Here's my response to last week's Meta Exercise. Since Julio Cortázar used a narrative piece of art, a novel, to construct his excellent short short. I thought I'd give myself a challenge and try to do the same thing with a less experiential sort of art, in this case, sculpture. Points to anyone who can identify the sculptor.
Last week I neglected the blog due to a family emergency, but this week I'm back with a short-short exercise based on Julio Cortázar's "A Continuity of Parks," found on p. 137 of the book Flash Fiction, edited by James Thomas, Denise Thomas, and Tom Hazuka.
Imagine a bar of soap lying by the side of your sink. It's a flat, creamy beige block no bigger than a deck of cards, with edges that aren't quite plumb, smoothed by hand and water. You made it from skin-scarring lye and olive oil in the pot you use to make soup, carefully weighing the ingredients on a postal scale, and whirring them together with a hand blender, watching carefully for the signs of miraculous alchemy, the puddingy texture, the marks on the surface that stay turgid for a moment before vanishing. You poured the soap into a shoebox mold, and cured it in the open air for a month, to remove its green bite.
Glad to see this piece from the Associated Press pointing out that North America's top selling Bible, the New International Version will be updated to reflect changes in Biblical scholarship, including changes to some gender terms. The revision is scheduled to be published in 2011.
For those of you who don't know, a short short, also called flash fiction or micro-fiction is a short story of as few as 200 words or as many as 2,000. It's bite-sized fiction or nonfiction. Fringe publishes them, as do many journals, but Quick Fiction is famous for publishing excellent flash fiction of 500 words or less exclusively.
It's no secret that people all over the country like to dress up in medieval gear and spend a weekend whacking things in the woods. But here's the proof. An esteemed colleague and former collaborator over at the Boulder Daily Camera sent me this excellent, respectful introduction to LARPing by Aimee Heckel.
Gamers have officially entered America's zeitgeist. World of Warcraft had more than 11.5 million subcribers -- the same number as the total population of Cuba -- at the end of last year.
It's old news that Ted Raimi of Superman and more importantly, Xena: Warrior Princess fame is set to direct a WoW movie. But more and more celebrities are coming out of the closet as hardcore gamer geeks.
This Daily Beast gallery (full disclosure: I contribute to the Beast's Cheat Sheet) of famous gamers has a few surprise appearances -- Dave Chappelle, Robin Williams, Curt Schilling -- as well as well-known gamers such as Vin Diesel and Elijah Wood.
The inestimable Felicia Day, star of such fan-boy bait as The Guild and Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog, recently put out a new music video "Do You Want to Date My Avatar?" And the answer to that question is, yes, Felicia Day, I do want to date your avatar.
If zombies roamed the earth, humanity's only hope would be to "hit them hard and hit them often," according to a team of Canadian mathematicians. "It's imperative that zombies are dealt with quickly or else...we are all in a great deal of trouble."
Consider the case of Dwight Whorley. This Virginia man authored an icky pornographic story that included pedophilia, then emailed his fantasy to likeminded internet friends, Wired reports. Whorley was convicted for possessing obscene Japanese manga and for possession of a filthy piece of print -- his pedophiliac fantasy.