Quotulatiousness

June 4, 2018

L. Neil Smith on his time in the salt mines of the Star Wars universe

Filed under: Books, Business — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Around the time I picked up my first L. Neil Smith novel (Tom Paine Maru), I saw his name on a couple of Star Wars tie-in novels. I didn’t buy them, as I’ve rarely found tie-in work to be worth much unless you’re a huge fan of the larger franchise. By the time I’d gotten around to reading Tom Paine Maru and rushed back to buy all the rest of Smith’s available works, the Star Wars books had gone. I haven’t seen any of them in my travels since then. In the latest Libertarian Enterprise, Smith explains how the books came to be:

In 1983, I was chosen (or condemned — it depends how you look at these things), by Del Rey Books, a division of Random House, and Lucasfilm Ltd., to write three little ”exploitation” novels about the Star Wars character Lando Calrissian, specifically because I wasn’t Brian Daley, author of three similar books about another Star Wars character, Han Solo.

“Lando Calrissian, meet Londo Mollari. Lando, Londo. Londo, Lando … ”

The late Brian Daley was one of the kindest, gentlest, most generous men I’ve ever known, a colleague to be proud of, and it was bewildering trying to figure out why the movie company had told the book publisher, when arranging for the second set of books, “Anybody but Brian Daley!”

Brian loved Millennium Falcon. He was like a little kid when he got invited to go out to Hollywood and was most excited that he got to clamber around inside the set. But it turned out that he had accidentally and unknowingly allowed himself to become associated with the losing faction in some kind of petty internal corporate feud and found himself rendered persona non grata.

My editor at Del Rey obligingly brought my name up. I was extremely reluctant to write in anybody else’s corpus, but I needed the money very badly — around that time I’d spent two weeks with nothing in the house to eat but a bag of shredded coconut. When requested, my editor sent LucasFilm a “sample” of my work — a copy of my highly-political libertarian first novel, The Probability Broach. I’d love to have been there, a fly on the wall, when they saw it. Remember Beaker, from Muppet Labs, with a shock of bright red hair, a big red nose, great big eyes, whimpering and terrified of every known phenomenon? It must have been a lot like that.

In any case, LucasFilm freaked out, and, hypocritically asked that Brian be brought back into the project as my co-author, apparently to temper my politically incorrect passions. My editor told me later that he blew up dramatically, and told them “These are authors we’re dealing with here, not Hollywood writers, they don’t write by committee!” They backed down eventually, but I had to promise I would write no politics in the books — which, given the attitude they were displaying, I interpreted to mean as much politics as I could possibly squeeze in before they squealed.

I was told to write about Lando but leave all other Star Wars characters and other things alone (I did end up using mynocks). I told them I would have the spaceship, or I would give the project a miss. Brian started calling us “the Brotherhood of the Falcon”. My editor advised me to politely decline any invitations to come to Hollywood, and stay out of company politics, which I gladly did. I invented a number of animals for the books but was told that only animals made up by George Lucas could be capitalized.

In the beginning, they gave me sixteen weeks to write three books which I regarded as tough, but doable. “But wait! We have to approve your outlines first!” And by the time they finished — altering my arch-villain Rokur Gepta to something other than a “Dark Lord of Sith” and making other insignificant changes, I had nine weeks left. For two and a half months, I got up each morning and wrote. My cute little fiancee came home for lunch and then I wrote. We had supper and I wrote. Then I collapsed and started the whole thing over the next day. Forget anything resembling a real life. This was just before word processors came along, and I did the whole thing in one draft, as Robert Heinlein advised, on a Sperry-Remington knock-off of an IBM Selectric II. It took a long, long time to recover my health.

May 24, 2018

QotD: Hunter S. Thompson on the importance of breakfast

Filed under: Food, Humour, Media, Politics, Quotations — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

It is not going to be easy for those poor bastards out in San Francisco who have been waiting all day in a condition of extreme fear and anxiety for my long and finely reasoned analysis of “The Meaning of Jimmy Carter” to come roaring out of my faithful mojo wire and across 2,000 miles of telephone line to understand why I am sitting here in a Texas motel full of hookers and writing at length on The Meaning of Breakfast……. But like almost everything else worth understanding, the explanation for this is deceptively quick and basic.

