The launch is in one week.
19th November.
Smiths Bookshop.
Awesome.
Mark it in your calendar.
In less than a week you'll be able to get your hands on a copy of BLOCK 9: filled with vivid, tranquil and seat-hurtling poetry, fast-moving, rock n' rolling stories, this journal is good. Very good.
On a side note, I'd like to mention a couple of things that I think are cool:
1. The Incoming Tide by Petra White. This is an award winning book of poems by a debutante author. It's fantastic. Accurate, sharp, humourous and marked by uncanny observation, the poems in The Incoming Tide are about everything from working in the office, going feral on Eyre Highway, growing tobacco and a protester chained to a tree in Kauri Forest.
2. Annie Hall. Watched this the other night after resolving to get over my suspicions about Woody Allen. I wasn't disappointed. Witty, quick and lightly personal, I didn't notice until the end just how understated the whole thing was. There was no dramatic music or moment of enlightenment, just intelligent conversation about love and art and intelligence that was, in the end, worth just as much. Of course, Woody's persona (the neurotic, quick speaking New York Jew) has been parodied and stereotyped so many times that it's almost cliche watching it. Nonetheless, pretty good. I'm going to rent Manhattan next.
3. Into White Silence by Anthony Eaton. I read this the other week while in the library. It's an award-winning Young Adult/Crossover novel, and, since the author is my supervisor at uni, I thought it'd be interesting to take a look. It's pretty damn good. Eaton mixes the postmodern with the classic in this. Simultaneously two stories at once, it is about a black ship named The Raven with thirteen crew aboard who go to Antartica to cross the continent and back again. Notice the italics? They're the classic elements of a horror story, but in this case the entire thing is told through a writer (a character named Anthony Eaton) who is attempting to turn the journal of one of the crew members, into a novel by stealing it and concealing the theft. It's a pretty good read; intelligent and convincing, and though the reason for setting out to Antartica in the first place (this was set after Amundsen had reached the South Pole) was a little weak, I still found a very enjoyable two hours. That's one of the things I like about YA fiction - they can be utterly engrossing works that are still fun to read when you're older. It's a really maligned part of the literary community, YA is, but I really do enjoy reading it. (On a side note, the author wrote afterwards that he'd received a letter from a woman who thought the entire thing was real - she wrote to express her personal disappointment in him for stealing the journal and novel!).
They're some of the things I like. And no, there's no real reason for the title of this entry being Daisy. I just like the plant, is all.
One week!