Ambrose & Elsewhere

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.

I don’t know if it’s come up before here, but my novel Blood of Ambrose is due out from Pyr in April. Publishers Weekly gives it a review today that glows in dark colors. I was startled and pleased. (I don’t know if the book is “unrelentingly grim,” though; “relentingly grim,” perhaps.) (That’s not my book at the top of the PW webpage, by the way–of course, I would be qualified to write it. At least proofread it. Okay, enough with the lies: I’m not sure what a supersexpert is, and I’m somewhat skeptical about the credentialling process.)

Word on the street is that the Audible.com audio version will be available April 21.

A big volume of Oscar Wilde’s stuff has been my bedside book for a couple days. Here’s a nifty from his essay “The Decay of Lying” (by which he really seems to mean fantasy–if OW ever really can be said to really mean anything at all):

No doubt there will always be critics who, like a certain writer in the Saturday Review, will gravely censure the teller of fairy tales for his defective knowledge of natural history, who will measure imaginative work by their own lack of any imaginative faculty, and will hold up their ink-stained hands in horror if some honest gentleman, who has never been farther than the yew-trees of his own garden, pens a fascinating book of travels like Sir John Mandeville, or, like great Raleigh, writes a whole history of the world, without knowing anything whatsoever about the past. To excuse themselves they will try and shelter under the shield of him who made Prospero the magician, and gave him Caliban and Ariel as his servants, who heard the Tritons blowing their horns round the coral reefs of the Enchanted Isle, and the fairies singing to each other in a wood near Athens, who led the phantom kings in dim procession across the misty Scottish heath, and hid Hecate in a cave with the weird sisters. They will call upon Shakespeare—they always do—and will quote that hackneyed passage forgetting that this unfortunate aphorism about Art holding the mirror up to Nature, is deliberately said by Hamlet in order to convince the bystanders of his absolute insanity in all art-matters.

1. The AV Club is still running its series of reviews of Star Trek: The Series Without a Subtitle. Over at the Pyr-O-Mania blog a posted some semi-thoughts about the modern paucity of cool character actors like Ted (“Lurch”) Cassidy, or Reggie (“I Still Have Nightmares”) Nalder or, for that matter, Michael (“Dr. Miguelito Loveless”) Dunn.

2. After I Blished-out, as it were, in the Blog Gate last week, the AV Club’s Kevin Phipps published a thoughtful review of A Life for the Stars–chronologically the second of the “Cities in Flight” books, although it was published last. I don’t say these things are causally related; they aren’t. I just note the great Blishing in the Zeitgeist, is all.

3. I do other things than read the AV Club and watch Star Trek. Unfortunately, on advice of counsel, I’ve decided not to blog about them. (Although I’m convinced some of that stuff is covered under the double jeopardy rule.)

Jason Waltz tells me my author-interview for “The Red Worm’s Way” has gone live at the Rogues Blades site. It is there that I finally tell all about everything, except on the questions I forgot to answer.

My latest post at the Blog Gate is up. It’s about sf/f criticism (not Bulwer-Lytton, sadly).

And it looks like I’m going to be late to my first class, so I guess this is the morning I try out those new teleportation skills. (The instructor said that if I paid him in cash they’d start to work right away, so of course I did. I’m no fool.)

As an intermittent mackerel-snapper, every now and then I look around at what is supposed to be my church and feel like the guy in Ionesco’s Rhinocéros who looks around and sees everyone turning into a rhino. And when I read a story like this, I’m pretty sure the wrong guy is pope.

Speaking of Ionesco, I saw an amateur production of “The Bald Soprano” this weekend that was mindblowing. The actors were high school students and (candidly) I wasn’t expecting much. The play’s lines are so meaningless, or so mind-trappingly nonsensical (not the same thing, I guess), that almost everything depends on the delivery, which was great, especially in the penultimate conversation scene, where the actors’ timing was flawless. I wish I had a sample to post here. (“My theater-of-the-absurd let me show it to you.”) But it was a great reminder of how important theater, even amateur theater, can be, something I’m apt to forget here in the Great Black Swamp, which does not possess one of the great theater districts in the world.

On another note, I celebrated Superbowl Sunday by going to a movie (as I usually do): this year’s non-football was Taken, the Liam Neeson vehicle. It’s a pretty good movie, if you don’t mind seeing lots of people get shot. (I mean that unironically.) Some reviews I’ve seen suggest that this is beneath an actor of Neeson’s caliber. But, as the first movie I saw him in was probably Darkman, I can’t agree.