Okay, re-entry into the first world has given me the most astonishing flu-thing (possibly acquired on the bus to Atlantic City), so I will be brief. Below are three pictures I took in Mexico that I never blogged. I now blog them as my feverish brain melts:

A flower on our veranda in San Miguel taken at sunset. When I can take a picture this good with our crappy camera, you know stuff is pretty.

This is my picture of a hummingbird, taken among the same flowers. Compare with Justine’s photo-essay on the subject. Trust me, these guys are hard to get into the lens. In German, I think they’re called “movingquicklybirds,” or perhaps, “fasterthanscott’scrappycamerabirds.”

One of their many names in Mexican Spanish is chuparrosas, which translates literally to “rose suckers.” Now that is some seriously poetic wordplay, dudes. No, really. It reminds one of chupacabras, the mythical Mexican goat-sucking bat.

In San Miguel, as in heaven, freshly made tortillas are brought to your door by a fleet of motorcycles. Can we please just surrender to Mexico now?

To my continuing series of Things I Will Miss In Mexico, allow me to add Skeletal Bathroom Tile Guy!

Our whole baño here is tiled with fanciful tiles, but none is more fanciful than Skeletal Bathroom Tile Guy. His most popular tile, in which he rides a bicycle, happens to be exactly at eye level (seated). It thus lends itself to dutiful contemplation, including such questions as:

1. Is a skeleton riding a bike funny enough? (No, it has to be a drunken skeleton!)
2. Is the skeleton wearing a hat, or some sort of bubble-making device? (Oh, right. It’s a hat. Those bubbles are drunkenness.)
3. Is the skeleton smiling? Laughing? Screaming in a terrifying way? Singing drunkenly?
4. Am I really sitting here contemplating a skeleton?

But wait, there’s more! Skeletal Bathroom Tile Guy doesn’t just ride bicycles. He also plays football:

Oddly, American-style football, not the local gooooooal-oriented version.

And he engages in wrestling-type activities with his friends:

(At least, I hope wrestling is what this is. Unless it’s that really cool Brazilian martial-arts dance invented by guys in chains. Nah, probably wrestling.)

But best of all, Skeletal Bathroom Tile Guy is a totally cool surfer dude:

So as I contemplate returning to my drab America bathroom with its non-delirious tiles, I know that I will miss him.

Hasta luego, Skeletal Bathroom Tile Guy!

PS. Kids, don’t ride bikes drunk. Also, wear a real helmet, not a comical hat, even if it does make bubbles. Skeletal Bathroom Tile Guy doesn’t have to worry about safety issues because, you know, he’s already dead.

We leave Mexico in less than a week, and already I’m making lists of things I’ll miss. Most of this list is food, of course, and most of that food is breakfast, my favorite meal.

Meet huitlacoche, the edible parasite. If you’re an ear of corn, huitlacoche is a scourge, a life-threatening invader, a deadly fungus. But if you happen to be human, it is the queen of all things mushroomy. It’s utter blackness indicates the saturation of the flavor. It’s like discovering Valrohna chocolate, or Italian espresso, or black truffles.

Ordinary mushrooms are to huitlacoche as the lightning bug is to the lightning.

Here’s what it looks like in its corn-killing parasite mode:

From Troy Gardens.

Eww, I know.

But this is what it looked like this morning at breakfast:

Like most edible parasites, the black fungus needs its intensity diluted. This omelet with huitlacoche and gruyare cheese was stunning on its own, but I figured that a few more flavors never hurt. So I stuck it into a tortilla with tomato, refried beans, hot sauce, and a big wedge of avocado, and had a breakfast to drool for.

How did it taste? Well, I’ll give you a hint. The place in San Miguel where they served me this is called “Nirvana.”

‘Nuff said.

Apparently, the stories we tell ourselves never much change . . .

From The Sinking of the Titanic (1912)
by Jay Henry Mowbray

“When the first of the 56- foot lifeboats were being filled, the first stampede of panic-stricken men occurred. Within a dozen feet of where I stood I saw fully ten men throw themselves into the boats already crowded with women and children.

“About ten shots sounded in quick succession. The six cowardly men were stopped in their tracks, staggered and collapsed one after another. At least two of them vainly attempted to creep toward the boats again. The others lay quite still. This scene of bloodshed served its purpose. In that particular section of the deck there was no further attempt to violate the ‘women and children first’ rule.”

“Were any of these men from the first- or second-class cabins?” Williams was asked.

“It was hard to tell. All of them were so scantily dressed. In the semi-darkness and prevailing excitement faces left no distinct impression with me. I should say that most, if not all of them, were from the steerage.”

That’s right, because it’s always about the misbehavior of those louts in the cheap sections, and never about having more friggin’ lifeboats.

Frame capture from Jared Arsement’s home video of citizen rescue efforts. Full video available on Current TV.

