August 31, 2001
Science fiction criticism
One of the advantages to my girlfriend's presence in grad school is that I can piggyback on her access to a research library. For instance, I have a decent chance of one day being able to read this essay on Stapledon's immensely dense, often painfully expository novel of the repeated rise and fall of the human race. It's an odd book and I'm looking forward to reading Lem's take on it. Lem is, of course, no slouch of a writer himself -- his mathematical love poem from The Cyberiad was one the readings at my friends Josh and Kim's wedding, and it's just as example of Lem at his best. Science fiction is blessed with good writers who are also good critics: Samuel R. Delany and Joanna Russ are two of the better known examples, but dozens of other genre writers have taken stabs at criticism. (LeGuin's excellent critical writing is particularly noteworthy, as, in a different way, is Bruce Sterling's aggressive little zine, Cheap Truth, almost as responsible as Neuromancer for creating cyberpunk.) I'm headed out of town for the weekend, but I'm bringing along a slim volume of R.A. Lafferty essays, It's Down the Slippery Cellar Stair, which I bet will be as good as everything else he wrote. Then back to Science Fiction Studies to build up a reading list -- let's hear it for research libraries.
August 29, 2001
Cockneys, Camembert, and candlesticks
The state sport of Maryland is, naturally, jousting, but many have argued that the state should instead celebrate duckpin bowling. Duckpin bowling (and its New England cousin, candlestick bowling) stemmed from bowling alley owners' efforts to differentiate themselves from alleys offering "big pin" bowling. Professional bowling and bowling leagues are less popular than in their heyday, but duckpin and candlestick bowling are almost entirely moribund, having fallen back from national semi-prominence to a flickering presence in their home regions.
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August 26, 2001
The Lazy ME
Congratulations to Greg, who has arrived in Reno! (You can read dispatches from his trip at Notlost.) The arch seen in his final post of the trip has a history dating back to 1926, when it read "Reno Transcontinental Highway Exposition". Reno's motto -- "The Biggest Little City in the World" -- has appeared on the arch since 1929, the winning entry in a contest to choose a city motto. Reno was named after Union Major General Jesse Lee Reno on May 9, 1868. Although Reno is most famous now for gambling, at one point Reno had a different reputation. Thanks to Nevada's liberal divorce laws and six-week residency requirement, Reno was once the prime location for a peculiar sort of spa: the divorce ranch, where upper-class women could while away the time waiting for their divorce to come through. Today, the divorce ranch is largely forgotten, remembered only through the occasional reference in literature from the first half of the century and George Cukor's 1939 film, The Women. But if you're ever in Las Vegas, stop by the Floyd Lamb State Park, the site of a former divorce ranch, and imagine a rich women -- a Rockefeller, a Vanderbilt -- spending a few weeks on the Monte Crisco or the Lazy ME, taking a poolside nap, flirting with cowboys, and riding into the sunset.
August 25, 2001
The Children of Mu
Most literary frauds tend to have obvious goals: "Some forge for love, some for money, and some for the glory of having done it." The false Shakespeare plays of William Ireland were done for fame; Alan Sokal or the Spectralists wrote their literary fakes as parodies designed to show a lack of critical judgment in movements they disagreed with. The Necronomicon (as available in stores, not as cited in the works of Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, and the like) was put together to help publishing companies make a cheap buck off gullible high-schoolers. But what about those who lie in between -- what about, for instance, Abbé Charles Etienne Brasseur?
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August 21, 2001
Nursery food
The last couple of days at work have been kah-razy, man, kah-razy. Now I'm home again, and I spent the entire drive home thinking about to relax. My sweetie is making homemade sauce. I thought about what to listen to -- Louis Armstrong's "Skokiaan" (also known as "that song from the end of Slacker", and one of my all-time favorite cheer-up songs) or Zumpano or the Pixies B-sides compilation on 4AD that I finally picked up. Something I find soothing. And a pot of tea, definitely tea. And something to read; I was thinking about starting Zilpha Keatley Snyder's The Egypt Game. I wanted to aim for the intellectual equivelant of nursery food, described by Jane and Michael Stern in Square Meals as food "that cannot fail to ease even the grumpiest crosspatch." No cilantro, nothing garlicky, no garam masala. I want to turn my brain off. But I discovered via Kathryn "the Oracle" Yu that Philip Pullman has been nominated for the Booker Prize. Maybe children's books are an adult pleasure now. I'm thrilled for Pullman, but also irrationally peeved. Garlic and cilantro are fine, but tonight? Velveeta and buttered noodles, please.
