Ambrose & Elsewhere

1. I had a dumb frustration dream last night: went to the grocery store, couldn’t find a cart–that sort of thing; nothing worth blogging about. But there was one memorable line in it. A bunch of guys were standing around in the cart area and one of them said, “Bowling. That’s my stimulus plan.” It sounded pretty plausible at the time: save the world economy through bowling. Crazier ideas have been proposed, so I say we try it.

2. Am I the only person who, when seeing news of the approaching green comet Lulin, thinks of the green meteor shower that began The Day of the Triffids? It’s fairly obvious that soon giant walking carnivorous plants will be feasting on our innards. Anyway, that’s one more thing to worry about, since there don’t seem to be enough problems to go around these days.

1. This would have been so cool!

2. This actually is cool, at least to my somewhat unbelieving eyes: the full jacket for Blood of Ambrose. (Dominic Harman blogs a bit about the process behind the cover here.)

I like the echoes of the cover-painting on the back and spine, and the overall color scheme. Someone has suggested that brighter colors stand out more appealingly on a bookshelf, but (a.) I hope and think that’s not so, and (b.) I think the black-and-blue goes better with the feel of the book. Readers might be baffled by finding a sword-and-sorcery story in a package sparkling with “inexplicable splendour of Ionian white and gold.”

3. In my intensive campaign to avoid doing any sort of useful work, I’ve taken to watching some old episodes of The Avengers. Last night I watched “EPIC”, which may have the least plausible plotline of any show in the series (yes, I know how strong a statement that is) but is far from the worst. One scene shows Emma waking up in an exact replica of her apartment, and being shocked when she finds out she’s been kidnapped. The same thing happens, of course, to Patrick McGoohan’s character in the first episode of The Prisoner, which hit the airwaves five months later (says IMDb). Influence? Allusion? Coincidence? Some other explanation?

1. John Scalzi’s AMC column is about the long odds against any book being adapted into a movie. He couches it as bad news, but I don’t see it that way. In my feckless youth, I pined for my favorite books to be adapted into movies; now (principally after the Dune adaptations, but also thinking of the Jackson LotR and the TV version of Earthsea) I fear that they may be.

2. It looks like there’s going to be a “new” Tolkien book: The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrun. I’d be psyched, except that it seems to be a verse narrative. I don’t think Tolkien was at his best in those.

3. Josh Marshall of TPM.com name-checks my favorite Roman philosopher, Seneca. It’s just the old line about “The Fates lead the willing but drag the unwilling,” which is really a translation from Cleanthes anyway. Still, that makes this a banner day.

4. Hence: this. (See what I did there?)

I just posted my Blog Gate entry of the week. This one is about not beginning with the beginning, among other things.

I’ve been spending practically my entire working afternoon trying to record a two-minute intro for the Audible version of Blood of Ambrose, after a couple of days of false starts due to technical snafus. (Until this megillah started, I had no idea that standard microphones won’t work with Macs, which need a powered mic or a USB mic.) Then there were the Audacity issues… Anyway:

I finally got a version which didn’t seem too scary bad, and I loaded it into iTunes to give it a listen. (Verdict: An “Eh” for effort.) The next track in the iTunes library began to play right afterwards: Debussy’s “Prelude to an Afternoon of a Faun.” It sounded horribly wrong and, at the same time, somehow right. The next track was Jane Krakowski singing “Run, Rudolph, Run” which was more in the “Totally Wrong” category.

From the “Not Everything True Is Useful” File:

“Nancy Pelosi is not Haman, Barack Obama is not King Ahashuerus, and John Boehner is certainly not Queen Esther.”

–Barney Frank

So who, in this scenario, isn’t Mordecai? Rahm Emmanuel? Rush Limbaugh? I’m confused!

As a chaser to my “metacriticism” Blog Gate post: here’s Morgan Holmes on Blish/Atheling on Poul Anderson. I don’t think MH is really being fair to Blish, but then Blish wasn’t being fair to Anderson either. What comes around goes around in a circle of bloggy injustice which is strangely like justice. (The link to MH’s short piece seen at lemuriapress‘s LJ.)

To celebrate this special day, I bought a copy of The Complete New Yorker. Actually, I just bought it because I found a copy remaindered at an incredible 82.5% off. More time than I like to admit was wasted with it this afternoon. When I say “wasted” I, of course, mean, “spent on job-related research.” Here’s the proof: a Chas Addams cartoon from 1936.

Some of the Addams cartoons are distressingly racist. (One never likes to learn stuff like this about one’s heroes.) But there were some antidotes to that, including this cartoon by someone named Hanley (sp?):

The text is at least equally amusing–lots of ephemeral stuff, but niftily written. And some of it comes under the heading of “everything old is new again”:

Admiral Plunkett’s suggestion that we may have to muzzle the press to preserve our liberties is too radical for us. We are also opposed to the suggestion that we shoot our admirals in order to improve the navy.

—The New Yorker, “Of All Things”, March 28, 1925

Snap! In addition to the pleasantly feline irony, I like the subtle erudition: I seem to hear an echo of Admiral Byng’s firing squad in the second sentence.

Good stuff, but it promises to be a pretty dangerous time sink. If need be, I’ll start transcribing whole pages of it into a new Morlock novel to keep my agent from singing at me.

My Blog Gate post for the week has gone up: some thoughts on rereading Le Guin’s The Language of the Night.

There’s some interesting discussion going on around Judith Berman’s latest Blog Gate post about the practical issues of women engaging in hand-to-hand combat.

My home state is apparently planning to invade Iran. I’m not sure what the casus belli is–possibly something about lutefisk, one of the few things that can cause a Minnesotan to leap off the twelve steps of rational sobriety and riot through the unlit streets of unreason. Lutefisk, or the Vikings winning the Super Bowl. So it’s mostly lutefisk people have to worry about.