I went to a wedding in Saskatoon, and at the reception afterward, this guy I didn’t know, who was the apparent date of an ex-stripper in attendance, an ex-stripper I sort-of knew from way back when — she’d been in a dramatic production that I’d been in, a stage musical, before she got into striptease, and I never got along with her, partly because I found most of her friends total freaks… wait, anyway, most of that is irrelevant to the story. (And people wonder how come I churn out novellas, and tend towards long forms… It’s all about fixating …
Tag: SF
The Viridian Design Movement
As usual, the latest Viridian Note by Bruce Sterling is worth a read. It’s mainly about a piece by Al Gore published in Salon. One very funny, but sadly necessary, link in the Note is to this article in the New Yorker, which mocks the moronic Intelligent Design hokum that is so popular in America.
Thomas Disch Interview @ Strange Horizons
I’m not really into his fiction, but I liked his treatise on contemporary poetry a few years back. Interview.
Grab Bag
Okay, well, straight from the title of this post: Good News: I have started a new novel, and it’s not my SF-jail novel (which I think I’ll work on, off-and-on, for a while, but which isn’t my main focus now): it’s a kind of a futuristic espionage thing, but with several interesting (I think) twists. So far I’ve mapped out some of the background, and I have a pretty good handle on at least two of the main characters. One of the main struggles for me will be to maintain neutrality when faced with the two vying organizations envisioned in …
ESL Teaching and Ultraviolent Fantasy Life: An Interview With Richard Morgan
Richard Morgan is an SF writer who works with extremely violent plotlines and vicious, tough characters. But when I listened to this interview with him that I learned something very interesting about him: he used to be an ESL (EFL) teacher in Britain. In fact, he attributes the extreme violence in his writing to his work as an ESL teacher. He talks about the kind of necessarily suppressed rage that one feels when one is confronted with bigotry, celebration of evil crap like Hitler and the Holocaust, and all kinds of other disturbing things that, well, frankly, are all too …
Bloglines Catchup
I gave up on doing much of anything useful today; instead, I just kind of relaxed, did a little work on my ghost story, posted some comments to a friend about a draft of a novel she sent me a while back, watched Trainspotting, and turned to my bloglines subs to catch up… a little. There are too many posts to catch up on them all, so I’m going to (a) delete some subscriptions and (b) delete some of the subs I’m not really interested in tracking anymore, or which have stopped existing. One site I will not be deleting …
Reading and Reading and Reading Some More
I’ve been reading a lot lately, but haven’t had much of a chance to post about any of it, so this is going to be a mass posting about several books I’ve read lately. (As in, during the past few months, the ones that come to mind only.) Okay, let’s see. First in importance come two graphic novels I’ve read in French: Paul a un travail d’été, by Michel Rabagliati, and Volume 1 of Persepolis, by Marjane Satrapi. […and here’s an odd note: both of the authors’ names begin and end with the same letter. Hmmm.] The two graphic novels …
The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch
Ah, yes, I dare put Philip K. Dick into the “lit” department, which is where he absoutely belongs. On a strange and almost-hurtful day a few weeks ago I found one beautiful thing in Seoul; surely enough to prevent a Gomorrah, that one beautiful thing in such a city. It was a pile of novels by Philip K. Dick, whose writing is these days much more easily gotten, at least in the nation’s capital. And so, responding to several years’ curiosity, I purchased The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch and set it upon my shelf beneath such random books as …
Matrix 2, Animatrix…
Over the last couple of months I have not seen a lot of movies. I have been busy enough to actually miss, in the theater, several movies that I was actually interested in seeing. Perhaps the only movie I have managed to see in the theater in the last couple of months is the new Matrix: Reloaded sequel. However, one of my friends here has become a sort of movie dealer to me… he feeds me CD-ROMs with downloaded films on them, and I watch them. Among the many films he has thus made available to me was the Animatrix …