omega minor and war protest

Fri, 09 May 2008 13:36:45 GMT

I'm subscribed to the Dalkey Archive Press mailing list, and waiting in my inbox this morning was this interesting news:

The Independent Foreign Fiction Prize 2008 has been awarded to the Belgian author Paul Verhaeghen for his novel Omega Minor, published by Dalkey Archive Press in November 2007. Paul Verhaeghen is the first author to have both written and translated the winning title and has therefore won the full £10,000 prize. The award, a partnership between Arts Council England and the Independent newspaper, was made in association with Champagne Taittinger in the UK. Past winners have included Immortality by Milan Kundera and Austerlitz by W. G. Sebald.

[...]

Moving back and forth between the main stages of the past century, Omega Minor (translated from the Dutch) is a tale of the survival of the soul. A novel of big ideas, the book's whirlwind plot is set between Berlin, Boston, Los Alamos and Auschwitz, and takes in neo-Nazis, a physics professor who returns to Potsdam to atone for his sins, an Italian postdoctorate who designs an experiment that will determine the fate of the universe, and a Holocaust survivor who tells his tale to the willing ear of a young psychologist.

Omega Minor is Paul Verhaeghen's second novel and his first to be translated from Dutch into English. Aside from his writing career, Verhaeghen also works as a cognitive psychologist; his work focuses on memory and the basic aspects of cognitive ageing. He currently resides in Atlanta, Georgia, where he is associate professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

Paul Verhaeghen will be donating his prize money to the American Civil Liberties Union in protest of US foreign policy.

Verhaeghen's "non-acceptance" speech (in which he accepted the award but donated the prize money) is here in full, and it's a doozy and a half. Some really powerful writing. I won't bother quoting from it, because the whole thing really needs to be read.

He also did an eye-opening interview at Bookslut last November that goes into the book quite a bit; and it reveals that Omega Minor won the Flemish Culture Award for Fiction (Belgium's equivalent of the National Book Award) after its original Dutch publication in 2006, which came with a €12,500 prize, and he did the same thing with donating the prize money instead of accepting it.

So the guy has won two major international prizes for this novel, with a total cash award of ~US$45,000, and he has donated all of that money to the ACLU and Human Rights Watch so that taxes on it wouldn't go to the US Treasury and help fund the war in Iraq. Talk about ballsy.

I was so inspired by this incredibly selfless gesture of war protest that while I was at Orchard Road today, I bought a copy of Omega Minor at Kinokuniya (thankfully, it was in stock, their last copy) for only S$27 (~US$18), which is a fantastic deal for such a huge book (and only slightly higher than the cover price).

If you want your own copy, and want to support a wonderful independent publisher (they've also published Zoran Zivkovic's Hidden Camera, Gilbert Sorrentino's Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things, and Rikki Ducornet's Phosphor in Dreamland, among many many others), Dalkey Archive is currently selling Omega Minor at a 20% discount, for only US$12.80. You can't even get two tickets for a movie at that price. A damn steal, I tells ya.

N.B. I realize that Verhaeghen probably could have just opened a bank account in his native Belgium and accepted the prize money in Euros, but as he says, it'll do a lot of good for the ACLU and HRW "in their legal battles against torture, detainee abuse, and the silence surrounding it." Good on him.

reset!

Wed, 07 May 2008 13:05:02 GMT

Had a minor heart-attack today (not literally) as my iPod froze up and nothing I could do -- clicking the wheel in various combinations, plugging it into my iBook or the wall charger, tapping it on the desk, slapping it with the flat of my hand -- would bring it back to life.

I have all the music stored on it backed up on an external hard drive, but it would be a huge pain in the ass, not to mention an unexpected expense, to replace the iPod with a new model (even though the new models are shiny shiny, and have more storage capacity, and a color screen, and play videos; mine is the 40GB version to the right). Plus, I don't need another paperweight; I'd rather listen to the music inside.

Thankfully, after searching through Apple.com, I found a support page on how to reset the damn thing when it freezes up. I performed the magical sequence of button-pushing and switch-toggling while dancing on one foot and wearing nothing but a strategically-placed sock (not literally; there was no sock), and wonder of wonders, the iPod springeth back to life.

