Mass MoCA & Me

Mon 6 May 2024 - Filed under: Not a Journal., , | Posted by: Gavin

me wearing my mask sitting in a wheelchair in a room with a rainbow painted around the door.

This past weekend Kelly and I and our kid (cropped out of photo above) went to Mass MoCA. I think this might be the first museum I’ve been to since the start of the Covid pandemic and the first time I’ve been to a museum since I came down with Long Covid.

Mass MoCA opened 25 years ago and it is a fabulous place to visit. It sprawls out over a series of old warehouses, there are weird and great permanent exhibitions, and always intriguing new ones. There are many floors with long hallways to get between them and stairways and, thankfully, elevators. They have two bookshops — Storey Publishing is in the same complex — and some great restaurants. And all the usual good things of a destination museum. I love it and was both anxious and delighted about going back.

I got an Apple watch a couple of years ago so that I could believe what I was being told by doctors: no, I wasn’t having a heart attack, something else was going inside my chest. It’s also been useful to show me how many steps I can take per day without wiping myself out: ~4,000 is my max. Sounds great! Except the stepcounter doesn’t quantify the part when I lie down for an hour+ after each meal or any tiny bit of doing anything. My body has calmed down somewhat (if my anger hasn’t), but I can’t walk around a museum all day, or half the day, or, really, for much at all. I go to Book Moon once a week or so and the big thing there is for me to remember to sit down and not spend all my energy at once.

Mass MoCA has free wheelchairs available so Kelly (and occasionally our kid) pushed me around so I was able to visit the museum and see two James Turrells again (and miss another) as well as some by Laurie Anderson and a fascinating exhibit, Like Magic, which I strongly recommend to any readers here who can see it.

I have not used a wheelchair since I first came down with this, but, I have also been incredibly limited in what I can do. I don’t know that I’ll get one (mobility scooter, here I come), but even though it was tiring (to be pushed around, ha), it was a relief to actually be able to go out and do something. My thanks to Mass MoCA for the wheelchair and to everyone who has ever fought for accessibility. I recommend currently able bodied try it (I say that because you never know how long that will last) wholeheartedly for a couple of hours: don’t stand up, see what it’s like to be wheeled around.

Anyway, now we’re home and I’m lying on our damned and blasted (and comfortable) couch. I’m still slowly piecing together our limited edition of Kelly’s The Book of Love and I’m wishing I’d been able to do more for the books we published in the last couple of years — I did most of what I’d usually do but there’s always more that can be done — and I’m grateful for the understanding shown by our authors. We’re not taking on new books but we’re supporting those we have, submitting them for awards as per usual (I generally believe, until announcement day, all our books will win all awards), submitting them for ebook sales and lists and so on, keeping them in print, working on international sales. And we recently received an intriguing email that might change the future of Small Beer. We’ll see.

In the meantime, I’m going to work a little on the next LCRW. After much taste testing, I think I have found the chocolate bar to go with the new issue.

 


Hot Chocolate

Fri 12 Nov 2021 - Filed under: Not a Journal., , | Posted by: Gavin

Me & our kid have just signed up again for the annual Hot Chocolate Run Walk fundraiser for Safe Passage. Is it true we only walk a couple of miles on a cold December morning so that we will get a mug of hot chocolate. No? No! We raises the money for the programs and we get hot chocolate. Win? Win!

We’ve been doing this fundraiser for the last few years — except 2020, which must have been virtual. I can barely remember although I just checked and Ursula raised $585 which is fantastic. Thanks to everyone who donated for that. Ursula has turned into a powerhouse fundraiser over the years — I am so glad she is older and I do not have to carry her part of the way anymore. Little does she know that soon she’ll have to carry me.

Anyway, back to posts about books and supple chains (pretty sure that’s what’s all over the news), and thanks again for support in the past and any and all donations for Safe Passage are welcome, thank you!


