“August is the month of last chances.” F. Nietzsche
I am an enormous fan of Israeli sci-fi writer Lavie Tidhar, if you haven’t read his work, it’s worth checking-out. So, I was intrigued to discover that he has teamed-up with puzzle writer Jake Olefsky to create an interactive sci-fi puzzle story website. The concept is simple, you read a chapter of a story on the site and then try to solve a puzzle to unlock the next chapter. The non-linear story can lead down different paths to reach the conclusion. In fact, there are 30 puzzles to solve for 20 chapters. I have posted the first chapter below. If you are interested, continue the story at Puzzle Tales.
Down and down, I felt myself sinking.
The outside faded: New Byblos and the skylarks singing in the branches of the olive trees. A soft, warm breeze. The smell of lavender and thyme.
New Byblos in the springtime: outside the window I could see the mountains that surrounded this hidden valley lush with vegetation, could see rock hyraxes and dorcas gazelles as they clambered along the slopes.
Out here the sun shone down as it had since before the first microbes lived and died upon this Earth.
I would miss the sun, I knew, once I was in. I always did.
Ifrim’s calm voice at the controls of the dive rig: ‘Ready to go, Mai?’
Hearing his voice always made me happy.
‘Ready,’ I said.
‘Breach initiated in three, two…’
Then I stopped hearing it as the translation began. The world I knew vanished from sight and I fell. Thoughts converted into electric impulses, travelling down a narrow band into the secure vault.
. . . It was a bad one.
I knew it as soon as I dropped in.
Flickering lights, an insubstantial room rendered in two dimensions. Something inhuman was gibbering in the corner, hidden in the dark. I couldn’t understand what it said.
The lines of the walls and floor met disconcertingly to form a door.
‘Ifrim, can you hear me?’
Crackly static on the line, as though he were coming from somewhere unimaginably distant.
‘How is it down there?’
‘It’s still operational,’ I said. ‘But I don’t know that there’s anything salvageable.’
‘Do you want to pull out?’
I stared at the door. Four white lines in a black wall. Stared at my hands. Realised I was two dimensional too, a stick figure with crude lines for fingers.
‘Mai?’
‘No,’ I said.
I went to the door. The thing in the shadows gibbered mindlessly. ‘Checksum error, four oh four, four oh four!’
‘How big is the Bostrom Field?’ I said.
‘7.5 to 10.8 variable,’ Ifrim said. ‘About the size of what a large house would have been back when the vault was first made.’
‘Well, great. Anything sentient?’
‘You tell me.’
I shrugged and pushed the door.
In the last decades of the time of the Great Excess it was said many miracles had become possible. And as the seas rose and the storms built in savagery, the lords of the last era sought shelter in specially-constructed time vaults, shielding their minds from the coming onslaught of the planet’s rage.
There were thousands of them just here in New Byblos. Here, in this lost valley of kings, the caves and shelters housed an uncounted number of old, forgotten pocket worlds. Many had been lost to time and the climate, their technological underpinning destroyed despite their designers’ best intents. Some had the internal capacity of a small city, with thousands of thinking minds still inside. Others, like this one, were much smaller.
I stepped out into a maze of shiny white dots. Something whistled through the air at me. I looked up just in time to see a crudely rendered barrel coming at me fast.
I ducked and it smashed into tiny glowing pieces against the wall behind me and vanished.
For a moment, I thought I saw a monkey up there.
I took a deep breath of cold, stale air and stepped into the maze. I kept a wary eye for any more attacks as I went through it. I wanted to try and find the centre.
It was a weird vault, I thought.
Ghostly shapes came at me from three different sides. They wailed in waka-waka. I dodged through an opening into an inner corridor. Two of the ghoulies followed me in. I tried to lose them by using the right-hand rule but one kept after me. I spotted another break in the wall and dashed through it.
The ghoulie came after me and another materialised on the other side.
I was trapped.
Now that it’s officially August, I was checking to see when the National Book Festival was happening in Washington D.C. and I found the wonderful poster for this year’s event. If you can make it to DC, it’s always worth braving the Capital summer miasma for the festival.
Yarran Jenkins owns a successful, traditional antiquarian bookshop in Brisbane, Australia called The Book Merchant Jenkins, but he also operates a shop called the Bardon 24-hour Book Shed. For the past five years, Jenkins has stocked his “pay-what-you-want-or-can” bargain book barn with inexpensive secondhand titles. Located in the suburb of Bardon, the Logical Unsanity Books and Miscellaneous Phantasmagoria is a sometimes leaky, but always welcoming, hideaway for insomniacs, a sanctuary for bibliophiles, and an outlet for anyone searching for a reasonably priced read whatever their budget. Jenkins acknowledges that some customers don’t actually pay for the books that they choose, but notes that more people donate their secondhand books to the shed than pilfer.
I’m in the midst of planning a road trip around New Zealand for later this year and was exploring Lord of the Rings and Hobbit related film sites. In the process, I stumbled upon these wonderful cross section drawings of Bag End—the ancestral home of Frodo and Bilbo Baggins—created by Adam Middleton who is a senior concept artist at Weta Workshop studio in Wellington. If you are a Tolkien fan like me, you will want to check-out Middleton’s page at Artstation for more related work.
