Category: Culture and anti-culture

Useful advice …

Missing: Porterhouse Blue

… should you ever find yourself in a South African jail, from Tom Sharpe:

“In prison they told me: ‘Make friends with the murderers,’” he told Britain’s Sunday Express. “‘Everybody else is afraid of them so if you’re with them the others leave you alone.’ That’s what I did. Good tip.”

Tom Sharpe, one of the funniest writers of the 20th century, died last month.

Born in 1928, he was the son of a British Nazi:

Years later, when Tom was a famous writer, he was invited to address a Jewish women’s group and began his talk with the memorable line, “You have probably not often been addressed by someone whose chief ambition, at age 15, was to be an SS officer.” Tom’s dad was the Ealing and Acton member of The Link (a pro-Nazi organisation) and also a member of the Nordic League. A loyal Nazi, he said he hated Jews “in the sense that I hate all corruption”. When the war began the family was on the run from the Special Branch, moving house time after time, always haunted by the fear that the minister would be consigned to the Isle of Man along with other Mosleyites. Tom’s father died in 1944, just too soon to see the film of Auschwitz, Buchenwald and Belsen which utterly devastated Tom; he realised that everything he had been brought up to believe had been wrong and that Nazism was pure evil.

Continue reading “Useful advice …”

Exploding princesses, etc.

(Via Darwin Catholic.)

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Siegfried — Game of Thrones version

An unexpected Dragonball fan:

In my ballet training, I had no enemy but myself. Especially when I would watch myself in the mirror in the studio and execute my ballet routines, I often envisioned myself as Son-Goku struggling with the enemy. When I would fail, my hair would look darker; when I would triumph over a seemingly impossible task, my hair would appear blonder than it is.
Whenever people watch me dance, I hope they see the character I’m trying to impersonate onstage. I might be the noble prince from Swan Lake or the Prodigal Son; I might be a beggar or a soldier. In reality, I am just a geek owing everything I can do to an ape alien named Son-Goku.

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The Man Who Was Thursday was one of my favorite books years ago. I thought it was a fantasy, but apparently it is one of the most realistic spy novels ever written.

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Presenting George Herriman and Krazy Kat, with appearances by archie and mehitabel.

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Killer trees? Poisons aside, I don’t think so. Killer bromeliads? Perhaps.

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What is the worst Bob Dylan song? I’m tempted to say all of them — Zimmerman, to my ears, has a modest talent for doggerel and none whatsoever for music — but some of his songs are worse than others. I’ll nominate one that’s a bit obscure nowadays (though not obscure enough), “The Ballad of Frankie Lee and Judas Priest.”

Well, up the stairs ran Frankie Lee
With a soulful bounding leap
And foaming at the mouth
He began to make his midnight creep
For sixteen nights and days he raved
But on the seventeenth he burst
Into the arms of Judas Priest
Which is where he died of thirst

If you perceive anything in the lyrics beyond the clanging rhyme, you need to detox.

Cultural notes

For those who remember Leonard Pinth-Garnell.

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Norman Lebrecht says that The Rite of Spring was “a glorification of primitivism that challenged the values of modern society. Its response was reciprocal violence.” My own theory is that the riot at its premiere was caused by time-traveling aesthetes happy for an opportunity to get rowdy.

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The Locus Science Fiction Foundation bought the rights to R.A. Lafferty‘s writing a couple years ago and is planning to reprint his complete short stories. The first volume is due out early next year, in time for the centenary of his birth. Twenty or so years ago I tried to collect every book by Lafferty in print. Although I found numerous chapbooks and small-press editions, most of his writing was out of reach. The new edition is very welcome, even though the first volume costs $66.

If you’ve never read Lafferty, there are a handful of his stories online:

Slow Tuesday Night

Narrow Valley

The Transcendent Tigers

Sodom and Gomorrah, Texas

The Six Fingers of Time

Nine Hundred Grandmothers

I’m pleased to observe that I am not the only R.A. Lafferty obsessive around. Andrew Ferguson is reading his way though Lafferty’s stories in order and commenting on them at Continued on Next Rock. See also The Ants of God Are Queer Fish.

