For he truly is the Kwisatz and so on

The planes aren't flying over London and the effect is remarkable. The birds are going crazy and the central city is eerily quiet. Normally at any given moment one can count at least three planes over London and hear them behind the clouds but without the canopy of noise the sky above the capital has reverted to uninterrupted blue and the "city" has been reduced to the quirky, layered village which so charms European tourists: all beer and Siouxsie T-shirts and answering back to authority figures. Also, nobody here knows how to barbecue. As I type this the locals are choking into distress level plumes of smoke.

On that transformational note, stories such as this make me happy:

Mr. Hoff... devoted himself to the development of the Groasis Waterboxx, which he says will grow food crops and trees even in the driest places on earth.

The Waterboxx is a round device made from polypropylene and about the size of car tire — 20 inches in diameter and 10 inches high. An opening at the center of the box provides a space for a plant or tree to germinate and grow.

The box is designed to capture both rainwater and condensation, which collects in the chamber underneath the cover, and prevents the water from evaporating. Mr. Hoff describes it as a “water battery.”

Mr. Hoff has recently concluded a three-year test of the Groasis Waterboxx in the Sahara desert in Morocco, an area that gets only a few inches of rainfall each year. Almost 90 percent of the trees planted using the Groasis Waterboxx survived after it was removed.

A test group of trees planted without the box, but watered once a week, produced the opposite result: only 10 percent survived.

The invention reminds me of the technology in Frank Herbert's Dune, the subject of an excellent article in the LA Times:

Herbert's story of young aristocrat Paul Atreides, along with maps, appendixes, glossary and epigrams ran to more than 500 pages. After almost two years, the book took off in 1967. The novel was a hinge between new and old, says Annalee Newitz, editor of science fiction blog io9.

" 'Dune' functions nicely as a transition between classic SF -- focused on space opera and astro-politics of the kind Isaac Asimov and other golden age authors wrote -- and the next generation," she says. "In the '60s, we saw a shift away from science fiction focused on space travel and space politics to anthropology. You aren't rushing between planets, you've landed on one and you talk about that one" -- including its biology and sociology.

Writers had imagined life on other planets and written of environmental catastrophe. But the scale of "Dune" was unprecedented, comparable, as Arthur C. Clarke said at the time, only to "The Lord of the Rings."

"The planet was something you could really feel," says Robinson, whose latest novel is "Galileo's Dream." "Herbert spent a lot of time outdoors -- you can see it in the writing, he's seen things you can only see if you've been there. It's physical and expansive."

The full article is available here.

Oh & btw

For critics of Shutter Island: are you mad? It's fantastic. From the first moment as the ship emerges from the white fog - white being the projected light of the movie screen - the director is signalling that the whole thing may or may not be a dream. (Titanic star DiCaprio, on the bow of a ship, saying he's scared of the water - is that not clear enough for you?) It's a formal exercise, like Scorsese's Cape Fear remake, or Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut. It's brilliant.

But then again, Mulholland Drive made no sense either, right? You ingrates.

I'm getting too old for this.

Also from space: this just in

From New Scientist:

There is something strange in the cosmic neighbourhood. An unknown object in the nearby galaxy M82 has started sending out radio waves, and the emission does not look like anything seen anywhere in the universe before.

"We don't know what it is," says co-discoverer Tom Muxlow of Jodrell Bank Centre for Astrophysics near Macclesfield, UK.

Uh-oh.

Random girls. In space

SHADO Moonbase Commander Lt. Gay Ellis (R) was my first pin up. I loved her when she was in black and white on a small TV on Friday nights, half an hour before the TVNZ Friday Night Horror if I recall. Only much later on reading the UFO annual did I discover that she and all the other Moonbase operatives' bobs were purple, which made her even more perfect. Much, much later I would learn that the actor who played her, Gabrielle Drake, was Nick Drake's sister. Purple wigged Moonbase girls and the guy who sang 'Pink Moon.' Just gets better and better.

One of the (too many) themes which The Church of John Coltrane concerned itself with were pin-ups, and the role of the fictional, random girl. In the novel Robert Marling discovers his father's obsession with a 1920s Shanghai lounge diva named Li Jin, while a nearby gallery hosts an exhibition by an artist named Xi Xi who paints the same woman over and over, a Hawaiian-themed pin up known only as Miss Manuki. Late in the novel Robert discusses the matter of pin ups and repeated images with a tagger named Ferguson:

'Graffiti in wartime.' [F said.]

'Ah.'

'I was a World War II enthusiast, originally. I loved planes. I would attend veterans' reunions to interview pilots and crews about their wartime missions. I also collected photographs of their aircraft. The nose art began as a way of identifying the planes. But after a while I became interested in the art itself. Why did the pilots paint their planes with these images of cartoon hookers and pin-ups?'

'For luck, I guess.'

'On one level, yes. They're good luck charms. The women are there to protect the pilots - like the bow carvings of sailing ships. They're talismans, which is why they're so fertile - they're literally busting with life. It's a Madonna-and-whore thing: secular saints. But they also serve as something else: a sort of dream image. The pilots painted this dream girl on the nose of the plane and then took it up into the sky, pushing her through the clouds. They literally make her fly.'

'I never thought of that,' I said. 'But you're right. It's art, in a way.'

'Not that they knew it,' Ferguson said. 'These men weren't artists. They copied the nose girls from the magazines of the day. Hollywood posters which had themselves been air brushed and touched up. The same design – the same girl – would be passed around different air fields, and different men would copy it again and again. So the features would become more stylised. Like Chinese Whispers.'

