry Of Intestinal Righteousness And Olfactory Justice, I will bid you all a good weekend - have fun, ladies and gents.

I got a new phone this week - a Nokia N73, thanks for asking - and in addition to a pretty decent camera (considering it’s a phone), it supports direct uploading to Flickr. Which should be pretty handy for those must-have photoblogging moments (which are, erm, frequent?), but is also of great utility on a typical not-taken-any-photos-for-FPB Friday afternoon.

So, without further ado, here’s the view from outside my workplace where I stand to have a smoke:

There’s good odds that I shouldn’t have taken that shot at all, because it’s technically inside the restricted part of the Portsmouth Naval base (so if it disappears at some point, you’ll know why), but I doubt it’s that big a deal.

I’ve just been really impressed by the recent rash of lovely blue skies we’ve had … not to mention slightly resentful that we didn’t have any of them back in the summer, when they would arguably have been of more use.

Still, a day on which I don’t get rained on during my journey home is a cause for celebration, regardless of the season. Atypical weather patterns, I salute you.

Writing about music

Another big batch of my reviews got published this week, though a lot of them were of distinctly average (or worse) albums. I have yet to discover the bitter acidity of the more experienced music hack when presented with something he or she just simply cannot get to grips with … though I am assured it will come with time.

But then, I’m not like other music journalists - and I have that on the authority of no lesser man than David Yow, former singer of The Jesus Lizard and current singer of Qui (pronounced ‘Kwee’, and don’t you forget it).

I had the great privilege of interviewing Mr Yow last night, and he was a lot of fun - the fact he was drunk may have contributed, but it’s safe to say he’s nothing like his stage persona. Well, maybe a little bit … but there’s a lot less fury and violence involved in just talking to the guy on the phone. Unless you mention English food. Or Morrissey …

I’ll link to that interview when it goes live. In the meantime, you can always read my chat with Larry from Hundred Reasons, whose ideas for dealing with religious fundamentalism suggest to me that he’d make the sort of politician I could support wholeheartedly.

Shortly after chatting to my good buddy David, I trundled off to The Wedgewood Rooms for a show. A lot of people whose opinions on music I respect greatly had been talking up a storm about a band called Cardiacs, who I’d neither heard of or heard anything by, so I thought “why not?”, put on my independent web-hack hat, and headed down to review the gig.

In hindsight, I realise this will be immensely challenging. Cardiacs defy easy description, as I’m sure anyone who knows their work will agree. The closest I can get in a sentence would be “a three-way car-crash between new wave punk, sixties psychedelia and surrealist British prog-rock”. In other words, absolutely mental, and unlike anything I’ve ever heard before (or am likely to again). I’ll be linking to the review when it goes up at The Dreaded Press.

And while we’re on the subject of music, I will take a brief moment to gloat, as I have an album that I expect a number of VCTB readers will be interested in hearing (in marked contrast to the raucous crap I usually deal with): the new Sigur Rós double-disc set, Hvarf / Heim. And yes, it’s lovely. But then what did you expect?

And an extra bonus musical gloat that deserves its own header:

I’m seeing My Bloody Valentine next summer!!

Get in.

Writing about books

I finally managed to nail the Brasyl review, or at least the first draft. How do I know it’s a first draft? Because it clocks in at about 3000 words … so I’ve asked for suggestions on where it should be trimmed, because I had run up against the wall of overfamiliarity.

I find that if I’ve been working too long on a review or essay, I become unable to approach it with the slightest bit of objectivity, which makes constructive editing an impossibility. The last time this was a serious problem was with my review of Extended Play for Strange Horizons - and that was fixed by helpful editorial comments, so hopefully the same will apply here.

So, next task is the combined review/interview of Iain M Banks’ Matter, which I finished last night and is now festooned in miniature post-its in what has rapidly become traditional fashion. I have the answers to my first batch of questions from the good Mr Banks in hand, and need to boil up batch the second, which will be the more detailed stuff, along with clarifications and expansions.

It’s harder than you might think - interviewing anyone you’re a huge fan of is always tricky, and IMB is pretty much my literary hero (inasmuch as I have such things). I’m even able to forgive him for being a devoted Mac user!*

Oh, and by the way - any VCTB readers going to the BSFA interview with IMB on Wednesday 28th November (next week)? It would be cool to meet up with people, so feel free to come and say hello - I’m easy to pick out of a crowd!

Writing about other stuff

Minimal writing work outside of reviews this week, because I’ve decided that I should bite the bullet and learn XHTML and CSS properly, as opposed to just faffing around with other people’s code.

