As those of you who’ve been following me on Twitter and Facebook already know, I was diagnosed with Shingles on Friday, after having had sore muscles since Monday and a rash since Wednesday. I’ve been taking the antiviral medication Famciclovir since Friday afternoon, but that hasn’t stopped me from feeling … like this.

Well, absent the blood and the alien creature eating its way out through my stomach.

Still, what I have been feeling is a strange abdominal pain unlike any I’ve ever felt before, as if a fist is opening and closing inside me, with muscles cramping and spasming and uncramping and warring against each other in ways they never have before. So much so that I occasionally peer down and wonder what the heck is going on in there.

Several female friends have reported to me that their Shingles pain was so great it exceeded the pain of childbirth, and I am so not looking forward to my case developing in that direction. From what I’ve read, the fact I started on meds within three days of the first appearance of the rash means I’ve got a good shot at it not progressing that far, though my doctor’s anecdote that the only time he ever saw his grandfather cry was from Shingles doesn’t give me that warm fuzzy feeling inside.

Only a feeling of something trying to chew itself out.

Wish me luck!

The universe must really want me to tell you about the collage artist born Burgess Franklin Collins, who became known as, simply, Jess. And who am I to deny doing want the universe wants?

First, while reading the latest issue of the Paris Review, I came across a collage the artist had done in 1956 that made use of comics—and you already know how intrigued I am by collages like that.

Then (I assume because I wasn’t acting quickly enough), up popped a Publishers Weekly review of the book Jess: O! Tricky Cad and Other Jessoterica, which told me more about the former Manhattan Project radiochemist turned artist and informed me that the book’s “publication coincides with the beginning of a traveling exhibition of his work set for 2013 and 2014.”

So I guess I’d better share the image which intrigued me so, or else mentions of Jess will inevitably start creeping into every magazine I read! (more…)

Yesterday, I shared with you a few rather enigmatic videos hinting at Next restaurant‘s Kyoto menu, which has its official opening tonight, and this morning, I posted a pic of the menu scroll itself, which had been tweeted by someone lucky enough to attend the test dinner.

But for those who want something a bit more concrete, here’s the video Next released today which explains more about the food (and the spirit of the food) during the latest incarnation of its ever-changing menu, similar to what was previously released for Paris: 1906, Thailand, Tribute to elBulli, and Sicily. (Oddly, there seems to have been no official video for Childhood, so this footage, uploaded by others, will have to do.)

This is what the lucky first night diners were able to experience earlier tonight in Chicago. (more…)

Tonight, Next restaurant will officially launch its Kyoto menu—and as I told you yesterday, I bought tickets for an upcoming Kitchen Table there even though I had no idea exactly what Chefs Grant Achatz and Dave Beran would come up with.

Well, early this morning, Graham Elliot tweeted a pic of the menu that shows what he was served during the test dinner Thursday night—and what I can expect when I return to Chicago in November.

Can’t wait to experience the umami!

I’ve been remiss in not yet sharing with you my impressions of the visits I made to Next, Alinea, and The Aviary (plus The Office, a speakeasy beneath The Office) during Chicon7, but recovering from the trip while staying on top of Blastr left me with no remaining juice to tell the whole amazing story of the restaurants Chef Grant Achatz has created. Rest assured, though … that will come.

For now, suffice it to say that I was so enamored of his constantly changing restaurant, Next—if you don’t eat there during each cuisine’s brief run. you’ve missed it forever—that I decided my three-star Michelin taste of Sicily wasn’t enough and so booked tickets for Kyoto the moment they became available this evening.

Booked? Tickets? Why, what could Scott possibly mean? What kind of restaurant sells tickets?

Don’t worry, all will be explained later, when I finish my write-up of the above gastronomic experience … this weekend, I hope.

In any case, if you’re wondering what awaits me during Chef Achatz’s Kyoto menu, perhaps the first video teaser he released will explain it all.

Perplexed? Then maybe this second clip will enlighten you. (more…)

Martin Amis was interviewed in the July 2nd issue of Publishers Weekly (as you can see, I’m way behind on that magazine) and had this to say about why he spent an unusually long time (well, for him, anyway) revising his latest novel:

Lionel Asbo took Amis a year to write and a year to revise. “I’ve never spent that long revising before,” he says. “A writer friend asked me, ‘What did you put in that wasn’t there in the first draft?’ My answer was ‘anxiety,’ there wasn’t enough anxiety in it. Books come out of a mixture of ambition and anxiety, and the anxiety has to match the ambition, that’s just how it works.”

I don’t know about you, but when I write, anxiety is far from my mind. When I write, I go to a place of peace, a space of almost spiritual contemplation. I am in that zone runners talk about, in which all the world falls away, and everything’s right with the universe.

But then, that’s just me. Who knows? Maybe anxiety is what’s been missing from my writing all along.

What do you think? Do I need to become a little (or a lot) more anxious to become a better writer?

Here, from playwright and actor Wallace Shawn, is a sentiment you might find … inconceivable.

When I think about my own case, I don’t think of writing as a professional skill. I think of it as an odd thing that I feel an impulse to do. You eat chocolate because you feel a desire to do it. You don’t develop a technique for doing it. You don’t get better at it. And I don’t want to think of writing as a skill I have that I habitually exercise according to a certain schedule of procedures. If it had to be that, I’d possibly feel that I’d rather not to it. Actually, I find the idea of writing as a professional skill somewhat sickening.

I’m not religious, but wouldn’t a religious person find something sickening about it if he were asked to think of meditation, prayer, or adoration of the universe as professionalized skills for which a method could be codified? I guess I am halfway between saying that writing is too personal, intimate, humiliating, and miniscule to discuss and saying it’s too sacred and vast to discuss. And I don’t like to think of it as a thing I do the same way again and again. Who says one instance of writing has anything in common with another instance?

(from an interview in The Paris Review #201)

When I was a kid, I joined the Merry Marvel Marching Society the moment its existence was announced in the pages of the comics. Yes, I was that much of a Marvel fanboy, even though the term fanboy hadn’t been invented yet. But considering how I joined, it’s surprising I ever became a member.

I gathered my pennies, nickels, and dimes, shoved them into an empty Junior Mints box, taped it shut, shoved that into an envelope, taped that shut, and mailed the chunky package off to 625 Madison Avenue. After what seemed like a millennium of waiting, and wondering whether the mess I’d mailed ever made it, my membership kit arrived … including this snazzy button, which I still own, and which I often think of wearing to Comic-Con, stopped only by my fear of the heartache I’d feel if I lost it.

But there’s another momento of that membership I’ve lost over the years … and I’m hoping you can help me regain it. (more…)

I wish I could have shared the following videos while Chicon7, the 70th World Science Fiction Convention, was still ongoing, as that would have hewed to Edelman’s Schadenfreude Rule of Convention Reporting. But alas, I was far too busy. (Future posts will show you just how busy.)

First up, on Thursday, August 30, Adam-Troy Castro read his short story “My Wife Hates Time Travel,” recently published in Lightspeed. Since you weren’t there, you don’t get any of the chocolate chip cookies he was handing out in support of his new novel Gustav Gloom and the People Taker—which should teach you to show up in person next time.

And then, on Monday, September 3, I read “A Most Extraordinary Man,” a sequel of sorts to Saki’s “The Open Window,” which will be published in the anthology The Monkey’s Other Paw: Revived Classic Stories of Dread and the Dead from NonStop Press. (more…)

Behold the true but secret headline which hides beneath all headlines …

If only a newspaper would run this for real instead of leaving it as subtext!

(panel from Hawkeye #2, November 2012, words by Matt Fraction art by David Aja)