Deborama's WWW Number 22 - The Flash Girls, Emma Bull, Will Shetterly and QWERTY Ranch

A homage to lost Minneapolis things. At the May Day parade, I saw a young woman wearing a T-shirt that read "Keep Minneapolis Weird". Amen to that.
Some excerpts from Wikipedia about the Flash Girls and Emma Bull:

The Flash Girls are a now defunct folk music duo based out of Minneapolis, Minnesota..
The duo consisted of Emma Bull, a noted science fiction author, and Lorraine Garland, who went by the stage name "The Fabulous Lorraine". Garland is also notable as Neil Gaiman's personal assistant; the group formed at a Guy Fawkes Day party at Gaiman's home. The connections that both Bull and Garland had with the science fiction and fantasy communities allowed them to have an unusually notable group of people writing songs for them, including Jane Yolen, Alan
Moore, and Neil Gaiman. These songs are mixed in with traditional songs such as Star of the County Down, and Lily of the West, as well as poems put to music, including works by Dorothy Parker and A.A. Milne.

Emma Bull is a science fiction and fantasy author whose best-known novel is War for the Oaks, one of the pioneering works of urban fantasy. . . She sang in the rock-funk band Cats Laughing, and both sang and played guitar in the folk duo The Flash Girls while living in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
Her 1991 post-apocalyptic science fiction novel Bone Dance was nominated for the Hugo, Nebula, and World Fantasy Awards. Bull wrote a screenplay for War for the Oaks, which was made into an 11-minute mini-film designed to look like a film trailer. She made a cameo appearance as the Queen of the Seelie Court, and her husband, Will Shetterly, directed. Bull and Shetterly created the shared universe of Liavek, for which they have both written stories. There are five Liavek collections in print.
She was a member of the writing group The Scribblies, which included Will Shetterly as well as Pamela Dean, Kara Dalkey, Nate Bucklin, Patricia Wrede and Steven Brust. With Steven Brust, Bull wrote Freedom and Necessity (1997), an epistolary novel with subtle fantasy elements set during the 19th century United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland Chartist movement.

Emma's Blog, Dark Roast
Will's Blog, it's all one thing
Steven's website, Dream Cafe
Neil Gaiman's Journal
Emma and Will's website QWERTY Ranch

I would dearly love to put a link to my Amazon.co.uk site and sell you CDs of the Flash Girls and Cats Laughing. They are unheard of at co.uk, and Amazon.com, there is one used CD available for each group (they both made several). The Cats Laughing CD is $44 and the Flash Girls will only set you back about $120.

Enter Sandman

City Pages has a great article about and interview with Neil Gaiman. I love the headline : Why Neil Gaiman is about to become bigger than Death. If you're a Gaiman fan you will get that. But apparently our boy is not the nerdy comic book writer and story teller he once was (not that he was then, either, but he came off that way). There are a massive raft of movies coming out in the next few years that are either based on his novels or graphic novels or otherwise involve him in the production. One is a live-capture version of Beowulf and one is called Death and is based on the Sandman graphic novels. I am sort of a Neil Gaiman fan. I still have never read Good Omens, which he co-wrote with Terry Pratchett and a few of his books I was not able to get into. On the other hand, I did love the Sandman series and also his novel American Gods.

Blogkeeping

As you can see, my links are now restored, and added to. One new link is the link to the small but perfectly formed weblog of Steven Brust, formerly of Minneapolis (like me) and a writer of science fiction and occasional song lyrics (not like me, although I have written one song.) I first became aware of Steven Brust because one of his books was called "Brokedown Palace" and I read it obsessively trying to find if there was any clue as to whether he was or was not a Grateful Dead fan. Finally, I had to give up guessing and go to a panel discussion that he was on, and just ask him. He seemed surprised that I couldn't tell. I believe there was at that time a very small collective of midwestern sf writers that include Steve and also a couple (at the time) Emma Bull and Will Shetterly (who were also on the panel). Some years later, I read and enjoyed books by both of them as well. Then I was briefly associated with Will in a political context when he ran for governor of Minnesota on the Grassroots Party ticket and I was on a committee with the Progressive Minnesota Party. And then not much later than that, my two kids, who were teenagers at the time, introduced me to the Sandman comics and we went to a Neil Gaiman reading (in aid of the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund?) and there was music performed there by the Flash Girls, one of whom looked vaguely familiar and turned out to be Emma Bull. (There's a link for Neil Gaiman's weblog and the Flash Girls home page down the side there.) That's what I love about the Twin Cities - it is such a social nexus, all these busy, buzzy, hard-working talented people. You get involved in one or two things, and pretty soon you know everybody.

Why I love the internet

Here is a link in the Public Monuments and Sculpture Association website to something called the Rhythmical Time Fountain. It is only 1/2 mile from where I am sitting at work right now, and so I am going to see it today or if it is raining today, maybe tomorrow. Now, how did I happen to find this? Wonderful serendipity. There was a mention of the sculptor Rowland Emmet in a letter to Neil Gaiman that he posted on his weblog, Neil Gaiman's Journal. (I was reading that just because I am bored.) There is no link telling where in Nottingham this thing exists, and it undoubtedly never occurred to Neil or his correspondent that a middle-aged woman working in Nottingham with time on her hands would read this fragment and wonder whether she could pop out for half an hour and see the piece. But the ever-useful Google provided the answer in a few seconds. I did not even know there was this meticulous registry of all the monuments and sculptures in Britain, and that alone will give me hours of time-wasting enjoyment.

Neil Gaiman excerpt

I was just reading Neil Gaiman's journal, which is one of my links down at the bottom of this page. He has a very funny little segue from telling of a story in the Guardian about the revision of European history to a kindler and gentler version, apparently in order to bolster the European Union. The re-casting of the Vikings from cruel barbaric pillagers to clever traders and peaceful farmer-settlers inspired him to re-write the Crusades, the Jewish diaspora and the defeat of the Spanish Armada. Check it out (you may have to look in the archives in a few days.)