Today’s Perfect Stars comic (”Very Inaccessible Comics”) is sheer lit-dorky brilliance.

Another episode in the “transcends genre” drinking game, from Sunday’s NY Times review of Tom McCarthy’s Remainder:

The subject of identity — how human memory and reality might be manipulated by outside agents — features in countless futuristic books, stories and films, and has been especially popular in the last decade as advances in the visual, auditory and surgical arts have made us increasingly wary of trusting our senses. But McCarthy’s superb stylistic control and uncanny imagination transport this novel beyond the borders of science fiction.

I’m now imagining a wall at the border between Science Fiction and Literary Fiction, not unlike the short section of “peace wall” I saw in Belfast in 2001 — dented, the base of it strewn with chunks of broken brick, the occasional bent bike wheel lying boomeranged on the ground.

Just stopping by to post a quick recommendation for Rackstraw Press’s new anthology, Glorifying Terrorism, a collection of stories published in response to the UK Terrorism Act of 2006. As Ned Beauman says on the Guardian book blog:

… we should be happy that in 2006 science fiction pulled on its balaclava. Whether or not we can wring out the slightest sympathy for suicide bombers from Iraq or Palestine or Leeds, we should certainly be forced to try, if only to clarify our thinking. And while mainstream authors such as Updike and Amis and Rushdie have tried to take us into the mind of terrorists, they stopped short of what would have been far more disturbing and effective: making their plotters into likeable heroes and seducing us into a unwary emotional involvement with their struggle.

Only science fiction has gone that far, and for this — even more than for decrying the theft of our civil liberties — it deserves our rapt attention.

(Link via Colleen Mondor)

I remember seeing this call for submissions last year; I’m fiercely glad the project was successful.

I’m in the middle of prepping for class at the moment, but I direct your attention to Justine Larbalestier’s satisfying rant about Maureen Dowd’s latest column, on chick lit.

I haven’t read Dowd’s column myself; it’s behind the pay wall, and, frankly, her obsession with referring to politicians by faux-cutesy pet names annoys me so much that I’ve stopped reading her, period. But Justine does an excellent job of highlighting the key elements familiar from many Times pieces on genre fiction: inadequate sample size; blithe generalization; treating all genre works as “interchangeable.” Maybe there should be some kind of drinking game for this sort of thing?

Recently, I’ve been wanting a cat. This is not new — I always want a cat, or three. It’s shocking, really, that I haven’t buckled and adopted one after more than two and a half years in Austin. (Of course, my apartment-mate B. got a kitten five months before she got her master’s and left, and R. has a wonderful, insane, hefty tabby, and then there were the three feral kittens I rescued and fostered while sharing a house with R.; but none of them were mine.) I stop and pet them whenever I can, and T. says, half-jokingly, that my superpower is seeing cats. I find them everywhere.

This is not the time to get a pet. We’re planning to move again this summer, and I may have to go to Oregon for a while at some point to help out, and who knows what emigrations may come, post-doctorate? Nonetheless: I want a cat.

So it was surprising, and pleasant, that the sweet silent little black cat who lives in the apartment across the parking lot — this is west campus; there is no other way to express proximal distance between buildings — decided to break into our apartment yesterday. She’s been friendly before, and it was cold out, but not that cold. I think she was just curious — and when the landlord showed up with the plumber to fix our hot water (sigh), she ran up the stairs ahead of them and bolted right in. I let her do that curious low creeping walk around the apartment for a little while, then took her out to the landing and held her on my lap. She purred a little, and twitched her tail, and it’s silly how happy I was then, sitting on our stairs with a borrowed cat on my lap, cold, thinking about nothing.