Category: Culture and anti-culture

Literary notes

Clare Vanderpool used to work in the youth ministry office here in the Wichita diocesan chancery. She got married and left the office, and I eventually lost track of her. I just now discovered that not only has she published a novel, Moon Over Manifest, but it won the 2011 Newberry Award.

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Tim Powers is occasionally compared to Neil Gaiman, but the writer he most reminds me of is that other Inkling, Charles Williams. Novels like The Anubis Gates and Expiration Date are direct descendents of Williams’ “spiritual thrillers.” As of 1/11/11, Declare, possibly Powers’ best book, is available at audible.com.

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If you’re wondering where I found the name for this weblog, it’s from John Bellairs’ little metaphysical farce, The Pedant and the Shuffly. While checking on other matters this morning, I found that all of Bellairs’ non-young adult books have recently been collected into a single volume, Magic Mirrors, including The Pedant and The Face in the Frost. Of note is St. Fidgeta and Other Parodies, which Catholics who remember “aggiornamento” will particularly appreciate.

Books as investments

What does $1,186.27 look like?

If that had been the paperback edition of Lafferty in Orbit, you’d be looking at $2,162.26. However, a hardcover like the one pictured is available for a mere $23.98.

By the way, if you ever spot any collection of Lafferty’s stories in a used book store — Nine Hundred Grandmothers, Strange Doings, Does Anyone Else Have Something Further to Add, Ringing Changes, Lafferty in Orbit, Iron Tears — grab it. There never was any other writer like him.

50 books

I came across yet another list of the “100 science fiction books everyone should read.” Like every other one I’ve seen, it’s an arbitrary selection and not at all what I would have chosen (though it does earn a point for mentioning The Fifth Head of Cerberus.) Rather than reprint that list here with the usual “bold what you’ve read,” I instead compiled my own. It’s half the length of the other and perhaps just as arbitrary, but I daresay it’s better reading.

A lot of writers you might have expected are missing. In some cases it’s because I haven’t read them yet, but usually it’s deliberate. For instance, I have no desire to re-read anything by Isaac Asimov no matter how historically important he may be, so why include The Foundation Trilogy? (And I think John Sladek is more reliable on the Three Laws of Robish, anyway.)

There are a lot of short story collections mentioned. Partly it’s because I like short stories, but mainly it’s because many writers are better at shorter lengths.

I could easily have made a valid list using just the works of Wolfe, Wells, Lafferty and Dick, but I’ll leave that as an exercise for the obsessive.

Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy: the Original Radio Scripts

J.G. Ballard, Chronopolis

Greg Benford, Timescape

Alfred Bester, The Stars My Destination, Starburst

Ray Bradbury, The Martian Chronicles

Algis Budrys, Rogue Moon

Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange

Arthur C. Clarke, Childhood’s End

Samuel Delany, Driftglass

Philip K. Dick, The Man in the High Castle, The Preserving Machine, or any other of his better novels or short story collections

Thomas M. Disch, Fun with Your New Head, Camp Concentration

William Gibson, Neuromancer

Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

Diana Wynne Jones, A Tale of Time City

C.M. Kornbluth, The Best of C.M. Kornbluth

Frederick Pohl & C.M. Kornbluth, The Space Merchants

Henry Kuttner, The Best of Henry Kuttner

R.A. Lafferty, Nine Hundred Grandmothers, or any other collection of his short stories ((If you need evidence that there is something fundamentally wrong with the publishing industry, note that The Collected Stories of R.A. Lafferty still doesn’t exist.))

Ursula K. Le Guin, The Wind’s Twelve Quarters

Stanislaw Lem, Solaris, The Cyberiad

Barry Malzberg, The Best of Barry N. Malzberg, or whatever else you can find ((It is not required to read a lot of Malzberg; a brief glimpse of his universe will suffice for most readers.))

Walter M. Miller, Jr., A Canticle for Liebowitz

George Orwell, 1984

Frederick Pohl, The Best of Frederick Pohl

Rudy Rucker, Master of Space and Time, or any collection with Harry Gerber stories

Joanna Russ, The Adventures of Alyx, And Chaos Died

Mary Doria Russell, The Sparrow

Robert Sheckley, Dimension of Miracles, or any collection of his short stories

Keiichi Sigsawa, Kino no Tabi ((Good luck finding this one. The contract to publish the Kino stories in English fell through shortly after the first volume was printed. You can get a taste of Sigsawa’s work by watching the animated series Kino’s Journey, which heads my short list of anime for people who think they hate anime.))

