Ambrose & Elsewhere

Arthur Clarke is dead, it seems. Behind every man alive now stands one more ghost.

[Seen at jimvanpelt‘s LiveJournal.]

Today it’s Belle Rêve but tomorrow it’ll be Belly Rave…

This never bothered me before, but it seems like Belle Rêve is a solecism; it should be Beau Rêve, according to the infallible penguin who wrote my French dictionary. Oh well: Pohl & Kornbluth probably liked the sound-devolution of belle into belly. Or maybe they’re making a point: bad linguistics leads to bad city planning. (Or maybe they talked to a different penguin, the same one Tennessee Williams used to hang out with.)

Okay, okay–maybe I’m going a little overboard on the garfish. But today is (a.) the Ides of March, when a bunch of Julius Caesar’s close personal friends (some of them garfish or pipefish for all we know) stood around him and put holes in him until he stopped moving, and (b.) the official release date of The Return of the Sword (available directly from Flashing Swords Press or Amazon, Barnes and Noble, etc).

The Return of the Sword started out, you may remember, as an attempt to recover from oblivion the stories in the briefly-available Flashing Swords E-Zine Annual, lost in the web-wrack and e-foam when Pitch-Black Publishing foundered with all hands. Some of the stories weren’t available, and some new ones were added. I was sorry, for instance, to see Steve Goble’s Spider John story didn’t make the crossing to the new anthology–but instead we have the first story in his series about the Faceless Sons, and it is, in a word, a riot. (How can you dislike a story with the line, “The man in the bloodstained white mask contemplated the impaled head”?) So the new anthology is undoubtedly bigger and better than the one it was designed to replace.

eeknight has a rundown of the contents and contributors here. The editor plans a sort of virtual book-tour in the blogosphere: it’ll be interesting to watch (and be a part of). So expect more noise and base self-promotion in this space.

This afternoon, in an increasingly desperate attempt to avoid useful work, I was reading the Gospel of Luke and I came across this familiar line:

εὐκοπώτερον γάρ ἐστιν κάμηλον διὰ τρήματος βελόνης εἰσελθεῖν ἢ πλούσιον εἰς τὴν βασιλείαν τοῦ θεοῦ εἰσελθεῖν.

–Luke 18:24

usually translated

“It’s easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.”

You waste more time if you look everything up, so I was interested to find that τρῆμα (the word usually translated as “eye”) can mean “orifice”, and βελόνη (the word usually translated as “needle”) can refer to a pipefish or garfish.

So maybe what Jesus was actually saying was, “It’s easier for a camel to pass through the yinyang of a pipefish…” This doesn’t add any moral or spiritual meaning that I can detect, but it is funnier, sort of like the lion jumping straight through the crocodile in Baron Munchausen.

In the wake of the now-bountifully-bipartisan sex scandals afflicting American politicians, one has to assume there is an inevitable link between intense moralism (as opposed to morality), the drive to seek public office in the US, and the compulsion to purchase sex.

Apparently, in the shockingly corrupt world we live in, not even a man’s suffering from entomological dysplasia is sacred.

The NYT broke the story:

In a scandal that’s sending shock waves through both the publishing industry and academia, the author Franz Kafka has been revealed to be a fraud.

” ‘The Metamorphosis’–purported to be the fictional account of a man who turns into a large cockroach–is actually non-fiction,” according to a statement released by Mr. Kafka’s editor, who spoke only on the condition that he be identified as E.

I hear these guys have reformed and are touring. The odds that they’ll show up anywhere near the Black Swamp seem a little slim, but you never know…

I’m not sure Katharine Whalen can act even by the lowish standards of music video, and I’m not even sure she sings that well–her voice is sometimes a little ragged in live performance–but I love the big cartoony verve with which she tackles a song.

I was just thinking about Janet Kagan’s Mirabile today because of a line in Gail Collins’ NYT column, which is a sort of FAQ about the Texas and Ohio primaries:

While we’re at it, would you please explain the Texas primaucus?

The primaucus is a large, featherless bird that feeds on roadkill and ethanol.

Janet Kagan has died. I loved her series in Asimov’s about genetic mishaps on a colony planet (“The Loch Moose Monster”, “Return of Kangaroo Rex” etc), collected in Mirabile, and was sorry when we stopped getting new stories from her. Now we never will again. All Frankenswine should fly at half-mast today.

[Seen at james_nicoll and Posted in Uncategorized | 2 Comments