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Yes, The Penultimate Peril is out (will be out, depending on where you are and when you read this entry), Lemony Snicket has gone public (to the penultimate dismay of friends and enemies alike), and the first chapter, for those who (like me) do not yet have the book, but wish to distress themselves unnecessarily (as if there weren’t enough distress in the world already), can be read here.

and watch out for Titus Groan, finally coming out locally at some point in the near future at Fully Booked, in the latest Vintage editions. for some reason, they still insist on putting Gormenghast on the shelves first, and when i was there, Titus Groan was both on and off their available-in-store book database, and one of their people said the books were there, but were still trapped in boxes. i left my number and hope to hear from them soon.

so they now have 2 different Vintage eds of Gormenghast, and 1 (different) edition each of Titus Groan and Titus Alone. utterly frustrating for someone trying to build a matching set for a nascent library.

like Jerry Fletcher, the Mel Gibson character from Conspiracy Theory, i find myself compulsively looking for copies and (in particular) new eds of Mervyn Peake’s books at whatever bookstore i find myself in, and purchasing a copy each time i find a new ed. fortunately (for purposes of personal expense, at least, but not, imho, for the reading public; and certainly not if Big Brother really did keep tabs on the bookstore purchasing habits of unwary citizens and were on the lookout for Mervyn Peake fanatics), Mervyn Peake books are rarer than J.D.Salinger books.

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Lord of War is a thoughful, compelling, and utterly dark view of the world. though as unrelated as bananas and steak (cooked very rare, still dripping blood), it makes a wonderful contrast to the ideas about the world put forth in Anansi Boys.

not everybody will find either one to their liking, but each one deserves its audience.

i find it interesting (though, when you really think about it, it shouldn’t be at all surprising) that heavier material (the thematic content of Lord vs. those of Anansi) tends to travel through lighter media (movies vs. books).

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i was contemplating ways to tell you’ve had a bad day while in the bath (that is, i was contemplating the subject while i was in the bath, and not thinking of turning into a prune by spending bad days in the bath), and i thought of a really good one: count the number of people you met that day whom you wanted to have killed. and think of how painfully you want each person to die.

by that standard, you’d tend to think, given this easy criteria, the more people you meet that you want dead, and the more slowly and painfully you want them to die, the worse your day would have been.

that’s probably true for most days, but, i realized, the worst days are really when you find yourself wanting only one person dead, and dead as quickly and as painlessly as possible.

last night, i tumbled into a wave of exhaustion, hunger, and the initial assault of an indeterminate viral infection. the whole city turned into a flurry of white noise.

if this has never happened to you before, imagine putting your face up against the screen of a TV tuned to a dead channel, the volume turned all the way up. jam the TV set onto your head, making sure your face is planted squarely through the middle of the screen, turn yourself about a few times as quickly as you can, and then walk home through a crowded sidewalk where people sleep on the street and unhelpful vehicles block the way at odd angles.

yes, apparently, even that is survivable.

the sky can fall tomorrow, and we’d none of us be the wiser. and even if it did, someone, somewhere, somehow, will survive.

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as pathetic as this will sound, i must give credit where credit is due. at a single phonecall, with no questions asked, my dear old mum swoops by and saves the day, faster than you can say "ohmygodwe’reallgoingtodieeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee".

hurrah for mums.

unfortunately, that meant not taking the whole day off and going back to work as soon as lunch was over.

sigh. sometimes, feeling bad is a good thing.

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still, there’s an upside to being nursed back to relative health so quickly (aside from the feeling better, i mean): tonight, i have the supreme satisfaction of having done something nice for someone very special to me, wading through a soup of malaise and headachey throbbing made just about palatable by a round-the-clock dosage of paracetamol, and, as a result, making her very happy. sometimes, that sort of thing is the only thing left in my life that makes any sort of sense to me, as un-sensible and impractical a thing it may seem from the outside.

it was by no means an especially imaginative thing for me to do, but i do me best.

she doesn’t celebrate her birthday. but i do.

every chance i get.

i find it odd that friendster now allows you to find out just who has been taking a gander at your profile. and then lets you set up your own account so that no one will ever know you’ve been lurking.

well, no, not really odd. just a little funny. in a not really funny way.