John Sladek, Tik-Tok, Mechasm

Cordwainer Smith, The Rediscovery of Man

Olaf Stapledon, Star Maker

Neal Stephenson, The Diamond Age

William Tenn, Immodest Proposals, or any other collection of his short stories

James Tiptree, Jr., Ten Thousand Light Years from Home, or any other collection of her short stories

Yasutaka Tsutsui, Salmonella Men on Planet Porno

Jack Vance, The Dying Earth

Kurt Vonnegut, The Sirens of Titan

Ian Watson, The Very Slow Time Machine, or any of his early novels

H.G. Wells, The Island of Dr. Moreau

Gene Wolfe, The Island of Dr. Death and Other Stories and Other Stories, The Book of the New Sun

John C. Wright, The Golden Age trilogy

Yevgeny Zamyatin, We

Eldritch prose

I write like
H. P. Lovecraft

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

Depending on which sample of text I use, I also write like Stephen King, J.K. Rowling, Dan Brown (ugh), Kurt Vonnegut, Douglas Adams, Chuck Palahnuik, Isaac Asimov, Daniel Defoe, Margaret Atwood, Vladimir Nabokov, George Orwell, Oscar Wilde or James Joyce. But not R.A. Lafferty or Flann O’Brien. Oh well, nobody else can really write like them, either.

Actually, when I read my writing, it just sounds like me.

Update: A bit of background about that site.

High culture, low comedy

Even if I had a television, I wouldn’t be able to watch Al ‘n’ Me. It’s broadcast only on “Metromedia,” which is not available in most markets at this time. Until that classical-era sitcom receives the wider distribution it deserves, you’ll have to make do with Acropolis Now, featuring such low-lifes as Heraclitus and Aristophanes and their mother the Oracle, and Socrates and Plato. A degree in Classics is not necessary to appreciate the show.

If you prefer modern, interactive entertainment, here’s the do-it-yourself Bayeux Tapestry.

(Via Maureen.)

Enlightened pessimism

William Tenn, who wrote some of my favorite stories, died a week ago. I wanted to link to “Bernie the Faust,” which SciFi.com used to host, but when they changed their name from the offensive “SciFi” to the stupid “SyFy,” they dropped the story. However, I did find an interview with Tenn in which he reads “On Venus Have We Got a Rabbi.” The story starts shortly after the forty-minute mark, but the entire interview is worth hearing.

Is television finally worth watching?

From Joe Carter’s weekly list:

Over the past ten years television—long considered the most embarrassing form of mass media—has come to surpass films and novels as the dominant form of narrative fiction. The advent of the DVD revolutionized television, making it possible (and profitable) to combine the depth of novels with the visual storytelling of film. The result was the greatest period of quality and innovation in the medium’s history—and some of the greatest works of pop culture produced in a hundred years.

Hmm. I quit watching teevee decades ago, when I realized that I could watch the first five minutes of any action/adventure show and accurately predict the rest of the episode. I have not lived in a house with a working television set since 1982. Aside from an occasional Simpsons episode at a friend’s house, I’ve seen very little American television since the first generation of Star Trek. ((I have watched a lot of Japanese animated television these past few years — see my other weblog — the best of which is very good indeed. (I’m tempted to remark that the Japan may be a strange, foreign place, but Hollywood is downright alien.) Most, however, is of no interest whatsoever, just like most American television.))

I gather that things have changed, a little. I’ve heard good things about Babylon 5. No less a critic than Barbara Nicolosi has praised Battlestar Galactica. I did have a chance to watch the first few episodes of Firefly earlier this year, and it does merit further investigation. However, Firefly was cancelled after fourteen episodes — perhaps things haven’t changed all that much, after all.

Are you a twit?

Do you tweet? Are your thoughts expressible in no more than 140 characters? Perhaps you should reconsider. Here are a variety of philosophical arguments against using Twitter. For instance:

Natural Law Argument
(1) It is wrong to do what is not natural.
(2) There is nothing remotely natural about broadcasting the minutiae of your life to all and sundry whenever it takes your fancy.
(3) Therefore, Twittering is wrong.

(Via First Things.)

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A useful term:

A related concept is heiwa-boke (hei-WA boh-keh), literally meaning “numbed from too much peace,” which describes the state of literally being made stupid by living in a country that’s overly harmonious, like the Japanese who traveled to Iraq in 2004 to help rebuild the country only to be promptly kidnapped because, well, they were in friggin’ Iraq.

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A piece on the Montreaux jazz festival included this note about an unlikely pairing:

The pair [Lang Lang and Herbie Hancock] ended with Franz Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2 — which Lang Lang says inspired him when he heard it in a Tom & Jerry cartoon at 2 years old.

Here’s that cartoon, a classic combination of music and violence. The pianist you hear is likely Shura Cherkassky.