The SFFaudio Podcast #812 – AUDIOBOOK/READALONG: The Soul Of Man Under Socialism by Oscar Wilde

The SFFaudio Podcast #812 – The Soul Of Man Under Socialism by Oscar Wilde – read for LibriVox by Martin Geeson. This is a complete and unabridged reading of the essay (2 hours) followed by a discussion of it. Participants in the discussion include Jesse, Evan Lampe, Will Emmons, and Terence Blake.

Talked about on today’s show:
the individual, therefore maimed, Martin Geeson, productions up on audible.com, some public property I can privatize, hundreds of contributions to LibriVox, almost all of it is poetry, about art, how to flourish with your soul, why Jesse likes Oscar Wilde so much, amused, a student for an hour, grammar, a deck of cards, images of various objects, leaves and bowls and roses, write a story in seven minutes using six sentences, a really good story, a king, a comb, and a snake, a lot of merit, “IT WOULDN’T WORK BECAUSE…”, a blind king who needed a wife, some tasty food, a mystery, there’s beauty there, Circe, Medusa, the missing card, works in many ways, no intended audience, central to the essay, problems as an ideology, that’s what he’s like, Oscar Wilde is also a fairy tale writers, an essay by Lovecraft’s wife, Commercialism: The Curse Of Art by Sonia Greene, she has the write idea, a case for socialism, the duty of society to liberate the audience, the audience for art, what the audience for a theater’s responsibility is, if the works of Shakespeare were presented as if new, Macbeth, counterarguments, long and rambling and strange, appreciated it, lasting impact, a good intervention, historically useful, by Wilde’s own metric, whether a work of art is useful or not, stories are incredibly central to human beings, society has a huge duty to the artist, he bends the stick too far, messaging the Che Guevara wikipedia page, Bill Maher, annoys in the right way, man can subsist under moral incentives alone, the new man, typical revolutionary, work 36 hours a day, student protests, what they’re protesting about, grieving, girl claims to be stabbed in the eye, shirt that says “Jew” on it, Che Guevara wasn’t, keffiyeh, huffington post, full of slurs, start drilling down, good or not, to tell a story that supports his point of view, we’re not socialists in America, a tenant that was talking to his landlord, the messaging has gotten through, we don’t live under socialism, everything is upside down, an interesting guy to read, in the context of a rich country, imperialist value chains that make British wealth possible, make a transition to socialism, socialist state builders in the 20th century, an immediate end to poverty, if we end poverty, through new machines, the William Morris book, News From Nowhere, a much more compelling story, whether essays can be artforms, designed to convince, an attempt, a try, not be prosecuted for your art, British vs. the French, a control of language on the cellular level, News From Nowhere is not plausible at all, how we got there, a pretty nice way, women do fabric art, men make wallpaper, an essay, his only political work, story is how people adopt, asked to teach essays, only the most insufferable people, the slandering of Che Guevara, A Modest Proposal by Jonathan Swift, undermines bad argument, functions like a story, within it are stories, best fricasseed or make a nice ragout, a series of plateaus, organized with a theme, crime and punishment, motivated by pleasure vs. pain, clusters of ideas, very Žižek in that sense, new paradigm, you can’t argue, counter-intuitive leaps, Terence spoke beautifully, agree entirely, very aspirational, quite beautiful, influenced nerdy graduate student Evan, do history, do podcasts, write it my own way, very juvenile about that attitude, the media, not just accepting the media’s interpretation about what art is, solipsistic, films and series, dumbing down, making everything consensual, why does popular art have to be bad, a democracy of individuals, ignorant schoolmaster argument, he’s in a knot, if this was the only thing we knew about Oscar Wilde, compare it to what happened to him, success and punishment, being publicly gay, physical punishment, a powerful lord, sent into prison, H.G. Wells, doesn’t get a sir, tried the wrong lady, royalty, it’s expected, previous conspiracy, a pretext for sending to prison, non-straight sex, Bill Clinton, he didn’t get punished for his art, lightfootedness, the Popes, the power of kings, a king with artistic sentiment, Voltaire, the