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Lemony Snicket is still missing, but his official representative in "all matters literary, legal, and social", Daniel Handler, has allowed himself to be tied down to a chair (one must surmise) and be asked questions at. just an fyi, in case you want to know.

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certain events of the previous night, which i choose to keep in obscurity here, but will be known to a select few who may be reading this blog, and probably putting a ridiculous smile on their faces, has had me thinking on the nature of moral ascendancy. which now appears to be on everybody’s current buzzword list. and which put this list of challenged books to mind.

calling these books "challenged" makes them sound as though someone had busted their kneecaps with a baseball bat, or a 12-gauge-shotgun-thing of some sort, and have had to go through several six-month-odd recovery programs which, while allowing them relative freedom, keeps them tied to appointments at least once a week with people in white coats and made-up smiles, which doesn’t really seem like the case at all.

(having just re-read what i wrote, it doesn’t seem exactly fair to the people in white coats, and so i post this article, and this one, neither of which go anywhere in explaining anything i’ve put-up here thus far, but will, i hope, add some backbone and character to an otherwise nonsensical blog.)

i am oddly discomfited by the fact that none of the books i’ve read and loved that come from the last 15 years are on the list. have i been subtly but effectively manipulated by the invisible, diabolical Hands of the Unspoken And Unspeakable Powers That Be? am i doomed to be an Instrument of Intellectual Tyranny, tied to some unknown fate which will reveal itself, in time, to be the downfall of Literary Justice, Liberty and Freedom? am i being shaped to become the Black-Clad Wolf of the Unimaginative?

riiiiiiiight.

it’s another dark and rainy-and-somewhat-thundery-but-not-quite-stormy-and-not-even-really-raining-anymore-now night here in the City.

i think i’ll go have a chat with her now.

oh joy. a couple days ago, despite wanting to "savor" the dish, i found myself swallowing Anansi Boys in one Sunday afternoon, and, having just returned from the world of Mr Nancy and Fat Charlie and Spider and Rosie and Daisy and Mrs Noah and Mr Grahame Coates and all the rest of them, i have to say it was well worth the trip.

i stand by my "It Isn’t A Laugh Out Loud Book" statement, the way a Douglas Adams or a Terry Pratchett book may be, although there were some places, come to think of it, where i did find myself giving a snort and a "Hah!", but it is a funny book, though not in those ways, but in a decidedly Neil Gaimany way.

way to go Neil!

at some points, i kept going back to July when Mr Gaiman kept saying things like "I couldn’t have gone and written a police procedural, just because that’s what sells at the moment…" or something like that, and that made me smile, because if you were there and you heard him say it, and you read the book, then you just know he was sharing a private joke with you right there.

no idea what i mean? you’ll have to go read the book, then.

now, should i or shouldn’t i pick up Mirrormask?

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oh joy again. while browsing for buried treasure at the place on the map marked "X" (aka, the Booksale at the mall), i managed to find myself a sketchbook by Wogtail and Bumcomb, with all that fancy proper-pH paper with the nice texture, a hard leather binding, and in plain, unsullied black (after peeling off the sticker price tag and the sticker label saying "Wargtil and Bubcock Sketchpad, so x so inches or centimeters or cubits, something or other proper-pH paper, all that and then some").

almost mint, too, except for a couple dents in the leather on the front (or back, though the sticker thingy was on that, so i think it’s the front), and the marking pen line down one of the short edges.

i was actually looking for something with lines (the letters and words will probably end-up wriggling and writhing all over the place at the agony of me having put them together into the unsightly things i call "writing"), but the blank sheets, while twice as intimidating as the kind with lines, are better for making the necessary doodles that go with each story.

now if only i can find the nerve, and the story, to go in there.