It’s heavy going, but it seems that those years of programming lessons at school and college sunk in - logical thinking is like riding a bike.** Still, end result should be the ability to build CMS themes pretty much from scratch, and have them work properly.

How far away that end result is remains to be seen. There is a reason for all this, as well.

Books and magazines seen

After last week’s bonanza, it should come as no surprise that this week has been devoid of reading material arriving in the post box.

However, if I was to list this week’s influx of CDs, you’d still be scrolling down on this post on Sunday morning …

Coda

Seven days always seemed so long when I was a kid … sometimes it feels like I start one FPB the moment after I publish the previous one. Still, it’s good to be busy - I can’t remember the last time I thought to myself “I’m bored”, and I spent years thinking that. I must be doing something right!

In the spirit of public thanks, a big cheery wave to Penny and Chris Hill for sending me a postcard from their trip to New York! If you’d like to donate to my slowly growing collection of postcards (and receive the dubious honour of a public thanks here on VCTB, feel free to email me and ask for my snail-mail address. I’m not fusy about locations - in fact, I think it might be fun to collect postcards from decidedly non-touristy locations.***

Right, that’s your lot. I’m off for The Friday Curry before a few fortifying beverages with the usual suspects, which should prep me up for what promises to be another busy weekend in front of the keyboard.

So, a belated happy Thanksgiving to all my American readers, and to everyone else, enjoy whatever you’ve got planned for the weekend. Hasta luego.

[** In that you think you're doing fine, right up until you either fall off or collide with a wall.]

[*** This from the man who, ever since a Flickr contact suggested it, has been considering photographing his entire collection of logo'd T-shirts and putting them online. Geek is as geek does.]

The unusually clear and sunny weather (which would have been nice to see back in July and August) has been producing some rather spectacular apocalyptic sunsets.

I’m pretty sure that if I had a better grasp of how exposure compensation is supposed to be used, this shot (and the others I took on the same day) might be even more impressive …. but they still look pretty funky, IMHO, even if it’s because Mother Nature did all the really hard work for me.

Writing about music

Those of you who plough through the daily link dumps on VCTB cannot have failed to notice the huge backlog of reviews that were published this week. This week has seen me writing some pieces for The Dreaded Press (including some polish work on an interview with Arnaud Rebotini of French techno/rock/industrial band Black Strobe), as well as my assignments elsewhere.

But things have been comparatively calm, enabling a week of deck-clearing and getting other things sorted out; having no live shows to cover has made that easier, though I did go to the aptly-named Waster on Wednesday night, a local event where friends of mine were performing as both DJs and bands. After the way I felt Thursday morning, it’s not something I’ll be doing too often, I think. I just can’t bounce back from a midweek booze-up the way I could five years ago.

Writing about books

Well, the Brasyl piece still isn’t finished, but it’s far closer than it was, and probably only needs a few hours of pruning and buffing before I’m ready to send it off as a first draft. The problem has been one of excess, in that there’s so much to talk about in the novel that even with a wordcount of over 2000 it’s almost impossible to say everything that needs saying. For example, there’s enough material on the theme of identity in there to write a full-blown critical essay (which I am vaguely considering attempting).

So I’m going for a compromise with the review by cataloguing the broader themes with a few examples, and trying to sketch out how they interconnect. Trying to do a synopsis would be even more challenging, in some respects, and would certainly do the book a disservice. But anyway, that should be nailed and mailed by Sunday; then it’ll just be the rewrites …

But hey, I have actually had some book reviews published this week! Those of you who get Interzone may have noticed my review of Karl Schroeder’s Queen Of Candesce (which I can’t recommend highly enough as the best compromise possible between hard sf and a good intriguing adventure story, with steampunk nuggets on the side).

Also live just a few hours ago is my review of Human Is? - A Philip K Dick Reader at SF Site … I tried a different approach to reviewing with that piece, so any feedback would be more than welcome.

Other writing malarkey

There has been some, but that’s all I can say right now. I know, I’m such a tease.

Books and magazines seen

The Orbit gang seem to be on a major publicity offensive at the moment - either that, or a lot of parcels were held up by the local wing of the Post Office, which makes Communist Russia look like an efficient and well-oiled machine by comparison.*

In addition to a glut of fantasy doorsteps and vampire-detective-sex marathons, yesterday’s arrival of Matter, Iain M Banks’ new Culture novel, has made me the envy of a number of fellow sfnal blogospherists.

I feel a trifle guilty about boasting, naturally. But in this instance, the overwhelming OMG!! factor means that I’m not going to castigate myself too much. By the way, I’m already about ninety pages in, and it’s safe to say that Culture fans are not going to be disappointed in any way whatsoever.

