KJ Bishop's Latest & Greatest

Vandermeer has an interview up with KJ Bishop, who's book The Etched City, I recently finished re-reading. Great stuff.

Why should readers pick up your book as opposed to, say, just about anybody else's book?
K. J. Bishop: Readers should pick up my book and someone else's. Readers: buy a book instead of a pizza, or half a pizza, or whatever fraction of a pizza you can get for a few bucks these days. It's a diet that works.

Yea. That's why there's 1377 books in our house, and no food in the fridge.

Breathing Space

Back to work. I'm so behind. My first drafts are always such crap.

Mixed Bag

Over at bluesmama, check out the lyrics for her "Blues for J." You may also be interested in checking out the President uncensored (via boingboing).

Also, Amanda's got some links up about voter fraud and directs us to Voter Video, in which those with video cameras are urged to catch Republicans challenging others' rights to vote at polling stations. She's also got up some thoughts on women, food, and anxiety, as does Hugo. I might post later about this one.

I also recommend: In My Arms, a web gallery of pulp magazine covers/comics, video clips, et al of men, monsters, and robots carrying women (there's even a shot of supergirl carrying a woman). A fascinating cultural image.

And here's a very good article about Bush's bizarre Dred Scott statement in the Kerry/Bush debates. Yea, it was code for Roe vs. Wade (Bush intends to erode it), but if you take the pres. at his word, that the judges in the Dred Scott case were acting on matters of "personal opinion" and weren't "strict constructionists" - you'd be wrong. The Constitution of the United States of America allows slavery. Slaves weren't real people. These guys were about as strict on the constructionism as they could be. Check it out.

The Fighting Life

I've been kinda off this week. Maybe because I spent too much downtime this weekend - I should have gone jogging or gone for a bike ride or something.

After this week's Monday class, I found myself too exhausted, hungry, and shaky to go to my now-usual Tuesday class. Instead, I made sure to eat well and sleep a lot to prep for tyhe Wednesday class. But last night, I arrived to class and found myself feeling weak and shaky and uncoordinated again. I slowed down, took several water breaks, and had that fleeting, "Oh screw it, I'm not going to finish this damn class tonight" thought.

We broke up into teams, and one of the warm-up exercises was running up and back down the back stairs of the building. It's only five or six flights, but I was seriously dying. I was the last person back to class; I had to slow down my descent because they're metal stairs, and I was really dizzy. I could easily imagine slipping up and cracking open my head.

Not sure what's up with this - if it means I'm working too hard or not hard enough. What it probably means is I need to up my calorie count. Weather permitting, I'll be going bike riding this weekend.

The good news is that I'm doing pretty well with my 30lb free weights in the morning, and I've been able to add another rep to each set this week. I've also discovered that my abs (though one cannot see them) are my speciality. Wednesday ends with partnered sit-ups while passing medicine balls from 4-12lbs in weight. This is tough for a lot of people, and not everybody gets through it without a break. But I've been doing abs every morning since I was fourteen. I think that at one point, in high school, I was doing 500 a day. I've settled into a comfortable morning routine of four different sets of 40, for some variety.

Hey. I gotta be good at *something*.