Elgin Award Voting, Poetry on Buses, and Summer Virus Attack With Reading Suggestions

So, I had a little good news today, which was my poem “Whispers of Home: Redmond” will be featured with the 4Culture Poetry on Buses 2014-2015 project web site, which is pretty cool. Somehow I’ve become a civic poet!

I also want to thank Diane Severson for her kind words featuring my little book, Unexplained Fevers, in her writeup of all the Elgin finalists for the SFPA prize on the Amazing Stories blog (Unexplained Fevers’ write-up is all the way at the bottom of the page, as books are listed alphabetically.) It turns out the voting has just been extended til the end of the week, so if you are a Sci-Fi Poetry Association member (or want to be) please go ahead and vote (for me, if I may ask so boldly?) (Voting rules are listed here.) Yes, there are some great books on the list, by writers I really admire: Sally Rosen Kindred, Brian D. Dietrich, Noel Sloboda, and more!

I’ve had a nasty summer virus that has flattened me since Sunday, unable to talk on the phone, sing, work much, even take my nightly walks around the woods near my house. So…here are some reading and viewing summaries, rated for appropriate sickbed reading:

–My Life in Middlemarch by Rebecca Mead – a sort of non-memoir-memoir which includes fascinating bits of research about George Eliot, Middlemarch, and other cultural details of her era. A little slow, but fun for those who are interested in Eliot, her life, and her era.

–Muppets Most Wanted: Meh. I just wanted a little more from this movie, although, admittedly, I did watch it while on a lot of cold medicine and very little sleep. There were a few giggles but doesn’t rise to the level of the last movie, which in my mind, didn’t rise to the level of some of the best classic Muppet films.

–Austenland: A movie that seemed much more amusing to me than it did on my first viewing – hey, a movie that improves with cold medicine! A woman who loves all things Austen spends her life savings to go to a grown-up sort of Jane Austen summer camp, but surprise! Instead of living a fantasy, she’s treated like a poor relation, is seen as awkwardly single, and manages to get in trouble with the people in charge, just like her favorite books’ heroines.

–I read the last little bit of Flannery O’Connor’s gigantic collected letters, The Habit of Being, which involve Flannery writing letters and stories like a fiend on her deathbed, literally unable to get out of bed, getting blood transfusions to extend her life, and suffering from anemia and kidney infections – not an especially glamorous ending, and so surprisingly moving because of her steely attitude towards her own health and frailty. If you can be said to have lupus “like a boss”…Anyway, not especially smart sick reading, since it’s a bit depressing and reminds us of our relatively short lifespans here on earth (she was dead at 39.)

–Delicious: A Novel by Ruth Reichl. I’m not far into this one yet, but it’s a bit of light reading about starting out at (a thinly disguised Gourmet) Delicious! Magazine, where the young assistant Billie discovers a trove of a correspondence between a young girl and James Beard. Not a masterpiece, perhaps, but fun for people who love food writing! Which I do!

–Lucky me, I got Murakami’s new book on the very first day it came out from the Redmond library, bless them! Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage suffers, perhaps, from some of the same clunky redundancy that plagued IQ84 (that book needed an editor to take out half of it) and the translation is either really bad or Murakami’s sentence structuring and language has suffered since his last book? (I suspect the former, not the latter.) Anyway, same old Murakami – magical sex dreams, suicidal tendencies, train stations, aimless 30-something man who barely knows about the internets plagued by a loved one’s unexplained disappearance, some pop culture references – I don’t want to sound jaded, because you know Murakami is among my favorite writers, but…I haven’t been blown away by this book yet. Would love to hear your thoughts on this one!

Speaking of Japanese cultural phenomenons…Two fascinating discoveries (courtesy of my little brother Mike, who supplies much of my Japanese cultural knowledge) – the movie The Edge of Tomorrow with Tom Cruise? Based on a Japanese novel (also made into a graphic novel) called All You Need is Kill, which I recommend checking out if you like Japanese sci-fi.  And, the lovely cover art for “The Robot Scientist’s Daughter” named “Cocoro” by Masaaki Sasamoto may be related to the classic Japanese text “Kokoro,” a novel about a young troubled student. The word has many meanings, but one of them is “the heart of things,” which makes Masaaki’s cover art’s name make a lot of sense.

Here is the cover art for The Robot Scientist’s Daughter again, in case you haven’t seen it in a while (coming out Spring 2015 from Mayapple Press!)