"I'm so sick of drinking whiskey with those pigs!"

Not a bit work safe!

My short story "The Refutation of Rosemont" is live at Strange Horizons. It's another view of Jeremiah Rosemont and John C. Miles, the main characters of The Magician and The Fool.

Also, I'll be at Present Moment Books this Wednesday night at 7pm, if you want to swing by, hear me read, and support a nifty independent. More details at my main website.

DADDIO and ROSEMARY finish watching SPONEGEBOB SQUAREPANTS with ISAIAH.

Rosemary: Where Mr. Krabs?

Daddio: Yeah. The movie's over, huh? Where is Mr. Krabs?

Rosemary: Where is he?

Daddio: Yeah, where did he go?

[Daddio and Rosemary hold up their hands in wonder.]

Rosemary: He's here.

Daddio: Where?

Rosemary: Mr. Krab here. [Points to stomach.]

Daddio: What do you mean?

Rosemary: Mr. Krab here, in my body. [Points to stomach.]

Daddio: What?

Rosemary: Here.

Daddio: Mr. Krab is in your belly?

Rosemary: No.

Daddio: No?

Rosemary: Patrick here. In my belly.

Daddio: You ate Patrick?

Rosemary: Movie over.

Daddio: Right. The movie's over.

Rosemary: Now he in my belly.

Daddio: Just like food.

Rosemary: Rice milk here. [Points to stomach]. In my belly.

Daddi: Mr. Krabs and Patrick, too, huh? You finish the movie and they go in your body.

Rosemary: [Big nod.] In my body.

Thumbs up from Cheryl Morgan, which means a lot to me -- I admire Cheryl's opinion. But I'm surprised I didn't get more of this, actually -- whiplash from reviewers going, "Wha? Plagues? Now urban mythology? Wha?" I think there are lots of similarities between Patron Saint and The Magician and The Fool (identity craziness, thrillers that aren't typical thrillers, magic that seems to work, but with no explanation why), but that's me as parent of these weird children talking.

Craig Gidney's review of The Magician and the Fool at Fantasy Book Spot.:

"The connection between [main characters] Rosemont and Boy King... makes for suspenseful reading. The resultant novel, though, is less like a commercial thriller than it is like ‘secret history’ fantasies of Elizabeth Hand, like Waking the Moon and Mortal Love. Like Hand’s work, Anderson’s supernatural occurrences aren’t just pyrotechnic window dressing. They are an exploration of the effect myth has on the modern world...The tricks that the author-magician plays are persuasive, even if they are trippy and open-ended."

Gidney is absolutely correct. Waking the Moon is a dear old friend and I've found Hand to be one of the few writers imbuing her work with mythic undertones that don't lean completely on Campbell.

I feel like I have a lot to say today for some reason. First of all, on parenting:

Parenting is like running a daycare. With your roommate. Whom you used to date.


Just a bit more on food. Want to feel some outrage on top of panic regarding spiraling grain costs and food prices? I always do. From the excellent blog Mulch:

By any measure, 2007 was a banner year for farmers of grain, soybeans and cotton, as high prices for their crops earned them record net income, even after they paid skyrocketing costs for fuel, fertilizer and seed.

But under formulas set by Congress in the 2002 farm law, taxpayers topped off the record farm earnings of 2007 with another $5 billion in "direct payment" crop subsidies.

Hard to decide what outrages me more, raining welfare on fat-cat industrial agribusinesses, or agreeing with George Bush that we should put a stop to it.


What else? I remain hypnotized by what meta-weirdness crawls out of the "voodvork" (as tanaise says):

At Spectra Pulse: Read the comments.

And then there's this: "The Room" by The Patron Saint of Plagues (YouTube)


And lastly, I don't buy the logic behind carbon trading. Here's a good example why.

With so much talk about rising food costs and shortages, I thought it would be good to touch base with my main man James Howard Kunstler on the Big Bottom Line (Business Week). The low down:

The rise and fall of oil production is asymmetrical. In other words, it'll be a steeper, rockier tumble down than the steady increase going up. My own sense of things is that we will be in very serious trouble inside of five years.

In the above article, Kunstler is focusing on oil's ultimate effect on U.S. suburbs, but he might as well be talking about the effect of food prices, too, since food and fuel are completely intertwined in this global system. None of the major candidates is talking about this beyond paying it lip service and there seem to be no ideas on the table about how to stem a global food crisis. That's not to say that no one sees the hard reality this May Day:

Workers Rally on May Day over Food Prices, Rights

(In Indonesia...)

(..and Russia too)

Oil and Food Firms in Public Relations Tap Dance

And the coup de grace: Haiti.

And what about America? Are we feeling it, too? Consumers are but the USDA doesn't get it. With a global middle class slavering for cheap goods, the USDA's long range projections are comical.

Meanwhile, in a knee jerk reaction to headlines, House Speaker Pelosi has introduced a bill to switch certain subsidies from the Farm Bill to feed the needy. An insulting measure considering the astonishingly piggish give away elsewhere in the proposed Farm Bill and the relentless efforts by conservative Democrats and Republicans to gut the entitlement programs of any meaningful funding toward local, sustainable, or really, MORE farms, which is exactly what we need. Less consolidation. A higher degree of local infrastructure. Here, and all over the planet.