After more than ten years of trying to deal with politics and politicians in a professional manner, I have finally come to the harsh understanding that there is no way at all – not even for a doctor of chemotherapy with total access to the whole spectrum of legal and illegal drugs, the physical constitution of a mule shark and a brain as rare and sharp and original as the Sloat diamond – to function as a political journalist without abandoning the whole concept of a decent breakfast. I have worked like 12 bastards for more than a decade to be able to have it both ways, but the conflict is too basic and too deeply rooted in the nature of both politics and breakfast to ever be reconciled. It is one of those very few Great Forks in The Road of Life that cannot be avoided: like a Jesuit priest who is also a practicing nudist with a $200-a-day smack habit wanting to be the first Naked Pope (or Pope Naked the First, if we want to use the language of the church)….… Or a vegetarian pacifist with a .44 magnum fetish who wants to run for president without giving up his membership in the National Rifle Association or his New York City pistol permit that allows him to wear twin six-guns on Meet the Press, Face the Nation and all of his press conferences.

There are some combinations that nobody can handle: shooting bats on the wing with a double-barreled .410 and a head full of jimson weed is one of them, and another is the idea that it is possible for a freelance writer with at least four close friends named Jones to cover a hopelessly scrambled presidential campaign better than any six-man team of career political journalists on the New York Times or the Washington Post and still eat a three-hour breakfast in the sun every morning.

Hunter S. Thompson, “Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’76: Third-rate romance, low-rent rendezvous — hanging with Ted Kennedy, Jimmy Carter, and a bottle of Wild Turkey”, Rolling Stone, 1976-06-03.

May 17, 2018

Tom Wolfe “would spend the rest of his days in a golden cage of a book deal”

Filed under: Books, Media, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In the National Post Colby Cosh explains why Tom Wolfe was so significant in the literary world almost from his first published work:

… Tom Wolfe was an educated man: unlike any of the macho novelists he was sparring with, he was entitled to adjoin an honest-to-God PhD to his byline. In the end, he could not escape the prejudices imprinted on him in youth. It is a truth universally acknowledged: a prose artist must excrete a novel to demonstrate his true mettle.

Wolfe described it this way himself in a 2008 interview. “Originally, I was only going to write one novel, to prove to myself and any random doubters that I could do it.” “Random doubters” sounds so dismissive and calm until you remember the amount of work Wolfe was proposing to undertake in order to impress them. He continued: “But that novel, The Bonfire of the Vanities, was such an astounding success… I’m afraid I got swept away.”

Wolfe, I suppose, was too well-raised to utter the word “money” in front of an interviewer. (The explicit subject of all his work, his journalism and fiction, is social status: but social status and money do travel together mighty closely.) Bonfire (1987) became one of the publishing events of the epoch, and he would spend the rest of his days in a golden cage of a book deal. The dabbler in the novel had proved too much: he had proved that the novel really is still in a class by itself as a social phenomenon.

More novels in the vein of Bonfire — deeply researched, socially prescient, full of truculent conservative squareness — followed. I myself would not trade The Right Stuff, Wolfe’s 1979 nonfiction book about the Mercury astronauts, for the whole pile, Bonfire included. (And I say this knowing full well that there is some quantum of sheer bull in The Right Stuff.)

Wolfe continued to insist, returning to the interview already mentioned, that “Nonfiction remains the most important literary genre in American literature of the past 60 years.” He still, 20 years on from Bonfire, felt the need to half-apologize for abandoning non-fiction. My instinct is that it was indeed a mistake, but I am only a consumer of Wolfe, looking back at the corpus from without: none of us readers had to meet Wolfe’s dry-cleaning bills.

May 9, 2018

Comics and Hard-Boiled – Pulp! Noir – Extra Sci Fi

Filed under: Books, History, Media, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Extra Credits
Published on 8 May 2018

Many sci fi writers, especially in the United States, had backgrounds in reading and writing detective stories. They introduced to the sci-fi genre the action hero — no longer just scientific or philosophical protagonists.

April 25, 2018

Hugo Gernsback – Pulp! Amazing Stories – Extra Sci Fi

Filed under: Books, History, Media, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

Extra Credits
Published on 24 Apr 2018

Sci fi “pulp” stories sometimes have a reputation for being cheesy and over-dramatic, but they were extremely important for building up the sci fi genre as something *anyone* could write for AND get paid for — not just famous authors.

