I just got hold of Jeff’s own The Third Bear yesterday, and it is next on my list after I fight through the last thirty pages of Titus Alone.

Uncanny Valley is a promising new project — online presence now, first print issue coming in 2011. If you’re the kind of writer who’s excited to submit to Birkensnake, you might also have work that you’d be excited to submit to Uncanny Valley.

As usual, electronic versions are available free in various formats, and print copies cost $4 each. The cover is definitely our most professional to date — for the first time, the vast majority of our prints look just about perfect to me. This is primarily because of Alec, but also, secondarily, because Joanna and Chemlawn and I are all geniuses.

In my own current daily life, Birkensnake is of course extremely significant: Joanna and Chemlawn and I spent all day today printing covers, and we’ll be back at it tomorrow morning. I am very tired.

Until this incident I had no idea that small convulsing bugs could make audible clicking noises. It seems like something someone should tell you early on, like here’s how to use toilet paper and by the way if you hear a weird clicking noise in a forest cottage it’s probably some bug convulsing.

I’ve been studying Modern Greek with Rosetta Stone — I mean Ancient Greek for a few years with books and such, but then only recently the expansion to Modern Greek. Rosetta Stone is this software where you look at photographs and listen to words in a foreign language and try to figure out what the hell is going on, and eventually you get the feeling that you’re being hypnotized. Each unit ends with an exceptionally surreal interaction, maybe it’s called a “capstone,” where an extended adventure is sketched out from a first-person perspective in a series of photos; for example, my most recent one had a character, “me” I guess, going around town shopping for 35 flowers, 48 eggs, a chair, and a suit. There would be a picture of a store “I” was going into, then a picture of “my” shopping list, then a picture of the shopkeeper as “I” told her I’d like to buy 35 flowers, then a picture of her asking what color, etc. At some point, I think when I was trying on the suit, I got to look in a mirror and noticed that I was a plump middle-aged man with a trim gray beard. You can imagine how all of this might put one a little off balance, this suddenly being thrust into the shoes of a plump middle-aged man with a trim gray beard assembling a mysterious set of objects in an unnamed and generic city.

I sometimes have dreams set in a certain city. The dreams aren’t recurring, but the setting is. Sometimes I’ll be in a new part of the city, seeing things I’ve never seen before, but I’ll know that in one direction there’s a tram that goes up a steep hill, and in another direction there’s a kind of underground shopping district, and if I walk a long way on that sidewalk and then turn left I’ll get to a glass tower. And all of those are places that I’ve been before, in other dreams.

Some years ago in Twice Sold Tales in Seattle I came across a funny little pamphlet called “The Road to Meikle Seggie,” by Richard Demarco. I couldn’t figure out what it was, so I bought it. It was one of those things that seem to have been written for people who already know, and that suggest parallel universes. It seemed to be about roads, especially forgotten and difficult roads that end up leading nowhere. I remember it here because there were some line drawings of Edinburgh in it that, although they didn’t resemble any kind of city I had seen in my dreams, did convey they impression of an Edinburgh that someone else had seen in his own dreams. There are currently some Road to Meikle Seggie videos on YouTube, and they are about Richard Demarco, and so definitely connected with my little pamphlet, but they are mostly about the design of an arts center in Malta. It’s hard to call them entirely interesting, but there is something unearthly about them, especially in the segments that feature officials from the Maltese government.

Does it seem like actual cities become harder and more real and less evocative every day? Even if they are in Malta? Is this an illusion — is everything just more romantic the farther away from it we are? Maybe we should take some kind of action to produce more and better artists.