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10 Feb 14:22

The Big Idea: Keith R.A. DeCandido

by John Scalzi

In today’s Big Idea, Keith R.A. DeCandido is here to represent for The Bronx, and why it’s a fantastic setting for his new urban fantasy novel, A Furnace Sealed.

KEITH R.A. DeCANDIDO:

Finding an urban fantasy novel that takes place within the confines of New York City is about as difficult, to quote that great philosopher Edmund Blackadder, as putting on a hat. Just in general, the Big Apple is a very popular setting for fiction, not just of the urban fantasy variety.

But when you say “New York City” to the vast majority of humans, what they think of is the Manhattan skyline. They think of the Empire State Building and the Chrysler Building and the Freedom Tower. They think of the Brooklyn Bridge and the George Washington Bridge and the 59th Street Bridge (and then they feel groovy). They think of Central Park and the Theatre District and Greenwich Village. They think of Harlem and Chelsea and Chinatown.

In other words, they think of Manhattan south of 125th Street. To most folks, that’s what New York City is. Maybe, maybe they might throw Brooklyn in there.

A Furnace Sealed is my attempt to remind folks that there’s a lot more to the Big Apple than that. The city has five boroughs. There’s also Queens to the east and Staten Island to the south. There’s Inwood and Washington Heights, the northern tip of Manhattan that is often forgotten.

And there’s the Bronx, my home borough, the northernmost portion, the home of the Bronx Zoo and the New York Yankees, the only part of the city connected to the mainland.

The Bronx has a long and fascinating history. It also has an image problem, as the only image most folks can conjure is the South Bronx forty years ago. Fort Apache, the Bronx was released in 1981, Howard Cosell famously said, “Ladies and gentlemen, the Bronx is burning” during the World Series in 1977, and all too often when I tell people I live in the Bronx, they think it’s still like that. “Do you carry a knife?” (I used to carry a Swiss Army Knife, but post-2001 airport security has gotten me out of that habit.) “Is it safe where you live?” (Very.) “Are you the only white people?” (No, and also, even if we were, so the hell what?)

But the Bronx has Little Italy (the real one, not the tourist trap in lower Manhattan), the aforementioned Bronx Zoo, City Island (a New England-style fishing village off the east coast of the borough full of great seafood and adorable crafts stores), several huge parks, the New York Botanical Gardens, Woodlawn Cemetery (where many famous personages from Elizabeth Cady Stanton to Miles Davis to Fiorello LaGuardia are buried), the Bronx Museum of the Arts, several great universities (Fordham University, Manhattan College, Mt. St. Vincent, etc.), and very soon an independent bookstore, the Lit. Bar. It’s where Edgar Allan Poe spent the last years of his life and where break-dancing and hip-hop were born. Alan Alda, Justice Sonia Sotomayor, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Neil deGrasse Tyson are all from the Bronx. And there’s so much more besides.

It’s because most of you reading this probably didn’t know most of what I just wrote about that I conceived The Bram Gold Adventures, of which the first book is A Furnace Sealed. Bram Gold is a Courser, a supernatural hunter-for-hire. He’s the guy you hire to wrangle a unicorn or babysit werewolves on the night of the full moon or get that pesky leprechaun off your lawn. And he works and lives in the Bronx. The first story I wrote with him appeared in the 2011 anthology Liar Liar, which had some fun with the history of the Marble Hill neighborhood, which used to be a physical part of Manhattan, then an island, and now is physically part of the Bronx (though politically still part of Manhttan).

The theme of the urban fantasy world I’ve created is that most of the creatures are not quite what you expect—much like the borough where the book takes place. Unicorns are, in fact, surly beasts any time they smell a male (which is why virgins can calm them—they don’t have man-funk on them). Vampires are total wusses who are pale and sickly and don’t like sunlight. Werewolves are mostly just people who turn into big dogs once a month.

And Coursers—and magic users, for that matter—are just people doing a job. In addition to letting people know that there’s a whole ‘nother part of the Big Apple to the north, I also wanted to make sure that I portrayed characters who need to feed and clothe and house themselves. Most people make decisions based on what they can afford, and fictional characters should do likewise. At one point in A Furnace Sealed, Bram has to put his investigation on hold because he’s working a shift at Montefiore Hospital. (In addition to being Bram Gold, Courser, he’s also Dr. Abraham Goldblume, who works two days a week as an ER doctor. He changed his name for the former job because if you want your nasty monster hunted, you’re not gonna hire a schmuck named Abe Goldblume. Bram Gold, on the other hand, sounds like he can get stuff done.) He has to work that shift, because he’s already called in sick too often, and if he does it again, he’ll get fired, and it’s hard to find more work when you’re fired for poor attendance at your only-twice-a-week job.

