The rest of this blog entry is going to contain spoilers for Neal Stephenson’s Anathem.

Usually I don’t buy books in hardcover, I prefer the paperback experience for the most part, but I was too excited to wait around past the hardcover cycle for this. I haven’t read everything Stephenson’s written up to this point, I still have The Diamond Age to get through, and the rest of The Baroque Cycle after the first book to read, but I’ve read enough to wonder what there is left to write about after you have written about the past and the present and the future.

I didn’t read any reviews or blurbs or interviews, I just ordered the book from amazon and opened up to the first page. I read the first sentence of the forward that said if you like surprises skip this, so I skipped the forward, and I was surprised, and I liked it.

For two seconds I almost groaned at realizing this was going to be a whole book full of made up science fiction words, and then I immediately stopped caring and loved it, because the ceiling opened up and my head stopped hurting and there was a whole long world where you had a bolt and a cord and a sphere and a giant clock and you could spend your whole life reenacting an ancient battle with some weeds in a back garden, drawing pictures of it on some leaves and shoving them in a nook in a stone wall that you knew was going to last forever until someone else a thousand lifetimes later could find it and say hey that’s cool, I can use this.

I was immediately envious of this life and world, while not perfect it seemed to flow correctly, taking into account the pockets of helium inside our skulls, opening up the ceilings wide enough for each little skull balloon to float up as far as it could.

If you like to think about things like the flow of information through time, isosceles triangles, cats that are both alive and dead, orbital mechanics, phonomancy, and what it means to be a finite biological organism exsisting in an infinte universe, this is a fun book to read.

I drove across Pennsylvania this week to meet my brother’s first son, Elijah Joseph Onuska. He has the cutest most smooshable monkey face. On the way there, I listened to Heretic Pride, on the way back, I listened to Sarah Vowell read Assassination Vacation. I might have died and been born over one thousand times or more.

Today I finished Live From New York, An Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live, As Told By It’s Stars, Writers, and Guests. My favorite person on Saturday night live will always be Brian Hooper, who would re-do all the funny parts with his friends every Monday during art class, but these guys were cool too. Lorne has lunch with Paul McCartney a lot, by the way.

I started Anathem and I’m ok with that being like it is, I think it’s going to be fun.

This past weekend was lovely and quiet. I made chocolate peanut butter chip cookies and did laundry and read more of the saturday night live book.  The steelers played hard and won it & so did we.

Anyhow, If you keep clicking through, you eventually see my name, and page one of the B-side Kieron wrote for me to draw. I’m super amazed to see my work hanging out in such splendiforous company.

Now is the time to mention to your local comic shop that Phonogram 2 is starting up in December, and you would like it very much please if they would order a copy for you.  They’ll probably be grumpy about it and turn up their nose, but that’s half the fun of the comic shop experience, isn’t it?

Success! Screens are on their way to Reading.

Anyhow, in the mean time, I’m teaching myself how to silkscreen, making some screens for t-shirts for my friend’s Obama campain office. It’s super frustrating, and I’ve not gotten a true success yet, but I think I’ve got the kinks ironed out and the next run through should work. It has the potential to be a very fun activity, and hopefully will lead to some new art that is less boring.

My table is messy these days. It has been more of an adjustment than I planned, not having BW to work on any longer.  I grabbed this book off the shelf because it looked small. It made me angry a lot of times, but it also had glittering abandoned martian cities, empty spaces and firebirds. I do have a question though. What is it with old school SF and whores? I am starting to sense a pattern. Not just bradbury, but all of them that I have been reading lately. A woman comes onscreen and you can bet two seconds later she’s deliberately using her bosom as a weapon. I don’t know, mabye it is because I am not a good looking person, but it just seems like such a ridiculous way to behave.  Also, there was like five failed missions before anything happened. If only we really behaved that way.

I guess, unrealistic, annoying, but still sticky is the final verdict. I’m not sure what I’m going to read next, there is a book about Saturday Night Live that has been whispering my name for the past couple months, well see if it gets through.

In the mean time, I am drawing a b-side for Phonogram 2, and then picking up one of Kieron’s orphan scripts, which is insane, so things are moving along.

Songs From The Stars, by Norman Spinrad

You just don’t hear “memory banks” enough anymore these days.

I guess I have to admit that when I said before in that other post that I haven’t been reading anything, that was kind of a fib. This book has been in my bag for a while now, so I have something to do while Justin is in karate. There is not an inside waiting area, so the parents just have to hang out in their cars in the parking lot. Despite having seventeen gadgets specifically designed to entertain me while sitting and waiting in the car, reading is still my favorite. I enjoyed dragging this book out over the space of months, I always looked forward to getting to spend an hour with Clear Blue Lou and Sunshine Sue, I’m kind of sad it’s over really. But I will be looking out for more Norman Spinrad. Aparently according to the internet, The Demolished Man is some kind of classic, so I’m sure that’ll be fun. I’d rather be hanging out in La Mirage though probably.