Coltrane is published in French but not yet in English. C'mon, iTunes: c'mon...

The change it had to come / We knew it all along

Michael A. Stackpole has written about the end of the publishing industry in the Huffington Post. It's a great article, and exciting because he's put a date on it. Afghanistan and oil will last forever and the bets are off for polar ice but publishing, Stackpole proposes, has 24 months left:

Michael Shatzkin, a book industry consultant who is widely read and respected, weighed in with an interesting article about how soon the publishing crash could come. His analysis is fairly solid and he sees a "serious disruption" in book distribution as early as November, 2012.

His thinking runs thusly: once ebook sales hit 20-25% of book sales, print run numbers will fall to a point where the current consignment system for sales will break down. Under the current system, most books can be returned for credit, so for every book sold, two are printed. Those "returned" books have the covers torn off, and the guts discarded, so they cannot be put out into the market again. Ebook sales will create smaller print runs, driving up the unit cost, forcing higher prices which, in turn, will kill sales. Game over.

I don't know enough about business to do the maths on this but I visit a lot of bookstores, and my experience in recent years has been that the major chains offer more and more choice of things people don't want.

When Borders folded in the UK I spent hours pushing through crowds in the Charing Cross branch and emerged with exactly one title. (A Murakami bio.) There was nothing else in the store I wanted that I didn't already have, and the majority (99 per cent) was manifest crap: ghostwritten titles by celebrities no-one outside of England would have heard of; franchise serials that had been churned out at two a year; generic machine-written doorstep-sized fantasy series of the World Quest variety; sporting titles thinner than a Sunday supplement; every other History masters' student's thesis packaged with a sexy / arch title (ditto for Science); bawdily captioned photo titles and joke compilations; I-Was-There travel bunf; and music titles on subjects that warranted little more than a Wikipedia page.

There were queues at the check out. Other people were buying more than me, but not a lot, and the stacks of books that remained on the shelves and in the bins - I wouldn't have put it out if it had caught fire.

Don't get me wrong - I like Borders. (Auckland's Queen Street store stocked more of my novels than Whitcoulls or Dymocks, but less than Unity Books.) My point is that before discussing the death of publishing one should ask for a specified diagnosis.

In the case of newspaper and magazine publishing, Gawker points out that Apple is now positioned as the new Gutenburg. (Their conclusion, in The Who's words: "Meet the new boss / Same as the old boss.")

When I talk about "publishing" I'm thinking of "literature" but a visit to any bookstore shows what a tiny slice of the pie that is. The publishing industry has become as vast and sprawling as the music industry -- industry being the key term. It's about shipping as much stuff as possible: books as lumber. Publishers want to make money out of printed paper in the same way that Coca-Cola wants to make money from sugared water. That's not going to happen, and it's ludicrous that it ever reached a point where that seemed possible.

Stackpole goes on to posit:

Publishers, because of their sloth in contracting electronic book rights, own ebook rights to maybe the last fifteen years of their output. Authors can easily produce ebook versions of novels and shorter work which publishers' don't own. Authors will make far more on those ebooks through direct sales than publishers are offering. There is no incentive for authors to sell those rights to traditional publishers which means, in the fairly short term, publishers run out of material to sell. Their backlists will vanish as authors sell the books themselves.

If you will, the publishers' gold mine will have played out.

This part of the prediction is more interesting. Literature has always been cheap. Writers pay themselves to create it, and a lot of the time it goes on to make a profit long after they have died. It's these profits which have created the status of different publishing houses as well as their business. It's the over capitalisation of that business which has created the problem. Says Stackpole:

The second point which Mr. Shatzkin doesn't seem to appreciate fully, in my opinion, is the sheer ease with which authors can themselves create and market ebooks.

It's true. In less than two years, I'll probably be creating and selling my own ebooks via this blog and my author site, or via some similar online mechanism. The notion is empowering but more than a little melancholy. Writing is already a lonely business: when the publishing model changes, it will become even lonelier.

FW: This is funny

Sarah Silverman has a memoir out.

“The writer’s room is just so animalistic,” says Silverman. “It’s like there’s this safe haven with only six of us being animals, and I get joy from it. It’s absolute, total freedom.”

I mention to Silverman that, anecdotally, I find her fans to be mostly male. (That she’s a vocal pothead might be one reason; she proudly points out to me that her book’s release date, April 20, is Stoner Day.) She tells me that she has zero interest in a conversation that might turn into a Woman in a Man’s World discussion. “A lot of women comics got all upset by Christopher Hitchens’s [Vanity Fair, January 2007] article about why women aren’t funny. Or like when Jerry Lewis says women aren’t funny,” she says. “If you are truly offended by an 80-year-old man saying you’re not funny, then you’re probably not funny.”

Full interview at New York Magazine. The pic of Silverman-as-Winehouse (a dream, really) is courtesy of the Annie Leibowitz cover shoot for Vanity Fair.

LA Times columnist Randee Dawn [real name, and no, I don't know if she knows Lisa Zunshine] writes of the writers room:

They say that explaining a joke kills what's funny about it. But every day, television's top comic writers have to do exactly that. No, not kill their jokes -- but plan them out, break them down, go over them dozens of times and then fit them all into 21 minutes and 35 seconds of air time. Give or take.

And when it comes to the mechanics of sitcom assembly, it's rarely a rote process. Each show has its own style, flair and tolerances. But if there's one thing virtually any sitcom just can't do without, it's the writers' room.

Full article at the LA times here.

If the sashaying of gentlemen gives you grievance now and then...