curse of the public and their interest through journalism, successful, pandering to an audience, A Picture Of Dorian G[r]ay, a gap between, the abolition of property, the means of production, independent wealthy, a theme that’s in here, kind of, wealth and private property, Lord Byron, they’re not separate, he jumps around, you have to share your toothbrush, doesn’t really define it, the long section on how wealth is a burden to the wealthy, [Andrew] Carnegie’s gospel of wealth, that’s the legal system, entirely about private property, a warehouse is an amazing awesome technology, keep the rain out, books, pencil crayons/coloured pencils, keep your paper dry, personal property but not private, an apartment complex, no idea of transition from here to there, we got there somehow, this great possibility of free expression and individualism, he’s read [Peter] Kropotkin, crafts, automation, nobody should sweep, throw a fishnet into the water all day, quotas of fish, a serious problem with this essay, Will has intellectually warped himself through Marxism, the media does this says this, for what reason, what class do they represent?, the public’s ideas bad?, during the French Revolution, tear down the Bastille, all answered, this is not acceptable, a previous story which controls them, if that story is bad, suspicious of human nature, people progress, people change, how fucked up it was, starving peasants fighting for feudalism, The Third Revolution by Murray Bookchin, bottom up democracy, monarchy, liberals, Jacobins, sections of Paris, met in monasteries and churches, 1792/3, suppressed during The Terror, bottom up faith, Maoist epistemology, communists don’t make history, the masses make history, Wilde finds the masses to be repugnant, their condition, the rebel is good in some way, the thief, those who don’t believe the ideology, resentment is something that makes you ugly, living in squalor and full of hate, accept the squalor, more sympathy for the thief, you should be rebelling, it is right to rebel, it is right to rebel against reactionaries, Chinese factory worker be careful, the western interpretation, who one the Cultural Revolution in the end, too soon to tell, the Lost Decade, vaccination rates, two distinct periods, different factions, boring history, the developmental stuff, chaos, more chaotic than, Wilde’s views about what one’s duty to society is, volunteering to do more work, the barefoot doctors, is that so bad?, extremely useful, artists should be allowed to flourish, what the purpose of artists is, that’s why he’s wrong, all art has a class basis, to paraphrase Mao, the innermost kingdom of the bourgeoisie, who is the audience, the artist is the audience, onanistic, oppression, why this is not a great piece, art or light under socialism, giving you the feel, exactly contemporary, Christology, fun, religious group of people, what makes us so religious, is Wilde speaking to an audience that is Christian, he loves Christianity’s beauty, Catholicism for the aesthetics, Lutheran, the liturgy, aesthetically, a cultural christian, a slap in the face with a fish, Jesus, currently accepted ideology, before the socialist experiments, non-authoritarian, before Freudian type, pain and pleasure, very Nietzschean, robot slaves,

“For it is through joy that the Individualism of the future will develop itself. Christ made no attempt to reconstruct society, and consequently the Individualism that he preached to man could be realised only through pain or in solitude. The ideals that we owe to Christ are the ideals of the man who abandons society entirely, or of the man who resists society absolutely. But man is naturally social. Even the Thebaid became peopled at last. And though the cenobite realises his personality, it is often an impoverished personality that he so realises. Upon the other hand, the terrible truth that pain is a mode through which man may realise himself exercises a wonderful fascination over the world. Shallow speakers and shallow thinkers in pulpits and on platforms often talk about the world’s worship of pleasure, and whine against it. But it is rarely in the world’s history that its ideal has been one of joy and beauty. The worship of pain has far more often dominated the world. Mediaevalism, with its saints and martyrs, its love of self-torture, its wild passion for wounding itself, its gashing with knives, and its whipping with rods – Mediaevalism is real Christianity, and the mediaeval Christ is the real Christ.”

