Evil Monkey Transmission: From Down Under

Evil Monkey:Jeff, what're you doing? You're not supposed to be interrupting.Jeff:Clarion South students too awesome. Must blog.Evil Monkey:Don't blog! Sleep.Jeff:Eh. Sleep is overrated.Evil Monkey:Far be it from me to stop you, but many stupid things have been happening. Maybe you'd rather not know.Jeff:Try me.Evil Monkey:Locus tried a roundtable on the year's best and it's stinking up the joint. It seems to want to deny how the internet works. It's puffery at its worse. It makes me want to hate Locus, and I love Locus.Jeff:Why should I care? I've been teaching/learning from students for the last week. I don't give a crap about the rest. I just met 17 remarkable people.Evil Monkey:At the new media conference in NYC some complete moron asked why novels aren't more like websites. I say: because neither are oranges anvils, and once you get your head out of your ass, maybe you'll be able to see the horizon, too.Jeff:Why should I care? I just spent a week on another continent. I saw a tree possum late tonight, although, granted, it might've been a shadow.Evil Monkey:Nancy Kress called an obsidian crystal a porridge and then admitted it was an obsidian crystal, but still blamed the New Yorker.Jeff:That doesn't scan. I just had a revelatory week of teaching.Evil Monkey:The world doesn't care, Jeff. The world's continuing to get on with its business.Jeff:Why do people need to create categories?Evil Monkey:Because people have emotions and they have hierarchies and they need to have structure in their lives, and if they don't, they get afeared.Jeff:Ah--now I see. Kress asked why the New Yorker doesn't value Stross as much as Millhauser. Might as well ask why F&Sf doesn't value William Burroughs as much as Edgar Rice Burroughs. And on again and on again we go, and, honestly, who cares?Evil Monkey:I care. I live in this world. I have to read the headlines.Jeff:Maybe you just need to start living in the real world.Evil Monkey:I'll cease to exist in the real world, Jeff. There's nothing I can help you with in any *real* world.Jeff:Then maybe you're going to die, Evil, because right now I'm in a foreign hemisphere and the stars even look different and I'm looking at each word on a page and whatever manifests in the electronic world is as insignificant as a grain of sand in the desert.Evil Monkey:Soon, Jeff. Soon, you'll be reintroduced. Then you'll care. Then we'll have a proper conversation.Jeff:I hope not, Evil. I hope not.Evil Monkey:Godspeed frog emperor, godspeed...