April 19, 2018

Lord Dunsany – The History of Sci Fi – Extra Sci Fi – #6

Filed under: Books, History — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Extra Credits
Published on 17 Apr 2018

Dunsany is arguably the “father of fantasy,” bringing to life the classic worldbuilding tropes that inspired so many authors, from H.P. Lovecraft to Ursula K. Le Guin. But his short stories and novels have sadly fallen out of memory…

April 2, 2018

The Five Forms of Ancient Egyptian Writing!

Filed under: History, Middle East — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

The Study of Antiquity and the Middle Ages
Published on 12 Mar 2018

In this brief video I discuss the five different forms of writing in Ancient Egypt!

March 12, 2018

QotD: Punctuation

Filed under: Media, Quotations — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

The rules [of punctuation] we’re taught in school are the syntactic ones; in these, punctuation is a part of the grammar of written English and the rules for where you put it are derived from grammatical phrase structure and pretty strict. Lynne Truss of Eats, Shoots & Leaves fame is an exponent of this school. But there is another…

Punctuation marks originated from notations used to mark pauses for breath in oral recitations, but 17-to-19th-century grammarians tied them ever more tightly to grammar. There remains a minority position that language pedants call “elocutionary” – that punctuation is properly viewed as markers of speech cadence and intonation. Top-flight copy editors know this: the best one I ever worked with was a syntactic punctuationist on her own hook who noted that I’m an elocutionary punctuationist and then copy-edited in my preferred style rather than hers. (That, my friends, is real professionalism.)

And why am I an elocutionary punctuationist? Because I pay careful attention to speech rhythm and try to convey it in my prose. Not all skilled writers do this, but elocutionary punctuation survives in English because it keeps getting rediscovered for stylistic reasons. Consider Rudyard Kipling or Damon Runyon – two masters of conveying the cadences of spoken English in written form; both used elocutionary punctuation, though perhaps not as a conscious choice.

To an elocutionary punctuationist, the common marks represent speech pauses of increasing length in roughly this order: comma, semicolon, colon, dash, ellipsis, period. Parentheses suggest a vocal aside at lower volume; exclamation point is a volume/emphasis indicator, and question mark means rising tone.

In normal usage, most of the differences between the schools show up in comma placement. But in less usual circumstances, elocutionary punctuationists will cheerfully countenance written utterances that a grammarian would consider technically ill-formed. Here’s an example: “Stop – right – now!” The dashes don’t correspond to phrase boundaries, they’re purely vocal pause markers.

Eric S. Raymond, “Extreme punctuation pedantry”, Armed and Dangerous,

January 26, 2018

Ursula K. Le Guin, RIP

Filed under: Books — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

I’m sorry to say that I’ve never read any of her work, but this obituary by Jude Karabus (especially this section) makes me think I missed out:

A lot of her work – like that of all the literary greats – had to do with thought experiments: What if the relationship between power and gender were different; what if you didn’t – for good or for bad – have to think about whether you wanted to have sex with someone when you interacted with them? What of the profit motive and humankind’s uneasy relationship with war, the environment and its own nature. Her work was, of course, unflinchingly feminist, humanist also.

There is a yellowed, slightly dog-eared copy of 1974’s The Dispossessed, complete with art nouveau-style illustration, on the shelf of the William Morris Gallery in London. It has a placard beneath it that reads something like: “This is the type of thing Morris was banging on about”. (Morris was a 19th-century English textile designer and social activist who brought art to the ‘lower’ classes by mass-producing tiles, wallpaper and other fine furnishings.)

It seems an odd choice by the curator; it’s the only book in the display that wasn’t literally written by a Morris compatriot or a known influence on him, and she was born years after he died. They were certainly of similar political bent, wanted to make art affordable etc, but only if you squint a little. The book was also written before I was born. There’s probably a connection I didn’t understand; perhaps the cover art was “a Morris” (he also painted and wrote poetry) – the terse note propped up against it doesn’t make it clear. But I like to think the curator was grabbed by the throat by her prose, like I was, and was simply looking for any excuse to say: “Here. Sit down. Read this! No really. Read this.”

A quick overview of the life and work of William Morris here.

January 24, 2018

Charles Stross on Heinlein’s “Crazy Years” notion

Filed under: Books, Media, Randomness — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Heinlein called it, back in the 1940s, and Charles Stross provides a few more data points to prove he was quite right:

Many, many years ago, in the introduction to my first short story collection, I kvetched about how science fictional futures obsolesce, and the futures we expect look quaint and dated by the time the reality rolls round.

