Podcast alert

Maybe you have yet to read the great Jazz Age poet Hart Crane, put off by his reputation for writing “difficult” poetry, or maybe you read him a while back and think there’s nothing left to say on the subject. Whatever may be the case, this terrific conversation about Crane’s work with the magisterial critic and educator Harold Bloom will send you running to find a copy of The Bridge, Crane’s long poem about the Brooklyn Bridge.

Chris Jordan talks about visiting and photographing the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.

Blake Eskin talks about the science of nightmares, and using imagery-rehearsal therapy to make bad dreams less scary.

Friday finds

A geological team looking for oil in the western desert of Egypt may have discovered the remains of some 50,000 Persian soldiers swallowed up by a sandstorm in the sixth century BCE. The “lost army,” mentioned by Herodotus in the fifth century BCE, has long been considered a myth, though that hasn’t prevented generations of adventurers from looking for evidence of the soldiers, sent by King Cambyses and (according to Herodotus) last seen at the oasis of Siwa. Maybe George Lucas should take note of this: Indiana Jones and the Lost Army could be a dynamite title for a movie. And, if memory serves, didn’t Robert E. Howard write a poem about Cambyses?        

Continuing in this mythological vein, Owen Sheers talks about White Ravens, his retelling of a story from the Welsh myth cycle The Mabinogion. The book sounds pretty good, but I still swear by Evangeline Walton’s retelling of the same story in The Children of Llyr. 

Get out your best gray flannel suit and work your way through “Books to Read Mad Men By,” listed by The Neglected Books Page in two installments here and here.  

Here’s the perfect stocking-stuffer for the Hayao Miyazaki fan in your family.

Robert Stone, author of Dog Soldiers, A Flag for Sunrise and Bay of Souls, is coming to Princeton University for a reading.  I am so there.

Everything’s turning up hobbits.

Bruce Lee or Jet Li? All I can tell you is that when I was a kid and The Green Hornet was on the tube, nobody ever pretended to be Britt Reid. Everybody wanted to be Kato. Pretending to use the Hornet’s Sting was a distant second.  

“This video is fantastic and highly educational. It teaches you how to whittle your own 19th Century dictionary, using only string, a turnip, and a clamp. But first you have to make your own Linotype machine.”

Roguetry in motion

Carl Hiaasen, eminent muckraker and novelist, reveals to the world a secret communication between Sarah Palin and the publisher of her soon-to-be excreted “memoir,” Going Rogue:  

2. The mainland of Russia is indeed visible from parts of western Alaska during favorable weather conditions in the Bering Straits. Considering the ridicule you endured over this issue during the campaign, your desire to set the record straight is understandable.

Still, 78 pages is a big chunk of the book. Perhaps it’s possible to deal with the I-can-see-Russia controversy a bit more succinctly.

3. Our researchers can find no evidence that Tina Fey belongs to the Taliban. Could you send us the sourcing for that reference?

4. John McCain’s campaign staff is vehemently denying the incident you describe in Chapter 13. Perhaps you could provide our legal department with the names of persons who actually witnessed the senator placing the duct tape over your mouth.

5. Even though you quit with 18 months remaining in your term, your achievements as Alaska’s governor will be of great interest to your readers and political supporters.

How about expanding that section of the book to a full chapter?

Looks like they’ll be editing this turkey right up to the last minute.

Friday finds

All you need to celebrate Halloween the H.G. Wells way. (And the George Pal way, and the Oson Welles way, and the Hugo Gernsback way. . .) The image above, incidentally, shows Michael Condron’s sculpture of a Martian tripod in Woking, Surrey, where all hell breaks loose in the original novel. Check here for the New Jersey location used in the radio broadcast.

How about some literary costume ideas for trick-or-tweeding?

Halloween, B’more style.

Continuing our Halloween theme, it turns out that Dan Aykroyd based the Ghostbusters storyline on the psychic exploits of his own dad.

Novelists nominate books they think have been unfairly neglected.

A medievalist tries his hand at the Dante’s Inferno board game.

Taking on Knut Hamsun.

No need to be skeptical about Martin Gardner.

Patricia Cornwell’s latest mystery tale is playing out in court.

Gore Vidal’s sunset years.

How Paul Shaffer was crucified and resurrected by Bob Dylan.

There’s nothing more pathetic than a whining contrarian.

Maurice Sendak has three words for parents who think Where the Wild Things Are is too scary for their kids.

The Guardian harkens back to its coverage of John Steinbeck’s Nobel Prize for Literature. A writer retraces the journey described in Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley.

M*A*S*H was Robert Altman’s first big hit as a filmmaker, but his son ended up making more money off it than he did.

If you don’t have the dime, don’t do the wine

I have to agree with J.D. Rhoades that the idea of a bottle of tequila that sells for over two grand is pretty astonishing. I mean . . . tequila? Cactus juice? Grapes, okay, maybe. Grapes are friendly. They practically ask to be squished and bottled and allowed to ferment in a dark place. There’s nothing friendly about a cactus.  Cacti mean to do you harm. They practically say: Yeah, fool, c’mon and try to squish me, see what happens. You wanna take off your shoes and stomp on a big vat full of cacti, go ahead, be my guest.

In point of fact, much as I love my red vino, I’d be afraid to drink a two-grand bottle of wine. I can’t imagine what would be there in the flavor and bouquet that could justify the premium price, but if I found out, I’d be stuck with a jones for something that costs the equivalent of a monthly mortgage payment to enjoy. At present, my vices have a pretty manageable price tag. Unless the publishing industry loosens up, and unless Oprah comes calling, they’d better stay that way.

