Category: [Books, magazines, etc]

Armitage’s vision

Also, for World Poetry Day, let me present a poem I’m fond of:

The future was a beautiful place, once.
Remember the full-blown balsa-wood town
on public display in the Civic Hall?
The ring-bound sketches, artists’ impressions,

blueprints of smoked glass and tubular steel,
board-game suburbs, modes of transportation
like fairground rides or executive toys.
Cities like dreams, cantilevered by light.

And people like us at the bottle bank
next to the cycle path, or dog-walking
over tended strips of fuzzy-felt grass,
or model drivers, motoring home in

electric cars. Or after the late show –
strolling the boulevard. They were the plans,
all underwritten in the neat left-hand
of architects – a true, legible script.

I pulled that future out of the north wind
at the landfill site, stamped with today’s date,
riding the air with other such futures,
all unlived in and now fully extinct.

Oh, that hurts to read. This is “A Vision” by Simon Armitage, it’s in a collection called Paper Aeroplanes which Rachel Oates (again) introduced me to, and it touches on something that resonates with me… cos when I were a lad, I read books like this:

This is the sort of thing I grew up on (there is a distinct possibility I still own these, too, though I’m not sure exactly where), this series came from Usborne in the late seventies and I presume it was the early 80s when I discovered it. Though this book’s otherwordly city of the future may be not exactly what Armitage’s poem describes, this is why I said it hurts. Cos I kind of expected this sort of thing would happen. It wasn’t just science fiction, it was something that, one day, could be real, I might even live to see it happen… And I don’t think that was just cos I was a child who didn’t know any better, I think there was still a broader sense that the future would indeed be expansive. There was indeed a vision for the future, and it was indeed a beautiful place (assuming we didn’t nuke ourselves out of existence before we made it back to the Moon).

The future… didn’t turn out like that, did it? I mean, sure, the Internet is cool, I suppose, and it’s weird how so few of our fictional futures seem to have expected it, but… I feel like there were so many other things that should have happened. We were cheated out of the futures we could’ve had, “all unlived in and now fully extinct”. (Cf. what Mark Fisher had to say about hauntology and lost futures; can’t share his enthusiasm for Burial, though). The lost future didn’t even need to be the sort of thing on the book cover above, it could just be the sort of thing Armitage describes, a small town or suburb made better and more interesting, then consigned to landfill. It didn’t need to be a grand vision… it just could’ve been more than what we got.

Jordan B. Poetry

On the occasion of World Poetry Day, I think it’s time I finally talked about something I’ve been meaning to talk about for a while now.

Jordan B. Peterson’s poetry.

And I don’t mean that hideous “children’s book”, I mean something he actually posted on his website presumably quite some time ago, though I will briefly mention that… or at any rate I’ll point you to a couple of Youtube videos:

Firstly, one from José which was how I discovered this book was a thing in the first place (he notes that Peterson himself seems to be doing oddly little to promote it, having apparently deleted his own video about it and I can’t see it mentioned on his website either, which is certainly… interesting) and discovered Jurr Durr had written a terrible Edward Gorey knock-off…

…and here’s Rachel Oates, who knows poetry, writes it, performs it, understands it, and is able to explain just why it’s a terrible Edward Gorey knock-off. Enough about that, what I want to talk about instead is… this. I’m going to take the liberty of quoting the thing entire in case the good doctor remembers its existence and decides to delete the evidence that he actually wasn’t bad at poetry once…

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A century of weird

Weird Tales #1, March 1923

Happy 100th birthday (and a bit; apparently the first issue really came out in mid-February) to Weird Tales, which is still going in some form today, quite impressive given that it looked like it might barely last one year under Edwin Baird’s editorship. No Lovecraft in this issue, of course, he wouldn’t appear in the magazine until the September issue (in the letters column) and then “Dagon” marked his fiction debut in October; indeed he apparently hadn’t even seen this first issue when various associates of his who had suggested it as a possible outlet for his work. Indeed, I was a bit surprised to discover just now Clark Ashton Smith actually appeared in WT before him (two poems, this being before Smith took up fiction)… odd, cos I dimly recall reading something in the Selected Letters where HPL credited himself with introducing Baird to Smith’s work. One of us is apparently mistaken…

More Than Human

Book #2 for 2023, continuing with the LOA 1950s SF collection. This was an expansion of a novella called “Baby is Three” which was published in 1952 (the novel following in ’53), with that original story being the middle part of the novel and two other new sections surrounding it, the first part being backstory and the third part being what happened next. I’ve not read the original (nor indeed anything else by Sturgeon except “Microcosmic God”), so I’m left wondering what if anything he did to fit it in with the two new parts… cos, taken by itself, I’m not sure it makes an awful lot of sense, at least not as it stands in the book. Then again, other critics have noticed the multi-part structure mirrors the “gestalt” theme of the plot, where each part depends on the others to add up to the whole and isn’t enough by itself… maybe so, I’m just not sure that it actually does that, I don’t know if it does cohere fully. On the plus side, it does achieve a reasonable feat by making its superhuman entity interesting and indeed kind of sympathetic, unlike, for example, Stanley Weinbaum in The New Adam…

Telephone to glory?

