Tactics is knowing what to do when there is something to do. Strategy is knowing what to do when there is nothing to do.
—Ksawery Tartakower
Archives for 2010
Tartakower on strategy
22 December 2010 by Leave a Comment
Silly observation #68
15 November 2010 by Leave a Comment
I spilled ink in a pet shop. Now I have a pet spot. His name is Dog.
G. K. C. on ‘Thou shalt not’
8 October 2010 by Leave a Comment
‘Thou shalt not’ is only one of the necessary corollaries of ‘I will’. ‘I will go to the Lord Mayor’s Show, and thou shalt not stop me.’
Anarchism adjures us to be bold creative artists, and care for no laws or limits. But it is impossible to be an artist and not care for laws and limits. Art is limitation; the essence of every picture is the frame. If you draw a giraffe, you must draw him with a long neck. If, in your bold creative way, you hold yourself free to draw a giraffe with a short neck, you will really find that you are not free to draw a giraffe.
—G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy
P. J. O’Rourke on the writing process
26 July 2010 by Leave a Comment
Writing is a slow and a difficult process mentally. How you physically render the words onto a screen or a page doesn’t help you. I’ll give you this example. When words had to be carved into stone, with a chisel, you got the Ten Commandments. When the quill pen had been invented and you had to chase a goose around the yard and sharpen the pen and boil some ink and so on, you got Shakespeare. When the fountain pen came along, you got Henry James. When the typewriter came along, you got Jack Kerouac. And now that we have the computer, we have Facebook. Are you seeing a trend here?
—P. J. O’Rourke, ‘Very Little That Gets Blogged Is Of Very Much Worth’
John C. Wright on fairy-tale logic
23 July 2010 by Leave a Comment
If the kiss of a princess is the only thing that can turn a frog into a prince, then that kiss and nothing else must be had. Being kissed by a Duchess or a Countess will not do, not even if Parliament so decrees. In a medical thriller or a science fiction story, perhaps, you can have someone discover an unexpected miracle cure, or have Scotty use the Transporter to turn the frog back to his true shape. Science fiction is all about problem solving through technology. Science fiction is about daydreaming. But Fairy stories are about logic.
—John C. Wright, ‘What to Do When Your Outline Breaks’
G. K. C. on tolerance
23 July 2010 by Leave a Comment
But modern tolerance is deafer than intolerance. The old religious authorities, at least, defined a heresy before they condemned it, and read a book before they burned it. But we are always saying to a Mormon or a Moslem — ‘Never mind about your religion, come to my arms.’ To which he naturally replies — ‘But I do mind about my religion, and I advise you to mind your eye.’
. . . . .
Historians seem to have completely forgotten the two facts — first, that men act from ideas; and second, that it might, therefore, be as well to discover which ideas.—G. K. Chesterton, ‘Mormonism’
David Wong on simplicity
17 June 2010 by Leave a Comment
Any claim that the root of a problem is simple should be treated the same as a claim that the root of a problem is Bigfoot. Simplicity and Bigfoot are found in the real world with about the same frequency.
—David Wong, ‘What is the Monkeysphere?’
John C. Wright on the Nebula Awards
17 May 2010 by Leave a Comment
John C. Wright explains how they pick the Nebula Award winners:
The selection process is relatively simple: the survivors of a Deathball tournament are examined by the Colossus-Skynet system for irregulationary defects, and if found acceptable, are sent to the haunted planet Arisia for mind-to-mind examination by the alien superbeing known as Mentor, and those who return sane are conducted to Wallach IV where the Bene Gesserit Witches test the candidate with a “gom jabbar” and the Box of Pain to distinguish the true humans from the mere human animals. Survivors are taught the Martian Language in order to achieve fourth level consciousness and exposed to the mind-altering rays of the Evolutionary Granolith, and expected to make at least one “drop” in full kit onto a planet controlled by the Klendathu. Then any remaining candidates are sent to Trantor, or maybe some other world covered entirely with buildings, and examined by the Jedi Council and the Psychohistorians to see whether passing the candidate will cause a disturbance in the force or throw off the predictive plan of history. The remaining candidates then cover themselves with walrus grease and wrestle nude with Harlan Ellison, or his evil twin Zebulon Ellison, in the Arena of Death, on a tightrope above a field of radio-active radium-knives. The winner is granted by the Padishah Emperor any space-kingdom on any of the garden-planets accidentally created by the Genesis Machine in the Multiple Green Sun system at the core of the galaxy, and any space princess for his bride, with the one exception (obviously) of the voluptuous yet deadly Princess Venomia, the Black Widow of Outer Space. The year Leigh Brackett won, instead of a space princess, she demanded her beloved World-Wrecker Hamilton be released from his disembodied confinement within the death-asteroid of the limbo dimension. The Padishah Emperor was loathe to set free so dangerous a planet-killer, but he had no choice.
I always thought SFWA was up to something fishier than meets the fishy eye.
Joseph Brodsky on evil
16 May 2010 by Leave a Comment
No matter how daring or cautious you may choose to be in the course of your life you are bound to come into direct physical contact with what’s known as Evil. . . . For the most interesting thing about Evil is that it is wholly human. To put it mildly, nothing can be turned and worn inside out with greater ease than one’s notion of social justice, civic conscience, a better future, etc.
—Joseph Brodsky
G. K. C. on cosmopolitanism
23 April 2010 by Leave a Comment
He who is homesick does not desire houses or even homes. He who is lovesick does not want to see all the women with whom he might have fallen in love. Only he who is sea-sick, perhaps, may be said to have a cosmopolitan craving for all lands or any kind of land. And this is probably why sea-sickness, like cosmopolitanism, has never yet been a high inspiration to song.
—G. K. Chesterton, Fancies Versus Fads
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