on the road to get healed somewhere, conversations with wives of Bath, a reflection of what artists are doing, a symposium of art making, by one’s self, music, one guy with a saxophone on a mountain top, pretty strong, his heart is in the right place, he himself wants his efforts to count towards social reconstruction, the overman is Caesar with the soul of Christ, one of his passions, art, science, politics, manual labour, craft and crafty, fishing, a self-help manual done right, come together in groups, very individualistic, kinda Ayn Randian, against business, against private property, against class difference, everyone a poet, as capable as him, been lucky, everyone can become creativity, more artists, better art, Roger Ebert, frustrated reviewers, easier to be a critic, snobby, Zack Snyder probably says that, why does he bloody show his movies, show to [Denis] Villeneuve and no-one else, a guy recording in his bedroom, stack of DVDs, free passes, free stuff, free audiobooks (that used to be expensive), becoming twisted and wrong, journalism feeding into bad behavior, cultivating an audience in a theater, utube is very big, hate bait, how to breed chickens properly, in that openness, feeling free to not have a popular channel, more ability to share, sharing is something he’s not fully thought through enough, so focused on oppression, the soul of man is art, whatever a soul is, why socialism is important, free us from the oppression of the property relationship, actual physical repression, the relationship is the oppressive thing, the freedom to comment, the freedom to review, if you don’t have your own printing press and your own distribution you don’t have freedom, mimeograph machine, the internet today, hard to find, the system is gamed against it, how bad google is, there but unseeable, virtually free to do that distribution, drowned out, ai art, an imperfect essay, handwaves a lot of this, the first line, we’re individualists in socialism, not making a program to get there, we’ll be freer individuals under socialism, we need other people to get us there, libertarian socialism, charity is the problem, amusing the poor, the accelerationist argument, the homelessness problem, people trying to solve, you shouldn’t do charity, the majority of people spoil their lives, he comes for the charity people pretty hard, this essay has such a humour to it, slave owners being kind to their slaves, let this outrage happen so the revolution will occur, in his back pocket, a program here, not detailed, it’s not for the masses, bourgeoisie cease charity, charity as a virtue, he’s for sympathy, for human feeling, otherwise socialism is going to be set back, it is immoral, the institution of private property, a personal program, under socialism this problem will no longer exist, places to organize, do what you can, Jesse might actually be right, Jesse is always wrong, a half sentence, the people who do the most harm, the charity degrades and demoralized, “Charity creates a multitude of sins.”, a hard argument, on French TV, presidential elections 30 years ago, equal time on TV, the marginal groups are marginalized even further, a Trotskyist, we are plundered, stealing everything from us, a star dancer at the Crazy Horse, stage name, as close to nudity as you can get, discovered by the head of the Crazy Horse, made her the star that she is today, the Marxist, I’m against charity, running for president to bring about the revolution, something sordid about this poor person elevated to stardom, patriarchal manipulation, charity vs. sympathy, property is theft, stealing $2 in the morning, Spider-Man should bite everyone to give everyone radioactive powers, with great property comes great responsibility, the logic of superheros, superheores are trying to stop the revoltionaries, Doc Oc, always some guy who wants to change things, Superman never zaps the president with his eye, judges shall not be impugned, questions in congress, happened for TikTok right now, you cant be super without lots of subs, sub-supers, The X-Men, homo superior, sympathy for Magneto, The League Of Evil Mutants, the oppressed group, the oppressed group, the oppressed individual, no one will have to seek approval, what’ll make somebody