Lately, as is my wont from time to time, I have been rereading the gospels. As I've been doing so I came to the rather surprising conclusion that Jesus was advocating a sort of feminism in much of what he said.

Take for example his admonitions against adultery and divorce. Taken within the context of the times and the rights of women at the time, I think it's quite clear that these admonitions are in fact pragmatic pronouncements meant to help women in a time when they had very little ability to support themselves without male patronage in the form of a father or a husband. In fact, an adult woman of the time only had the options to live as a beggar or a prostitute if she was turned out of her father or husbands house. From this perspective, the prohibition on adultery, a prohibition that I had previously taken to be little more than typical of jewish prudishness about sex, made a lot more sense. The law, after all, is aimed at a male audience, so in a sense the prohibition on adultery is saying to men not to take sexual liberty with a woman and then leave her to fend for herself and your offspring, because to do so is to condemn her to poverty and prostitution. The same is true of the ban on divorce, that is, it is wrong for a man to set his wife aside because without him the realities of the times doomed her to a life of ignominy.

Doing a little googling, I found out that I was not the first person to come to this conclusion. I found the following excellent article which I think sheds a lot of interesting light on the sexual mores found in the New Testament, and which I think put some of the more offputting and strange ideas to be found in the gospels into a better light:

http://www.godswordtowomen.org/feminist.htm

Also interesting were several statements in the gospel of thomas about making the female male and dissolving the distinction of male and female into spirit.

Here's some stuff for you to keep you busy while I'm writing a whole novel this weekend.

Must read: Down in the Ghetto at the SF Cafe, Hal Duncan really sums up the problems/questions of genre in really astute ways. This is the beginning of a new column by him called "Notes from a New Sodom" which promises to be very, very good. Hal Duncan (author of the novels Vellum, Ink and Escape From Hell and his blog, Notes from the Geek Show, I read religiously).

A new short story by Wet Asphalt favorite and living god of writing David Mitchell

Ed Champion's Dramatic Readings of Hate Mail project has me cracking up.

Download a free copy of China Mieville's Perdido Street Station courtesy of Suvudu.

and finally,
Canabalt is an extremely addictive game with only one button. My favorite thing about it is the whole John Woo-does-the-apocalypse milieu of the game.

Apparently yet again the mainstream critics have gotten it wrong, and not surprisingly it came out of Northeastern literary circles, whose stable of critics includes such dim luminaries as the functionally illiterate Michiko Kakutani and the it-would-be-funny-if-it-weren't-so-tragic-how-completely-wrong-she-always-is-about-everything-she's-supposed-to-be-an-expert-on Helen Vendler, and need I mention N+1?

This latest, as Matt Cheney rightly points out, is an attempt to elevation to "serious literary discourse" the old straw man that's been kicked around in genre fiction and fan fic circles for at least a generation now, namely that genre fiction is somehow superior to literary fiction because it has a plot and literary fiction is just a bunch of navel gazing character study nonsense couched in mandarin language.

Sony had a big press conference today, not only for the new regular ($200) and touch-screen ($300) ebook readers already announced, but also for a big new $400 touch-screen reader with always-on 3G Internet courtesy of AT&T free of charge ala the Kindle.

Gizmodo has the rundown, but here's the highlights: The 3G device will be called the "daily", and will be available in December. The always on 3G will only have access to the Sony eBook store (so far), so no web browser like the Kindle(?). The new device is bigger than the Kindle (7"), but smaller than the Kindle DX, priced between them and, unlike them, touch screen so you don't have to deal with those annoying buttons. Also it's much purtier than the Kindle. And, of course, all the new Readers reads ePub books, like those sold at Fictionwise, Books-On-Board and Powell's World of Books. Unlike the Kindle models.

More big news is that the Sony eBook store has made deals with a number of public libraries, including my own New York Public Library, to have automatic access to library ebooks from the Sony software. All I have to do is type in my library card number and it will download the book, which will automatically expire and delete itself, with no possibilities of late fees. Normally, I'm against DRM'd books that delete themselves, but hey, library books are free, so who really cares. I'll take free books that delete themselves over no books.

Sony also announced some kind of literary Twitter service, which strikes me as very odd. Something to keep an eye on, anyway.

Of course, if the 3G Sony Reader was the same price as the Kindle 2, then we would really have a horse race on our hands. As it is, it's still exciting to see that Sony is trying to innovate and staying in the market, and the $200 reader (when it's finally released) I think is still a killer device.

Also, whither the Mac version of the Sony software already??

Update: Gizmodo has a comparison chart of the 3G ebook readers

Update 2: Mac version of the software finally released!

The big news in the ebook world is that Sony, creators of my beloved PRS-505 ebook reader, are going to make all the books at their store in the open epub or Adobe's DRM'd version of epub format, effectively killing their proprietary LRF ebook format. There's been a lot of criticism on Teleread of the NY Times brushing over the fact the Adobe's format is just as proprietary as any other, though some think the ease with which it can be hacked may be a bonus feature. However, any move towards open standards I'd say is a good thing.