A brace of magazines has appeared also; the latest Interzone (#213), as mentioned above, and the latest Apex Digest - yet another mag that I’d entirely forgotten I had a pending subscription for. So, a pleasant surprise there … finding time to read it may be quite a challenge, however.

Coda

After learning my lesson last week, I shall not be embedding any foolish snark in this final section of FPB. **

Probably the only exciting thing to happen this week occurred this afternoon - I managed to get a ticket to see My Bloody Valentine play one of their reunion shows next summer!

I thought I’d missed the boat, as they only announced one London show which had already sold out when I tried this morning. But apparently demand was so high that they announced two more dates immediately, which enabled yours truly to get a ticket to see a band he never got the chance to see when he was a teenager.

If you’re at the June 21st show at the Camden Roundhouse next year, I’ll be easy to spot - I’ll be the shabby hippy wearing earplugs and crying with joy in a seat on the front row.

So, there’s your weekly dose of Paul Raven - I hope you enjoyed the buzz, and that the comedown doesn’t linger. I’m off to fetch The Subcontinental Repast Of The Week’s Fifth Day, (as is customary) before doing the Friday Free Fiction round-up at Futurismic and trundling out to the pub (as is also customary).

So enjoy your weekend, boys and girls. Hasta luego.

[* - Paraphrased email conversation between me and one of my editors:

Ed: So when did this week's package turn up?

PR: Friday morning.

Ed: WTF! I posted that first class at lunchtime on Monday.

PR: Yeah, that figures. I told you everything was back to normal.

I'm not knocking posties per se, but the service provided by the company they work for is a bloody sham.]

[** - Speaking of which - Paul: yes, I know I've not yet provided 1000 words on the letter 'i' yet, but I've been busy. When you get a job that involves more than spending hours a day scouring eBay for dead drum machines, I will permit you to castigate me for failing to reach unpaid deadlines which were instigated by my own flippancy. Not that I think you'll ever wait for my permission, but hey. We know how this friendship has always worked, why break the chain now?]

Some folk don’t like the Dewey Decimal system*. It doesn’t work well with the more casual library user, so the argument goes, because the granularity of information it provides isn’t intuitive to people who don’t have that sort of mind-set.

Hence the decision of a public library in Arizona to do away with Dewey and replace it with a broader topic-based cataloguing system, more akin to that of bookshops. And cue debate by bookworms and library types over the rights and wrongs of the decision.**

What this highlights is that we have access to too much information for any single linear cataloguing system to handle sufficiently. Neither Dewey nor  subject sections can handle both topical cross-referencing and precise atomised location of knowledge. for example.

Which, as far as I’m concerned, is another argument in favour of the Google Books project. Once books are detached from their physicality, the inherent problems of finding something on a shelf becomes irrelevant. With a decent search engine, you can locate exactly what you want, or browse more broadly - whichever suits you best.

And despite childish pseudo-protests from publishers who seem to have misunderstood the entire issue, more institutions are opening up to the idea. The Big Ten US universities (which are actually twelve in number, for some reason) will be letting the Google people get their mitts on significant chunks of their library collections, with the intent of creating “a shared digital repository that faculty, students and the public can access quickly.”

As I’ve said before, I don’t think the death of the physical book is incredibly close, but it can be seen on the horizon. The problem isn’t dead-tree technology, it’s the distribution mechanism. We’re now very accustomed to getting the information we want as soon as we need it, and libraries cannot always meet those demands.

Nor can bookstores, for various reasons - many of them profit based, which has led to the pseudo-monoculture of big-chain bookstore shelves. It’s a situation that has encouraged the MD of Edinburgh’s Birlinn Press to buy up a series of indie bookstores in an attempt to revive the industry, a quixotic move that (much as I’d love to see it work) doesn’t seem likely to succeed.

The future of books is in digital catalogues and print-on-demand technology. There’ll still be a need for libraries with good stock, and for shops with full shelves to browse. But until libraries and shops can cater to every possible customer’s every possible request - quickly, cheaply and efficiently - they’re going to lose users to services like Amazon and Abe. Sad, perhaps, but also true.

[* Not me - I love Dewey, being a natural born sucker for taxonomic systems. The proprietary nature of it frustrates me, though, and is a major source of its bugs and inability to move with the times ... but that's a whole different rant.]

[** Much of the debate seems to miss the point that the really important function of Dewey is to allow the library staff to quickly locate a book on the customer's behalf - a task that becomes exponentially harder with loose-category shelving. But that is yet another different rant.]