First, cover art for my next collection of essais, Style is the Rocket:
Featuring the title piece and a Bunch of Other Cool Stuff.
The Artist’s Statement
20 July 2015 by 2 Comments
Hat tip to Michael Flynn. Out of the mouths of smart-alecks comes spot-on satire:
‘Don’ts for Dogmatists’
17 July 2015 by 13 Comments
I should very much like to write one last roaring, raging book telling all the rationalists not to be so utterly irrational. The book would be simply a string of violent vetoes, like the Ten Commandments. I would call it ‘Don’ts for Dogmatists; or Things I Am Tired Of’.
. . . . . . . . . .
Don’t say, ‘There is no true creed; for each creed believes itself right and the others wrong.’ Probably one of the creeds is right and the others are wrong. Diversity does show that most of the views must be wrong. It does not by the faintest logic show that they all must be wrong.
I suppose there is no subject on which opinions differ with more desperate sincerity than about which horse will win the Derby. These are certainly solemn convictions; men risk ruin for them. The man who puts his shirt on Potosi must believe in that animal, and each of the other men putting their last garments upon other quadrupeds must believe in them quite as sincerely. They are all serious, and most of them are wrong. But one of them is right. One of the faiths is justified; one of the horses does win; not always even the dark horse which might stand for Agnosticism, but often the obvious and popular horse of Orthodoxy. Democracy has its occasional victories; and even the Favourite has been known to come in first. But the point here is that something comes in first. That there were many beliefs does not destroy the fact that there was one well-founded belief.
I believe (merely upon authority) that the world is round. That there may be tribes who believe it to be triangular or oblong does not alter the fact that it is certainly some shape, and therefore not any other shape. Therefore I repeat, with the wail of imprecation, don’t say that the variety of creeds prevents you from accepting any creed. It is an unintelligent remark.
—G. K. Chesterton, A Miscellany of Men
Visit Edmonton!
15 July 2015 by 2 Comments
The oldest and most vibrant Alberta tradition is the bitter rivalry, amounting to actual hatred, between Calgary and Edmonton. This dates back to 1905, when the Canadian government (over the objections of most Albertans) made Edmonton, then a village in the remote North, the capital of the new province, instead of the thriving young city of Calgary. As a sop, Calgary was supposed to be the site of the new University of Alberta… but that went to Edmonton as well. (Calgary did not get its own university until the 1960s.)
The long history of actual insults and injuries is largely forgotten now, except by old curmudgeons like myself; the rivalry has largely been sublimated into the realm of professional sports. The ‘Battle of Alberta’ between the NHL’s Calgary Flames and Edmonton Oilers, in particular, is heated and acrimonious, and in days gone by (when both teams were good) produced some of the most viciously entertaining hockey ever played. Just recently, the Oilers tried to freeze Calgary out of the act by trademarking the phrase ‘Battle of Alberta’, despite more than 30 years of usage in the public domain. This is how Albertans keep warm in the insanely long winters.
Herewith, one Calgarian’s effort to spruce up Edmonton’s public image.
‘Deal Me Out’
13 July 2015 by 3 Comments
Until the middle of the 1970s, conventional wisdom had it that a half-hour situation comedy had room for only one plot per episode. Subplots, if any, were kept down to the level of a running gag. Fitting a good story (and some laughs) into 25 minutes of film was hard enough; to tell two was thought to be impossible. M*A*S*H was one of the first sitcoms to break that rule and introduce multiple story lines per episode: so successfully, in fact, that the technique became a mainstay of the show’s formula in later years. Nearly every episode from the fourth season on has clearly identifiable ‘A’ and ‘B’ stories.
