New Music: Laura Marling

At this very moment I'm sitting enthralled in front of my Amazon cloud player, absolutely loving the sound of a song by emerging British singer Laura Marling. Turns out Amazon.com has a promotion in which you can download "Sophia," one of the songs from her album A Creature I Don't Know, for FREE during the month of December. I did so, am delighted, and will now press the button to purchase the rest of the album. Hurray for new tunes! I first heard about her on CBS Sunday Morning, one of my favorite news magazine shows. I've loved their features for years - it's been a Sunday morning tradition in my parents' household since I was very young. I still get a warm, pleasant feeling of well-being from the associations of hearing Charles Osgood's opening lines, which I used to hear sleepily from my room along with the sounds of the kitchen as my mom prepared delicious Colombian Sunday favorites like arepas, huevos pericos (eggs scrambled with onion and tomato), or caldo de papas (a delicious broth with potato, egg, cilantro and scallions) - comfort food extraordinaire!

Anyway, back to Laura Marling - she has an amazing sultry, deep voice that totally took me by surprise after seeing a photo of her delicate 21-year-old self. This is where people say she's soulful beyond her years, or an old soul, or something like that - but I like to think that people can really be soulful at any age. Her voice, however, does have a bit of the older woman about it. Let's just say they had me at "sounds like a blend of Joni Mitchell and Leonard Cohen" or something along those lines. I highly recommend at least downloading the free song to see if you're into it.

Speaking of Brits, Marlings and CBS Sunday Morning, a few months ago they did a feature on indie actress/filmmaker Brit Marling (no kidding!) and what looks like a great sci-fi film called Another Earth. It won awards at Sundance, I believe, and I'm very anxious to see it. I missed it in theaters for mommy reasons, but I just put it on my Blockbuster Online queue. More on that when it arrives. Yay!

Update: Now listening to full album. Hear banjos and a subtle air of bluegrass in the mix. Still delighted.

Used Bookstore Jackpot

As pretty incorrigible used bookstore addicts, we have the extreme good fortune (or bad fortune? monetarily speaking...) of living close to several wonderful independent bookstores. Our favorite for the past few years is definitely the aptly named BookBuyers, and I really believe that I can count the times we've made it out of there without buying anything on one hand (fyi, I almost went back and deleted the name selfishly, so that no one else will compete with us for the new treasures that appear. But I think my desire for their business success won out). I always giggle when the person at the counter asks if we've got store credit, since the couple of times we actually sold things to them, we used up the credit before leaving the store. Most of what we get is books, most recently favoring comics and graphic novels that we snatch up for our growing collection. However, they also sell things like games, music, movies and sheet music, among other delightful things - so you can see why we very rarely escape without carrying something out. Once in a while we really luck onto some crazy finds, like when I happened on the complete box sets of Gundam Wing and Neon Genesis Evangelion on two separate occasions. Lately we've had some good holiday vibes and gotten pretty awesome scores, including this haul the other day:

1) Volumes I and III of The Complete Little Nemo in Slumberland, a classic comic by Winsor McCay I got turned on to by a Stanford prof. of Film and Media Studies, Scott Bukatman, who just published a new book on it that I'm very excited about called The Poetics of Slumberland: Animated Spirits and The Animating Spirit, not yet released but available for pre-order. 

2) The Castafiore Emerald, from The Adventures of Tintin, to add to the other four volumes from the same set that I found at BB on another visit. Incidentally, another Stanford prof., Jean-Marie Apostolides, from the French department, wrote a book about Tintin called The Metamorphoses of Tintin: Or Tintin for Adults. I recently heard some disparaging words about the upcoming Tintin movie release from Spielberg by a cartoonist who will here remain nameless, but whose opinion I value highly (and which confirms my skepticism based solely on the previews). Nevertheless, I will likely be seeing it in theaters, if only because we are doing a session on it in the Graphic Narrative Project workshops next quarter (an academic community for the study of graphic narratives, of which I am co-founder and graduate coordinator). Oh, and by the way, we were very excited to read this article about our group written for the Stanford Human Experience website, then picked up on the Stanford Report: http://humanexperience.stanford.edu/graphicnarrative. As per item #1, I should mention that Scott Bukatman has been instrumental in our development as a workshop and was one of our faculty coordinators last year. Huzzah!

3) Not pictured - UNO! One pack, to supplement another Target-bought pack, in case we need to play with a double. I can't wait to revive the old favorite card game. Woot Woot!

4) A vintagey puzzle of the city of San Francisco. Must still do some digging to find out more about it, but there's a medium-to-high likelihood that I'll give up that idea and just enjoy it sans historical details for its delightful aesthetic qualities and fun-having potential. Speaking of puzzles, stay tuned for some piece-gathering insanity on my next post. Tootles!

