I’ve gotten in the habit of taking photos of books that look interesting to read. I have a big backlog on my phone at this point; here are the most recent.
I don’t actually want to read this last one, but it is an interesting curiosity, as it’s co-written by one of the world’s most famous sleep researchers.
On The Muppet Show, the young and annoyingly earnest Scooter gets to have his way—because his uncle owns the theater. Kermit, in order to put on his show, must keep him happy. Scooter suggests a number with a dancing poodle.
Kermit says, “It sounds, said the frog, displaying his artistic judgment, sappy.”
Scooter mentions his uncle.
Kermit adapts: “It sounds, said the frog, displaying his will to survive, wonderful.”
Ibid. (I’ve just discovered the “your Kindle highlights” page on Amazon — can you tell?)
[Henson:] I didn’t call him a frog.
[Interviewer:] Right, he was just Kermit the thing.
[Henson:] Yeah, all the characters in those days were abstract because that was part of the principle I was working under.… I still like very much the abstract characters and some of those abstract characters I still feel are slightly more pure. If you take a character and you call him a frog, or like Rowlf, our dog, call him a dog, you immediately give the audience a handle. You’re assisting the audience to understand; you’re giving them a bridge or an access. And if you don’t give them that, if you keep it more abstract, it’s almost more pure. It’s a cooler thing. It’s a difference of a sort of warmth and cool.… [I]n terms of going commercial and going broad audience, you want to reach the audience as much as possible, and you need those bridges.
Quoted in MAKE ART MAKE MONEY, Elizabeth Hyde Stevens
Doris Lessing, from the introduction to SHIKASTA, 1978. Plus ça change, what what?
It’s not often you come across a proper science fiction poem. (“The Neighbor’s Wife” is the only other one I can think of.) Read ye.
I’m both surprised and bummed that Lord Guan checked out this early. Will Zhang Fei be next? NO ONE IS SAFE.
I can’t be the only person in this world who wishes Steven Brust and Ta-Nehisi Coates were talking more, at least where I could hear it. Initially I just figured that they were two smart, well-spoken, well-informed people with shared interests in the Civil War and fantasy literature, and it was hard not to imagine an interesting conversation eventuating. As I’ve been reading them regularly over the months and years, some other trends emerge, both commonalities and contrasts. They’re both decidedly to the left of center, but it’s not the same “left” whose center of mass is people like me, i.e. mainly white folks with advanced degrees from brand-name universities who have a lot of opinions and don’t do a whole lot — although those people do, I think, form a large part of their audiences. They’re both from working-class backgrounds; both low on formal education, although the depth and facility of their thinking don’t appear to have suffered for it; both raised in families engaged in the work of revolution. Brust identifies as a revolutionary, but his brand of revolution doesn’t really have a place for racism as an organizing force in society, instead classifying it as a special instance of class war. Coates does not identify as a revolutionary yet, but in his recent “blue period” his dissection of the racist roots of American society is so comprehensive that it’s hard to imagine revolution can be far from his mind.
That’s perhaps overstated for parallelism’s sake. OK. But it arises not entirely inorganically when you read, from a recent post on capital punishment:
In America, the history of the criminal justice—and the death penalty—is utterly inseparable from white supremacy.
If you’ve been reading Coates in the last year, you know that “criminal justice” can be replaced with any X short of possibly dog breeding. I could say “in his opinion,” and that would be true, but I don’t want to dismiss it as just opinion–I think he makes a good case; I think it might really be true. Coates goes on to say
Understanding this, it is worth asking whether our legal system should be in the business of doling out an ultimate punishment, one for which there can never be any correction.
(The quoted “this” has a different referent in context, but I think the one implied here will serve.) Yes, it is worth asking. But it is also worth asking the next question, or rather, all of them at once: What should such a legal system be in the business of doing?
This isn’t meant to be a rhetorical question, at least not in the sense that it exposes an absurdity or a contradiction. I’m just trying to get where it goes. Criminal justice has a racist history, granted; racism still corrupts the practice of criminal justice today, acknowledged. Then what? If we shouldn’t accept this corruption in the death penalty, why should we accept it elsewhere in the law? If we shouldn’t–what do we do?
I don’t mean to suggest Coates should have an answer here. I’d appreciate one, but I don’t want to minimize the importance of anatomizing the problem. In any case, I wrote this post because the problem made me think of Brust and revolution. If the corruption in the system, whatever that is, is bone-deep and indelible, is there any other option?
Well, I imagine Coates saying, there’s always getting by. Living how you can. Talking about the problems, not out of any hope of fixing them, but out of fear that they’ll get worse if they’re overlooked. That’s a genuine form of hope, I guess; and even if it isn’t, maybe the idea that hope is necessary is an affectation of those who’ve never had to go without it.
John Scalzi’s latest Big Idea is LONG HIDDEN: SPECULATIVE FICTION FROM THE MARGINS OF HISTORY. I still need to finish Kai Ashante Wilson’s “The Devil in America”. From experience, it’s easy for nerds to think this stuff doesn’t matter. But there are whole worlds you wouldn’t think to build; whole worlds I’m sure I never will.
A few things brewing in the short fiction arena, though nothing along the lines of “sold a story somewhere” —
This is mostly to remind myself that things are happening in my creative sphere, despite my constant nagging feeling like nothing is getting done.
Oh, right, here’s the first paragraph of “Sack of the Summer Palace”:
The Rafters of the World are justly and unjustly famed for many things. The mandarins of the Orchid Court praise the refinements of poetry, strategy, and agriculture that have draped our dry and craggy lands with the rich silk of a flourishing society; the lamas of the White Way praise the favor of the deities that brought us the great prayer-engines of the Iron Harvest, whose secrets are like oysters, sweet to the persistent mind and lacerating to the hasty; the half-civilized zealots of the River whisper in fear of our deadly snakes, which they describe in terms that violate the precepts of physics and physiology, and croon with longing at the merest mention of our unremarkable goats. But even the albino barbarians, who betimes blow in on the spars of shattered ships or stumble arrow-pierced across our border with the Grass, are clear on one thing: Ua is not a warm realm. Warm days there are, aye, and warm regions, especially in the south of Degyen where the tableland begins its kowtow to the sea; but the kingdom’s fame is for chill cliffs, tree-deep avalanches, bears and tigers with fur enough to hide a brace of Therku lumberjacks and warm their lunchpails.
In the inevitable Lankhmar movie, the part of Fafhrd will surely be played by Tim Meadows.
the pulchrifex papers 