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Nisi Shawl’s novella, “Good Boy,” is a finalist for a World Fantasy Award. “Good Boy” appears in Nisi’s 2008 book, Filter House, which has already made a lot of folks’ best-of lists — including mine. Good luck, Nisi!

Home-loan blues won’t stand up to Grandpa Elliot and the Playing for Change band.

Check ‘em out, and here’s hoping we all hook up at the show in Seattle in November!

L. Timmel Duchamp wrote a great review of On Joanna Russ, the literary-critical anthology which I’m a part of.  The review just went up on Strange Horizons. Duchamp writes,

the realization struck me that the collection’s essays could be divided into those that, on the one hand, seek to smooth over Russ’s angry edges and those that, on the other, attend closely and carefully to all that is uncomfortable and challenging in Russ’s work. Such a division, however, would create so sharp a difference between critical approaches that I had to wonder: does recognition of the angry edges in Russ’s work matter? Ought critics to engage directly with them? Psychological experiments have shown that subjects more easily recognize anger in men’s faces than in women’s, confirming feminist observations that women’s anger is commonly treated as derisory, unnecessary, or unwarranted. What, then, is a (feminist) reader to make of a critic’s ignoring or patronizing of that anger?

I’m not sure Duchamp ever really answers that question in her review. Speaking for myself, I felt that Russ’s anger is at the core of her work, that it truly does matter, that her anger is what makes her work sing, and so I tried to honor it as well as I could. Her’s what Duchamp says about my piece:

The final piece in the book, Brian Charles Clark’s “The Narrative Topology of Resistance in the Fiction of Joanna Russ” is more a paean to Russ’s fiction than an essay. It leaps and soars over the (topological) surface of Russ’s fiction at speed, sampling literary and theoretical allusions even more promiscuously than Butler’s essay does, with manic energy and delight, never lighting on the surface for more than an instant. While Butler’s essay invokes Cixous’s style, Clark’s, never burdened by the gravid weight of critical pretension, actually emulates it. Clark’s essay serves as a coda, taking the book out on an appreciative—even ecstatic—note of Russ’s still-standing challenge.

KJ and I saw McFarin do this at a show at the University of Idaho a few months ago. It was amazing to be part of the audience – but the effect is pretty cool even as a viewer of this video.

World Science Festival 2009: Bobby McFerrin Demonstrates the Power of the Pentatonic Scale from World Science Festival on Vimeo.