Month: June 2014

Sponsor Me! (Please?)

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So, I’m doing the Clarion West Write-a-Thon this summer. I started a week ago, and was meaning to post about it, but I got busy, so I’m posting now instead. I need sponsors, because trust me, I’m writing my ass off. What’s a Write-a-thon?  Like a marathon, except instead of running, you write and write and write. The money raised goes to the Clarion West Workshop. Sign me up! Cool! You can sponsor me here! Just follow that link and click on Sponsor Gord Sellar. How will I know if you finish your writing pledge? I’ll be posting weekly updates on …

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Georgian England, The Developing World, Crime Prevention, and Internet Trolls

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Life in Georgian London was an alien sort of existence: it’s hard to wrap your head around it, though there is one analogy I’ve discovered for it that neatly says a lot about the things we take for granted… and also suggests something of our future, too. I suspect the unexpected key is this figure: Yes, our old friend… the internet troll.  I’d argue that, among other things, the Internet is pretty invaluable in keeping humanity acquainted with what it’s like to live in a lawless, unpoliced world. Which is the kind of world that people in the 1730s lived …

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Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand by Samuel Delany

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Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand is a very difficult book to talk about. It’s a challenging book to read, too, but talking about it seems harder than reading it, to me. That’s usually a sign that there’s something worth thinking over, though I am struggling to find a way into discussing it. Certainly, a mere “reader reaction” of the type that one sees all over the internet seems insufficient, for the same reason it strikes one as ridiculous for someone to walk out of a hall where a piece by Mahler or Webern or Stravinsky has just …

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Bev, Gandhi, and Chinese Drivers

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The other day, I posted this video on Facebook: The responses on Facebook were interesting: https://www.facebook.com/gord.sellar/posts/10152490693171070 Note that it was in the second response that the discussion suddenly focused on stupid things Koreans say to white people, like, “Wow, you can use chopsticks!” or “Please marry someone from your own country.” The second comment. It’s interesting because, as outsiders in a culture, people often tend to try fit their experiences into an understanding of that culture. Which, you know, is skewed by the fact that people tend to remember most clearly, the most offensive and idiotic exchanges they’ve experienced.1 In …

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Howard Who? by Howard Waldrop

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I just finished Howard Who? on Tuesday night, though I first read “The Ugly Chickens” a couple of years ago, and loved it. (My edition is the Peapod Classics one put out by Small Beer Press, pictured at the right.) So of the “slipstream” books I’ve read from Small Beer aren’t really my thing, but this collection was overall really, really good. It’s worth noting, by the way, that this is a Small Beer reprint: the collection was Waldrop’s first, and originally was put out by Doubleday in 1986. It seems so obvious to me that a smaller press could fruitfully …

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And Called It… Macaroni?

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Yes, even in Canada we know the Yankee Doodle song. But like everyone else, as kids we giggle and find that last line in the first verse: Yankee Doodle went to town Riding on a pony; He stuck a feather in his hat, And called it macaroni… Who the hell sticks a feather in his hat and then calls it “macaroni”? What in the hell is that about? Maybe everyone else knows, but I sure didn’t. Not till the other day, anyway. The answer, as for so much around here lately, lies in Georgian England.

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Two Comets: H.G. Wells and W.E.B. Du Bois

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I mentioned the other day that I’ve been writing a couple of short stories, just to give myself a breather on the novel I’m working on. One of those stories, the one I discussed in connection with the 1960 Newport Jazz Festival, is kind of response to two interesting “comet” SF stories I read back in 2010, and have been thinking about ever since: In the Days of the Comet by H.G. Wells, “The Comet” by W.E.B. Du Bois (which was collected in the first of Sheree Renée Thomas’ Dark Matter anthologies, but it’s also available in the public domain, as part Du Bois’ …

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Newport Jazz Festival, 1960:The Year They Called the National Guard

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You won’t catch me hating on the Newport Jazz Festival, of course! When I was a teenager, the festival on Rhode Island had a kind of magical aura of importance: on PBS I’d seen footage of Gil Evans playing there with Art Farmer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nlgKLwhoVgI … and listened time and again to John Coltrane and Archie Shepp’s New Thing at Newport: … and Dizzy Gillespie’s big band recording At Newport: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GJF7075fvg4 … dozens and dozens of times. (Seriously, in high school, I was baffled by how everyone was into music we all knew nobody would be listening to by 2002. My jam …

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The Beggar’s Opera by John Gay

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(Note: This is a longish post. I apologize that I could not shorten it further, but I haven’t the time.) Those in the know will note that I specified only John Gay, and not the composer Pepusch: I’m working on getting hold of a copy of the opera–the 1983 staging, supposedly with the original music, aired by the BBC–but for the moment I just have the public domain etext from Project Gutenberg. It’d be an understatement to say that The Beggar’s Opera was kind of a big deal during and after its first staging in Haymarket back in 1728. Better to …

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Steam-Powered Brewing and Gibson & Sterling’s The Difference Engine, or, Research vs. That Other Thing

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I mentioned a while back that I’m listening to an audiobook of The Difference Engine. Well, I’m pretty close to the end now, and enjoying the hell out of it. One phrase that comes to mind is how Edward Said described the novel as a form (in the process of explaining why understanding novels were useful to understanding imperialism), in Culture and Imperialism: Note the highlight: “an incorporative, quasi-encyclopedic cultural form.” That is not only something I aspire to in my own fiction writing, but it most definitely is true of The Difference Engine, except it’s sort of a weirdcyclopedia, …

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