an elite under socialism, harvest more wheat?, an asian Soviet with a pipe [Semyon Nomokonov] who notched the number of nazis he killed on his pipe, 9 children and 49 grandchildren, not allowed to have open factions struggles, a war hero, a different sort of examples, Robert Sully Sullivan, played by Tom Hanks, whuffie, the congressional medal of honor gives credit to living people, Ulysses S. Grant, all the previous guys were all WWII veterans, you can’t give that status, Bush I, you’ve fucked up, can you have an elite, people’s who’s paintings you like, sweeps really good, tending to defer, a different kind of culture, this guy’s teepees are the best teepees, this collective, multiple elites, the stupid utube model, unbeleivable popularity, lowest common denomenator, flaming gold Ferrari, attract most attention for revenue, focusing on repairing fans (the things that you make you cool), Jordan U, why does he have 17th phones in his house, paintings on the wall of the warehouse, people who show off their rare book collections, Will’s greatest sin, scanners live in vain, scanner printer combo, the printer industry is superevil, Brother, Martin Geeson doing what Oscar Wilde is saying, unfortunate that Jonathan Weichsel doesn’t like Martin Geeson’s voice, the way to be popular, distracted by the whole socialism thing, a lot of people don’t get it guys, usually advertized without, its right in the first sentence, judging a book by its cover, talking about oppression, censorship on a basic level, people who can’t use words that they want to use, humanreadable, at symbols and upside down 3s, how much more could he say before he is thrown in prison, if the mood was wrong in the country, they chopped off the head of their monarch, restored the monarchy, Oliver Cromwell, if it weren’t for the Irish, Lord Protector, all cavaliers, now, a true leveller, entry points for people to grok things, start with what materials you have, making things easy for people is difficult, Martin Geeson is choosing interesting books, great voice, soul of an artist, valances with Sirius by Olaf Stapledon, the conditions of the people in England, under some social programs?, bankrupting the empire!, sold everything to win that war, the dog with no hands, the soul of dogs under socialism?, similar philosophy, an individualist quality, thinking together, working together, a particular novelist, Meredith, who that guy, Charles Kingsley, an immoral novelist, George Meredith, forgotten, didn’t have any science fiction books, just read Scalzi, The Three Body Problem [by Liu Cixin], The Dark Forest, Damien G. Walter, boycotting the book, the shows, why you have to do homework for this podcast, this podcast has homework, his sinophobia is facile and dangerous, too positive a view of the Cultural Revolution?, bad for science, the traitor to humanity girl, she meets up years later with the three women who lead the criticism and physical action of killing her father, privileged, before they joined the Red Army, able to better themselves a little during the Cultural Revolution, more complex than his propaganda, so empty, goes on and on, 2 hour things by him, you have to go to your death knowing that, did and didn’t, John Vervaeke, we need a new mythos, trying to determine what is in canon, you can’t do that unless you’ve read a lot, more of a media guy, an article, a list of all the women authors of science fiction not usually talked about, working through the canon, Mildred Klingerman, Margaret St. Clair, Judith Merrill, a great tastemaker, seems all right, writes really interesting stuff, leaning on make sure you get your diversity quotient in there, Madagascar science fiction, the same perspective, you can live in Bali, more about American literature, women writers and black writers, percentage, James Baldwin, first queer writer, Herman Melville, obviously super gay, if the stick is wonky, a qualitative judgement, compensating, black writers and asian writers and women writers, because he’s funny, being obtuse on purpose, Evan’s colleagues, eurocentric, teaching cohort, early modern history, too lazy to learn this stuff, we can tell the history of the world through European eyes, teaching world history, not just white European men, not