Around the time I published “Toast” (the title an ironic reference to the way near-future SF gets burned by reality) I was writing the stories that later became Accelerando. I hadn’t really mastered the full repertoire of fiction techniques at that point (arguably, I still haven’t: I’ll stop learning when I die), but I played to my strengths — and one technique that suited me well back then was to take a fire-hose of ideas and spray them at the reader until they drowned. Nothing gives you a sense of an immersive future like having the entire world dumped on your head simultaneously, after all.

Now we are living in 2018, round the time I envisaged “Lobsters” taking place when I was writing that novelette, and the joke’s on me: reality is outstripping my own ability to keep coming up with insane shit to provide texture to my fiction.

Just in the past 24 hours, the breaking news from Saudi Arabia is that twelve camels have been disqualified from a beauty pageant because their handlers used Botox to make them more handsome. (The street finds its uses for tech, including medicine, but come on, camel beauty pageant botox should not be a viable Google search term in any plausible time line.) Meanwhile, home in Edinburgh, eight vehicles have been discovered trapped in an abandoned robot car park during demolition work. This is pure J. G. Ballard/William Gibson mashup territory, and it’s about half a kilometre from my front door. The world’s top 1% earned 82% of all wealth generated in 2017 — I’m fairly sure this wasn’t what Adam Smith had in mind — and South Korea has such a high suicide rate that the government intends to make organising a suicide pact a criminal offence.

Go home, 2018, you’re drunk. (Or, as Robert Heinlein might have put it: these are the crazy years, and they’re not over yet.)

November 30, 2017

“[W]henever I visit a newsroom these days, I instinctively feel unhealthy, like a 19th-century Lake Poet visiting an especially polluted part of London”

Filed under: Business, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Colby Cosh goes well out of his way to rub salt in the wounds of daily commuters, while basking in the glories of working from home:

When Statistics Canada puts its big brains to work on measuring the time devoted to commuting, and the various ways in which people drag their butts to work, I always read the results with the particular interest-fascination-horror of a permanent non-commuter. I am well into my second decade of working full-time, pretty much exclusively, from home. I’m dragged out of the house very occasionally for assignments and broadcast appearances, but most of what I do for a living happens a few feet from my bed.

None of it, I should specify, actually happens in bed (and relatively little of it involves actual writing). As most people who have to physically travel to a job seem to suspect, working remotely gives you a scary, even nauseating freedom to customize your working arrangements. I suppose most of us professional shut-ins find that we have to establish arbitrary rules and mini-disciplines to prevent our lives from becoming totally unstructured and unhealthy. “Bed is for sleep” is one of mine.

All of my conscious writing and research is done strictly at a desk, whether or not I happen to be wearing pants. With that said, as I get older, I do find sleep to be a more important component of my overall work process. Naps can be magical, and the ability to get around a writing difficulty by means of one is something I would immediately miss if I became a miserable corporate prisoner/drone again.

This kind of consideration deepens the psychic divide between commuters and remote workers: we have trouble understanding one another’s worlds even when we have switched between them. Commuters shudder at the thought of an amorphous life with less social contact and minimal formal barriers between work and non-work. Indeed, I think working at home does make one a little dottier (note: this is not necessarily a practical disadvantage for a newspaper columnist). I suspect it may also discourage groupthink. It definitely cuts down on pointless meetings; and whenever I visit a newsroom these days, I instinctively feel unhealthy, like a 19th-century Lake Poet visiting an especially polluted part of London.

I’ve spent more of my time working from home over the last decade than sitting in the office (and therefore also needing to drag my carcass to and from said office), and I really do understand his viewpoint. It’s one of the things I anticipate with no joy at all, as any new job I’m likely to land will probably require a daily commute. On a good day, it’s about an hour’s drive to downtown Toronto, but there aren’t enough good travel days and taking public transit literally doubles that time. Spending four hours per day to get to work and back feels very wasteful, even when I can get in some reading on the way.

November 25, 2017

QotD: Reading

Filed under: Books, Quotations — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Reading is inherently ephemeral, but it feels less so when you’re making your way through a physical book, which persists when you’ve finished it. It is a monument to the activity of reading. It makes this imaginary activity entirely substantial. But the quiddity of e-reading is that it effaces itself. […] There is a disproportionate magic in the way black marks on white paper — or their pixilated facsimiles — stir us into reverie and revise our consciousness. Still, we require proof that it has happened. And that proof is what the books on my shelves continue to offer.

