To tolerate does not mean to forget that what we tolerate does not deserve anything more.
—Nicolás Gómez Dávila
Archives for September 2016
Spangling the conversational firmament
26 September 2016 by 3 Comments
You can tell you’ve been having a strange conversation when – well, let me just give you the last line:
‘You know, there’s a reason why very few dogs are employed by the better restaurants as dishwashers.’
Cincuenta
25 September 2016 by 3 Comments
Over at According to Hoyt, they’re having Sunday Vignettes. The object is to write 50 words (exactly 50, if possible) on a given prompt. Today’s prompt is ‘alchemy’. My own humble contribution:
I went Midas one worse. Everything I touch is transmuted. Food turns to metal when I try to eat. The love of my life is now a lifeless statue. Everything in my house is hard, shiny, and useless.
But I didn’t even get gold.
Anybody want fifty tons of zinc?
‘Superversive’ coming soon
25 September 2016 by 12 Comments
Someone showed me a picture and I just laughed—
Dignity never been photographed.—Bob Dylan, ‘Dignity’
Neither the redoubtable Sarah Dimento nor I could think of any good way to draw a picture of a superversion; so after long dithering, I asked her to come up with a simple text design.
Here, then, is the cover for Superversive: Recovering the Tao of Fantasy, coming soon to an Amazon near you.
The exotic and the familiar (Part 3)
24 September 2016 by 9 Comments
Continued from Part 2.
In the first half of the twentieth century, the ‘school story’ was one of the most popular genres of British pulp fiction. The giant of the field was Charles Hamilton, better known as ‘Frank Richards’ and ‘Martin Clifford’. Under these two names, he was the lead writer for The Gem and The Magnet, the two leading boys’ weekly magazines in Britain between the World Wars. (He also wrote for other markets under other names, including his own.) For more than thirty years, Hamilton published a 20,000-word story in each magazine every week without fail – more than two million words of fiction per year – until they were killed by the paper shortage of the Second World War. After the war he continued to write, with paperback books taking the place of the vanished pulps. By the time he died in 1961, he had written and published about 100 million words.
Many other writers had a go at school stories. Thomas Hughes founded the genre with Tom Brown’s School Days in 1857, and attracted scores of imitators. Kipling was one of the first; P. G. Wodehouse made a name for himself in the genre before switching to light comedy; and there were, of course, many lesser lights. But the genre died with Hamilton, as it seemed, beyond resurrection. [Read more…]
The Nine Worst Provisions in Your Publishing Contract
23 September 2016 by 1 Comment
David P. Vandagriff, the intellectual property lawyer who blogs at The Passive Voice, has done the writers of the world a valuable service. He has written a short book on some of the most dangerous clauses in publishing contracts – clauses that can cause an author severe financial distress or even kill his career.
The book is called The Nine Worst Provisions in Your Publishing Contract, and from now until Sunday, 25 September, it is available as a free download from Amazon’s Kindle store. (After that, the regular price is a trifling $2.99.)
If you’re a writer thinking of working with a traditional publisher, or if you have already done so, I urge you to download it here.
Apologies
22 September 2016 by 7 Comments
Part 3 of ‘The exotic and the familiar’ has been badly delayed. My doctors have changed my medication yet again, and my body and mind are struggling to adapt. Going cold turkey on one drug has given me nightmares, reduced mental acuity, and random weepy bouts. Starting up on another drug has given me insomnia and anxiety attacks. Both of these effects are bound to go away in a few weeks, but until then, I am having great difficulty applying myself and getting work done
On top of that, I somehow managed to throw out my back and strain a muscle. For the first 24 hours, I could not stand up straight, but had to walk like Dagwood Bumstead or Groucho Marx. Now I can stand, though not without pain, and my mind is mildly fogged with painkillers.
I am very sorry for the delay. Please pray, if that be your wont, that I may get through the next few weeks without any more of these interesting experiences.
Relative truths
21 September 2016 by Leave a Comment
Truths are not relative. What is relative are opinions about truth.
—Nicolás Gómez Dávila
The exotic and the familiar (Part 2)
14 September 2016 by 6 Comments
Continued from Part 1.
Throughout the 1970s, the ‘New Hollywood’ had been establishing itself. Heroes and villains, Westerns and war movies, were out of fashion. The critics’ new darlings were men like Coppola and De Palma, who pointed their cameras at the mundane and the sordid. The good characters in the new films were ineffectual; the effectual characters, as a general thing, were unselfconsciously evil. This refusal to engage ethical reality was called ‘moral ambiguity’, and praised; the tight focus on a narrow and unrepresentative segment of modern city life was called ‘realism’, and praised more strongly still.
So far as the film business was concerned, fantasy, like animation, was banished to the realm of children’s movies. Such things were considered beneath a grown-up audience, and Hollywood as a whole was trying to be very grown-up indeed. One or two cracked auteurs tried to make animated fantasies for adults, and succeeded in making cult films for stoners and adolescents. [Read more…]
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