Readers of Lafferty are often readers of Gene Wolfe as well. I recently found a couple of weblogs devoted to Wolfe, Silk for Caldé and The Silk and Horn Heresy.

Hmmm

Discovered while browsing in Wikipedia:

[Graham] Greene’s film review of Wee Willie Winkie, featuring nine-year-old Shirley Temple, cost the [Night and Day] magazine a lost libel lawsuit. Greene’s review stated that Temple displayed “a dubious coquetry” which appealed to “middle-aged men and clergymen”.[16] It is now considered one of the first criticisms of the sexualisation of children for entertainment.

It may be just as well that he didn’t live to see moe-licious anime.

Quote of the week

Anthony Sacramone:

Nothing can compensate for a crap script. Not irony, not flamboyant camera movement, not stars, nuthin’. On the other hand, a great script can survive a mediocre director, dull music, uninteresting production design, and even less-than-stellar performances. But you always need a story, and characters you want to see get what they want, or be denied what they want, or discover what they want or where they should go ….

Miscellany

If you’re a creative sort, you have an opportunity to collaborate with Neil Gaiman. Unfortunately, the deadline is next Monday. I wish I’d heard about this earlier.

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Coming attractions: Pixy might be able to see Comets Lemmon and PanSTARRS now. The latter should be visible to those of us in the northern hemisphere soon.

There are more comet pictures here.

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Vertical, Inc., is considering whether to translate Yusuke Kishi’s Shin Sekai Yori. If an English-language copy of the novel would be worth $25 to you, go to Vertical’s Tumblr page and “like” it. They need 4500 people to express an interest before they’ll undertake the project, and I was only #699.

Kishi does have one book available in English translation. I’ll probably include The Crimson Labyrinth in my next Amazon.com order.

If you’re not watching the anime Shin Sekai Yori, you’re missing one of the finest — and most nightmarish — science fiction stories ever broadcast.

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Bambi Meets Godzilla, rebuilt:

You can watch it in 1080 if your computer can handle it.

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Professor Mondo‘s novel is now available as pixels at Amazon.com. I just got a new pair of glasses, so I’ll probably wait for the print edition and read it the way books were meant to be read, on dead trees. You can read one of his short stories here.

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A note on current events in the Catholic Church: everything you read in the secular press is complete and absolute BS. Don’t believe anything you read. I suggest checking in occasionally with Elizabeth Scalia if you want an informed perspective.

Meanwhile, here’s the Vatican version of March Madness, and Christopher Buckley’s introduction to simony.

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guess_who

Which famous British poet is this? The answer is here.

(Via Eve Tushnet.)

Insomnia and czárdás

Early this morning, after I had given up on getting any more sleep, I discovered that there are a number of full-length ballets on YouTube. Coppélia is a favorite of mine. The melodious score is worth listening to even if you are not interested in dance, and the story almost makes sense. There’s even a mad scientist (or magician). The video above is a Bolshoi Ballet performance.

Others I found include La Bayadere, The Sleeping Beauty, Swan Lake and more, often in multiple versions and occasionally in HD. There’s also opera.

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And now for something completely different: Japanese Vikings, singing songs of [censored].

Update: And the video is gone. This is what you missed.

Quote of the day, anime edition

Arhyalon, in a discussion of “aristocracy”:

So, is it impossible to show noble characters well on film?

Not at all. In fact, it is done very well over and over again today. By the Japanese in Anime.

One also sees it occasionally in British films. The Japanese and the English, both peoples with a long history of a noble class, seem to grok nobility in a way that the Americans and New Zealanders just do not.

A few notes

A couple of noteworthy post titles:

Proposition: “The collective national IQ peaked in 1967, and has eroded since.”

From the comments:

I read a study years ago claiming that, since the Late Victorian era, the average written sentence loses five words per decade. ((Um, just how long was the average sentence in late Victorian times?)) I cannot claim to know the methodology of the study, but if it’s true, we may all be communicating in grunts, soon. Actually, some of the teens I hear on cell phones seemed to have reached that stage.

