If I stopped to tell you why I haven't been updating, I wouldn't have time to talk about anything else. Oh, but special thanks to Keckler and CleaPet, who helped advise me on making the site layout a little more clear. I hope.

Every so often I look for Magnetic Fields on iTunes, and just as I was about to give up and go buy the new album at the actual store, it appeared. Along with all their older stuff. Actually, this is annoying, because I have the first disk of 69 Love Songs, and they have all three disks on iTunes, but it's $30 for the set and I already have, well, a third of it. So I guess I'll have to hem and haw about that for a while and then buy it anyway. Oh well. Anyway, I'm listening to i now (that's the new album). I really like "I Thought You Were My Boyfriend" after just hearing it twice, and it's the tune that really grabs me. And both of those reactions are strange for me since I usually have to hear a song a few times and know the words before I can decide what I think of it. This may mean it's really good, or it may mean I'll hate it after another couple of listens. Hopefully the former.

So I got the rest of Fritz Leiber's Fafhrd & Grey Mouser books on another jaunt to the Book Alcove.

Swords Against Wizardry has four stories. "In the Witches Tent" is just a quick set-up for "Stardock," which is about... rock climbing. Which just makes me think of MST3K, so that's unfortunate. At least there's not a sandstorm. It's better than that, of course, but it's still pretty forgettable, and probably my least favorite of any of the stories. I think the problem is that a lot of the fun in the books come from the interaction with other characters, and, well, this one's pretty short of other characters to interact with. Didn't hate it, but the fact that I'm having trouble remembering what actually happens in the 60-odd pages is not a good sign. "The Two Best Thieves in Lankhmar" is another cute short piece, and then "The Lords of Quarmall" is a novella that I enjoyed immensely. Fafhrd & Mouser go to a strange kingdom in a mountain, and there are eccentric characters galore (it actually reminds me a bit of Gormenghast) and everyone's scheming and some of the bad guys are sort of likable, while still deserving of a bad end. Alan Rickman would play one of them, you know? So that one was a winner.

The Swords of Lankhmar has them battling the age-old foe of mankind: the rat. Loved this one. It's suitably epic yet silly, and I really enjoy the fact that Leiber doesn't expect the reader to be as dumb as the heroes. I mean, it's obvious from the moment she's introduced that Hisvet is evil, and within a few paragraphs you understand that she's a rat, or a were-rat, or in some way rattish. It takes Fafhrd & Mouser ages to figure this out, which seems like it should be frustrating, but it's actually fun as they go on happily defending her against people who suspect her (correctly) of being up to no good. The second half is pretty much all Mouser, as Fafhrd just spends his subplot riding to the rescue, but I like Mouser better so that's okay with me.

Swords Against Ice Magic is more epicness, and more sillyness, and a bit weirder as well. The first six stories detail the various attempts made by Death and a few gods to kill or manipulate Fafhrd & Mouser. The last two stories are a novella in which they're hired as mercenaries by two women on a remote island, to defend them against a giant battle. And then it gets complicated, with Lankhmar gods and Norse gods. No, honest. The bit where Odin has some inappropriate interest in the young girls "worshipping" him was... odd. I wasn't sure how I was supposed to take that. 'Cause they're kind of breezy, fun books, and there's a lot of breezy, fun sex (er, not pornographically so, but it was the 70's after all), and so it's hard to know how to take it. Or how old the girls are. It's probably best not to think about it too carefully.

And then comes The Knight and Knave of Swords, which has even more sex, because much of it was written in the 80's and so Leiber could be a more explicit. And some of it is even more inappropriate than in Ice Magic. I'm just saying, "The Mer She" is kind of peculiar. Anyway, in an unprecedented twist, Fafhrd and Mouser not only start living like grown-ups instead of going adventuring, they also continue their relationships with the girls they hooked up with in the previous book. Not entirely faithfully, but what fun would that be? There's a rather complicated plot running through the four stories, involving a few friends and enemies from past books. Sadly, Sheelba and Ningauble do not turn up. It's a little strange, just because the characters have gotten a little more serious over the years, even if the plots haven't, but I imagine that after writing about the same characters for a couple of decades, it's hard not to make them grow up a little. And I respect the way each of the books is a little different -- straight fantasy, horror, satire, farce. I think Swords in the Mist is still my favorite overall, but Swords of Lankmar is a close runner-up.