Back in 2009 and 2010, I worked for the U.S. Census Bureau, and I got to go to a lot of different parts of the Bronx. It was that work in particular that got the wheels turning about the manifold glories of the Boogie-Down Bronx, and I wanted to bring them to the world in a way that I hope youse guys (as we say in da Bronx) find entertaining. And if you do, rest assured, I’m already hard at work on Book 2 of The Bram Gold Adventures…

—-

A Furnace Sealed: Amazon | Barnes & Noble | Kobo | Smashwords

Read an excerpt. Visit the author’s site. Follow the author on Facebook and Twitter.

 

18 Dec 04:56

How an influential economics paper used imaginary environmental overregulation to spur low-density luxury housing

by Cory Doctorow

Why Do Cities Matter? Local Growth and Aggregate Growth is a 2015 paper written by University of Chicago and UC Berkeley economists Chang-Tai Hsieh and Enrico Moretti, which purports to show that the reasons cities are so expensive is that bourgeois NIMBYism drives affluent people to raise spurious environmental challenges to new developments, stalling growth. (more…)

13 Aug 22:53

Cubs and Diamonbacks bullpens during a rain delay…

by Jonco
Thanks, Kevin F
17 Jun 17:31

Grandma is proud of her little vandal

by Jonco

Thanks, Wirecutter
 
03 Apr 00:15

When Your Whole World Feels Empty

by Ronni Bennett

Grieving

Fairly regularly, we discuss loneliness at this blog mainly due to the oft-repeated cultural belief that all old people who live alone are lonely. The general media pick up this idea from startling research reports that loneliness in elders leads to early death, as much as by seven-and-a-half years.

I've read that research and it has convinced me. What I do not agree with, however, is the extent to which the media apparently believe all people older than 50 or 60 who live alone are lonely.

Certainly some people are generally lonely all the time but I think for most of us it is a sometime thing that comes and goes depending on circumstances – that for most of us it is not a permanent condition.

That said, I'm here today about a singular aspect or type of loneliness that I don't believe we have mentioned.

A week or two ago, I ran across a quotation credited to a man I had never heard of, Phillipe Aries, a French medievalist and historian of the family and children (according to Wikipedia), who died in 1984 at age 69.

Probably because we do talk about the difference between loneliness and being alone fairly often here, the quotation has been rolling around in my head ever since I first saw it:

”A single person is missing for you and the whole world is empty. But one no longer has the right to say so aloud.”

With each re-reading, my mind, my heart went straight to the handful of times in my life when, as I walked own the street, people were rushing to and fro, couples kissing, car horns honking, panhandlers begging, dogs sniffing at each other, music pouring out of a bar, a cop car's siren wailing and I wanted to scream: "What are you doing being so normal, doing everyday things? Can't you see that my world ended yesterday? That nothing will ever be the same?"

Not only was my world suddenly empty because someone I love died, I wanted the rest of the world to be empty around me.

The quotation is often mis-attributed to Joan Didion who referenced it in her book, The Year of Magical Thinking but is actually from Aries' book, Western Attitudes toward Death: From the Middle Ages to the Present, published in 1975.

In addition, having now looked into the quotation fairly extensively, too often only the first sentence is quoted. It may be true on its own but it is a much richer, more important with both sentences.

Time was when people grieved the deaths of loved ones for a year or more. Widow's weeds and a circumscribed social life especially for widows - not so much widowers - and other rituals to help assuage the loss.

Nowadays, only the most religious Jews sit shiva for seven days. At memorials I've attended for people with other or no religion, we are expected to tell funny stories and, as the quotation shows, get on with life afterwards as though nothing has happened.

We have, beginning in the 20th century, deprived ourselves of our grief. There are any number of psychological treatises on death and grieving but I think those short two sentences from Aries are enough to know that we probably should rethink our reserve about expressing grief.

To get through it without much fuss – preferably briefly (see you tomorrow at work) – is our oh-so-modern way of a loved one's death. To repeat:

”A single person is missing for you and the whole world is empty. But one no longer has the right to say so aloud.”

image

A few weeks ago I met a woman near my age who is becoming a friend. As we are gradually exchanging life stories and episodes so to come to know and understand one another, I learned that she is a widow of about two years.

What did not happen in that conversation is that I did not say something like, “Tell me about him.” No one ever told me to skim right past such information but I know that it is sort of expected – I've seen it often and I've done it before.

Many of you know this personally and although I was married for only six years many decades ago, I don't I have any difficulty imagining emptiness when a husband or wife of 20 or 30 or 40 or more years dies. I have no trouble imagining that it will be a long time before you feel anything like having a full life again.

One of loneliest thoughts I had when my mother died was that no one was left alive who knew me when I was a little girl. Fortunately for me, I had two or three weeks to clean out her home with my step-brother who was staying with me.

We were together in our grief with plenty of time to talk, without reservation – or sit silently together sometimes - and my emptiness was partially relieved by spending those weeks with Joe. It was a good and healthy and fine time together for us.

It has not been like that when cherished friends have died.