Justine and I spent the evening of July fourth on the Moon Dance, a thirty-foot sailboat co-owned by our splendiferous publisher, Eloise Flood of Razorbill. We sailed down the Hudson from 79th, catching great city views as the sun went down, then watched the fireworks, drank beer, and grilled various things.

On the sailing end of things, Justine and I were pretty crap. As the NY Times said today, “There are few things more useless on a river than a novelist.” But I did do a bit of winching, which was well received by all.

I was going to photoblog the affair, but forgot to bring the camera. Fortunately, the Times has come to my rescue by running a photo taken from exactly our spot beside the Intrepid, looking across Manhattan toward the East River. (We also had an uninterrupted view down toward the Liberty Island explosions.)

Vincent Laforet/The New York Times

Needless to say, it was loads of fun and a great way to witness a familiar ritual from a new perspective.

On the way back uptown, we were attacked by the wakes of giant, millionaire-driven powerboats, which taught me three things:
1) 30-foot sailboats can roll over 45 degrees and still pop back up;
2) non-skid surfaces save lives;
3) millionaire powerboat owners are generally ass-hats.

But surviving made for a great workout. Thanks to Eloise, Ben, Brandi, and Andrew for a cracking good time.

When I was about ten years old, a big storm moved over my grandparents’ house in Crawford, Texas. The sky turned brown, the colors on the whole street shifted eerily, and my ears popped as titanic air masses jostled overhead. I knew from school and from the weatherguy on TV that deep brown was the mark of a tornado sky.

I saw a similar color in Sydney on my first antipodean Christmas Day. But on the arid continent, brown means a bushfire sky, caused by the ash and smoke of the summer burn-offs.

The same hues appeared today over New York City as this thunderstorm rolled in:

This is from Justine’s and my apartment, looking down on Second Avenue from the seventh floor. The camera is facing south, and it’s about six PM.

My favorite moment in a NYC storm is when the streets turn dark, but the sky is still glowing. Especially when the heavens are the crazy brown they were today, shifting the colors of everything and turning the rain-mirrored asphalt the hue of a slow-moving bayou.

It was definitely weird looking. Right as the rain broke, we were headed off to meet our Razorbill editors for dinner, umbrellas in hand. A kid came out of the building in front of us, looked up at the sky, turned to his dad and said, “Why’s that like that?”

I didn’t tell him about the tornado-sky thing. Partly because I would have been lying. Back when I was ten, the tornados didn’t come. One hits Crawford every few decades, but I’ve never seen it happen. And in NYC, of course, storm funnels hardly ever form. But although I’m generally against massive death and destruction and all that, one of these days, you know, it would be really cool to see one live . . .

I am blogging to you from 4:19 in the morning to bring you this important news . . .
Apparently, there is a 4:19 in the morning! It differs from the normal 4:19 in the following ways:

Complete suckage.
Phantasmagoric darkness.
Unseasonable cold.
Strange fuzziness clings to all objects, especially teeth.

More later on this disturbing development.

First things first: Go and buy Valiant now!

Well, maybe not now, because it officially hits the shelves on June 1. But you can always order it now, or go bug your local bookseller. I read it a couple of weeks ago, and let me tell you it is great stuff. For those of you who don’t know Holly Black’s work, it’s elegantly written urban fantasy. Black really knows her fey folk: They’re psychologically real, though otherworldly in that genuinely inhuman (and creepy) faerie way. Her human teenagers, on the other hand, are firmly grounded in the here and now. I love the collision of old-school phantasmagoria and gritty realism, which makes her universe a real pleasure to inhabit.

And this book is her best so far, which makes it a must read.

So, while you’re reading, I’m headed off to Wiscon, my favorite sf convention of the year. It’s billed as “the world’s leading feminist sf convention,” which it certainly is. It consists of lots of panels and conversations about this crazy world we live in, and various imaginary worlds we don’t live in, but might one day.

But it’s also summer camp for smart kids–but with adults, and beer. Or another way of putting it: It’s 800 of my favorite writerly and readerly people all packed into one hotel for a long weekend. We do formal things like sit on panels talking about writing and sf, and informal things like cocktail parties (in which we pretty much talk about writing and sf).

Here’s the schedule of my public events:

40 Common Questions for Pros
Saturday, 10:00–11:15 A.M. Room 623
Every pro writer has answered a million questions from interested amateurs. What are the most common questions you’ve fielded? The most uncommon? Share the questions and the answers with those who are interested. M: Lauren Ann McLaughlin, Jack Byrne, Scott Westerfeld, Ysabeau Wilce

This looks like fun. I love talking about the publishing business, and these kinds of panels always have a big audience of people with very wide eyes.