Reading, listen to Kathe, go see Karen

Wed 3 Nov 2010 - Filed under: Not a Journal., , , , , , , | Posted by: Gavin

What up? Many things. Visitors, busyness, to and froings in the oncoming weeks. The permanence of change. Catch up, link dump, tab closer, recent reads and more:

A few books are appearing which you may enjoy: Ray Vukcevich‘s new collection Boarding Instructions is just out. Go get from Powells.

Also to get: Sarah Smith‘s first YA novel which is out this week: The Other Side of Dark. It’s about ghosts, treasure, and two teenagers and life, art, madness, love, and more and it’s set it this here fair city of Boston.

One of our great local-ish bookshops, Food for Thought in Amherst—one of those places that just makes you happy to walk into—is in a moneycrunch. If you did you next book buy here, it would be much appreciated. Biased suggestions for starting places: Under the Poppy, Stories of Your Life, What I Didn’t See, The Poison Eaters, Meeks. And, as of this writing, these books are all in stock: what an awesome place!

Another non-local fave bookshop is Subterranean in St. Louis and there’s a lovely little piece in the local student paper about it. They have signed copies in stock of a certain 1,000 page McSweeney’s brick as well as excellent Africa-supporting lit-shirts. It’s a lovely shop from which we walked away with a nice bagful of books. (via)

Really enjoyed the current issue of the Harvard Review. Got it because Georges-Olivier Châteaureynaud has a story in it but there were a couple of excellent stories and essays as well as a good range of poetry in it.

Jay Baron Nicorvo has an excellent essay about re-roofing the family house with his two teenage brothers on Guernica.

Apex just published a special Arab/Muslim themed edition.

Chocolate: want. (Difficult to acquire as $$$ and in the UK.) Next time we do have $$$ to burn, maybe we will play fill-a-box-o-chocs here.

How does a book signed by Betty Ann Hull, Fred Pohl, and Gene Wolfe sound? Sounds good!

Thanks to Susan for this. Go read, but not while eating cake.

And Congratulations to Susan and to Niall: we love Strange Horizons and are both selfishly sad and very happy to hear about the transition.

Awards: John Kessel‘s story “The Invisible Empire” received an Ignotus Award, “Spain’s equivalent to the Hugo.” (via)

More on the World Fantasy Awards at some point soon. Mostly: yay!

Reviews. What?

Belletrista looks at What I Didn’t See and likes what they see, “Fowler’s stories are gripping and surprising, with multiple pleasures awaiting the reader.” The San Francisco Chronicle also published a good review: “Fowler understands how disappearances heighten suspense. And she’s equally skilled at weaving mystery from the unknown.”

Karen’s final reading of her mini-California tour is this Friday at 7 PM at Vroman’s in Pasadena.

Under?

One of our fave bloggers, The Rejectionist, read Under the Poppy and calls it a winner at Tor.com.

You can see Kathe read in Ann Arbor next Wednesday night at the Blackbird Theatre where there will be delightful and scary sexy puppets. Thanks to Scott Edelman (having more than either of us right now) you can also see her reading on the youtubes. More on those readings TK.

Great review also in the Ann Arbor Chronicle—and Kathe’s on WCBN Ann Arbor radio today at 4:30 PM—listen here.

Life?

A couple of readers discover Ted Chiang’s Stories of Your Life and Others for the first time. The sound of their heads exploding echoes through the intertubes. 1) Ed Park @ the LA Times [“patient but ruthless fascination with the limits of knowledge.”] 2) Dreams & Speculations 3) Stefan @ Fantasy Literature.


Cacao Piquin Stout, or, Beer of the Gods

Mon 3 May 2010 - Filed under: Not a Journal., , | Posted by: Michael

I made a chocolate beer. It wasn’t so many years ago I swore I’d never do any such thing—too gimmicky, I said, too much of a deviation from the tradition that has made beer great. But things change.

