"Be the sand, not the oil in the machine!"
Every time I go in to sign on I have a wander around the Solihull charity shops. Today's visit yielded no new paperbacks, but I did find a postcard book of mythical creatures by British female artists - anybody want a beastie through the mail? The one card I know I'm going to hang on to is this one by Sandra Dieckmann:
That alone justifies £1.50. :) There's little else to say about today or Sunday, which was mostly eaten up by job applications. One in particular involved a two hundred question "assessment". Considering it was for a building society vacancy I'm at a loss to explain the "I return library books on time: strongly agree/slightly agree/feel meh about/disagree/throw netbook across the room" nonsense was about.
So the highlight of the last few days was seeing John H Saturday night. We toasted Aickman's centenary with pints of Silver Adder. This will probably explain why a bit later a conversation about Tony Hancock briefly morphed into an AU Archers written by Arthur Machen (I'm not sure if either of us will be ever be ready to write about that). We talked about religion in PKD, radio SFF (in particular a play by Gunther Eich that I hope to read in translation; it's where this entry's subject line comes from). He gave me a copy of Simon Strantzas' new collection Burnt Black Suns, which is very good, redolent of Caitlin Kiernan's dark SF and Ligotti in places. It also has seriously one of the best weird stories about artists I've ever read - "Emotional Dues" - which I wish I'd written. But I need to re-read John's first collection in the next couple of days in order to conduct an interview for its reissue. Need to crack on with No Language as well.
And in other news, I can't play tafl. As M has just demonstrated several* bloody times!
*Okay, I won one game. That'll never happen again.
That alone justifies £1.50. :) There's little else to say about today or Sunday, which was mostly eaten up by job applications. One in particular involved a two hundred question "assessment". Considering it was for a building society vacancy I'm at a loss to explain the "I return library books on time: strongly agree/slightly agree/feel meh about/disagree/throw netbook across the room" nonsense was about.
So the highlight of the last few days was seeing John H Saturday night. We toasted Aickman's centenary with pints of Silver Adder. This will probably explain why a bit later a conversation about Tony Hancock briefly morphed into an AU Archers written by Arthur Machen (I'm not sure if either of us will be ever be ready to write about that). We talked about religion in PKD, radio SFF (in particular a play by Gunther Eich that I hope to read in translation; it's where this entry's subject line comes from). He gave me a copy of Simon Strantzas' new collection Burnt Black Suns, which is very good, redolent of Caitlin Kiernan's dark SF and Ligotti in places. It also has seriously one of the best weird stories about artists I've ever read - "Emotional Dues" - which I wish I'd written. But I need to re-read John's first collection in the next couple of days in order to conduct an interview for its reissue. Need to crack on with No Language as well.
And in other news, I can't play tafl. As M has just demonstrated several* bloody times!
*Okay, I won one game. That'll never happen again.