Crying Birds™ for September 12, 2011

1.

Albert Pujols had no comment about a derogatory tweet the Brewers' Nyjer Morgan posted after being ejected from a game against the Cardinals, but manager Tony La Russa did.

Morgan, whose handle is @TheRealTPlush, referred to Pujols as Alberta and criticized Pujols for running to the mound and making sure Morgan's confrontation with Cardinals starter Chris Carpenter didn't escalate in the ninth inning of a shutout over Milwaukee on Wednesday night.

"Alberta couldn't see Plush if she had her gloves on!!!" Morgan tweeted, and added, "Wat was she thinking running afta Plush!!! She never been n tha ring!!!"

Earlier he referred to the Cardinals as crying birds.

La Russa said that Morgan was a good player but that he needed to "get a clue." La Russa added, "I'm aware of him. The less you talk about him, the better off you are." --AP

(Via Jane)

2. Over at The Literarian, the Mercantile Center for Fiction's magazine, I pick a few SF-ish titles that I like. (Oddly, when I was first asked to come up with a list, all I knew for sure was that I wanted to mention Joe Haldeman's The Forever War...which I forgot about until it was too late!)

3. Fans of interviews in The Believer will want to check out the latest issue of Jeff Lemire's Animal Man...done as a Believer interview!

(Via Douglas)

4. Tomorrow! A Believer event at KGB, featuring Justin Taylor, Rozalia Jovanovic, and f.s. Rebecca Taylor!

Megatext me

My final Astral Weeks column is now up at the Los Angeles Times site. It's a review of The Wesleyan Anthology of Science Fiction, which I highly recommend. A taste:

There are gems from giants. Encountering "Fondly Fahrenheit" (1954), Alfred Bester's robots-and-murder meditation, for the first time, I reread a stretch of it over and over, thinking that surely a printing error had been made. By collapsing the first-person voice — aggressively mingling two "I" points of view — Bester flouts the rules of narrative to show a meltdown of authority between a master and his android. It's a joy to find Philip K. Dick's 1966 "We Can Remember It for You Wholesale," the basis for the Arnold Schwarzenegger film "Total Recall," in all its brisk, blunt glory: I love both the carpet-pulling, memory-versus-implant plot and the doofus-y futuristic touches like the robot taxicab driver who says "Yes, sir or madam," the fashionably topless receptionist and a drug called "narkidrine."

My first column appeared in April 2007, so it's been nearly four years. Thanks to my editors and readers!

Apocalyptic SF contest

From Joshua Glenn:

Disambiguation readers are INVITED TO SUBMIT an extremely short RADIUM-AGE APOCALYPSE STORY to the following URL:

http://hilobrow.com/2010/03/22/micro-fiction-contest-2/

The story should (a) be apocalyptic, i.e., either the world or life as we know it should be shattered; and (b) it should either be set in the 1900-35 era (science fiction's Radium Age), or be written from the perspective of that era — i.e., without knowledge of any post-1935 historical events, social-cultural transformations, or technological developments. Please read guidelines (word count limit, language, etc.) at the URL above. Deadline: 5 pm EST on March 31.

The stories will be judged by HiLobrow.com editors Matthew Battles and Joshua Glenn, and HiLobrow’s Magister Ludi, Patrick Cates. The author of the winning story will receive a HiLobrow t-shirt, and her story will be illustrated and published on HiLobrow; we'll also record the story for the next episode of "Parallel Universe: Pazzo," our monthly Radum-Age science fiction podcast. A few honorable mentions will be awarded; those stories will also be published on HiLobrow.

Joshua Glenn's "10 Best Apocalypse Novels of Pre-Golden Age SF" post for io9 is recommended reading:

http://io9.com/5098861/the-10-best-apocalypse-novels-of-pre+golden-age-sf-1904+33

Not so good

It's time for my Atkinson vitamin:

In Tempo di viaggio (1983), the doodle Andrei Tarkovsky and Tonino Guerra made for Italian TV as they prepped Nostalghia, the great struggling Russian answers a question about genre films by saying that his Solaris (1972) is “not so good,” essentially because it is science fiction, because it is a genre film. You can easily understand why Tarkovsky felt this way, given his topos and metaphysical concerns, but what’s shocking is how little the filmmaker apparently understood about his own film, and about the purpose of science fiction in general. The key to the genre is its functionality as metaphor—if it’s merely space opera (Star Wars or the new Star Trek or whatever), then it’s kiddie stuff, and as close to real science fiction, as it’s evolved, as the old Buck Rogers serials. Real science fiction, the only genre defined by ideas, is closer to satire than to fantasy or horror: its battery of metaphors is used as speculation and commentary about the present, hyperbolically exploding whatever mitigations might couch an issue in real life, so we can see the fallout rain down. (In ideas begins morality, and pulpist Edmund Crispin was only the first to note that science fiction is “the last refuge for the morality tale.”) The critic who got this best was the late Brit writer Philip Strick, whose modest but electrically philosophical 1976 volume Science Fiction Movies was an epiphany for me as a movie-struck tween.