Tempus fugit, and then some

How nice to know that The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction has been around long enough to get a 60th anniversary anthology in its honor. How weird to look at the table of contents and realize I’ve been around long enough to have read most of the stories already as they appeared in the magazine. And how wonderful to be reminded of the pleasure those stories gave at the time, and continue to give.

F&SF was the second genre magazine I started buying regularly at the newsstand. The first was Analog: Science Fiction, Science Fact, a few years before editor John W. Campbell’s death, when the magazine was pretty much moribund — a fact my teenage loyalty would only recognize after I’d read the Science Fiction Hall of Fame anthologies and looked at the publication dates of the Astounding/Analog stories in the books. Campbell’s impact on the SF field was undeniable, but the major authors he’d nurtured had all left the bullpen, leaving gimmicky hacks like Jack Wodhams who were willing to write to Campbell’s increasingly cranky specifications.

Moribundity was not a problem with F&SF. The first issue I bought featured the initial  novel in Jack Vance’s Durdane cycle, and that’s the kind of reading milestone you don’t quickly forget. A few months later came one of F&SF’s tribute issues to selected authors — Poul Anderson, in this case, which introduced me to another fine genre writer. Though come to think of it, I doubt I ever read a single issue of F&SF that didn’t introduce me to at least two authors worth following, along with others I already followed.

Let’s see. I first encountered Michael Bishop through a deeply creepy short story called “Darktree, Darktide,” and later a novella called “The White Otters of Childhood” that shares more than a few affinities with A Canticle for Leibowitz, my personal gold standard for science fiction. The book reviews by  Joanna Russ, James Sallis, and James Blish (and later, Algis Budrys) were several levels better and more sophisticated than anything in Analog.  When Frederik Pohl completed some short stories started with his late partner Cyril Kornbluth, F&SF was the only place for them. I still have the issue that featured Harlan Ellison’s “The Deathbird,” the novella that marked a turning point in his writing, and I remember the thrill of figuring out what he was up to. (The bright wrap-around cover painting by the Dillons was pretty spiffy, too.) The magazine’s literary standards have always been high enough to command respect even outside the genre. In fact, I would say F&SF was second only to New American Review in its impact on my young reading brain.

As Michael Swanwick has pointed out, genre magazines aren’t exactly thriving in the current market, and if the thought of F&SF not making it to another big anniversary strikes you as a pity, then the best thing to do is buy a subscription.

Friday finds

Want to give this year’s Halloween celebration a Lovecraftian flavor? Then Propnomicon is the site for you.

Now here’s somebody who really does it up brown for Halloween. The Martian invasion alone must have required a second mortgage.

A Chicago boy, Roger Ebert, writes about another Chicago boy, James T. Farrell.

Slaughterhouse-Five, Kurt Vonnegut, and the wages of literary fame.

An evolved writer and thinker talks about evolution.

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s tax returns. John Scalzi considers the economics of the writing market in Fitzgerald’s era, as does Walter Jon Williams.

Writing the life of a writer who has already written his life quite well.

More than most writers, James Tiptree Jr. lived by silence, exile, and cunning — or, in this case, like an opossum.

A close encounter of the Pauline Kael kind.

Naturally, “Low Rider” deserves the top spot for any list of the “Top 10 Cowbell Songs.” But where the hell is “Mississippi Queen”?

Inspired film geekery over at Trailers From Hell, which gives directors a chance to riff about their favorite movies over the trailers for said movies. You get Eli Roth giving mad props to Forbidden Planet, Bill Duke singing the praises of The Spook Who Sat By the Door, Allison Anders rocking out to Privilege, and Larry Cohen getting paranoid over the original Invaders from Mars.

Cold print

This time of year I usually re-read Ray Bradbury’s The October Country because . . .  well, do I really need to explain why? But Jonathan Lethem is looking ahead to winter with a list of his favorite icy books.

Can’t argue with any of his choices: the four I know are all stellar reads and the one I don’t know — Vladimir Sorokin’s Ice — sounds worthwhile. Cat’s Cradle remains my favorite Kurt Vonnegut novel, though not until Lethem pointed it out did I realize that Vonnegut preceded his novel about the Dresden firestorm, Slaughterhouse-Five, with an apocalyptic tale that shows life snuffed out by a jacket of ice. Interesting. Ice-Nine, a substance so dangerous that its mere existence threatens the world, remains one of the most powerful metaphors of the nuclear age.

A Simple Plan has been overshadowed by Sam Raimi’s film adaptation, but that opening chapter remains a model of how to set the stage for a moody thriller. And as much as I admire Deliverance, To the White Sea is the James Dickey novel that deserves to be better known.

If I were going to expand Lethem’s list, I might add Peter Hoeg’s novel Smilla’s Sense of Snow, which I’ve blogged about before, and Anna Kavan’s novel Ice, a surrealistic work in which civil war and an encroaching ice age serve as the background (and, sometimes, a terrifying foreground) to an three-way relationship in which the players — a nameless woman, her obsessive pursuer, and her abusive husband — play out appropriately frozen roles.

Listen up

A podcast on the pitfalls of publishing yourself.

Don’t believe in writer’s block? Don’t tell that to Nicholson Baker.

Discussing (and, one hopes, dispelling) myths about Nietzsche.

A talk on the difference between plot-driven and character-driven fiction.

Unfortunate headline alert

“Lucy the Elephant sustains rear-end wind damage in Margate.”

Please contribute your one-liners in the comment field.