With me and brewing, the circumstance most likely to cause such a turnaround is the ready, cheap availability of superior ingredients. In January, I went to Guatemala—the cradle of Mayan civilization, and arguably the cradle of chocolate as a human institution. I brought back a half-kilo of cacao “beans”—a form of chocolate two steps removed from the least-processed chocolate you’re ever likely to encounter in this country. “What the hell is a cacao bean?” asked the customs official rummaging through my bags in Houston. I started in on the two-minute explanation; disappointingly, he waved me on before I’d got half started.

Read on for the two-minute explanation—but first, know that when I sat down to brew this beer, it was with the purest of aesthetical intentions in the Small Beer spirit: I strove for a beer that would as closely as possible resemble a bar of 70% raw cacao dark chocolate in liquid form.

Read more


LCRW & Chuao Special

Tue 4 Aug 2009 - Filed under: Not a Journal., , | Posted by: Gavin

LCRW 24We just mailed out the last of the subscriber‘s copies of LCRW 24 (thanks to the amazing intern team of: Michael, Paul, Felice, Kristen, and Abram!) and subscribers did not in fact get the Spicy Maya bar we promised: instead we sent out the Firecracker because it is at once fantastic and also weird and wonderful. It’s a dark chocolate bar with chipotle (mm), salt (mmm), and popping candy. What?! Yes. Feeling the popping candy go off in the middle of the deep dark chocolate is like eating the stars at night.

We have one bar left then new subscribers will get something else. And sharp-eyed readers will note that in the pic to the right there is a coupon from Chuao Chocolatiers especially for LCRW subscribers for 20% off online purchases: LCRW and the unexpected extra chocolatey goodness bonus! We recommend moving phasers to Stock Up.


LCRW and the spice

Fri 17 Jul 2009 - Filed under: Not a Journal., , | Posted by: Gavin

Spicy Maya Bar SetThe new issue of LCRW is about to go out and we are last-minute getting the chocolate in (in summer we can’t keep it around here because 1) Gavin will eat it and 2) it will melt). So we’re ordering a bunch of chocolate and this time round we are getting in the even better stuff. Last time we asked if anyone minded a low-price (er, cheap) bar that time so that we could go great this time. The readership said Sure! and we sent out IKEA Food dark chocolate bars! So this time we’re taking the savings from that time (and any subscribers since then are just lucky!) and ordering Chuao Chocolatier‘s Spicy Maya Bar. This is one fantastic chocolate bar which we’ve only tried a couple of times: it’s more of a birthday present than an everyday bar.

So, anyway, if you want to subscribe to LCRW and get a chocolate bar each time, now is maybe the best time ever to do it. We’re going to order something like 100 bars (hope the delivery person isn’t a chocolate fiend) and once they’re sent out (and once we’ve tried a few around here) that’s it with the Over The Top excellentness and it will be back to the regular goodness.


catch all

Tue 30 Dec 2008 - Filed under: Not a Journal., , , , , | Posted by: Gavin

It’s pre-tax madness around here. Who didn’t make those estimated payments? Oops. Ok, must go fix that now. In the meantime, these:


LCRW + chocolate

Tue 23 Sep 2008 - Filed under: Not a Journal., , | Posted by: Gavin

LCRW means Loads of Chocolate something something....LCRW update: we’re in the middle of thinking about being in the middle of reading and putting together a new issue of LCRW for publication in November. We have stories, drawings, horses.

One thing we are wondering about is whether those smart and happy subscribers who receive a bar of chocolate each time with their zine would mind if we sent out a lovely but cheaper bar this time (except for those whose subscriptions are about to expire) and a lovely but expensive bar next time? Any thoughts? We’d love to hear.

Besides the chocolate bar subscribers, another choice proving happily popular is Option 6, “Newness,” which for $89 comprises: a random chapbook; 4 issues of the zine and a good chocolate bar with each issue & all our fall 2008 books The Ant King and Other Stories (pb), The King’s Last Song, The Serial Garden, and Couch). Otherwise, about $107.