Barry Graham: Illusory Flowers in an Empty Sky

The Picnic by Vince Larue

On the last day of 2011, I offer warm thanks to my friends, my enemies, and everyone who reads this blog.

Here are the ten most-read blog posts this year:

Beavis and Butt-Head Should Study English Lit

Koan Commentary: The Book of Serenity, Case 20

Chris Hedges’ Hysterical Defense of Cornel West

We Must All Become Grandmothers

Any Man With a Microphone Can Tell You What He Loves the Most

Abortion: Choose Your Ideology and Defend It

Alone

Zen in the Street

There Is No Such Thing as Money

Writing Wipes the Dirt from the Window

The second book of mine to be published in French will be Before, which is being published in France as Les Nuits Blanches d’Edimbourg.

Vince Larue is doing the art for it, as he did with the first one, Regarde les Hommes Mourir.

It’s fitting that this book is being published in France, considering that its strongest influences are the films of Godard, Truffaut and Bresson, and the novella of the title is written in the style of a film - with suggestions for camera angles and music - but written in such a way as to be entirely a novel, and, while using the conventions of film, unfilmable.

This is the hand of the great French artist Vince Larue, with the books I wrote that he did the covers for. There will soon be our graphic novel, Dark Heat, and more books in the future.

© Vince Larue

When I was a boy, science fiction films, books and comics promised that 2001 and after would be a world with technology so sophisticated it would bear little resemblance to the world of the 20th Century. I laugh when I hear people lament that it never happened.