Pretty Magic Butlers of Roanoke
Sunday, 10:00–11:15 P.M. Readings Conference Room 2
Young adult fiction comes in many forms. Some of it involves the Pretty Magic Butlers of Roanoke who will read for your pleasure and offer spectacular cookies and prizes. Gwenda Bond, Justine Larbalestier, Scott Westerfeld, Ysabeau Wilce.

Me reading from PRETTIES with three other fabulous YA authors. Plus cookies and prizes.

The SignOut
Monday, 11:30am-12:45pm in Capitol Room

Come here with stacks of books and I will sign them. They don’t even have to be my books, I’ll sign anything.

(Note that one of my events starts at 10AM! What kind of revenge-is-a-dish-best-served-cold crap is this, anyway! Don’t they know no one goes to bed until 4AM at Wiscon! Okay. Deep calming breath.)

I may be blogging a bit from the con, or perhaps posting embarrassing pictures (see 4AM comment above). But if case I don’t, I’ll leave you all with some fine writing advice . . . later tonight.

Have a nice Memorial Day, and don’t steal my stuff while I’m not at home.

Justine, my wife, has been my great inspiration in going online. She had a website before me, has introduced me to most of the cool blogs I read, and has been my excellent web mistress for the last year. For this she has all my thanks, and so much love she would need buckets.

And now, at long last, she has her own blog. Which starts by revealing the way-cool cover of her next book, Magic Lessons. (Sequel to the fantabulous Magic or Madness.) Most authors don’t really have too much to do with their covers, but we actually took the pictures for this one:

But here is not the place for that story. Especially since all this online praise from me is as nothing . . . Justine gets plenty of that in the real world. All that matters now is a big hit count, and maybe lots and lots of comments.

So please go say hi to Justine.

Buying art should be like falling in love–you shouldn’t set out to do it, it should just happen.

So here’s how it happened:

When we first got back to New York, we learned that an old Aussie friend of Justine’s has a gallery show up in Chelsea. (This friend’s name is, confusingly, Justine Cooper, so I’ll be calling her Justine C.) Now, I’m always trying to get Justine (Justine L., my wife) over to Chelsea to look at art. In my dot-com days, I actually bought some artworks, mostly as a way to avoid buying crashing tech stocks. So this personal connection of Justine’s was my chance to drag her around the galleries and see what was up this summer.

And the best thing that was up was Justine C.

Justine’s C.’s show is called Saved By Science. It consists of work created in her year as artist-in-residence at the Museum of Natural History. Basically, Justine C. got to poke around in the basement storerooms of the museum (where 95% of their collection lives), finding exceedingly cool and weird stuff to take pictures of. She even used a 1910 camera from the museum’s collection of vintage cameras, which is the sort of touch I love.

Experiencing the show is sort of like exploring an old Victorian mansion owned by a mad-keen collector of butterflies, tiger skins, and vitriated frogs:

(Okay, all these pictures are copyright 2004, Justine Cooper. Do not steal them. I asked permission to post them, you should too.)

This stuff is spooky, melancholy, and beautiful. There’s a weird juxtaposition between the pictures’ cool technical brilliance and the 19th-century mustiness of the subject matter. The (sometimes) high-tech storage equipment clashes with the skins, bones, and antlers, like a spacecraft built to take Earth’s heritage somewhere after a nuclear war.

So Justine and I wandered through these virtual cabinets of curiosities, soon splitting up to explore on our lonesomes. Eventually we rambled back into each other in front of a particular picture, which turned out to be both our favorites.

“I want it,” she said.

I did too.

So here it is, our first major art acquisition since getting married. It’s called “Elephants in the Attic.” And yes, those are elephant skulls, all set out in a row in the attic of the museum. The skulls look almost like something from a Giger painting to me, something alien enough to disturb, yet familiar enough that you can still make elephants out of them in your mind’s eye. Their home in the musty attic adds a layer of sadness and a feeling of forgotten history, which is pretty much what these hidden places are.

Click to behold in a larger format.

It’s full size is 39″ by 30″, which is big. If you go big, you’ll see that the skull in the middle has a tag on it. In person, you can actually read the handwriting on it, which says, “C. Akeley.” This refers to Carl Akeley, the museum’s primary African collector from 1909 to 1926, when he died of a fever in Africa. For MoNH and SF geeks, this is super cool. Akely hunted with Teddy Roosevelt, was something of a creepy eugenicist, safaried with a young Alice Bradley (who later wrote several masterpieces of science fiction under the penname James Triptree), and was instrumental in early conservation movements.

After he was buried in Africa, his bones were stolen by poachers and sold to some collector somewhere. Well, turnabout is fair play.

Anyway, every picture tells a story. This one tells many,

To see Justine C.’s work in person, go to:
Kashya Hildebrand Gallery
531 West 25th Street, New York
until June 4, 2005.

For more about Justine Cooper, go to her site.

To see many of the photos online, go here.