The Green Spine
So the trade paperback edition of Blindsight showed up in my mailbox yesterday. Not bad, I guess. You've seen it before: they truncated the teaser text on the back, but that left room for more blurbage (which, I'm pleased to note, was actually about Blindsight this time around). I'm a bit doubtful about the presence of that virtually incomprehensible quote from John Clute inside the front cover (seriously, guys, what is "a great, granulated, anfractuous rat king of shrikes", and would you pay good money to have it goose your midbrain?), but okay. No big surprises on the front cover: catchy title font, way better than on the hardcover, and they lost that lurid red border, but — oh wait a minute, what's this on the spine....?Ah. Lurid green border this time. Perhaps it is meant as a symbol of growth and rebirth, a signal that the bloody days of the revolution are past and now it is time to rebuild. Or something. Wish I knew what it was with these guys and borders. But at least they kept it off the front panel.
Anyway, here's some good news about the paperback, especially for those who read Blindsight for free online and now want a hard copy for their very own, but don't want to spit on the very soul of the Creative Commons by actually paying for it. Patrick St-Denis, of Pat's Fantasy Hotlist — the guy who brought you the infamous "Angry Man Interview" — is giving away three copies of the paperback, just as he did with the hardcover when it came out. Go over there, check it out, give him your hits.
Oh, and according to Leonard Nimoy on The Colbert Report last night, poor body-images in today's teen girls are causing them to opt for oral sex over the intercoursal kind, because blow jobs don't require them to be seen naked. I'm not really sure what that has to do with anything, but I thought I should pass it along.
Labels: writing news
posted by Peter Watts at
9:54 AM
7 Comments:
Oh, and according to Leonard Nimoy on The Colbert Report last night, poor body-images in today's teen girls are causing them to opt for oral sex over the intercoursal kind, because blow jobs don't require them to be seen naked. I'm not really sure what that has to do with anything, but I thought I should pass it along.
The stuff actually on-topic in this post, i.e. everything to do with Blindsight, was interesting but not enough to make me want to comment. The passage quoted above, however, makes me want to say many things, but I cannot yet sort them out into complete sentences. So I'll just throw up a list of nouns:
1. Leonard Nemoy
2. Naked Teenage Girls
3. Blow jobs
And a serious of gibberish symbols (thusly):
E&#%&**#@$%F&*%(%$%#^$&
to express my generalized and nebulous frustration with beautiful women of any age who do not take me seriously when I tell them of their great beauty.
Also, I'm sad I missed seeing Spock talk about oral sex. Not sure why, just am.
ahem "And a SERIES of gibberish symbols"
the leonard nimoy video should be the leonard nimoy interview should be at this link
http://www.comedycentral.com/motherload/
click on "colbert report", the player will load, click "the daily show-colbert", click "colbert report: interviews" and BLAM it's right there!
Ah, paperbacks! Now I can afford to hand these suckers out!
I grant that poor body image might be part of the reason, but it's likely not the sole cause.
There's an element of safety (which could be a naive perception, I'll admit) for girls with oral sex that's less present in intercourse. With oral sex, she can keep all her clothes on as a condition of her performing the act, she has the least amount of body contact with the recipient, and if the guy gets squirrelly, she has her teeth to defend herself. Heh. Yeah, I saw all you guys twitch.
--Janbo
Clute and incomprehensible are often fellow-travellers. I mean, did you ever try and read his novel?
The Nimoy thing reminded me that his last 'expression of his art' was a bunch of photos of large women in burlesque. Not that I mind this at all - BBWs are sexy and his pics treated them as such - but I'm not sure in that context what 'poor body-image' meant.
Nimoy is such a hoot, especially when he gets a little worked up defending his fat lady models!
I heard a previous interview in which he talks about how he got into photographing plus size models, how the head of a fat-girl burlesque performance group asked him to photograph their company.
He mentioned she had sadly gotten cancer and died, and I somehow got the sense that he was quite affected by her? He admitted to being flummoxed by the idea, and not sure how to photograph in a tasteful way. I think that the experience and this woman had made an impression on him, had made him think some new thoughts.
If you look at his previous stuff, it's very vanilla, largely of traditionally beautiful young women - he did a whole series called "Rachel" I think - and you get the sense he just finds women fascinating as art.
It's also quite funny to me because he's usually so closed off in interviews. Polite, but not letting too much of his inner person show? So watching him get riled up was great. XD
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