The City Within by Toronto-based artist Natalie Draz is a brilliant artists’ book and city map simultaneously. This kinetic piece is housed in a plain pine box with what first appears to be an irregularly shaped booklet , but expands into a freestanding rib-cage structure juxtaposing letterpress and intaglio prints. Draz’s city in a box is based on elements of downtown Montreal. The video below shows the artist interacting with one of the limited edition books:
Cities and maps are common inspirations in Natalie Draz’s work, as she “illustrates and papercuts cities that exist between reality and her own perspectives”. Check her website for more of her terrific work and to find out how to own some for yourself.
From French Surrealist writer and artist Gisèsle Prassinos’s early collection La Sauterelle arthritique (The Arthritic Grasshopper).
Anyone who has ever been stuck in middle seat hell will applaud the S1 (AKA the “Slip-Slide Seat”) clever redesign of airline middle seats from Colorado’s Molon Labe Designs. It sits a little back from the seats to either side, is slightly wider, and has slightly lower arm-rests—and in some configurations, it allows the aisle seat to be slid over it, temporarily widening the aisles and speeding boarding and unloading.
The “Slip-Slide Seat” has just had limited approval from the FAA and an unidentified airline in the U.S. will be trialing it on 50 planes by the end of 2020. The seats are heavier than regular seats and don’t recline, and are intended for short-haul flying. The company is working on other models for long-haul flights.
Sicilian author Andrea Camilleri, who died last week at age 93, is probably best known as the author of 27 novels and multiple short story collections starring police officer Inspector Salvo Montalbano, many of which take place in the fictional town of Vigata, Sicily. Camilleri based Vigata on his home town of Porto Empedocle, which honored the popularity of the Montalbano series by officially changing its name to Porto Empedocle Vigata between 2003 and 2009. Although he was a successful screenwriter, Camilleri didn’t write his first novel until he was 53 years old. His first two books were unsuccessful, but his third, The Hunting Season, became a bestseller. His fourth novel, The Shape of Water, was the first story with Inspector Salvo Montalbano.
I first discovered the wonderful world of Vigata and Inspector Montalbano by accident about 20 years ago, when I stumbled across a secondhand paperback copy of The Shape of Water . I was hooked from the first chapter and have every book in the series. Camilleri’s Monttalbano series always offered a quick fun read, but with a social conscience and a message.
Thirteen years ago, Camilleri wrote a final Montalbano novel in which the sometimes irascible detective is irretrievably killed off, to avoid the fate of Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes. The name Montalbano is a tribute to Spanish author Manuel Vázquez Montalbán (1939-2003), whose Detective Carvalho was also a gastronome and used to highlight local culture and issues.
If you haven’t yet discovered the joy of an afternoon with Inspector Montalbano and the crew from Vigata’s police station, a great place to start is with the Penguin paperback Death in Sicily, which offers the first three novels in the series.
Thirteen simple rules for writing from the tragic genius Walter Benjamin.
I. Anyone intending to embark on a major work should be lenient with themselves and, having completed a stint, deny themselves nothing that will not prejudice the next.
II. Talk about what you have written, by all means, but do not read from it while the work is in progress. Every gratification procured in this way will slacken your tempo. If this régime is followed, the growing desire to communicate will become in the end a motor for completion.
III. In your working conditions avoid everyday mediocrity. Semi-relaxation, to a background of insipid sounds, is degrading. On the other hand, accompaniment by an etude or a cacophony of voices can become as significant for work as the perceptible silence of the night. If the latter sharpens the inner ear, the former acts as a touchstone for a diction ample enough to bury even the most wayward sounds.
IV. Avoid haphazard writing materials. A pedantic adherence to certain papers, pens, inks is beneficial. No luxury, but an abundance of these utensils is indispensable.
V. Let no thought pass incognito, and keep your notebook as strictly as the authorities keep their register of aliens.
VI. Keep your pen aloof from inspiration, which it will then attract with magnetic power. The more circumspectly you delay writing down an idea, the more maturely developed it will be on surrendering itself. Speech conquers thought, but writing commands it.
VII. Never stop writing because you have run out of ideas. Literary honour requires that one break off only at an appointed moment (a mealtime, a meeting) or at the end of the work.
VIII. Fill the lacunae of inspiration by tidily copying out what is already written. Intuition will awaken in the process. Nulla dies sine linea [“no day without a line” (Apelles ex Pliny)] — but there may well be weeks.
X. Consider no work perfect over which you have not once sat from evening to broad daylight.
XI. Do not write the conclusion of a work in your familiar study. You would not find the necessary courage there.
XII. Stages of composition: idea — style — writing. The value of the fair copy is that in producing it you confine attention to calligraphy. The idea kills inspiration, style fetters the idea, writing pays off style.
XIII. The work is the death mask of its conception.
Travel Between The Pages 