—Michael Atkinson, Criterion Collection online

Bringing home the Bacon

Some gorgeous "pre-Golden Age" science fiction covers illustrate Dzyd Josh's latest transmission at i09 , including Harold Steele Mackaye's The Panchronicon (1904):

I'm informed that The Panchronicon concerns a pair of New Hampshire spinsters who are given the opportunity to travel through time via a solar-powered airship-thing from the 27th-century. See, first you fly the Panchronicon to the North Pole; then you orbit the Earth widdershins (anti-sunwise, like Christopher Reeve does in the 1978 Superman); and presto, you're in 16th-century England, where you're able to disprove the Bacon-was-Shakespeare theory.

And there's an Ouroboros, linking back here, to boot!

7. E.R. Eddison, The Worm Ouroboros (London: Jonathan Cape, 1922). More admired than read, Ouroboros is a linguistically adventurous saga recounting the infinite war between the king of Witchland and the lords of Demonland... on the planet Mercury. Call it Nietzschean SF: somewhere out there, the author would have us believe, another world is possible, one in which the self-overcoming values and worldview of Roman, Arab, Germanic, Japanese nobility, Homeric heroes, and Scandinavian Vikings will never be corrupted. (As Lord Juss puts it: "For better it were we should run hazard again of utter destruction, than thus live out our lives like cattle fattening for the slaughter, or like silly garden plants.") The end of Eddison's novel is also its beginning, hence the title and Keith Henderson's heavy-metal jacket illustration — a snake devouring itself tail-first. Like they so often do in medieval engravings, Celtic sculptures, Egyptian scrolls, Aztec glyphs, and on Agent Scully's lower back. Wish I could afford a 1st edition.

(Here's my take on the book at Astral Weeks.)

Wylie agency

At io9, Joshua Glenn lists "the Ten Best Apocalypse Novels of pre-Golden Age SF (1904–1933)," with some hypnotic covers.

New Zealand, Benjamin Rosenbaum, and Me — Memo to myself

In the first of a few "best of the year" spots, I list some interesting ’08 titles in SF/speculative for the L.A. Times (some of which will be familiar to the vast Astral Weeks audience).*

And...speaking of lists—ye olde Personal Days makes it onto The L Magazine's holiday gift guide!




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*And.....speaking of Astral Weeks, I want to read this interview with Van Morrison at some point.

Notes from the Forum on Aesthetic Diversity

From Ange at Harriet:

2. Robert Pinsky cited an early science fiction story by James Blish , “Surface Tension.” This story in which a stranded colony of space travelers use their genetic material to create tiny puppet colonies of people who live in water was, for Pinsky, “the birth of thought.”

Domino dancing

1. Memories of Pop With a Shotgun: Fab Four, Howard Stern, David Thomson, and more.

2. Great Onion piece: "Earthquake Sets Japan Back to 2147." Sample line: "The prime minister said that the greatest effort would be exerted on rebuilding the Procross Buster Quasigravitic Lensing Frame, the motive force behind Japan's automated network of roads, aerobuildings, and levitation canals."

3. Nice pic of a jar of rubber cement!

4. Levi weighs in on the ouroboros and more (NSFW!)...

5. Rachel in the Times on a two-person abstinence society at Harvard. The piece contains the classic line: "He redirects his attention toward his fajitas."

(Accidentally double-clicking that last word got me: "A dish consisting of strips of marinated meat, poultry, or vegetables that are grilled over an open fire and served in a tortilla, usually with spicy condiments. Often used in the plural.")

6. This NYT headline today led me to my first iTunes purchase in a while—does anyone remember this?

"April Wine" now appears right before "Arcade Fire" on my iTunes. There's a line in French toward the end of the song; what if all Canadian groups had to include a line in French in every song (or a song entirely in French, à la the Arcade Fire's "Une Année Sans Lumiére," on every album)?

Astral Weeks and more

1. My new science fiction column, Astral Weeks, debuts at the Los Angeles Times website today. This installment looks at books by British writer Brian W. Aldiss and Nick Mamatas.

2. Tragic SF note: One of the victims of the VT shootings was the son of Michael Bishop, author of The Secret Ascension, or Philip K. Dick Is Dead, Alas.

3. Notes for a list: Songs that mention other songs—

Lying on the floor just playing my guitar
Trying to find the chords to "Just the Way You Are"
—Fountains of Wayne, "Peace and Love"

And I heard another one yesterday...it will come back to me.

4. Best bank music: The other day, at a Citibank on 86th, the Decemberist's "O Valencia" was followed by Aztec Camera's "Oblivious." This was somehow exciting. Then on a TV commercial for—some sort of vehicle?—I heard a line from a Jam song ("What you see* is what you get"). This was somehow depressing. (Apple should have used it in the early days of Mac!)

5. Over at the NYT's Education Life, Dizzyhead Christine has a short bit about the things people throw in the air at graduation. Ouch!


(Photo taken at Eslite Bookstore, Taipei, Taiwan)

*UPDATE: As Arlo points out, it's "what you give is what you get," from "Start!" (Sorry, Apple!)