Something a bit curious I found on Tumblr, via Cory Doctorow. When I first looked at it I misunderstood it as some sort of telemarketing for Jesus type of deal (and wondered how many of the 70,000 individuals on the back cover were happy to have their day interrupted by Harold trying to palm God off onto them in the middle of dinner), but then I realised it was actually one of those things people call into… and how did they get people to do that? Well, as I found by a little extra research, by being ever so slightly deceptive…

More than a year ago a Seventh-day Ad­ventist layman visited me in my office in Atlanta to interest me in purchasing a Code-a-phone. Now a Code-a-phone is a telephone answering machine capable of giving as much as a three-minute message and also capable of receiving and record­ing a message from one who calls. This layman suggested that it might be possible to give Bible studies over the telephone. […] Arrangements were made, the telephone line was installed, the ma­chine was delivered to the office, and I re­corded the first message. […] We called a newspaper and put the ad in the personal column of its classified section: “DO YOU NEED AD­VICE? DIAL 288-1666.”

https://www.ministrymagazine.org/archive/1967/11/the-magic-of-telephone-evangelism

I suppose telling people upfront that “this ad has been placed by a cranky 19th-century semi-cult” might’ve put people off, and this vague enough to be meaningless thing might at least have attracted some people’s curiosity. Which, according to Harold in the above article, it did:

Of the 650 people who called the first week of operation more than 100 gave their name and mailing address. In just a few weeks our line was so busy all day long that we installed a second telephone and a second answering machine. In another few weeks the two machines were so busy we needed a third, then a fourth. Our four Code-a-phones are now giving our two­-and-a-half-minute message twenty-four hours every day and are receiving names and addresses by the hundreds […]
In about eight months 80,000 have called and listened to our daily program in the city of Atlanta. Of that number 11,500 have given their name and mailing ad­dress to receive our free Bible course. You can readily see that this is a way by which the masses can be reached on an individual basis.

Which, however, is an awful lot more people not doing that, and I do wonder just how unhappy some people would’ve been having called this mysterious phone number only to find Adventism at the other end. At least Harold acknowledges that sort of thing did happen, but that doesn’t make it any better; I presume, too, that they still made money off the 70,000-odd they didn’t succeed in selling their thing to, cos I daresay that phone call wasn’t free… I feel weirdly sure the money the Adventists would’ve made from this thing mattered more than the 11,500 people they got addresses from (wonder how many of the latter actually persisted with them afterwards)…

The Space Merchants

First book for the year at last (we are clearly not out of the reading slump yet). I’ve had ebook copies of the Library of America’s series of American SF of the 50s and 60s, and I decided to finally kick the year off by breaking into those… starting off with messrs Pohl & Kornbluth’s Space Merchants from 1952. I’ve never been 100% sure how I feel about SF literature, but I have admittedly simply never read a lot of the generally acknowledged classics in the genre, so I should probably do that…

Anyway, I liked this one, some time in the future the US is very much ruled by competing advertising agencies (corporations have senators and the presidency is inherited), and our hero is an exec at one of these agencies charged with solving the ultimate problem: how to sell the colonisation of Venus. Basically what ensues is a kind of futurist corporate thriller (the other big agency is not happy at the exploitation of Venus being stolen from them) embedded in a somewhat acrid satire of 50s American concerns, with a conservationist organisation clearly meant as a stand-in for communism; plot isn’t always the clearest when it comes to who’s doing what and why, some aspects are only thinly explained, but on the whole a decent read from start to finish.

As opposed to what, fake books?

Spotted this on Mastodon this afternoon. What an odd and kind of infuriating question. What do you think I’m reading, the fucking Necronomicon?

I know electronic copies of books aren’t “real” in the physical sense but they still require a physical device to read them—Kindle, phone, computer, whatever. The issue of audiobooks is a lot more vexed, but if we leave that aside for now and limit ourselves to the words on the page, are the latter any more real in a paperback than in an .epub file? Is it more real in hardback? Is the author’s original manuscript written by their own hand more real? What if they never actually “wrote” it as such and did the whole thing on a typewriter or (perish the thought) a computer? What if the author types it all up in Word then sends it to a publisher to actually print it, is it not real or something until the latter step takes place?

I don’t know, I just find this sort of thing to be bullshit and always have done. Saw it decades ago with cinephilia (I still hate that fucking word), here’s an example from an ancient (year 2000!) edition of Senses of Cinema:

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