I was at a party after the release of Magician and The Fool where I made the mistake of telling liberal friends that I didn't think Hillary or Obama would make a difference due the coming crisis, that I might not even vote at all. It was anathema to them and I got royally chewed out. This was at the beginning of April, and I saw what was coming based on UN reports mentioned in articles like the one on Haiti above. Indeed, it seemed to me that with their lush ties to Monsanto and other agribusiness moguls, Hillary and Obama would actually undo much of the work that I do on a daily level for local and sustainable farming. Lots of wine-soaked shouting and accusations on all sides (Them: "You're living in a fantasy world!" Me"YOU'RE living in a fantasy world!"). But at one point a buddy said, with a note of derision in his voice, "So you think we're headed for soup kitchens and bread lines?"

"Based on these candidates' connection to reality?" I said. "Absolutely."

Probably not this summer, in the Land of Plenty, but I agree with Kunstler. It's really not that far away.

Black Nurse: [readying the blood pressure cuff] So who do you think is going to win the Democratic primary?

White Daddio: I think Hillary's stacking the deck. She'll win it in the convention.

Black Nurse: Why can't Obama put her away? Why don't he debate her and knock her out once and for all? [straps up Daddio with the b.p. cuff] I'm so sick of her throwing race in his face. So sick of hearing about race on the news the way it gets reported. Uncross your legs please.

White Daddio: Well, he shouldn't be arguing with her at all. He should have said before Pennsylvania, "I already have this sown up. She can win all the individual primaries she likes, but I'll still have the delegate lead, and she never will." Instead, she's got him in the clinches. Why's he boxing with her at all? He won, he should act like it.

Black Nurse [squeezing the blood pressure bulb angrily] Somethin wrong with that bitch.

This new French documentary, The World According to Monsanto, has been taken down by Google over a copy right issue. So if you want to watch it, watch it soon (it's long, but worth it). The link provided may not last long. Here's the skinny:


On March 11 a new documentary was aired on French television (ARTE – French-German cultural tv channel) by French journalist and film maker Marie-Monique Robin, entitled 'The World According to Monsanto' (Le Monde selon Monsanto[1]). Starting from the Internet over a period of three years Robin has collected material for her documentary, going on to numerous interviews with people of very different backgrounds. She traveled widely, from Latin America, to Asia, through Europe and the United States, to personally interview farmers and people in influential positions.


More info here.

Look! The original first chapter of The Patron Saint of Plagues.

I'm still trying to parse the crazy Facebook man at Spectra Pulse. It doesn't seem to be my brother, although, a man who'd create a UFO blog MUST remain a suspect indefinitely.


 

I've hooked a freak -- check out the comments at the end of this Spectra Pulse blog post.

Shout out to DreamHaven Books for winning Best Science Fiction Bookstore from City Pages!

The employees are there to be your helpful guides, offering tips on authors who might be like the one you absolutely adore, or picking up clues to your buying habits and recommending a new author out of the blue.

We know it's true...

An early heads up. I'll be reading at Magers & Quinn, Uptown Minneapolis (a half block south of Hennepin and Lake), on Thursday, May 29 at 7:30pm. 

This is another one of Minneapolis's great indie bookstores -- I hope you'll come by and show M&Q some money-love for supporting a local author. 

For months I've been getting a copy of the United States 2007 Census of Agriculture in the mail, which I've ignored because, you know, I'm not a farmer. Today, I got one that said that my answers to this survey were required by law and that they were due back in February.

So I got on the horn for the inevitable Kafka-esque phone call, and I wasn't disappointed. The logic is irrefutable, after all: If one received a USDA survey one must be a farmer. Why else would one receive a survey if one wasn't a farmer? I got this from three successive phone-tree jockeys (along with questions like, "So how much acreage DID you have in production?") before someone knew what to do.

Because apparently there's a survey to de-farmer myself! And I could do it over the phone. Just these simple questions, and I was no longer a farmer in the eyes of the law:

1) How many acres DID you have in production? How long were they were in production? *

2) What form of crop insurance did you carry and for how many acres?

3) Did you have any nursery production?

4) Fruits or nuts? Berries?

5) How many heads of livestock?

6) Colonies of bees?

7) Aquaculture?

8) What was the total value of your sales?

9) Did you receive any money under the federal commodity subsidy program?


And like that, I was an ex-farmer. What will happen to my ex-cattle? My ex-blueberries? Who will investigate the ex-collapse of my ex-beehives? Ah well. As they say, how you gonna keep 'em down on the ex-farm...?



* I actually got to say, "I always never had any farm land in production." A gold star to the blog reader who knows why this filled me with irrational literary delight.

John Joseph Adams has a piece on  SCIFI Wire regarding The Magician and The Fool.

Yesterday, I went to the zoo with the kids and got there just before feeding time. The animals were ornery, lively. A woman got some lingering eye contact from a lynx and when she didn't look away, the beast lunged at her, going rampant before the glass. It was a funny moment, but there was a split second where she got the message that the thing behind the glass would have taken her out in the wild. 

I love those little reminders. 

 In which I'm pretty sure We'll Never Know the Truth (from the guest blog over at Spectra Pulse)

 "The Bones of You." Elbow.

(This one's going out to gregvaneekhout, who's talking about a novel based on his rocket-ride story "The Osteomancer's Son" which appeared in Asimov's a couple years back.)

Mm mm. Donut holes and bourbon.