Addendum to "The Scavach Basin"

 ["The Scavach Basin" is a track written for Tales from the Farlands, an Ongaku Concept Collective album. It's a bit of a concept album, with each team writing a track for a fictional country they invented. I ended up the only one working on the track, however, this is the concept I worked from. Special Thanks to Jack Doherty - as I remember, this was a combination of both of our ideas; similarly, I used ideas similar to his early sketches in the final track that I wrote.]

Brief Thoughts: A Better Crooked

Last year I read Austin Grossman's Crooked, a novel reimagining the Cold War as not merely a diplomatic, economic, and - by way of proxy wars - military conflict but as an occult conflict in which the Soviet Union has raced far ahead of the United States, and Richard Nixon is the last of the sorcerer-presidents. It blends alternate history with political thriller, and layers onto this shades of Lovecraftian horror, Faustian bargains, Cold War-era espionage and intrigue, and suspense. (There will be spoilers.)

My Psychedelic Love Story | Errol Morris (2021)

After watching Errol Morris's Wormwood, Joanna Harcourt-Smith - author of an autobiography, Tripping the Bardo with Timothy Leary: My Psychedelic Love Story, and Timothy Leary's girlfriend (perhaps "common law wife" would be equally apposite) during the period 1972-77 - got in touch with Morris because she had been wondered, had wondered: had she- a young and naive rich girl - been manipulated into Leary's life somehow?

The Great Mistake | Jonathan Lee (2021)

Jonathan Lee’s The Great Mistake is a masterpiece of a novel; a beautiful, enthralling, humane novel of deep sympathy which I devoured in three days.

Underrated: Jo Walton, Master of the Low-Key Story

(This was originally posted to Reddit's r/fantasy on June 24th. It's been a while but I figure I should put this up here, too. There are some minor revisions here and there, and arguably some small spoilers.)

A few weeks ago somebody complained about the deluge of posts about things being overrated and asked, why are there not more posts about things being underrated? I am pleased therefore pleased to present my attempt to fulfill that request.

Jo Walton is one of my favorite writers working today. She writes science fiction and fantasy in a distinctly literary, distinctly low-key style. She writes novels, short fiction, and poems, and has been doing so since the turn of the millennium. She also writes short essays/reviews for Tor, which have been compiled into two books.

I would like to make the case for you that she is one of the finest writers of genre fiction writing today.

The Nonbinary Cowboy Cop: A Comic Monologue

I’m a maverick. I like to do things my way and I do things my way because it gets results. I’m a detective. Been a detective twelve years and I’m good, damn good, at what I do. Sometimes the rules are a wall, and you gotta be a crowbar. I’m a renegade – I don’t always follow the laws I’m enforcing. I’m a lone wolf, an outsider, from the social scene, from the country club, from the gender binary. I’ve got a drinking problem and I’ve been quitting the pub yearly for a decade now. I’ve got an ex-wife and an ex-husband but no kids. Can’t stand kids. Can't stand how dirty they are. Can’t stand dirty cops. I’m a compulsive germophobe. Hygienic to a fault. I do what I have to do, to keep myself sane and keep others safe. I hold everyone in contempt, especially those above me. I believe in results, not paperwork, in Getting Things Done even if the Things that are Getting Done aren’t the Things my superiors want Got Done. I’ve been asked for my badge three times, turned it in four, and I’ve still got my job. I don’t get along with my partners, until I do. When a criminal's rushing at you with a gun in one hand and a knife in the other, if you're thinking about the rules your captain tells you about instead of pulling out a gun than it's like bringing a spoon to a gun-and-knife fight. Sometimes I think I should go independent, become a private detective. Wait for some lady with legs or a gentleman with arms to walk in. But I don't have the discipline for it. I'm a loose cannon, a powder keg, a hot potato that's just leapt out of the oven. I'm a problem for the City but I'm too good for them to let me go. I don't like suits or uniforms. I'll die doing this job and they'll bury me in a tuxedo. Life's hard. Real hard. 

Brief Thoughts: Calvino, Eco, and Borges as writers 'of a piece'

Italo Calvino, Umberto Eco, and Jorge Luis Borges seem to me to be 'of a piece.' They are all writerly writers - now this is not so uncommon. Many writers, especially modernist and postmodernist writers, could be described as such. In and of itself, that isn't too unique. What make these three unique, in my eyes, is that they're also very readerly writers for a specific value of readerly - all three are fascinated by the act of reading itself. Borges, I would hope, doesn't need to be explained in this regard. Calvino's If on a winter's night a traveler is about a Reader attempting to find a novel of that same name; and Eco's The Name of the Rose revolves around the contents of a missing work by Aristotle.

(Note: of these writers, I have read Borges's Ficciones, Calvino's Invisible Cities, and I'm in the middle of reading The Name of the Rose.)

Poem 14 (Homage to Stephen Crane)

 

My Reading List for 2021

Last year I finished 151 books. I don't plan to exceed that this year, but there are some books that I have written down that I want to read this year.

Brief Thoughts - A Quote from Ursula K. Le Guin

Hard times are coming, when we’ll be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine real grounds for hope. We’ll need writers who can remember freedom — poets, visionaries — realists of a larger reality...

Ursula K. Le Guin, in her speech accepting the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters.

At a time when capitalism is attempting to re-entrench itself in the face of the largest protests and movements that have ever emerged confront its contradictions, cruelty, and inhumanity, and with capitalist realism -- Mark Fisher's term to describe how so many people have become totally incapable of even imagining that an alternative to capitalism could exist -- being put to the test, her words ring truer by the day. She said these words in 2014, predating the sudden ascent of proto- and neo-fascist elements from the fringes skirting the edge of the mainstream (let us not pretend they are sudden, they have been present for a very long time) into the very center of culture -- and, faced with fascism, capitalism's last and final resort when all other methods of restoring the complacency of the lower classes fail, she is right, we do need visionaries, utopians, dreamers, those people that she calls (in maybe my favorite phrase ever) the realists of a larger reality.