A Song for Swooning

I just uncharacteristically clicked on one of those creepy targeted Facebook ads, vanquished by the inescapable draw of the name "Mark Lanegan." It was a link to this free promotional mp3 of "The Gravedigger's Song" from his new album, Blues Funeral. For those of you not familiar with him, Mark Lanegan used to be in the grunge band Screaming Trees, after which he has done various solo projects and some collaborations. I became a big fan of Mark Lanegan after writing a review of his collaborative album with Isobel Campbell of Belle and Sebastian, Ballad of the Broken Seas, which has to be one of my favorites of all time. I wrote it for a now-sadly-defunct mp3zine called Daily Sonic. I haven't had a chance to work things out so that I could include the audio file of my review here, but if you really want it let me know. Anyhow, I am pretty crazy for Mark Lanegan's voice, for many of the same primal reasons I love Leonard Cohen's later-life raspiness. You can get a taste by listening to the "Blues Funeral" mp3 I embedded below (you don't have to download it or provide your email to listen). Has anyone gotten to listen to the rest of Blues Funeral yet? I'm tempted to buy it, but was hoping someone might have some input first. I've lately been buying music through Amazon mp3, so that I have it on the handy Amazon Cloud Player, but this might be one to get on vinyl, if available. Lately they've been doing these awesome new vinyl releases of albums that come with a code to download the mp3 version online, so that you have it both ways. Genius!

Review: The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Annie Barrows
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I couldn't put this book down! The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society is an epistolary novel following the post-WWII encounter of a writer and the residents of one of the Channel Islands, held together by a literary society formed as a means of surviving the German occupation. I am very interested in stories describing the period after the Second World War, and this novel has a beautiful way of bringing out the nuances of the post-war experience with a touching and vibrant combination of humor, romance, loss, and tragedy. Despite the necessarily bleak experiences described in the novel, recounted in the heartbreakingly personal letters, the novel somehow stays lighthearted and often hilarious. The authors do a spectacular job at developing the characters through their writing style and developing a riveting plot across the gaps between the beautiful "snail-mail" correspondence in which most of us no longer engage. I heartily recommend this novel, and thank my friend B.T. for lending it to me!

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Review: Kiss and Tell

Kiss & Tell by MariNaomi
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Kiss and Tell is bare-all graphic memoir (or autobiographical comic) about the romantic and sexual history of San Francisco cartoonist Mari Naomi. The memoir reads like a little black book of encounters, going chronologically through each person (some of whom we meet more than once). The step-by-step, grittily honest tales touch on way more than sexual experiences and paramours - candidly revealing the entanglements and growing pains of a girl coming of age and how it shapes her relationships with family and friends. Her minimalist drawing style is as direct as the delivery of her story, both managing to come through as both matter-of-fact and heartfelt. Creating such a level of intimacy with a reader takes great courage and risk on the part of an author, especially as a woman writing on subject matter that, despite many changes over the years, still remains more comfortable as the domain of men. Mari Naomi does it humorously and artfully, and I consider myself duly charmed.

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The Hunger Games

I am so excited about the Hunger Games movie coming out next year. I read the books by Suzanne Collins in something like three or four days while breastfeeding Baby W. I hadn't swallowed up books that fast in a while - and I found them to be completely riveting and amazing - highly recommended! They are young adult books, though the theme is pretty heavy overall (think "The Lottery" as a survivalist, Huxleyan YA action trilogy). I think the casting looks perfect - and it was a great surprise to see Woody Harrelson in the trailer. Boop boop!

The List of Shame

As part of my recent reawakening to social networking - in an attempt to climb out of that slippery slope of social isolation that is infant-parenting - I have been updating my Goodreads page. Historically I always find list-making and profile-doctoring to be extremely soothing and delightfully compartmentalizing activities. As I added six more books to my "currently reading" list, however, I realized to my dismay that it has turned from a wonderland of possibilities to a overpowering roll call of shame.

Alas, that is the sadly ironic dilemma of the literary life. We spend our lives reading books, yet must read so many of them that one our most valuable skills is learning to be successful at reading partially when needed. Granted, many of those books I have pretty much completely read - but I am a victim of my inability to click on the "read" button unless I've read every single line. Ah, how I lament your lonely dust-filled covers, my friends in "currently reading." May your day also come, when in a golden light of glory I will turn the last page of your final chapter, having read your careful pages sequentially and fully from one end to the other!

Review: Towers of Midnight

My most recent Goodreads review: Towers of Midnight by Robert Jordan & Brandon Sanderson.

When I started reading The Gathering Storm, the first book of Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series "co-authored" by Brandon Sanderson, I found the style difference between the two authors to be pretty jarring - particularly because I had just finished reading Jordan's last book, Knife of Dreams. However, after settling in to Sanderson's somewhat more casual, more quickly-moving style, I am definitely a convert. I thoroughly enjoyed Towers of Midnight, the second book by Sanderson, and breezed through the 1000+ pages (relatively speaking). I find Sanderson's manner of storytelling to be refreshing after the last couple of Wheel of Time books, which I have to say had been getting pretty unruly and tedious, even frustratingly redundant at times. Sanderson's fresh take on Jordan's work breathed some new life into it, unraveling the knots and propelling the plot forward - making it very exciting and gratifying to read after spending so many hours and hours with the characters over the course of 12 books. One of Sanderson's strengths is definitely the battle scenes. My husband and I have previously lamented a couple of battles in Jordan's previous books that definitely didn't give us the payoff they promised after hundreds of pages (or even several books) of lead-in. They were not fully developed and were over much too quickly, almost as if they were paraphrased. It seemed as if they weren't really Jordan's favorite thing to write, so he didn't linger too long on them. Sanderson, however, really does the battles justice. They are detailed to just the right amount of depth, including some descriptions of strategy, fighting sequences and such, and really highlighting the individual gifts of the heroic characters. I'm not hardcore enough to be a big fan of battle scenes generally, so it says something that I enjoyed them so fully. I'm now anxiously awaiting the next volume!

