Wis[s]e Words

Shelf porn

Published on November 25, 2010

a secret room for your comics

Comics Reporter today linked to the latest installment of shelf porn over at Robot 6, in which collectors show off their hobby rooms. This time it featured Rod Hendrickson who, as seen in the picture above, has created his own secret hideyhole behind his bookshelves — the ideal way to hide those ungainly long boxes full of comics pamphlets. It’s a great idea and if I had the money and more importantly, the room, I would do the same. Get myself a little library room, make it cozy and hide away all the not so nice books. But I’m afraid I don’t even have a walkin closet to my name and hence the vast majority of my collection is stored at my parents’ house. All I have at home are three narrow Billy bookcases, which together still manage to fit some 600 trade paperbacks and albums in though.

Rooting through the shelf porn archives is illuminating, as it shows how small my collection is — and how much worse S. could’ve had it. But it also shows that collections and graphic novels have largely taken over American comics collections; fifteen or even ten years ago many of the collections featured would’ve lots more floppies on display. I stopped comics collecting in June or July 2000, just fed up with it and back then it was all about buying the monthly issues. When I got back into it seriously this year, it had migrated to the trade paperback or hardcover collection. And there is something to say for seeing a whole row of Marvel Essentials in your bookcase, even if I still have a visceral preference for the humble pamphlet.

Seeing so many collections one after another with all those oversized, overpriced Absolute Editions and DC Archives and Marvel Masterworks and such grouped together in picture after picture, just makes me realise all the more how awful they are. I just don’t like them, they look glitzy and cheap and I’d rather have a cheaper, black and white Essential or Showcase edition every time. Also, if I ever do get my own comics library room, it needs to be more than just cheap bookcases stuffed full with books and loaded up with tsotchkes. It needs to be nice, with good, comfortable chairs, quality bookcases and a room that’s actually finished…

The Pride of Chanur – C. J. Cherryh (reread)

Published on November 24, 2010

Cover of The Pride of Chanur

The Pride of Chanur
C. J. Cherryh
224 pages
published in 1981

I’ve read and reviewed The Pride of Chanur before, way back in 2001. That’s only three sentences long though, so high time for a reread and a proper review, especially as I’m trying to read more women sf writers this year, having discovered how unbalanced my reading was. Rereading old favourites like this one seemed a good way to start. Even if it did make me dream of kissing a Kif at Kefh.

The Pride of Chanur is a trade ship run by Hani –a race of bipedal intelligent lions– of the Chanur house/clan, captained by Pyanfar Chanur. She’s doing the rounds of her ship, currently docked at Meetpoint, the big interspecies trading station run by the stsho, when something speeds past her into the ship. At first thinking it some kind of animal escaped from another ship, it turns out to be sapient, but “naked-hided, blunth-toothed and blunt-fingered” unlike any species she knows, something that after careful questioning calls itself human and turns out to have escaped Kif custody, the Kif being a particularly nasty race of black robed, grey skinned, long snouted pirates and thiefs. She refuses to hand it –him– over to them and the result is she and her ship have to flee Meetpoint, one step ahead of the murderous Kif, who in the process blow up and murder another Hani ship…

Now read on at the bookblog…

Half of Holland not getting any tonight

Published on November 23, 2010

One of the local free newspapers carried a thinly disguised press release from a digital tv channel that shall remain nameless about a survey done on how much people are getting it on in perverted, libertine Holland. The answer turned out to be not so much: a quarter of the interviewees turned out to have sex never or hardly ever, with another quarter only having sex a few times each month. This despite eighteen percent admitting to having had affairs and another twentyseven wanting to have affairs — somebody has way more fun than they should.

Inarticulate spaces

Published on November 22, 2010

At Making Light, Abi talks about learning Dutch and, as with learning any language, finding new concepts absent in her mother tongue:

But equally strange are the vocabulary items that teach me some concept which has been lurking all my life in the inarticulate space between the English words I know. One such word is anderhalf. Literally, it means “another half”, but it is actually “one and a half”.

These “inarticulate spaces” are what most often trips me up when trying to write an English post about something I’ve only got Dutch sources of. Frex, why doesn’t English have an expression as simple as “er vraagtekens bij zetten“, putting question marks to some explenation offered to you? Or even as simple a concept as “bestuur“, a nebolous group of people who administrate an organisation and where it doesn’t matter who they are exactly? Or something generic like “gemeente“, not quite translateable with city council or municipality or “wijk“, which is not quite a neighbourhood and might be the same as a borough, though I’ve mostly seen that used for New York rather than as a generic term.

And why oh why is it so difficult to get an English translation of hottentottententoonstellingstentjetoegangspashoudercontroleur?

QotD: Steve Coogan on life

Published on November 21, 2010

You can’t treat your whole life as a Radio Four panel quiz.

From the surprisingly good The Trip, with over the hill Steve Coogan and never quite as good as he thinks he is Rob Brydon playing themselves, or at least the BBC Two version of themselves. Understated, artfully underlighted and balancing on the edge between pathos and parody, you never quite know if it’s “real” or just acted.