Another study I read claimed that, in the late sixties, early 70’s, one needed a vocabulary of about ten thousand words to comprehend a television news show, or to read a newspaper. In the eighties and nineties, it was five thousand.

Ignorance of Botany Is Ignorance of Literature

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Wonderduck is giving Vividred Operation a close look — a very close look, from a variety of viewpoints, from many low camera angles. Better him than me. Can you guess what is a vivid shade of red? Hint: think Strike Witches.

Izu Oshima, by the way, is a real place and a frequently active volcano — sometimes spectacularly so. If Oshima gets feisty during the course of the series, Vividred might be worth watching after all.

Today’s cultural trivia

Spotted by The Rat:

For many years I used to see Kurt Vonnegut shambling around the streets of Turtle Bay, on the East Side of New York, always with a disconsolate expression on his face. I could never figure out why he looked so miserable; he was, after all, one of America’s most successful and admired novelists. Then one day, while reading Exposing Myself, I found out that Vonnegut had briefly been Geraldo [Rivera]’s father-in-law.

A double dose of culture

Thomas Hardy does the hokey-pokey:

On a morning when the grey skies rained down sleet,
I stuck my left foot into the abyss;
I shook it to and fro, and then switched feet,
And thought how all must end with death’s bleak kiss.

Update: Poe sticks his left foot in.

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J. Greely notes that the DVD of the movie Megaforce has finally been released in the USA. Out of curiosity, I searched for clips on YouTube and found this. “Awesome” isn’t quite the word.

Coincidentally, one of the links in Greely’s sidebar is “A Cubic Light-year of Cheese.”

Quote of the day

Helen Rittelmeyer:

4. Disregard the haters who denigrate blogging as a medium. Blogging is an amateur’s medium, but there is a lot to be said for amateurs. Bloggers sometimes write about things they know nothing about. Professional journalists often write about things they know nothing about. Academics write about things they know so much about that they no longer have any passion for the subject or any sense of its intrinsic interest, since, for understandable reasons, it is all now very boring to them. So don’t be intimidated by their credentials or put off by your lack of them.

See also her list of books for 2012. I will have to track down Honor Tracy.

Pre-Rush Day link dump

J.K. Rowling has been recognized in Thog’s Masterclass:

Dept of Trickle-Down. ‘There, in his poky office, Simon Price gazed covetously on a vacancy among the ranks of insiders to a place where cash was now trickling down onto an empty chair with no lap waiting to catch it.’ (J.K. Rowling, The Casual Vacancy, 2012)

Daniel Barenboim also earns a mention in Ansible:

Pianist Daniel Barenboim is interviewed by Rosanna Greenstreet: Q. ‘What is your earliest memory?’ A. ‘In my mother’s belly, I remember not liking the tempi my father played the Beethoven Sonatas in.’ (Guardian, 2 November)

Christopher Tolkien doesn’t care for Peter Jackson’s movies:

Invited to meet Peter Jackson, the Tolkien family preferred not to. Why? “They eviscerated the book by making it an action movie for young people aged 15 to 25,” Christopher says regretfully. “And it seems that The Hobbit will be the same kind of film.”
This divorce has been systematically driven by the logic of Hollywood. “Tolkien has become a monster, devoured by his own popularity and absorbed into the absurdity of our time,” Christopher Tolkien observes sadly. “The chasm between the beauty and seriousness of the work, and what it has become, has overwhelmed me. The commercialization has reduced the aesthetic and philosophical impact of the creation to nothing. There is only one solution for me: to turn my head away.”

So is the world going to end tomorrow? Nah. I suppose you could marathon RahXephon if you’re feeling silly, but I suggest listening to Geddy, Alex and Neil instead.

These are the acceptable ways to end civilization:

… asteroid/comet, climate, massive volcanic eruption, zombie pandemic, Daleks, the Master, the Mayor turns into a giant snake monster, Gachnar (although that would be a very tiny apocalypse), gateway to Hell opens over Los Angeles, Anubis, Tripods, Triffids, Ragnarok and possibly a Farnsworth Doomsday Device.

Are you still using Windows 95?

You have two cows ….