Laura Seabrook's Ramblings

One reason I went to Westfields today was to buy a copy of The Painter IX Wow! Book at Borders. I've had a working copy of Painter for a while now, and am keen to explore and use it. In the event, I didn't, and here's why.

Firstly, I have Painter X, which is one version on, and there is a version of the book for X out there somewhere. Secondly, the borders price was $A 75 and I considered that a bit excessive, considering that the uni library has a copy anyway. In fact, as I'll be doing my Masters for 4 years, I'll have plenty of opportunity to bottow that if I need to.

Two things that have been frustrating me have been attempts to use my graphics tablet (which might be solved by getting a different table) and the high learning curve of Painter. The book mentioned above looked really instructive on the ins and outs of Painter. I've decided to use painter to scan and colour my next few web comic pages, so we'll see how that goes. The uni library had a copy of The Photoshop and Painter Artist Tablet Book: Creative Techniques in Digital Painting (golly, these long titles seem like they were written by pamphleteers in the 17th century or something) and borders also had it too, but $73 is a bit much to pay for asuch a thin book.

Anyway, what I actually bought was a book on life in ancient Rome, which only cost $A 25, and felt much happier doing so. The othe $50 can be spent on other things like maybe digital tuners or (gasp) bought software.

Also in the uni library that I borrowed today were Painter IX Creativity: Digital Artists Handbook and Character Design for Graphic Novels. The first looks very interesting, though I suspect I ought to read the "Wow" book first. The second I thought was an Ilex book, as it has a lot of artwork I've seen in Ilex books about web comics and graphic novels in it. Since I'm about to start work on twographic novels, I thought this'd be worth reading.

And the moral of the (non) story is - use your local libraries before spending money - it can be cheaper that way!

Bought a copy of Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber Of Fleet Street (the original novel) yesterday. It's an edited reprint of the original penny dreadful serial from 1846-7 and is edited by Robert L. Mack.

I was reading the introduction to this while waiting for Kevin and Michelle last night. This should be interesting reading, because although many of the characters have similar names, I know that they are radically different from the ones shown in the most recent film.

Now I wonder where I can get a copy of Varney the Vampire?

I was watching an episode of NORTHERN EXPOSURE where Holling Vincoeur and Phil Capra started quoting poetry. It sounded vaguely familiar and then they gave it a source - Robert W. Service. I still couldn't place the name and looked it up on the Wikipedia. A poet of the Yukon and the West. And what did I find, but Project Gutenberg has seven of his books there.

( The Cremation of Dan McGee )

Shades of Logger Lover which I used to hear at folk clubs - I love it!

I used to love reading another (Canadian) author from the same period as well - Stephen Leacock. He was mostly a satirist and humorist (and reminds me greatly of O'Henry) and I used to listen to a number of his stories being read on radio national. And guess what, Gutenberg have a collection of Leacock's books online as well!

I've been reading a couple of interesting library books: The Atlas of Atlantis and other lost civilizations, and Our Gods wear Spandex.

Atlantis

The first of these deals with how the idea of Atlantis has changed, every since Plato wrote a parable based on the idea. Like vampires, the idea of Atlantis has come represent different things for different people. The book is very much a coffee table book, but no less entertaining and instructive for that. It also details the lives of major contributors to the myth, such as Ignatius Donnelly, Madame Blavatsky, Edgar Cayce and others. It lists potential candidates for a historical Atlantis (and believe me, people have come up with ones on every continent!) and similar concepts like Mu, and Lemuria.

I found the book very informative and entertaining. As a Fortean I love to read about the strange things that people experience and/or believe. Atlantis (whether there was a historical place the myth was based on or not) is a wellspring for both of these.

Superhero Gods

The second book, which traces a line of inspiration and storytelling from ancient gods to modern super heroes, surprisingly covers very similar ground. The same names, like Blavatsky, Bulwer-Lytton and so on, kept on being mentioned in this book too. What isn't immediately obvious, is just how much popular culture (the New Age and super hero comics included) is based on their writings.

An awful lot of that was very racist, proclaiming over-classes that ought to rule purely because they were "better". Read any old comic from the so-called "Golden Age" and you'll see what I mean. The main problem with the book is that it's too pedantically written. If you already know half of this stuff (which it appears that I do) it's a little tedious re-reading it. Was almost everybody who wrote for comics into the occult?

The book is also illustrated by J.M Lisner, whose work I much admire. I can't help feeling though that in this case his illustrations are more than a little forced.

Mind you, none of this is going to stop me reading the next library book of this ilk - Hollow Earth: The Long and Curious History of Imagining Strange Lands, Fantastical Creatures, Advanced Civilizations, and Marvellous Machines Below the Earth's Surface!  

I've just finished reading Fatal Revenant by Stephen Donaldson. This is the second book (in a series of four) in the final Thomas Covenant series.

When I first saw a copy of this at the City Library in the display area, I immediately requested a copy of it. I put down the book I was then reading - The Venus Throw by Stephen Saylor - and immediately read it from start to finish. Funnily enough I borrowed the other book again from Wallsend Library again and it still has my bus ticket bookmark in place!

Any way, I had to read it. It's been one reason I've been putting off my proposal (not the biggest reason, but one anyway). The books in these series are "Tolkienesque fantasy", but they have also always dealt with issues of doubt, hope and despair. That combination gets me in all the time.