Verlyn Klinkenborg, “Books to Have and to Hold”, New York Times, 2013-08-10.

November 24, 2017

Not Guided by Policy: Hunter S. Thompson and the Birth of Gonzo Journalism

Filed under: History, Media, Politics, Sports, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Today I Found Out
Published on 6 Nov 2017

In this video:

“We were somewhere around Barstow, on the edge of the desert, when the drugs began to take hold.” This is the opening line from the highly acclaimed roman à clef Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream written by Hunter S. Thompson, one of America’s most countercultural and anti-authoritarian writers. The untamed master of his own self-titled genre, “gonzo journalism,” Thompson set ablaze the American standards for journalism during the 1960s and 70s with a cornucopia of drugs, alcohol, gun toting, and most notably, his exemplary writing.

Want the text version?: http://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2015/07/not-guided-policy-act-gonzo/

November 14, 2017

QotD: Depressive writing leads to depressed readers

Filed under: Books, Quotations — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Agatha Christie gave her characters foibles, sure, and often there was a tight intrigue and not just the murderer but two or three other people would be no good. BUT the propensity of the characters gave you the impression of being good sort of people. Perhaps muddled, confused, or driven by circumstances to the less than honorable, but in general driven by principles of honor or love (even sometimes the murderer) and wanting to do the right thing for those they cared about.

You emerge from a Christie memory with the idea, sure, that of course there was unpleasantness, but most of the people are not horrors.

How did we get from there to now, where the characters aren’t even evil? They’re just dingy and grey and tainted, all of them equally. The victim, the detectives, the witnesses, will be vile and contorted, grotesque shapes walking in the world of men.

If this is a reflection of the psyches of most authors, I suddenly understand a lot about the self-hatred of western intellectuals.

But I wonder if it’s a fashion absorbed and perpetuated, communicated like the flu, a low grade dingy patina of … not even evil, just discontent and depression and a feeling that everyone in the world is similarly tainted.

I realized that was part of what was depressing me, partly because I’m a depressive, so I monitor my mood fairly regularly. BUT what about normal people? What if they just absorb this world view — and the idea that it’s smart and sophisticated, too — through popular entertainment, through movies and books and shows and then spew it out into the world, because it stands like a veil between them and reality, changing the way they perceive everything.

[…] such despairing stuff, such low grade despair and unpleasantness change us, particularly when they’re unremitting. You internalize these thoughts, they become part of you. If humanity is a plague, who will have children? If humanity is a plague, why not encourage the criminals and terrorists? If humanity is a plague who is clean?

You. Me. Most human beings. Oh, sure, we’re not perfect — I often think people who write this lack the ability to distinguish between not being perfect and being corrupt and evil — and we often have unlovely characteristics. But, with very few exceptions, most people I know TRY to be decent by their lights, try to raise their kids, help their friends and generally leave the world a little better.

Now, are we representative of everyone? Of course not. A lot of people are raised in cultures (here and abroad) that simply don’t give their best selves a chance. But why enshrine those people and not the vast majority who are decent and well… human?

Even in a mystery there should be innocent and well-intentioned people. It gives contrast to the darker and more evil people and events.

Painting only in dark tints is no more accurate than painting only in pale tints. It doesn’t denote greater artistry. It just hangs a grey, blotched veil between your reader and reality, a veil that hides what is worthwhile in humans and events.

Make yourself aware of the veil and remove it. It’s time the low-grade depression of western civilization were defeated. No, it’s not perfect, but with all its failings it has secured the most benefits to the greatest number of people in the long and convoluted history of mankind. Self-criticism might be appropriate, but not to the exclusion of everything else.

Say no to the dingy-grey-patina. Wash your eyes and look at the world anew. And then paint in all the tints not just grey or black.

Sarah Hoyt, “A Dingy Patina”, According To Hoyt, 2015-10-22.

November 9, 2017

Frankenstein: The New Romantics – Extra Sci Fi – #2

Filed under: Books, Europe, History, Science — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Extra Credits
Published on 7 Nov 2017

Industrialization and the Age of Reason benefitted society in many ways, but also created an atmosphere of dehumanizing mass production. The Romantic literary movement rose up to assert the value of emotion in a modern world, and praised science as a marvel whose discoveries bounded on magic made real.

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