In those later years, when the original writers had been replaced by lesser talents, the ‘A’ story was usually straight drama. This afforded the actors opportunities for Serious Dramatics and tub-thumping on their favourite causes célèbres, whilst making the writers’ jobs easier. Comedy is much more difficult to write than drama; it is harder to act, too – though far less gratifying for the performer’s ego, since Oscars and Emmys and the like are generally awarded by humourless clods. (Charlie Chaplin never won an Academy Award as an actor; he got his sole Oscar as a composer, for the score to Limelight. Before he died, the Academy gave him an honorary award for lifetime achievement as an actor: the feeling was that if they let Chaplin die without winning an Oscar for his acting, the Oscars themselves would be devalued. Chaplin did not win an Oscar so much as the Academy won a Chaplin.)
In the first year and a half of M*A*S*H, there were several ‘odds and ends’ episodes, consisting mostly of comic sketches strung together without much pretence of a plot. Usually, the unifying device was a character’s letter home, as in the ‘Dear Dad’ episodes. ‘Showtime’, the final episode of the first season, lacked even that. Commissioned at the last moment, when CBS demanded one more episode than Reynolds and Gelbart thought they were under contract for, it features a USO performance at the camp, intercut with brief comical interludes. This was not where the future of the series lay.
That future began with an episode called ‘Deal Me Out’, in which, for the first time, the writers worked multiple plot lines together into a unified story. The structure is complex and ambitious, and in lesser hands, could easily have turned into an unfocused mess. Fortunately, the writers were Larry Gelbart and Laurence Marks, and the script is a landmark, not only in the history of M*A*S*H, but in sitcom history as a whole. [Read more...]
A follow-up: On hope
8 July 2015 by 36 Comments
After all, he never had any real hope in the affair from the beginning; but being a cheerful hobbit he had not needed hope, as long as despair could be postponed.
—The Return of the King
Dear Theophilus,
Not being a cheerful hobbit, I have not Sam Gamgee’s happy frame of mind. My outburst the other day, which the Loyal 3.6 have read, some have remarked upon, and one has sneered at, came from the exhaustion of hope. I shall try, this time, to be less cryptic and elliptical about what is bothering me. [Read more...]
Resolved
6 July 2015 by 14 Comments
I shall not fool myself again. I shall immure my heart in the living rock a thousand fathoms deep, where it will trouble no son of Adam, and vex no daughter of Eve. And though I have nothing to gain by my labours, labour I shall: for I cast my defiance in the teeth of oblivion. I have seen that no reward can come for my work in this world, for the longing of my heart is denied, and the desire of my soul is shut up against me. Asking bread, I have received stones; casting my net for fish, I have caught serpents. Very well, I shall live upon stones and serpents while I may; and though none may mark my passing, or remember my works thereafter, at least it shall not be said that I ceased from my duty. I shall sow, though I cannot reap; I shall pour out the last measure of myself, though the vessel be not refilled. Let it be for a bitter jest; and if all the world have no manner of use for me, nor for the work of my pen, still let the jest be played. God at least may laugh.
Eponymous, King of Kings
25 June 2015 by 12 Comments
H. Smiggy McStudge returns from sabbatical with another load of notorious codswallop. All the usual disclaimers apply, and possibly some unusual ones, too.
Since I have been on secondment to the Historical Branch, my lovelies, I have had a chance to observe some of the so-called talent that our academies have been vomiting forth. Just the other day, during a marathon committee meeting, we heard from a bright young thing who must be fresh out of the breeding vats. He had his full share of the myopic optimism and theory-fed smugness that one usually sees in those who have been extensively schooled but never educated: a type, fortunately, that breeds just as copiously among the humans as in our own genus. We are at no disadvantage there. Still it soured my gizzard to hear this puling brat snigger mechanically and say: ‘You know, we really ought to call ourselves the Society for the Prevention of Historical Knowledge.’
Fortunately the chairman squashed him like a beetle, but not as convincingly, perhaps, as I would have done. His objection was that whatever we might do for the grand cause of preventing historical knowledge among the humans, that in no way made us a society. Abhorrent word! It still stinks of its own etymology; for the Latin language, in which (as some of you poppets may have omitted to learn) socius means ally, is not yet as dead as we should like. Allies! Faugh! Society means cooperation; means mutual benefit; means, if anything at all, a voluntary gathering of people in pursuit of some common good. The Historical Branch does not exist for anybody’s good, except in so far as we all benefit from wreaking harm upon the humans. An army in battle is not a society, and nor is a plague of locusts. So spake the chairman; and they were sound enough remarks, but wide of the point.