Even so, it was a hard slog. Donaldson's text is dense. I would read it on the bus, I would read it out the back under the trees on the sofa with Pegasus lying next to me. And it took just over a month. I know I have a "Victorian" (period, not State) reading rate, but it was still slow moving. For example, imagine someone else writing:

The cat strolled into the lounge room and curled up on the mat. The dog, upon hearing the cat, woke up and looked at it, then let out a small bark. The owl which had been on a perch in that room, flew out the window.

The "Donaldson equivalent" might be:

The cat thought about all that had led it to this place and moment in time. Get out of the kitchen her owner had screamed, I'm not feeding you until dinner time! She considered all that this might have meant and doubts concerning the rightness of her action impeded upon her consciousness. Using her slightly impaired prescience granted to her by right of wearing the flea collar, she ascertained a clean mat within a large room nearby.

Memories of conversations held between Her Owners and The Child seemed to indicate that this room was called, in the ancient tongue of the two legs, the Lounge Room. This implied connotations of lounging, of sleep and rejuvenation long held essential to the well being of The House. Cautiously entering this space she spied both the mat and also a being whose ambivalent pussience seemed to belie the inherent goodness of the situation. But, she was too hungry and too tired to face the prospect for withdrawing and finding some other source of rest and nourishment.

Reaching the intricately interwoven raft of natural fibre, the cat saw an intriguing interplay between colour and shape within the mat. Her health-sense immediately responded to the source of warmth near it, the so-called "Fire", and bereft of energy she fell, curling up in a protective ball.

To one side, the being that the cat had spied broke its period of inactivity and raised what appeared to be its cavernous head. the cat was familiar with this being from previous occasions and was conflicted about the possible motivations it might have towards her. The being, called "Rover" in two leg parlance, opened its maw wide, displaying sharp white teeth that might otherwise have alarmed the cat, had she not known that the being was also ancient to this world, and had worn down its fangs by chewing on hard white oblong objects.  From within the being came a cacophonous sound that hurt her ears to behold.

Anyone else perhaps would have fled before such a visage, but the Cat had changed since it had come to this place, changed forever by The House into something new and different from what she had once been. Her gut feeling told her that the noise was a sign of friendship, and she simply closed her eyes.

Far above another pair of eyes viewed all that had transpired below. Had the cat seen the presence that loomed above she might have chosen another course of action, one other than lying upon the mat. With movements that echoed countless generations of natural selection, with a look that, had the cat seen, shone like a beacon of malevolence, the avian took flight and without further delay exited "The Lounge Room" via an opening made possible by an altered state of rectangular constructs. At times these constructs were arrayed in a variety of configurations, but today they acquiesced to the exiting of the room by the Owl.

As the cat finally drifted off to sleep, she vainly tried to comprehend the meaning of --until dinner time!

As infected by klwalton's post. These are the top 106 books most often marked as "unread" by LibraryThing's users. Bold what you have read, italicize what you started but couldn't finish, and strike through what you couldn't stand.:

( 106 books hide behind this cut )

I've just finished reading The Pelagius Book by Paul Morgan, which is a collection of reminiscences about the title character by his secretary, Celestius. Historically Pelagius "taught that the human will, tempered in good deeds and rigorous asceticism, was sufficient to live a sinless life. He told his followers that right action on the part of human beings was all that was necessary for salvation" (see Pelagianism). Sounds vaguely like Buddhism to me.

In the book everything is filtered through Celestius's memory, as he writes as an old man in hiding in Alexandria. The book is quite short, but as a result the writing seems more elegant than detailed. Certainly, there is a sense impending doom and downfall that is usually associated with this period, with all the hysteria and madness that entailed (who killed the Roman Empire? the "Romans" did!).

It was an enjoyable read, and suggested some possibilities for my Tales of the Galli strip (which I still haven't the next page for - tomorrow for sure).

Infected from leduck...

1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open the book to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of the next 3 sentences on your blog along with these instructions.
5. No digging for that "cool" or "intellectual" book in your closet! Just pick up whatever is closest.

OK, here goes...

"For the full potential of the comic tradition to be released into serious painting, it was necessary for an artist to have a natural gift for funny drawing, to have a deep emotional dissatisfaction with the accepted decorum, and finally to find some new and unexpected catalyst that could unlock the repressed energies of satiric imagery in a way that would allow them to enter, and even annex, high art.

This was achieved in about eighteen months in the middle of the first decade of this century by Pablo Picasso. the transformation in Picasso's art from 1905 to 1907 is still perhaps the most astonishing transformation in art history, and is often been described and diagnosed, usually in terms of impact of new influences or as the logical working out of possibilities implicit in his earlier paintings"
High and Low / Kirk Varnedde & Adam Gopnik. - New York, 1991

...I swear I didn't set that it - it was the nearest book to me when I typed this! Mind you, it's no wonder I've been merely browsing through this book, which doubled up as a catalogue for an exhibition in the U.S.A. some years ago.

I just heard that Jim Baen (SF editor) died on the 28th. Seems there's an eulogy by David Drake, and the Baen Free Library, of free online books(!)

Never met the man of course, but it's quite likely I've read some of the books he edited or published.

I had a brief look at the online library, but didn't recognise too many titles.