about seeking out a quotient, not being ignorant about the world, people look for excuses not to read, because its propaganda, we all have to winnow, a bunches novel series ever written, Discworld, stuff without depth, not everything is showworthy, Tales Of The Gold Monkey, Indiana Jones pre-wwwii nazis, Buck Rogers in the 25th Century in the South Pacific, an ex-flying tiger, set in 1939, it’s impossible, no active duty until 1942, a hot lady in a hot tub talking to a nazi dressed up as a priest who wants to have sex with a native named Tiki, skin colour, sounds cool, what they called lived experience, their mom and dad were nice to each other, hung up on the wrong things, they’re all books, nobody talks about those, people need excuses not to read, Fearless Benjamin Lay, can we get more diverse than a Quaker abolition vegetarian dwarf who made his own clothes and lived in a cave, bend the stick to far against the liberals, what’s the baby, official commitments to anti-racism, why do you have a police state, the Deep State replaced Richard M. Nixon, the origin of policing after reconstruction, slave catching patrols, police hitting teachers, the philosophy professor being dragged off, sad but hilarious, I can’t breathe, she’s doing a callback, making an analogy to another situation, political correctness way of protesting, arrested and died, knee on the neck, oh you’re all right, fluids to make him calm down sir, heart massage, CPR, if somebody looks dead, we notice he looked unconscious, Evan is missing out all these amazing, give you you shittiest take, twitter is not good for Evan, talking about Reconstruction, the freedman wanted to be slaves again, quite good at governing themselves, Wilde in conversation with Mao, the greatest socialist intellectual of all time, something Damien G. Walter needs to read, Ursual K. Le Guin has a dangerous philsophy, The Dispossessed, not a lot of amazing art happening on that moon, a position of scarcity, post-scarcity, maybe Cuba has great art, musicians, health care, scarcity, internal production is not as efficient, a very small country, is Le Guin doing the same thing to criticize our man Oscar Wilde?, could be in dialogue, libertarian socialist, more liberal than anything else, attitudes towards copyright, for overthrowing the government, people don’t pay attention to what she says, near the end of her life, given an award, speaking about capitalism, a poem quoted in full on BoingBoing, Cory Doctorow had to take it down, The Master by Ursula K. Le Guin, the passing of knowledge and the mastery of tech, how to learn the slipstick, copyright in China, the argument that is always thrown against China is they steal patents/copyrights/trademarks, a serious problem, there’s a long story about the Tetris game, an ideological opposition to censorship, copyright is a form of that, Mr. Shitlib King, breaking copyright, not in favour of censorship ever, socialist/communist society, what’s the difference?, a communist society vs. a socialist state, a good place to be, philosophy of mugs, a really nice mug, spouse, a cute mug, bad shape for a mug, mugs should be functional, spoons, mug with hole in the bottom, a mug, an indigenous mug, made in an anti-imperialist country, handwashing, a mug is a device for delivering liquids to your mug, a cute mug, hence the drips, take a photo of it then get rid of it, emotional sentimental value, not broken yet, Mao would call that liberalism, use it often and carelessly, you should not be upset when it breaks, point in the direction, deception is allowed, the right shape, efficient, homeless guy who masturbated in the public square, Diogenes, u need a lamp, some onions, Louis CK, stoics, in a mugshell, one mug, thank you for everything, thanks for all the mugs, What Mad Universe by Fredric Brown, a novel, Lawrence Block had a book come out, a writer that Block appreciated, a way of getting into that relationship, a halfway important science fiction writer, a writer’s writer, Mack Reynolds, not his great novels, the fuckin system, after 1963 fuck everybody, copyright for 7 years, so it can be useful to multiple people, works in translation, a holdover from the imperial period, he’s cute, he’s funny he’s smart, a science