The point, you see, is that our committee actually is there to prevent historical knowledge; and the worst way to go about it is to say so. Back at home in the Cultural Division, we have worked main hard for many years to infect the humans with a visceral loathing and contempt for the obvious; but even a human can take a hint, sometimes, when it is dropped on his skull in the form of an anvil. In the last century, the Communist Party U.S.A. (which learnt so much from us in methods and philosophy) operated numerous front groups in order to infiltrate and control liberal organizations. These front groups had names like ‘Patriotic Americans for a Brighter Tomorrow’. They were not called ‘Bolshevik Bastards with Bombs’. That much truth in advertising they dared not risk; nor should we.
That issue having been expertly mishandled, we returned to the subject of the meeting: how to destroy the various social sciences by contaminating them with each other’s methods. We have achieved great and lasting success by teaching silly historians to apply the techniques of anthropology to their own field. Anthropology is an inherently bogus field to begin with, for the proper study of mankind is anything but man. Man, if such an insect deserves to be studied at all, is the proper study of us McStudges, who have the proper critical distance to be objective about it. Even a human anthropologist can be right sometimes; or wrong in an interesting direction. But if we can once get a social scientist to work on solid historical evidence in the same vague and woolly way that he works on folkways and tribal tales, we can be sure that the result will be neither good anthropology nor good history. Motor oil is good for lubricating engines, and wine is good for lubricating souls; a mixture of the two is good for nothing. That is the principle that we follow, and it works beautifully as long as the humans never figure out what we are actually making them do.
I have before me a book not intended for scholarly consumption, but written by an ostensible scholar (a worm named Cavendish) to give gullible laymen the idea that they are reading a valuable summary of scientific findings. It is called Legends of the World. So far as this goes, it does us little good. Legends are harmless enough; a human can consume several tons of the things without any apparent ill effect. Where the Historical Branch goes to work is in smudging the border between legend and history: a harmful thing for the humans, and therefore very profitable for us. [Read more...]
Revenge of the Forbidden!
19 June 2015 by 11 Comments
Sarah Dimento, our Esteemed Cover Artist, offers some thoughts on her trade:
Your Generic-Ass Cover Makes Me Think There’s a Generic-Ass Book Inside
And in a heroic attempt to rid the world of generic-ass titles in the form ___ of ___:
The Cliché Fantasy Title Generator
Generate your own stupid fantasy title! Use at your own risk! Yes, you too can come up with classic titles at the touch of a button. Titles like:
Revenge of the Forbidden
Wizards of Evil
Evil of Wizards
Evil of Evil
and the ever-popular Arthurian saga:
Nightmare of the Round Table
Which ought to be the name of a book about a zombie King Arthur. Alas, there is a book (or at least a comic) that appears to be about a zombie King Arthur, or at any rate a zombie-killing King Arthur. It’s called Dead Future King, which is clearly the Wrong Title, because it has not got an of in it.
Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt
31 May 2015 by 24 Comments
I confess that I am unsure whether I should continue my posts on M*A*S*H, or whether I should just keep my notes to myself and take the existing posts private.
On the one hand, I seem to have found the perfect method for making my 3.6 Loyal Readers’ eyes glaze over. I certainly don’t mean to be boring, and it always dismays me when I succeed.
On the other hand, while I don’t know what constitutes a quorum of 3.6 Loyal Readers according to correct parliamentary procedure, I do know that a quorum of one writer is… one writer. So I might just take the attitude of the apazine editor quoted by Frederik Pohl in The Way the Future Was:
‘Wow, gang, you really slammed the last ish, but wotthehell, we’ll keep plugging.’
Your comments are important to me, even if you have nothing more to say than ‘I read this and it was OK’. They help me decide what is worth writing more of and what isn’t, and when they dry up, I find myself rather at sea.
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