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I saw this in my neighborhood. Please vote.

The Graveyard Book

Just listened through Neil Gaiman’s new offering The Graveyard Book and I must say, if any of his fans (or fans of speculative fiction in general) are avoiding picking it up because it is ostensibly a “children’s book” – you are doing yourself a disservice.  This is a book that anyone (including children obviously) could read and enjoy, not a “book for children”.  There is a difference.

The premise is simple enough: this is basically a riff on the Mowgli stories from Kipling’s The Jungle Book (and other literature with similar themes).  But rather than having a character raised by animals and learning their ways, the protagonist “Bod” (a toddler as the story beings) is taken in and cared for by dead people.  In a graveyard.  Great seed idea really.  I’ve always loved when this author, generally in his short stories, plays with themes and styles of other kinds of literature and this experiment is no exception.

The narrative style has a cool structure: the entire eight chapter book defines a complete story.  However, every chapter is essentially a self-contained short story, each taking place approximately 2 years apart.  The only thing that really jumped out at me about this being accessible for younger audiences is the prose he chose.  I once heard an interview with Mr. Gaiman and when asked how he approached writing children’s books versus his regular output, he said (me paraphrasing) that when writing children’s books, every word was there for a reason, whereas in his other books (he used American Gods as an example), there were plenty of words included just because he wanted them there.  So yes, the prose in The Graveyard Book is very focused and compact, but it is still descriptive and playful and the self-contained chapters keep things fresh and interesting.

Even with its accessibility to younger readers with it’s compact prose and smaller cast of characters, it can still be pretty dark in places.  Bod is being raised by dead people after all, and some of the characters, like his not-dead yet not-alive guardian Silas, definitely have a sinister edge.  Plus (this is not a spoiler as it happens on the first page), the book begins by the toddler Bod wandering out of his house at the exact moment that the rest of his family is being murdered by a knife-wielding intruder who likes his work a little too much.  And unlike most children’s books (I would imagine) this actually has a rather melancholic ending.  Made me a little sad at least.

The audiobook was a real treat as well.  As with the audiobook releases of his short story collections, this is narrated by Neil himself.  I understand why they get “professional narrators” to do his longer and more complex works like American Gods and Neverwhere, but there is a certain delight in listening to a storyteller read their own story.  While not a professional voice actor, he assuredly brings a certain additional charm to his own work. The audiobook is just under eight hours long and the chaptering style makes it really easy to manage.  Each chapter is perfect for a train ride or a run.

The other awesome thing he did was how they did the book tour for the release.  At each consecutive stop, he read a chapter from the book – they videotaped the reading and made the videos available for free online.  It seems that Neil in cooperation with his publisher Harper Collins has been showing that you can actually increase sales by giving away content.  I wish more companies would get on board with this.  If they spent as much time trying to find new and inventive ways to market their product as they do lobbying Congress, they might move some more units.  I discovered Gaiman’s oeuvre from one of these giveaways and that certainly got him a fan and his publisher a new customer.

So, I need to give this one a thumbs-up.  In either audio or written form, this is a compelling and inventive story that just about anyone can enjoy.  Unless you’re a jerk.  If you do have a child, then read it to them and you’ll both have a blast.  And hey, Halloween is almost upon us so everyone can use a creepy story right about now!

I happened across an interesting iPhone App today that integrates with/enhances the built-in camera.  It is called CameraBag and it purports to emulate other camera formats/film sizes/effects.  You can use it “live” while taking pictures or doctor already taken pictures on your iPhone, and I must say, it’s pretty cool.  It won’t replace Photoshop, but for on-the-fly pix to be posted to the cloud, it has it’s uses.  And at a current price of $2.99, one could do worse.

The app mimics various cameras lens/exposure styles (apparently the preset names are changed for copyright reasons), border styles and aspect ratios:

1. Helga: An old toy square format camera with vignetting. Square format.
2. Lolo: Not sure of the vintage, but makes very vivid shots. Square format w/borders.
3. Cinema: Dramatic contrast-y shots with the appropriate 16:9 aspect ratio.
4. Ansel: Mister Adams style smooth silvery B/W gradients.  Original aspect.
5. 1962: Old style contrast-y B/W. Original aspect.
6. 1974: Washed out color photos.  3:2 bordered aspect (Polaroid?).
7. Infrared: For infrared landscapes shots.  Original aspect.

Here are comparison shots based on one picture – click on the thumbs for larger pix (the thumbnails don’t represent the aspect ratio of the final shots):

This is the original shot from my iPhone.  Predictably, it’s a crappy shot.  A no flash indoor/incandescent light/no ambient light shot, so it is fuzzy and has the horrible indoor white balancing issues you would see in such a snap.  Not to mention, the iPhone is not the best camera on the planet.

The orginal shot

This is the Helga tweek: all nicely washed out and vignetted.  It has charm.

Helga preset

This is the Lolo shot: it boosted the shitty indoor “gold bloom” white balance issues, but amped up the colors and contrast.  I’ll say more about this preset later since this is a bad example of this preset.  Note the stylistic thick border around this one – kind of cool, no?

Lolo preset

The Cinema shot: the aspect of this shot is all wrong (since it is applying a 16:9 landscape aspect to a portrait aspect shot), but it’s nicely touched up the contrast and colors of the shot.  Probably want to shoot “live” through the CameraBag when using this one rather than post-processing (it gives you a mask to aim off of when you are shooting “live”).

Cinema preset

The Ansel shot: very nice smooth greyscaling.  This will work nicely if one wants a good B/W shot.

Ansel preset

The 1962 shot: cool, constrasty and grainy.  I like this one.  One could get all dramatic with this one.

1962 preset

The 1974 shot: normally I like more saturated photos but I like the somewhat washed out version here and the interesting aspect ratio/bordering. Plus, Bethany likes it, so it’s gotta be good.

1974 preset

The Infrared shot: probably a bad example since I think this is mostly for outdoor nature shots.

Infrared preset

One can either post-process shots taken with the internal camera – in which case it creates a new processed copy – or “shoot directly” from the plugin where it just saves the doctored version. As noted above, it’s probably a good idea to shoot “live” through the app when using one of the square-ish or cinema presets.

I wanted to give another quick look at one of the presets that looks useful: the Lolo preset.  It seems to make things really vivid.  Consider the following:

Bad light Lolo test

This is a prety banal shot really.  Just an uninteresting tester picture of some junk on my back porch.  However, this was taken on one of those horrible San Fransicso days where the light, the air, and everything else was basically the color of dirty dishwater.  The light was low, the focus is lame, and there was no flash.  But everything with color, including the cherry tomatoes on our dying vines, has some snap.  So that’s sort of cool.

All told, CameraBag is no substitute for lovingly post-processing your shots in Photoshop/Pixelmator/whatever.  Then again, the iPhone is not really a substitute for a proper point and shoot (or better).  Since more and more photos from sketchy “cameras” like the iPhone are getting put online via social networking sites/apps without intervention, I think that CameraBag is not a bad way to touch up an iPhone photo or front-load a little artistic touch before doing something with it.

Final verdict: check it out!

Having purchased a new iphone today, it is only natural to put it through some paces. We said goodbye to Sprint – good coverage, crap phones. And it is all too tempting to not try to blog from it since “you can”. So here goes. A somewhat content free post sporting a phone taken pic of one of our Maine Coons (Momiji in this case). He is chilling in/on some of our shopping containers. The photo placement tweeks seem somewhat limited with the Wordpress iphone app, so consider it a test post. Apparently crap Internet content can be augmented with the inclusion of cute feline media, so such is the tactic here.