Oh yes, and I got Robert Sheckley's Immortality, Inc. Which was somewhat infamously filmed as Freejack. I've never actually seen the movie, but I think it's safe to say they aren't very similar. From the movie synopsis, I think it's based on about fifty pages near the end of the book, where the main character is on the run from bounty hunters. The book follows Tom Blaine from his death in 1958 to his revival in a new body in 2110, and then there's a lot of him wandering around and just exploring the new world he's in. It's light on plot -- a couple of characters reappear a few times to provide a little momentum, but mostly it's a big "What if," and then Sheckley has some fun thinking about the consequences. But the "what if" is fun: in this world it has been scientifically proven that the mind exists independently of the body. Minds can be swapped between bodies, and they can exist outside the body if they are prepared for it. "Preparation" consists of either a lifetime of yoga-like practices, or a quick run through an expensive gizmo. So, of course, only the rich can afford it. After death, a mind that's been prepared this way can go on, either as a ghost, or inhabiting a new body, or moving on past "the threshold," which may or may not lead to heaven -- no one's reported back to say. So Sheckley just runs with that premise, describing how churches react, how businesses form to sell all kinds of new services, how laws have changed to allow murder if the deceased's mind is going to survive anyway... That's where the bounty-hunters come in, by the way. It's not a great story, because the plot is incredibly thin, but the ideas in it are very amusing.

Comics!

• Grant Morrison's Seaguy #1. You know how Morrison's a little peculiar sometimes? Right. This is about a not-very-super-hero who's always wearing a wetsuit and goggles. And his sidekick is a cigar-smoking fish that floats through the air. And he has a crush on a gorgeous blonde who wears revealing clothes and a full beard. And, um, he vomits up a pink blob named Xoo and then rescues Xoo from some people and the moon is raining down chunks of stuff for reasons that are yet to be determined. So there you go.

• Ellis's last Transmetropolitan: One More Time, which collects the last five issues. I can't believe I stayed totally unspoiled for the end all this time. Heh. Well, plotwise it was never quite as gripping as I think it should have been, but on the other hand... I think it was always a pretty simple story about the state of the world dressed up with Spider because who'd read a simple story railing on about politics and compassion and journalism?

• I got caught up on Mike Carey's Lucifer. Well, relatively. Caught up on the trades: The Divine Comedy (book 4, for those playing along at home) and Inferno (book 5). There are a couple more brief cameos by characters we met in Sandman, both of which are very satisfying. And once again, after reading the latest books, I wanted to go back and reread the first three. Mike Carey is impressing me more and more, and I was pretty impressed to start with. The book just has such an epic feel. I don't know how far he's plotting in advance, but the transitions from story to story flow so nicely. It reminds me a bit of Angel's season 4, where resolving one crisis automatically causes the next.

  Just to avoid being completely useless, I will say that the Basanos never really clicked for me. I found the first TPB less enthralling than the next two because they didn't catch my interest, and they have the same effect when they turn up again in Divine Comedy. Luckily, there are plenty of other characters screwing around by then, so they weren't quite as big a drag. I don't know why I don't do anything for me. Maybe it's just because there's a bunch of them, and only one really has a personality. Eh. So I preferred Inferno, which has another visit to Hell, which always means a lot of double-crossing shenanigans. It also has some fun new minor characters who seem like they should be annoyingly cutesy, but manage not to be.

  Also? Mazikeen kicks so much ass. She and Lucifer have very few scenes together in the two books, but I feel a strong urge to recreate the Mazikeen costume I put together years ago for next Halloween. If I have a party to go to. And can fit into the clothes by then. Well, I have a few months.

Other stuff!

The Post had an opinion piece a few weeks back by Blake Gopnik, criticizing the World War 2 memorial. Because it's bland and uses quotes liberally instead of actually saying something through, you know, sculpture or architecture, which is kind of the point of a memorial:

What insights, however different, does the World War II memorial provoke? Where, for instance, is any stirring evocation of the reasons for joining in this war, and of its justness? Where are the special virtues that the United States presented as an alternative to fascism?

Which sums it up pretty well. It's not ugly. It's not beautiful. It's not anything. I saw one of the public hearings about the memorial on CSPAN years back, and it was just heartbreaking. There were veterans there talking about how the memorial not only looked like a tribute to fascism, but, well, let's see, they fought to protect this country, and we pay tribute to that by... putting a giant nasty mess across the mall, screwing with the presentation of the history they were trying to defend.

I'm just putting this here as a note to myself more than anything, but: this is clearly the coolest miniature golf course around, so I must go there.