Whew.

reader requests next week

Mon, 05 May 2008 13:43:25 GMT

Some great questions have already been asked for Reader Request Week, and I'm hoping for even more. To give you a little extra time to rack your brains, I'm extending the deadline until Sunday, 11 May.

This coming week is the final crazy week when all the tests and assignments that have been piling up need to be marked so that I can input the grades next Monday (although I would prefer to do it before then). I may pop up occasionally during the week (such as with the NIN news in the previous entry), but blogging will most likely be light.

So get in those questions! Make me dance for my banana!

new! free! nin! the slip!

Mon, 05 May 2008 13:11:23 GMT

As a thank you for his fans and loyal supporters, The-Awesomeness-That-is-Trent-Reznor today released a new Nine Inch Nails album, called The Slip, as a completely free download. That's ten MP3 songs, baby, completely for free, with no DRM. W00t! (Streaming audio here.)

As with Ghosts I-IV, each song has artwork attached (if you use iTunes), and they seem to have some relation to Year Zero, especially the one for "Letting You," which looks to be the OSR flag turned sidewise.

Once again, the music has been released under a CC Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license, readymade for remixing, sharing, blogposting, podcast background or foreground, et cetera.

This is so full of win I can hardly stand it.

That download link again.

literary linkses

Sat, 03 May 2008 05:42:56 GMT

1. Tavis at the Powells blog notes that a film is being made of Aimee Bender's wonderful novel An Invisible Sign of My Own. Bender is an amazing writer, so this is very cool news.

2. Colleen at Chasing Ray has put out a call for bloggers to write about their favorite political books (fiction or non-) during the month of August. I know I'll be blogging about Orwell's 1984, which sits among the top of my list of influential novels, and will probably also talk about the groovy new cover by Shepard Fairey. Mention will also most likely be made of Cory Doctorow's Little Brother, which just hit bookstores this week.

3. As cmpriest mentioned, if you have signed up for the mailing list at Tor.com, the free e-book this week was her own Four and Twenty Blackbirds. Yay!

4. storySouth just revealed the Million Writers Award Notable Stories of 2007; i.e. the best online short stories published during 2007. In addition to the attention paid to the short fiction of lots of great writers (matociquala, pgtremblay, ombriel, catrambo, kenscholes, jeffvandermeer, cybermonklives, Paul Jessup, snurri, yhlee, samhenderson, Gavin Grant, timpratt, Jason Stoddard, mevennen, scalzi, lucius_t, and Gene Wolfe, among others), Farrago's Wainscot won the Million Writers Award for best new online magazine or journal. W00t to Darin Bradley and the whole FW krewe!

reader requests

Sat, 03 May 2008 04:40:26 GMT

I've quite enjoyed blogging (almost) every day this week, and want to see if I can continue to keep it up. But to do so, I'll need your help.

Earlier in the week, jeffsoesbe asked if I wouldn't mind writing another entry in my Singapore Observations series, and I'm happy to do so (and am quite chagrined that the last of these entries was in September 2007). So that will be my next actual entry. But instead of just blathering on after that, I'd like to answer any questions or discuss any topics that you, my smart and beautiful readers, might be interested in. Back in March and April, scalzi ran a Reader Request Week, and I'd like to do the same.

So here's your chance to ask me anything. It can be serious or silly, political or geeky (or politically geeky), about writing, publishing, expatriation, living in Asia, being in an interracial relationship, whatever. The topics are completely up to you. I'd like to be able to do a week of these, so if I could get seven questions at the very minimum, that would be perfect. It's your chance to, as Scalzi says, "make me dance like the proverbial monkey."

If you're worried about duplicating questions I've already answered, you can search through the blog archives and/or double-check yourself with the following interviews: Ecstatic Days, The Story, Behind the Wainscot, Tobias Buckell Online, I Should Be Writing (audio), The Spoken Alexandria Project (audio).

Requests should go into the comments for this entry.

Thanks in advance!