on being gwyneth

Fantasy is popular because, since heroes and villains don’t exist, it’s absolutely necessary to our survival as a species to invent them.

- k.j. parker

in the “fantasy fiction” category of the 2006 bulwer-lytton contest:

It was within the great stony nostril of a statue of Landrick the Elfin Vicelord that Frodo’s great uncle, Jasper Baggins, happened to stumble upon the enchanted Bag of Holding, not to be confused with the Hag of Bolding, who was quite fond of leeks, most especially in a savory Hobbit knuckle stew.

one of my few regrets when i die will be that i hadn’t enough time to read everything i ought or want to.

that i need to re-read certain books periodically, only compounds the problem.

I jerked my hand back as though the plastic were hot, and stood there weaving until one of the silences between rings stretched and stretched and stretched and changed key and became the silence of an apartment in which no telephone is ringing.

— donald e. westlake, god save the mark

The sf pulps still survive today, in the shape of monthly digest-size magazines — Asimov’s, Fantasy & Science Fiction, Analog and the like. (And, in the name of God, how does Analog sound science-fictional now? May as well call the thing Clockwork, or Coal Scuttle.) But they don’t have the true spark of madness in their covers, and rarely in their content. Sf, in print, just doesn’t excite people the way it used to. (…) Very few people put the lighted taper to the blue touch paper in the back of their brain and just fire big flaming chunks of it all over you anymore. Not the way they used to. You could look at those old covers and see people opening up the throttle and just letting rip, getting as crazy as possible, just for the hell of it, just for the art and sound of it.

— Warren Ellis

Still, I have been tempted, on this night of revel and that, to meditate over the beer on the roundness of my peg, the squareness of my hole, and the swiftly wasted brevity of me, to stand, at the full, pulling the tide of passionate wishing to rattle in the pebbles.

—Gwyn Thomas

this is why steampunk is my favorite form of postmodern literature:
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“Lady Southmere replenished the vacuum with one of the more long-drawn, contemplative, and non-committal varieties of the inimitable transatlantic ‘Aha’.”

—E.R. Eddison, A Fish Dinner in Memison

for many years of my earlier life, i used to toss and howl in my sleep, and several nights a week i would wake up screaming.

in an odd way, i sort of miss it.
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i really need to re-subscribe to the new york review of books. i recall vividly the controversy that arose there over the gabler edition of ulysses, or the scholarly contests between gould and dennet, penrose and searle. it took erudite literary criticism as a point of departure for high-quality analysis of everything from global realpolitik to aboriginal mythologies.

yes. i really do need to re-subscribe. though i will have to abandon the habit of stacking and saving them. alison is pressing hard for me to reduce piles, not augment them.