One thing nobody seems to be pointing out though, is that if the LRF format dies, any books I have in that format (which I probably paid good money for) will soon become useless. Sure my PRS-505 will still read them, but when I upgrade to a different reader sometime in the future, will it be able to? This is, of course, one of the problems with proprietary, DRM'd formats in the first place, if the format goes down so do your books.

Also, this emphasizes the fact that ePub is becoming the defacto standard ebook format, and the Kindle is really the only ebook reader now that can't read it. Inevitably, it must come around.

This is the second in my ongoing Series on the work of Michael Moorcock, which will include a review of his latest book The Best of Michael Moorcock, and finally an interview with the man himself.

Some readers may have been surprised at my admiration for Moorcock's formulas for writing fantasy novels, considering previous statements I've made disparaging formula in fiction. I've been especially critical of the tyranny of the three-act structure in film, because so many films are shoe-horned into it that it becomes predictable and rote.

However, I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with formula in fiction per se. No less than William Shakespeare used them quite often, and even the strictest literary fiction will often use structural conventions, such as the "moment of epiphany". It occurs to me that a good comparison can be made between music and fiction here— stories that hew closely to formulas, such as the typical closed-door mystery, can be compared to Blues, where the structure from song to song is almost identical and the interesting stuff is what you do on top of it. Looser, say, would be rock music, with its standard forms like ABACAB but no hard-and-fast chord structures, and then there are any number of other forms with varying degrees of complexity and looseness, from the classical sonata to the most experimental out-jazz. What forms you use depends (obviously) on what kind of music you want to make; for someone like Frank Zappa, the ever more bizarre song structures is what makes the work interesting, while for B.B. King, what he plays and sings over the standard structure is where the magic lies. Which is all to say that formula is only bad if you do it in a boring way.

Michael Moorcock has always shown an obsession with structure and an eagerness to play with it. In his early fantasy writing, he took his lead from Robert E. Howard, who wrote relatively simple stories about heroes fighting monsters in which the innovation lay in making the monsters and settings weird and fascinating. Conan the Barbarian may have been the star of the show, but it was the soul-sucking devil-dog or the tortured, blind elder-demon-thing that kept you reading. To this Moorcock added a hallucinatory, sixties sensibility and moody, unpredictable characters, especially the doomed albino Elric. A decade later he followed the lead of a very different writer, William Burroughs, and created the absurd, plotless book A Cure for Cancer, part of the ever-more-experimental Jerry Cornelious series. Even A Cure for Cancer, though, follows deliberate structural decisions; a note at the beginning describing it as being "in something approximating sonata form." Further, all the Cornelious books (which each take place in a different, parallel universe) have ripples and patterns flowing through them, characters and situations following similar courses or being reinvented in intriguing ways. Likewise, the entire Cornelious series references and is referenced by the rest of Moorcock's work, with, for instance, the first part of the first book (The Final Programme) being essentially a rewrite and update of the first Elric story with elements of the psychedelic (and Philip K. Dickian) short story "The Deep Fix" thrown in for good measure.

Throughout his career Moorcock made a project out of mastering different forms and styles, refusing to stay still or stop experimenting, and in this, he is comparable to Pablo Picasso or David Bowie. In one sense, Moorcock's work can be seen to be a reflection of the entirety of 20th century literature, a map of modernist, post-modernist and pulp sensibilities. In another sense, Moorcock's work is a complete, self-contained universe, a game of mirrors, connections, clues and red herrings. And it's Moorcock's obsession with structure which allows him to create his narrative puzzles, and to blueprint so many different styles and fill them up in new and interesting ways.

Hal Duncan joins the Narrative-haters club, and explains why you shouldn't submit work to (or read) a magazine that charges people to submit work and engages in spamming tactics.

Related my own Fuck Narrative Magazine

Is it true that Harlan Ellison monitors Google Alerts to see if anyone is bad mouthing him so he can jump up and down on whoever it is? That he has no sense of humor about himself? Harlan Ellison, the guy who likes to grope women at cons, sit on other people's short stories for decades so they can't publish them, and freaks out and sues anyone who looks at him wrong?

You know, for a guy who's been around for a while, Ellison sure has thin skin.

Also, he's a douchebag.

You hear me, Harl? I'm talkin about you!

Electric Literature just put together this animated trailer for the short story "Your Fate Hurtles Down at You" by Wet Asphalt favorite Jim Shephard. It's... pretty damn awesome.

Full disclosure: Electric Literature pays us money to put ads on the site (but not to post things like this). Irregardless of that, I honestly believe that they are a pretty great literary magazine that appears to be doing everything right--and offering their magazine for a reasonable price in a myriad of formats including DRM-free ebooks. But most importantly they publish really good writers like Jim Shephard and pay him real money for the privilege. So go buy their first issue already.