fiction novel about science fiction, another case for the Baroque Cycle, interesting, long, as a long as a story needs to be, sometimes things need to be longer, this essay didn’t need to be 2 hours, why do we have long books, the cost of a credit, subverted, not why Stephen King writes long books, what censorship, he would never be censored, self-censorship, he’s not following the market, he’s 7 and a half feet tall, he’s not Spud Webb, most people who write long books, unnecessary sex scene, fetch quests, Evan went wild, a popular podcast, Geek’s Guide To The Galaxy, side quests, find the G.E.C.K., representing the game, defending it, The Stand, awkwardly updated the setting, the tone, this is here to sell more paper, he’s living life under socialism, he’s rich, people who are wanting to be Stephen King, writing novels, 7 sentences in 7 minutes, they’re wrong, you have to fill a certain number of pages, you have to have a cover, self-identify as a writer, not a real person, a class of people who aspire, doing a disservice by trying to make shorter or longer, when TV shows are about an hour are not confined by a hard number, when not helpful to the story it shouldn’t be followed, longer is better, big fat fantasy novel, wanted to live in that would, what Paul would say, room to breathe, he goes by instinct, develop a philosophy, make an argument, give me an example Will/Paul, favourite really long book Cyteen by C.J. Cherryh, doorstop books, a person’s whole life, a big Russian novel, wheels within wheels, Dune by Frank Herbert, a lot of plot, long for the period, every sequel by other hands, an important density in there, it isn’t room to breathe, it’s long because it has a lot in it, the Baroque Cycle, characters, packed with ideas, denser, despite being that long, the origins of capitalism, money, the scientific revolution, abolitionism, Anathem, Player Of Games, people who love Culture, don’t need Dune Messiah, bring Duncan Idaho back, that’s stuff happening, the guy has no name, the servant has no name, the lady who it is about has no name, ideas can’t exist in characterization, apple show A Man In Full by Tom Wolfe, an idea in it, military SF is more about gun polishing, ideas are central, fully explored in a short amount of space, the writing quality is less important than the idea explanation, the density, how many books I could read in the time I am reading this book, like Evan with women, build up the body count, women are the opposite of ideas, the people who like Dune too much, being immersed in the world, gets your juices excited, he isn’t heavy on ideas, The Colorado Kid, Mike suggested we do The Flitcraft Parable, a scene in The Maltese Falcon, chapter 7, like a fist when you open your hand, when processing it to consider it, Eric S. Rabkin, a really solid book, 196 pages, didn’t need to by 700 pages, Sam Spade is having sex with Archer’s wife, he’s one of the suspects, mysteries are an interesting parallel to science fiction, exploring our reality, in his rambling short book about the Flitcraft Parable, the length is appropriate to the idea, From A Buick 8, complain about his endings, life just sort of goes on, sets up characters as dominoes, eucatastrophes, shinings, the house forgot about its own boiler, not servicing fans?, intimate relationship with his fans, hurried to finish the Dark Tower, an old woman writing him, shitlibbery caused by a desire to please his audience?, Joyce Carol Oates, not normal for people to be liberals in our society, fucking suffer, can’t have a house, can’t have a wife, people are suffering, his fans are not all boomers, an Xer, Marissa likes him, it doesn’t define him, a 70s vibe, he feels the need to be relevant, comes off awkwardly, the Bachman book that was in a drawer, counter-culture vibes, hippie commune vs. the nazis, so not relevant, this old black lady, just show up, talk to the fascists, eucatastrophe happens, they’re mean and short, they have an idea and the character dies, The Running Man, Roadwork, Rage, The Long Walk, weary, just life, this oppressive thing the state is doing to them, questioning the purpose of life and why we’re here, droppin’ dead, a metaphor for life, an oppresive state, about school, the military and