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NaBloMo - what?

Well, it turns out that it's National Blogging Month - and although I'm a week late and not even close to having a regularly interesting blog the likes of my good friends at The Sporadic Post and Bread n Jam for Frances, I'm going to try to up the ante here and eek out a few posts this month, either here or on my other blog as my mommy self. I know these posts show up on various forums such as Facebook, Google Reader, etc. (where I usually read other people's blogs), but I would say that going to the sites directly will give you a more pleasurable viewing experience potentially - and you can see the design changes I made recently. Although, really, does anyone actually go to people's actual blog sites anymore, with all of these alternative access routes?

To follow up on my previous post, I did actually get to try WriteMonkey and I completely love it. I've used it several times now, both on the very large monitors of my home computer and on the small screen of my netbook at a coffeeshop, and was impressed both times with the productivity and focus that resulted. Basically WriteMonkey takes over the screen, making a black canvas that display only the words you type. No formatting buttons, no Windows taskbar below, no distractions. It discourages excessive editing - so I can hit Ctl + I and italicize, but the text won't actually show up that way, just _like this_. I tend to obsess about corrections and overedit, thereby routinely stunting my own creativity and smothering my ideas before they even make it onto the page. This solution really seems to be doing the trick, especially since I don't see the little browser buttons below on my taskbar, daring me to check my email again. I've written several pages of my dissertation on it so far - so mission accomplished! Who knew a black page with rows of green letters could be so beautiful and soothing? Well, I guess they did.

Here's a screenshot from PC Magazine - which included WriteMonkey in "The Best Free Software of 2011":

Sometime soon I'll also need to try out organizational software to put together all of the bits and pieces that I'm writing on WriteMonkey and elsewhere, but right now I'm mainly sorting them in files on my computer by chapter and on Google Docs. I can already sense things getting lost in the mix, though - so I'll probably report back soon with word on one of those writing organization programs that work for PCs.

Guten Morgen, Writing Self

It has been a couple of years since I last blogged semi-regularly, but my virtual self has found new life thanks in part to the other blog I've been writing about my new adventures in rookie motherhood. That one is mainly directed at updating family and friends on how Baby W is coming along in the world since his birth on January 7, 2011.

I've started using my blogging as a way to plunge back into writing creatively on a regular basis, which in turn will hopefully help jump-start my writing self from her current dead-battery status into full-fledged functionality for the massive writerly undertaking that now lies at my feet: THE DISSERTATION.

As most of you now, I am currently pursuing a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature. At the end of May I successfully passed my prospectus colloquium, during which my advisory committee of professors approve what is basically a 10-page description and plan of my dissertation. After a summer of talking theory and philosophy with my main advisors, taking care of Baby W and attempting to recover enough from newborn-land to establish a routine that blends mommy-time and Ph.D.-time, I'm pleased to announce that *bugles blaring* I've written two paragraphs!

Of course, I'm now apparently procrastinating by writing this post, but it does feel good to preen a little bit. I spend quite a lot of my time breastfeeding these days - time which I occasionally use wisely to look things up on our handy new iPad 2. I recently found this awesome links page on a website called Literature & Latte that is dedicated to digital writing tools, focused mainly on Apple systems. They're the people behind Scrivener, which some of you writer types may be familiar with. For those of you who aren't, it's organization software for writing that is made to help organize all the bits and piece of extensive writing projects and increase focus and productivity. I use a PC, so I won't be able to use a lot of the shiny, pretty writing software out there for Macs. Scrivener is on beta testing for Windows, but I'm frightening by the disclaimers about losing your work. Since I'm not willing to entrust my dissertation to a beta test, for now I'm going to try a similar PC program listed in the links called PageFour.

I am also dying to try one of the programs that is geared toward writing minimalistically, without distractions, on a refreshingly clear screen that avoids menus and sidebars and instead goes full-screen with a white page and plain text. I can't decide between WriteMonkey and Q10, so I think I'll start with the former. Here's their description:

Writemonkey is a Windows zenware* writing application with an extremely stripped down user interface, leaving you alone with your thoughts and your words. It is light, fast and free. With an array of innovative tools under the hood, it helps you write better. Editing is for another day ... 

If anyone has any input on these, let me know! For now we'll see how it goes with WriteMonkey. I'd better go try it before Baby W wakes up from his nap. Oops.. too late.