In the mood for pirates, rum, beheaded holy men (whee!), metal men, and spaceships? Go over to Atomjack and read my classmate and friend Ben’s story Of Rum, Madness, Thunderstorms and Prayer. It’s good, piratical fun.
Category: REVIEWS
No Maps
It must be weird to be asked to talk to someone with a camera long enough to have an hour and a half of footage. I’m watching the William Gibson documentary No Maps For These Territories, and I’m struck by the difficulty of this kind of “performance.” No doubt it is a performance: sitting around and talking is different from sitting around and talking to a camera. It’s interesting in a number of ways. It certainly provides some context to Gibson’s career, especially his recent comments about SF and the comments in the documentary about the relative difficulty of imagining …
Pedal Up
Rahsaan Roland Kirk, 1975. Damn!
Robbing Your Creditors of an Hour
I just noticed the sidebar quote for the last time I loaded my page was from Walden: Some of you, we all know, are poor, find it hard to live, are sometimes, as it were, gasping for breath. I have no doubt that some of you who read this book are unable to pay for all the dinners which you have actually eaten, or for the coats and shoes which are fast wearing or are already worn out, and have come to this page to spend borrowed or stolen time, robbing your creditors of an hour. -Henry David Thoreau, Walden, …
In case you were wondering…
I realized that, being that I live near Seoul, someone might wonder whether I am trustme3, mentioned in this pretty silly, anxious, pathetic document pertaining to the whole illegal takedowns notice thing that Andrew Burt of SFWA instigated. Although I enjoyed Cory’s book, that wasn’t me. I didn’t even know about Scribd until Doctorow mentioned it over in Yokohama.
Oh Ursula, Ursula, Why?
On this, and this, and this, which I learned about from this. In the comment thread to the first post, Mr. Burt, the snarling copyright poodle of SFWA, claims that Fair Use is often recommended to be 5-10% of a work. Which, of course, raises an interesting question. Nick Mamatas notes how this is a number Burt has pulled right out of the hole in his bottom, but let’s give it the momentary benefit of the (serious) doubt, see how it looks when you wipe the poodle dung off. If 5-10% <i>were</i> Fair Use, would it make sense for people …
Miéville on Floating Utopias
China Miéville’s article Floating Utopias, or at least the bit online, was a good read.
Rudy Rucker’s Postsingular Launch/Art Show
Hey all. The art show for Rudy Rucker’s new novel, Postsingular, is happening on November 9th-11th at the amusingly named Live Worms Gallery. He’ll be there all weekend, but will be joined by Kage Baker for readings on the Saturday, in the late afternoon, for those of you over in San Francisco. Durn ocean. I just can’t make it, sadly. (It’s one of those things about living far away that is hardest for me: no readings I can attend, or literary events of the kind I enjoy.) Anyway, here’s a link to the announcement with more details, and you can …
“The Head Ach”
William Wordsworth’s sister Dorothy’s diaries have been published. They are none too interesting. I had to read on in undergrad, perhaps because we were reading William Wordsworth, it was a Nineteenth-Century Life Writing course, and the idea of a diary (by a woman, no less) filled in slots in the course both in terms of gender representation, and genres of life writing. But I would rather have read something interesting by a female writer of the time. Not to disparage my professors in that class — Harding and Vargo were great, and most of their other choices were great. (I …
Skewering Twits
I remember reading, somewhere — in a long-ago issue of Dragon Magazine back in the 80s, I think — some quip about wizards being “cute… on the end of a spear.” One of the joys in the blogosphere, for me, is watching Nick Mamatas skewer twits so we can see how cute they are on the end of his verbal spears. Example here. Object lesson? Don’t pretend you’re in a Creative Writing MFA program with a writer who is: actually good cleverer than you likely to verbally bitchslap you online (deservedly) when you inevitably become offensive … and then go …