conscription, Carrie is nice and short, The Dead Zone, Firestarter on the backburner, in the zeitgeist, boomerness, what does Joyce Carol Oates represent in the zeitgeist, irrelevant Princeton professor, middle age guy, Killdozer, Marvin Heemeyer, Stephen King when still drinking, Thinner, gypsy curse seems silly, experimental in the 90s, the idea idea idea thing, one series, very meta, not like Hunger Games, a fast reader vs. a slow reader, you have to be in the right headspace, The Alleyman by Philip Jose Farmer, COVID doesn’t help, two boosters once, don’t accept injections unless literally dying, flu vaccine, now is the time to do Jesse’s epistemology, he’s a skeptic, have a police incident happen to you, it’s about that for everything, Sextus Empiricus, sense impressions, what’s a heap, suspend judgement, a lot of baby words, retweet a lot of far right things, show me one, nothing, heterodox, Jackson Hinkle, 1776 revolution, liberating Canada, absurdity, already captured, no need to invade, shampoo, how many of the words on the ingredients list can you pronounce, syllables, sodium lauryl sulphate, if your shampoo has more than syllables your children will have autism, putting all this shit in u, why do people do this?, a little discourteous, we know how long people have been smoking, spike it, most people who smoke don’t get lung cancer, that’s the weird part, a Philip K. Dick story, body parts you need to replace, if you can’t pronounce it why are you getting it in your body, there’s a lot of things I can’t pronounce, cancer too, NaCl (sodium chloride), end up in a whole bunch of cults you don’t know you’re in, dem vs. republican a cult, tribal thing, partisanship, demented tribal leader vs. demented cult leader, more cult like, Biden is in control, obviously he is not in control, reading the parts he’s not supposed to read, just defer to better him than Trump, against team bad, you should be against things that are bad, some sort of use for some shampoo, how an average consumer can know, a silly test, properly fund an independent agency that can check, it’s been corrupted, we’re left with the label, the Food and Drug administration is corrupt, Plato, you have feet, you don’t have the document in front of you, the documents exist, evidence all around you, assume corruption is the default, moms abuse, that doesn’t get us anywhere, there’s a mom over there, she’s doing, the shampoo supply is not safe, the stuff injected into your body, you have to buy food, flu shots, they don’t work, they’re full of chemicals, mercury, a chemical, salt is fine, know what the words mean, reading labels, margarine is not human food, lubricate objects, define mayonnaise, chlorine, basic chemistry, who put this shit together, something for sale, preservatives, calcium propionate, water that comes out of the faucet, no industry, there’s nothing, coast mountains, metal pipes (not lead), perfectly good to drink, bottled water full of plastic, advertised to, there water is terrible, the water in Taiwan, boiled water and bottled water, water dispenser, Coca Cola, drink the tap water, water are the ingredients, do what their parents do, who you probably assume are corrupt, maybe his graduate research, follow all his footnotes, bit the bullet, you could question everything, reasonable suspicion aroused, start questioning, bad puppy, cook that puppy, shot that puppy in an ethical manner, we all have to give up our inquiry, big flashing warning signs, recreate all these experiments home, this tub margarine has been sitting in my fridge since 1981, it doesn’t rot, food rots, alcohol is a poison, designed to kill things, sugar doesn’t rot, this is an industrial lubricant sold to us as a replacement for butter, seed oils and vegetable oils, a food product, you can eat industrial lubricant, your mom gave you butter and it seemed good to you, butter is really good for you, you need fat to live, asparagus fats, is this important, she makes a good point here, anything that is not super old, animals, see if they’ll eat it, when set of grandparents, switched to butter, poison that’s for sale, not human food, the coal butter, that’s what shit is, carnauba wax, employed in food grade polish, making food out of it, see you on twitter.

