artnouveauho ([info]artnouveauho) wrote,
@ 2009-07-01 22:59:00
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Entry tags:friends, links

Two friends, two travellers, two books
I got to know Andy Losowsky in London some years back. He then moved to Madrid, then Barcelona. Then, two more friends of his and mine moved to Florence, and Andy went to visit them there.

While there, he took photos of doorbells.

He took to putting the doorbell photos up online with little stories, or descriptions, or single sentences, about the people he imagined would live behind them.

Eventually, Andy self-published a book of the photos and the stories. The Doorbells Of Florence won a prize, got picked up by a publisher, and had a reading (as a sort-of-launch) tonight. Andy is as engaging and funny a reader as he is a writer, and although the downstairs room at Stanford's was suffocatingly hot, it was a very entertaining evening. I heartily recommend this excellent book. Read excerpts here, and then go buy it from Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk.

Andy now lives in America. As an American living in the UK, I can relate to this. My friend Ally Shaw is another traveller: Chicago to San Francisco to LA to London. She, too, has just self-published a book: The Desperate Ones. When I describe this book to others, I usually use the words "poetic cyberpunk." Words like "dystopian" and "apocalyptic" usually make an appearance too. Her city, Pottersfield, can't be found on any map, but it's beautifully, densely imagined-- and it is dying. I'll let her tell it:


Dominion Capital has slated the walled city of Pottersfield for obliteration. Those within must survive or be subsumed. While hackers invent a resistant religion from Dominion Capital's tech discards, they discover survival rests with one man: Rhubarb Ward, a war veteran and ex-con whose military issue implant holds the key to the future of Pottersfield. Rhubarb is newly released from prison when he meets Lola. Fierce, cunning and addicted to the drug blue, she is the secret to his captive past. While the city's wealthiest residents are lifted out, the rest are trapped behind. Among them are a history professor obsessively recording his memories as he forgets them, a suburban runaway compelled by the glamor of implosion and a call girl bent on meeting a new god even if it means martyrdom. Their lives intersect with a certainty that only some will survive to see the strange new world that blooms in the exit wound of the disappeared city.

Podcasts of Ally reading excerpts are available here. On lulu.com, you can buy a copy or download it as an e-book for free. (If you do download it and like it, a donation via the button at Ally's site would be a lovely thing.)

I have a personal bias towards this book, since I helped edit it. Luckily it's the sort of book that rewards multiple readings, as all the spiderweb-like links between the various characters and their stories become clear. It does contain sex, drugs and violence; it also contains some unearthly beauty.

I'd love to know what you think of it. Meanwhile, what are you reading at the moment? Anything good?

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[info]miriya_b
2009-07-02 12:05 am UTC (link)
These sound fabulous!

On the metro ride home today I just finished reading Catherine Madsen's The Bones Reassemble: Reconstituting Liturgical Speech -- so smart, spot-on, incisive: I can't recommend it highly enough to anyone who cares about language and its religious/liturgical uses, heterodox or traditional. (See http://www.thedaviesgrouppublishers.com/madsen_bones.htm) I also have great esteem for her In Medias Res: Liturgy for the Estranged (http://www.thedaviesgrouppublishers.com/Madsen,%20In%20Medias%20Res.htm), in whose 2007 author's note she writes:

"Anyone who writes a deliberately controversial book about the failures of modern liturgy should be expected to follow it with a book that shows how the job should be done. This is not that book."
(The material that follows the note was in fact written some 15 years prior to The Bones Reassemble.)
She notes that "[t]he rituals are 'secular' in the sense that they assume no necessary connection between ritual and theism, and 'pagan' in the sense that they take the seasons for their calendar. In some underlying sense they are Jewish, or proto-Jewish, in their reaching for what Emmanuel Levinas called a religion for adults. ... My own sense is that the point of ritual is not to set forth a coherent theology or ideology at all, but to create a state of mind." Her rituals make excellent use of powerful poetic quotation as well.

Otherwise? For a book group a friend put together, I recently read A.B. Yehoshua's The Liberated Bride (which apparently could also be translated as "The Liberating Bride" -- though such a use of "liberating" doesn't sound like very idiomatic English to me): only 2 of us in the group finished it, and though it had its strong points I don't know that I'd particularly recommend it.

While I was reading this (during a trip to Kipling's house in Vermont*), the spouse was finishing Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell and picking up my youngest brother's copy of World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War.
I think he had the better end of the deal.

*see http://www.landmarktrustusa.org/naulakha/about.html

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[info]velvetdahlia
2009-07-02 11:59 am UTC (link)
Thanks for the shout out and for being the ideal reader for the book.

It's interesting that the term "self-published" has recently become hotly debated. I believe it is becoming quickly archaic given new technologies, and still caries with it the stigma of the vanity press. It is possible now, given POD and E books, to publish work and distribute it without paying anyone a penny for the service. In the days of vanity presses and "self publishing" the author would be charged. An indie writer is someone who is producing work using new technologies without a publishing contract. The comparison to indie film makers and indie musicians is more accurate. I'm sure traditional publishing, very troubled at the moment, finds this threatening.

Edited at 2009-07-02 12:12 pm UTC

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What am I reading?
[info]larissa_00
2009-07-03 07:55 am UTC (link)
Mapping Mars, by Oliver Morton. It's a history of man's understanding of Mars, from Lowell's canals to how to choose lander sites. Includes interpretations of Mars in fiction (his lit crit is quite savvy, for a basically scientific book), and musings about how humans might understand, or even use, Mars in future.

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What have I been reading?
[info]library_keeper
2009-07-03 10:25 am UTC (link)
I'm on a mid-Victorian reading jag at the moment. Ferdinand Mount's novel Umbrella, about Lord Aberdeen (Prime Minister during the Crimean War); not exactly a classic of historical fiction, but a decent, thoughtful and intelligent novel of some relevance to me because I've been working on the Aberdeen Papers at the BL, and it helps to be able to visualise the people whose letters I'm reading. William Gibson and Bruce Sterling's The Difference Engine (SF/steampunk), for light relief, though also slightly work-related because I have to write an exhibition label about Ada Lovelace and the invention of the computer. John Stuart Mill's Autobiography, because I don't know much about Mill and thought this would be a good way in. And Peter Hopkirk's The Great Game, because there's nothing nicer than putting one's feet up on the chaise-longue and reading about Victorian explorer-adventurers in jeopardy in the deserts of Central Asia.

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