One thing that happens is that other friends and acquaintances who know what happened verbally tiptoe around you for a few days but they don't make room for conversation about your devastating event beyond “Sorry for your loss” and then they move on.

I understand that people often don't know what to say but maybe we're just out of practice. Having given it some thought now – spurred on by a new friend and a quotation from a 42-year-old book – maybe we just need to say something as simple as “tell me about him” or “what do you miss most.”

And if it's too soon, undoubtedly the person will tell you and you can let it go for awhile. But I'm pretty sure the time comes when each of us wants to talk about a person who, when they died, made the whole world feel empty.

What do you think?

26 Nov 00:03

One Bit of Good News; Criminal Justice Ed.

by Comrade Misfit
15 May 02:58

(via zoia-mischina)

06 Dec 18:33

doublemeatwithguac: Breakfast shenanigans with Sheik (full...



doublemeatwithguac:

Breakfast shenanigans with Sheik (full version)

OMG

07 Jul 06:12

Organize your web bookmarks

by David Caolo

As a person who writes online for a living, I’m constantly finding articles and other insights I want to read. I don’t, however, always have time to read what I find when I find it. So, I must save those articles and websites for later viewing.

Unfortunately, I’m really bad at it.

I’m a Mac user, and the Mac’s operating system will let you drag web addresses into the “Dock” at the bottom of the screen. The good news is that sites and pages saved this way are a click away once saved. The bad news is that if you’ve saved many (as I have), the result are a row of identical icons. The only way to determine where one is pointing is to mouse over it. It’s a cluttered mess. With this in mind, I went searching for alternatives and found the following.

Instapaper: This solution seems to have been made with me in mind. With a single click, I can save an article, site or page to the Instapaper service, which is accessible via a browser, iPhone, iPad, Android, or Kindle. I can leave notes on the articles I’ve saved and even read them when offline.

Historious: This is a searchable history of web pages you’ve marked. To get started, create an account and then drag the Historious bookmark to your browser bar. Then, when you’re on a site or page you want to read later, simply click the bookmark. When you want to find a page again, go to the Historious website and search for a term that was on that site, and it’ll find it for you.

Pinboard: Pinboard isn’t free at $11/year, but there are no ads and no frills. Just bookmark your favorite addresses and refer to them later. Since it works in a browser, it’s compatible with nearly anything you can throw at it. It will even sync with Instapaper if that’s something you want to use.

Ember: This Mac-only software lets you collect URLs but goes way beyond that. You can take snapshots of a web page, too, and annotate it. Everything you save to Ember can be gathered into collections, making it easy to organize by project, work vs. home, interests, what have you. It’s quite useful.

There you have several options for getting you web bookmarks organized. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have my reading and organizing work cut out for me.

Post written by David Caolo

Let Unclutterer help you get your home or office organized. Subscribe to our helpful product shipments from Quarterly today.

The post Organize your web bookmarks appeared first on Unclutterer.

26 Jun 01:52

Life advice from Dave Grohl

31 Jan 01:59

Stuff I found while looking around

by dooce
01_30_2015
This week's link roundup.
17 Jan 09:03

The Problem with the White House Cybersecurity Proposals

by Xeni Jardin
"Unfortunately, the positive effects will be minor at best; the real issue is not addressed." Read the rest
18 Nov 05:50

[mandatoryrollercoaster]

05 Nov 06:13

Ultimate Raging River Sqwerl ResQte!!

by Brinke

Somehow, this bedraggled little knucklehead got stuck on a rock in the middle of a river. Along comes Mr. River Boarder Guy Thomas Paterson to save the day!

From VVV.


Filed under: Uncategorized Tagged: Can't wait 4 ResQte Of The Wk, sqwerls
11 Sep 17:12

RoboCouch

by Jonco

OK, this is cool.  Not very useful or practical, but cool nonetheless.

Read all about it.

Thanks Mike (from Spain)

 

15 Jul 06:01

Timo tries to catch an insect, he never gives up.He...



Timo tries to catch an insect, he never gives up.
He doesn’t know he’s chasing a fake butterfly.

Credit: Youtube.com/Xiedubbel

08 Jul 06:27

Equation Watch

by Jonco

Uhhh, … I really don’t care what time it is.

Equation watch

Only $35.99 here

Thanks Mike (from Spain)

 

27 Jun 08:33

Laziest thing

21 Jun 18:56

Are 5 star rating systems useless?

by Sean Sandulak
I posted this in a thread in the Sword and Laser Goodreads forums, but I was curious what WordPress people thought about it. Have you ever noticed that when you check the rating for a book on Goodreads, it will…
07 Jun 10:26

Watching a movie with my girlfriend.

13 Nov 04:43

Comic by ©Hannah Messler



Comic by ©Hannah Messler

08 Nov 05:21

In Hiding

by Jonco

Hiding from exercise

via

 

29 Jul 19:32

laughingsquid: A Compilation of Scaredy Cats