I recently mentioned reading The Lais of Marie de France. Now, I discussed her work specifically in that previous post, but the introduction actually reminded me of a nexus of things that connect in interesting ways: the medieval concept of mouvance, our modern concepts of remixing and the Creative Commons, and the profound difference between oral and literate cultures… and what the implications might be for magical systems in fantasy worlds unlike ours. (Say, those that have predominantly illiterate populations.)
Category: GENERAL
Publication News: Cthulhu Fhtagn! and More…
I’ve been writing less short fiction since embarking on my novel project—which has once again taken over my life, as it does during work holidays—but I’m happy to announce that Ross Lockhart’s Lovecraftian anthology Cthulhu Fhtagn! Weird Tales Inspired by H.P. Lovecraft is available for preorder at Amazon.com as a Kindle ebook; the print release is on August 15th, which is this Friday Saturday (oops). (See the publisher’s website for more information.) Among many other tales by esteemed Lovecraftians, Cthulhu Fhtagn! includes my “The Return of Sarnath.” Those that know “The Doom That Came to Sarnath” can probably guess some of what it’s about, though in fact it’s another …
Recovery Complete; Recovery Irrelevant
Well, I’ve finally recovered the complete contents of my blog. I’d intended to do so for quite a while, so why don’t I feel more excited about it? I guess bevause it doesn’t amount to much: maybe the first ten posts on my original Blogger blog (somehow still online though I haven’t posted there since 2003!), which were ported over but somehow got lost along the way, have been reintroduced to the database, along with a ton of old creative writing stuff I long ago put up on the blog, then decided to take down and partially move over to my Stuff to …
Surviving in Trollworld
So, Facebook’s buzzing over some idiotic opinion piece (don’t click on that link: trust me, you don’t need to read it) by one Choi Shi-yong that mostly amounts to “Korea=civilized; foreigner=uncivilized” as the theme that runs through the stream-of-consciousness drivel. There’s some particularly patronizing garbage about how sometimes they do after all… when they’re taught respect by Korean society: On the other hand, I saw a Canadian friend in a bus who has lived in Gwangju for over 10 years. He was willing to give his seat to the old lady after finding that she was standing right behind his seat. I thought that …
Boyoung Kim’s “An Evolutionary Myth”: Reviews and Comments, and Audio Version
I mentioned recently that our translation of Boyoung Kim’s “An Evolutionary Myth” was published in May, in the (excellent) 104th issue of Clarkesworld. Since then, a podcast of the story has been released—you can hear it here. It’s worth mentioning that, David Steffen deemed Boyoung’s story the #4 best of Clarkesworld’s story podcast episodes (out of a total of fifteen best) in his review of Clarkesworld’s podcast. In addition, the story has been reviewed a few other times since it was published, and very positively too! It was one of Lois Tilton’s recommended stories for the month. In her reviews column in Locus, she …
NO LONGER: Broken Comments Form
UPDATE (28 May 2015): It’s fixed! My comment form is now working properly. For those who’re looking for a way to update DevPress’s Cascade theme, I’ve posted the fix to the WordPress support forums, but I’ll duplicate it here:
Medicine in the Early 18th Century
From Jennifer Lee Carrell’s The Speckled Monster: A Historical Tale of Battling Smallpox, a brief account of how, in the early Georgian era, … medicine was unabashedly aggressive; in an attempt to be heroic, it was more often horrific. A very few practical men had begun systematically observing their patients and describing symptoms that clustered into specific maladies. The most eminent physicians of the day, however, were abstract philosophers who snipped and stretched experience to fit theory, in their case a modified version of the ancient Greek theory of the four humors. Good health, in this system, was a perpetual circus act, …
The Perfect Pitch Karaoke Paradox… and its Probable Resolution
I’m still working my way through the book I mentioned in my last post, Steven Mithen’s The Singing Neanderthals: The Origins of Music, Language, Mind, and Body, and I seem to have come upon a paradox. The paradox has to do with the geographical distribution of perfect pitch and relative pitch ability in adult humans, as it relates to the invention of karaoke.
Verbal Grooming, Social Media Tribalism, and Opiates
So, a follow-up to my earlier post on Social Networks and how we behave on them: Steven Mithen’s The Singing Neanderthals: The Origins of Music, Language, Mind, and Body is a fascinating book, even if sometimes I feel like the short chapters jolt me out of the experience, and even if his use of the word “ape” as non-inclusive of humans (who actually are members of the ape family) is distracting. The text mostly addresses the question of how deeply linked, evolutionarily and neurologically speaking, are the human capacities for music and for language, as well as exploring various theories about the musicality of speech and the the …
Social Media, Ender Wiggin, And the War With Eastasia
Recently, Kevin Geary posted a horrifyingly muddled, cynically manipulative article on the rhetoric of “both sides” of the so-called “vaccine debate.” (Like the “debate” over evolution, this isn’t a debate: it’s an extended performance of the Dunning-Kruger Effect, wherein people who cannot think logically sit around patting themselves on the back for being more logical than the people who actually can think logically.) Since I wish to deprive Geary of hits benefit — for reasons I’ll mention in more detail below — here’s a donotlink-shielded link to the article, in all its horrendously ignorantist glory: Bringing Much-Needed Sanity to the Vaccine Debate: I normally would …