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oh some more joy. i’ve just fulfilled part of the deal i made with myself with the last post: having found myself a copy of The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, i sat myself down in front of my laptop and stood there through the whole thing, stopping only to change discs. it’s probably the nth time i’ve seen it, the last time when i was, oh, yay high, which was not long after its release, and yet i still found myself loving every minute of it. the movie has, in every way, prevailed against the loathsome watersprite.

for those of you who’ve never heard of it, or have and would like to remember (for good or bad), mozy on over to The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (1989). or try imdb. that place is always good for a few laughs.

i don’t quite agree with everything Mr Scheib has to say about the film, and at times i’m not so sure he got the point of the picture, or whether he actually liked it or not, but was paid a good deal of money to Say Good Things About It. But all in all, it’s a smart analysis of what you’ll find in the film, and there aren’t any major spoilers to be had. at least not obvious ones.

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when you write a blog (or anyway, when i write a blog), i find  you either end-up writing all the happy things that happen to you, or all the shitty things you want to bitch about. so far, i’ve noticed, this isn’t quite the bitching kind of blog.

and really, if you think about it, that makes all this darker than it seems. it’s all undercurrents.

after all, i could list down all the people i ran into today whom i would really like to murder with my bare hands, but that would be giving it all away wouldn’t it?

Good Omens has been "in the works" for quite somet time now. but production has apparently hit a very big snag. a 15million USD snag. check out Yahoo! Groups : discworldmonthly Messages : Message 101 of 101:

Do you happen to have a spare 15 million USD? It appears that American investors won’t raise that amount to make Good Omens. Terry Gilliam has been offered 45 million USD from the international community but it appears that American investors don’t have the confidence to back Gilliam due to his shaky track record. For all his brilliance some of Gilliam’s films never got finished or went horrendously over budget - Quixote and Baron Munchausen for example. Gilliam wants to cast Johnny Depp to play Crowley and Robin Williams to play Aziraphale.

incidentally, i happen to like Baron Munchausen. i’ve seen the vcd around, though a fear of watersprite syndrome has kept me from getting myself a copy. meanwhile, while critics rave over Brazil, i confess i thought it a bit over-rated. might be about time i saw both movies again. back when i saw Munchausen, that sort of weirdness was rarely seen in films (not that it’s all over the place now), and was the kind of weirdness i actually liked, and, despite the slow bits, the movie always managed to fill me with the kind of wonder only kids are legendary for (i was a kid then, too, after all), no matter how many times i got to see it (it probably didn’t hurt that a low-grade thrum of hormones had started actively pumping through my body, and Uma Thurman was quite a sight to see in her Venus pose). when i picked up a copy of Brazil, on the other hand, i think maybe my expectations were running a little too high.

i think the Johnny Depp/Robin Williams tandem ought to be fun to watch, though it’s been a while since we’ve seen Johnny Depp as "cool" (21 Jumpstreet is the last i remember of it, and that’s showing a bit of age, innit?). lately, he’s just been "weird", which, while being "cool" to some ways of thinking, isn’t quite the same thing.

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i almost forgot to mention (actually did forget, just that blogs have this nice "edit posts" function which lets you cover-up errors and slip-ups before other people get a chance to see them, thank god), Mirrormask has just opened in the United States. rather than post links to reviews, here’s an interview of Neil and Dave at the Nerve.com Screening Room.

as critical reviews seem to be mixed, there’s an awful chance Mirrormask won’t be showing in theaters locally, but may go straight to video (though the superpowers of The Amazing Neil And The British Council may yet have their day, and i do recall them saying as much last July). either way, we won’t be seeing it around here any time soon, and that makes me more than a little green. Dammit.

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one last thing. i’ve lost touch with the ongoing investigations at The N A M E L E S S Novel. not-much to my surprise, having just now checked-in, Mr Snicket is still missing, the novel is still nameless, and the editor is still in a state of impending catalepsy, despite the looming release date of October the 30th.

while i’ve lost my taste for the investigation (i’ve missed too much, and i really don’t feel like doing the necessary catch-up work), the search must go on, Mr Snicket must be found, the novel must be named, and the editor has got to, well, finish up whatever editing he’s got left to do and not go into seizures over the missing title, so i’m passing the word on to whoever has the stomach for it.

there are rewards, promised, after all.

me, i think i’ll just wait for the book to arrive, nameless or otherwise.

good night.