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:
” ‘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
Endymion’s revenge:
the moon’s bright eye is shut,
and on its ashen lid
I see red shadows lie.
My flashfic “Brother Solson and Sister Luna” has gone live at Every Day Fiction.
It’s a vampire story, and a non-Morlock story. The specific genesis was seeing I Am Legend this winter and thinking, “This is impossible. The vampire-zombie-whatevers have completely obliterated their prey population and they should be dying off. They’re monsters with no visible means of support!” Then I got onto a line of thought (probably well-travelled by others before, but new to me) that vampires (as presented in the media) really could not exist. They are essentially prolific superpredators; they would hunt through their prey population in very short order and become extinct. A couple of days later I pounded out the story and sent it off. And now it’s in “print” as it were and people are commenting on it–not quite Instant Messaging speed, but close enough to justify the title to this entry.
The title of the story is a little too obscure, though. The viewpoint character is a narrow-minded minor-league academic (“They said to me, ‘Write what you know,’ so I says to them…”) and, to sneak my ecological argument against vampire stories into this vampire story, I made him an ecological biologist. This, and some other things in the story, suggested dark echoes of Francis of Assisi’s Song of the Sun, the first significant piece of Italian literature, where the sun is saluted as Frate Sole (“Brother Sun”) and the moon as Sora Luna (“Sister Moon”). At first the title seemed to me too much of a giveaway for the story, but in retrospect that looks like a symptom of how cloistered my thinking is getting.
There was a Zeffirelli movie about St. Francis, Brother Sun, Sister Moon, but apparently that doesn’t ring any bells with people anymore. I vividly remembered the TV commercials for this movie as I was typing out the title… but now I realize I must have seen them thirty five, thirty six years ago, in the early 1970s. I think I’m starting to get that old-folks memory, where it’s easier to remember things that happened a generation ago than what happened an hour ago.
Oh, pus and blasphemation! Steve Gerber’s dead. Among other things, he created the beyond-brilliant comic Howard the Duck (known today largely as the basis of George Lucas’ worst movie–yes even worse than Episode I, a truly epic standard of awfulness).
Well, all men and ducks are mortal, and Steve Gerber was a man, but I wish he had managed to duck the Reaper’s scythe this time.
The other morning, I was watching the previews for Spider-Man 10. (The logo for the movie is, of course, a very webby Roman numeral X.) I’m happy to report that, despite its somewhat schlocky tagline (“Spider-Man Vs. King Kong!”), the movie looks pretty good. In it, Manhattan has been flooded or sunk by aquatic invaders, who are going around the city with cannons that fire weird spider-frog beasties–not as weapons, but apparently as some sort of seeding program for the new aquatic ecology they have planned for NYC. Spider-Man was just initiating some sort of rapport with a spider-frog, via their mutual spider-sense, when my alarm went off and I woke up.
Why King Kong? I wondered. He hadn’t shown up in any of the footage I’d seen. (Although the flooding would be convenient for him; he’d be able to swim to the top of the Empire State building.) Google tells me that the phrase “Spider-Man vs. King Kong” has been drifting on the frothy surface of the internet for a while, so maybe I saw it somewhere. I’m also pretty sure that, in this continuity, Spider-Man’s romantic interest was Gwen Stacey, but again I don’t know why I’m sure: she never showed up in the previews.
I guess these and other mysteries will be resolved when the movie actually comes out, some time in the 2020s.
Most readers of this LJ will have already read about this, but I thought I’d mention: Mike Kabongo (a.k.a. onyxhawke) is running another one of his manuscript reading marathons, this one dubbed the Winter Workout. He really does give great feedback, so anyone agentless and interested who has an unsold sf/f novel in hand might want to give this a try. It’s easy, fun and improves the posture. Maybe.
Double Tongued Word Wrester hasn’t been too thrilling lately–e.g. their breathless revelation that step on means “cut” in the parlance of the drug world. (I mean, where did these guys spend the 1970s?) But they made up for it today with a new-to-me buzzword about screenplays: “Page 75.” That’s ““the dark heart of the narrative arc, this moment of failure represents a loss so profound that the viewer (or reader, as the case may be) is meant to abandon all hope of a tidy resolution. Well, almost.”
Another interesting site for narrative tropes I came across recently and serendipitously, thanks to these guys, is the TV Tropes wiki.
One could waste endless hours in trope-hunting, of course, and the fact that someone can caricature a trope doesn’t mean it’s a cliché or otherwise unusable. (I’ll always insist, for instance, that “white room syndrome” is not necessarily a mistake, but a perfectly valid way to begin a story.) Still, a browse through sites like this or the famous “Turkey City Lexicon” can stimulate the storyteller into realizing he is trying to reinvent the wheel (or something they used to use before there were wheels). At least, it can if the storyteller is me.
