If it seems inconvenient or operose to look over the fence and wave to the lady in her garden, or exchange a few words in the elevator with the tenant next door, or swap news with the other locals shopping at the bakery or getting theri mail, here's the solution -- SOCIAL MEDIA!

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/13/business/on-nextdoorcom-social-networks-for-neighbors.html?ref=technology

 I enjoyed my visit to Boreal, the Canadian Francophone SF/Fantasy convetnion in Quebec City.  The city (my first visit) could in its old center and river battlements be mistaken for a European city, but actually it doesn't feel the same.  Maybe because, old as it is, it's still actually new -- nothing older than 1600.  I attended a couple of panels with an English-whisperer at my side, and participated in one too, with several smart and funny speakers, including the guest authors Heloise Cote and Jeanne-Philippe Jaworski, whose work has of course not been translated, shame on us.  The conference was held in a bastion of Anglophone Quebec, a former (very former) prison turned into a college and then a Literary and Historical Society with pictures of bewhiskered worthies offering lectures and improvement.  It now houses the only Anglophone lending library in Quebec.  I walked a few blocks to the Chateau Frontenac, an absolutely enormous hotel, like a Sleeping Beauty castle blown up to vast size; I had wanted to go there because my parents had their honeymoon there in 1938.  

The panel topics and discussions were, in general, much like those of similar cons I've been to (as far as I could tell) -- witty and contentious and a little inbred and a lot well-read.  But it didn't have a panel like one that apparently is to be offered at Readercon (to which several of the wtiters and readers at Boreal often come) this July; I don't think the COn will mind if I quote a sentence from the proposal:

"..as the romance genre becomes more welcoming of both the erotic and the undead, how will weird erotica maintain its identity as something separate from paranormal porn?"

How indeed?  I will be there to learn.

From an article in the TLS about wild and rowdy 18th century London:

"Fairs, spas (or "spaws"), gardens, gambling, drinking, prizefighting (including by women), cock-fighting, bear- and bull-baiting, and so on."

Seems to me you could get a publisher's advance with a single paragraph about a book that stars a bare-knuckle female boxing champion, her trials and tribulations and successes as she meets opponents and kicks ass in Merry Olde England.  Actually I'm serious.  Wouldn't that be great?  The book could be inflammatory and the movie would be more fun that Scorsese's Gangs of New York, with a pre-sold audience, even larger if you put the right stars into... well, what DID women boxers wear in 18th c. London?  

The book, which sounds terrific, is "London in the Eighteenth Century" by Jerry White (who's already done ".. in the Nineteenth Century" and "... in the Twentieth Century," working his way backwards.

You'll see on the left hand of this page the sites I visit or like -- they haven't been updated lately, and some may be gone -- but the  Perpetual Interview attached to the 25th Anniversary Edition is still happening, and I've lately posted answers to some surprisingly tough questions there; also posted from earlier are Harold Bloom's questions to me, and other inquiries.  

Readers of the Aegypt cycle may remember (or may well not) the ceiling fresco by Fumiani in Venice that is cut up in four parts to cover the new edition of Fellowes Kraft's history tomes and which I (like Pierce Moffet) wanted for my own works, for the beauty and the metafictional thrill.  I wrote about this before and of my search for an adequate image on the internet, finfing none, nor in the art libraries around me.  joculum also tried with apparently little success.

But the Web keeps webbing, and look now at this:

Soffitto  

Here is the passage in Aegypt when Kraft records his firat sight of it:

Maybe because of the long and fascinating (and learned and witty and wise) conversation held here a while back, but I thought that once upon a time I asked for suggestions of utopian novels.  I am going to be teaching a course (of my own devising, how nice) in Utopia as Fiction, a topic I've long pondered.  Students will be asked to write their own utopian fiction in the course of the class, and also read and critique a utopian novel or fiction selected from a list.  

I gave something like this course the very first time I taught at Yale (or anywhere), in a program called College Seminars, where students in the Yale colleges chose their own course to sponsor from many applications.  

I gave them a list then that now looks a bit stodgy and old-fashioned, though the new class would certainly still be offered Herland, Lost Horizon, maybe Walden Two or Robert Graves's  very peculiar Watch the North Wind Rise.  But I need hipper and more contemporary offerings.  (The Dispossessed will be on the main reading list.)  A Kim Stanley Robinson one about California was mentioned herein in connection with treatment of disabilities in Utopia.  Any others we can think of?  Remember, Utopia not Dystopia (or at least Utopia out of Dystopia.)

 From Slate:

Santorum To Make SCOTUS Stop During Health Care Hearing