August 15, 2001
Highfalutin bathos
Recently, I ran across a reference to the word "ecdysiast". It wasn't attributed (by the AskOxford folks) to H.L. Mencken, so I dashed off (and clearly failed to proofread) a letter. Praising Mencken led me to read some of Mencken's essays again, and what a treat they are. Mencken was the author of The American Language and several volumes of essays under the apt title Prejudices; he was a newspaperman, a columnist and reporter for the Baltimore Sun; he was an editor, founding both the American Mercury and the now-forgotten Smart Set. Mencken was viruently anti-Christian, anti-fundamentalist, anti-Appalachian, anti-black, anti-Semetic, anti-female, anti-FDR, anti-upper-class, anti-middle-class, and anti-lower-class. He was anti-people. He probably kicked dogs and babies. About the only things I can bring to mind that Mencken thoroughly approved of were free speech, lucid writing, good cigars, and the occasional tipple. One of the things he mostly approved of was Harriet Monroe's Poetry.
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August 12, 2001
All my Barbies and all my Kens
Last week, I got a song stuck in my head. "You threw out my Nancy Drew books / My model horses from Massachusetts / All my Barbies and all my Kens / My stuffed animals, my childhood friend!" The song is called "Nancy Drew", it's by a band called Tuscadero, and even though I own the Teenbeat album it's on, I probably haven't heard that song in five years.
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August 10, 2001
Delia Derbyshire
The name "Delia Derbyshire" may not be familiar to you, but if you were even a marginally geeky child in junior high, you've probably heard her work. Derbyshire, who died this July at the age of 64, wanted to be a recording engineer for Decca, but was turned away because she was a woman. Instead, she went to work for the Radiophonic Workshop at the BBC instead, and quietly developed into a prolific and pioneering electronic composer, working with comparatively primitive equipment to create haunting music for television, records, and live performance.
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August 06, 2001
Annotated annotations
If you're a casual reader of Shakespeare and you run across a word, phrase, or reference you don't understand, what do you do? Grab an annotated edition! Annotated editions -- whether of Shakespeare or the Bible, Alice in Wonderland or The Wizard of Oz, annotated editions make faking scholarly knowledge of a work ever so much easier. Annotations flourish on the Internet, but they tend to be a bit more esoteric than Shakespeare and the KJV (or even Lovecraft and Carroll and Baum).
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August 04, 2001
House of games
A MetaFilter thread on text adventure game writer Andrew Plotkin led to a few happy discoveries. Plotkin (whose website is at eblog.com: "Blong! You are a pickle." Nobody who likes Daniel Pinkwater could be an evil man!) has written a number of entertaining (and, in some cases, viciously difficult) interactive fiction games, some of which I have played and enjoyed. But there's more to this story.
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August 01, 2001
An unsolicited testimonial
Tonight I made a batch of spicy peanut butter noodles, using a recipie loosely adapted from a Deborah Madison recipie. The secret ingredient? Magic Rooster sauce! My college roommates and I first discovered Tuong Ot Sriracha sauce -- the one with the rooster on the bottle -- at Apsara, home of the best Thai and Cambodian food in Providence. (Apsara is also dirt cheap; if you happen to be passing through Rhode Island, stop by for some nime chow.) Magic Rooster sauce was a delicious compliment to our orders of noodles, and it's still probably the best hot sauce for cooking with that I've found. Sure, a bad batch of sauce produced potentially explosive gas, but it adds some heat and a pleasant taste anywhere you might want to use cayenne. (For spicy faux-Thai peanut butter sauce, thin a scant cup peanut butter with a quarter cup of soy sauce, a quarter cup of water, and a half cup of rice vinegar. Stir in three cloves finely chopped garlic and a scant tablespoon each of sesame oil and peanut oil. Add a dollop of honey and Tuong Ot Sriracha to taste. Heat and stir until blended. Adjust the proportions if the sauce is too thin or thick -- I don't measure when I make the sauce, but it should be a fairly thick, gloppy liquid. Mix with rice noodles and garnish with finely chopped cilantro, scallions, or crushed peanuts if you have them on hand. It also makes a fine topping for fried eggplant.)