It Wouldn't Work Because by Jesse

Posted by Jesse Willis

The SFFaudio Podcast #802 – READALONG: The Seventh by Richard Stark

Jesse, Will Emmons, Terence Blake, and Trent Reynolds talk about The Seventh by Richard Stark

Talked about on today’s show:
sometimes published as The Split, the movie kinda sucks, it should be excellent, not one character actor in it, Jim Brown, Donald Sutherland, Gene Hackman, the girls are fine, they fuckaround with the plot a lot, convincingly convinced, impossible to make Parker a character on film, watched the movie then finished the book, Parker is off the page a lot in those books, entire acts where he’s offscreen, they can’t get inside his head, the old narrator problem, voice over narration, talk to the guy sick in bed, she goes away and gets some tea, do you want lemon or sugar or cream or milk, Parker doesn’t know anything about tea, ignorant of vast swaths of humanity’s interest, pop up menu like The Terminator, he doesn’t operate like a normal human, at the end of the book we see something out of character: he laughs, emotionless or pissed off, he’s not a human, he’s some aspects or parts of human, trying to run people off the road, to test them for his crew?, the character lacks definition, they want to make Parker into a film so bad, it never works, The Sour Lemon Score, Harvey Keitel in City Of Industry (1997), one scene where they’re at a stoplight and cops pull up next to them, this little mechanism, professional and amateur, more than ten years, The Man With The Getaway Face, Ask The Parrot is better, one of the scores, The Black Ice Score, black panthers, The Score, somebody loves every book, no rhyme or reason to it, Slayground, fairly typical of the books, a heist of some kind, trouble dividing the money, thieves fall out, how did you find this book, the beginning, slow, badly prepared, the blurbs, this is amazing in pace, you can’t put it down, not sleep til u finished it, nobody knows what’s happening, the action crystalizes, false tracks, so much description, he has to describe everything, hands, the realist principle, a less good book if you took out the descriptions, a four and a half hour book, unputdownable, the time aspect, Parker thinking, time had been playing tricks like that, an hour took a week or more to be done with, the personality (despite it’s almost absence) underneath the opposition between amateur and pro, different stupidities, the pro vs. the amateur, another type of stupidity, a key, a meta level explaining other detective thrillers, richer in the second half, subtle about his philosophy, makes you want to read the books, super-formulaic, Westlake is writing a formula, he’s being playful, I guess for my seventh book, 1966, feels a little bit earlier, fins on the cars, middle sixties, the secret hidden philosophy or anxieties behind all of Westlake’s fiction, obsessed with insurance, Abe Klinger, a temporary condition that had lasted about twelve years, television was to blame, an insidious monster in living rooms, taxes getting worse every year, barely possible, except for the rotten box, kiddie matinee on Saturday, always a double feature, a nice friendly neighborhood theater, the public library, long suffering voices, in every Westlake Parker book, we get inside other character’s minds, they become sympathetic, reconciling all these modes of being, insurance is worry, it’s a concern, “detective” thriller, this has a mystery in it, failed, he writes crime fiction, closer to suspense than mystery, the light face and the dark face detective, present himself as an agent of change, The Risk Profession, a murder mystery about insurance, successful, the Dortmunder series, high 20s, built up the crew, Kifka, Abe Klinger, had he not been shot, sympathize with him, an amazing choice, wrote this just for money, television or sensationalism came along and ruined everything, very brainful, uses thoughts to create characters, the killer’s problem is he’s an amateur, a non-functioning penis, vituperative girlfriend, bad with his hands, imagery that goes with the sword, it felt good in his hands, letters from prison, criminals get away with it, chance to get away with a crime, Westlake is cerebral, a non-cerebral character, the Reacher series, powered through it, he’s no longer a Terminator, an attempt at acting (was bad), the first season was very solid, had reviewed the book, he’s not Conan, Conan doesn’t have a pension, Conan is not patriotic, our anti-hero is not patriotic, a little bit of Parker’s backstory, a criminal when he was in the army, he doesn’t love his country, he doesn’t think about that at all, a red blooded American, spit on the flag, Westlake is not a super-patriot, surrounded by patriots, Westlake’s real passion, he like community theater, finances his fun with his skill, a furniture maker, put out of business, so now he’s a criminal, Grofield, puts his heisting money into his theatre, in The Score, Parker puts together the heist, show up and look like a manager, the detail work on the other characters, a depth of character, figuring out life philosophy, how to be in the world, what’s the point of crime fiction?, edifying, in this particular instance, the leader, the money was stolen out from under him, abandon this and run away?, an amateur stole from him, with his seventh, Westlake rewarding Parker, a professional pirate, doesn’t have a nation, makes war on all the world, and is vengeful on those who break the covenant, they’re all armed, a homosexual relationship, you got to go to a doctor!, goes vengeful on Parker, acting irrationally, they’re not his friends, they are colleagues, they are comrades, the best Parker on film is Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs, you’re acting like a punk, various psychopathic characters, a very Parker/Stark scene, a war of all of us against the institutions that are betraying us, the cop is probably the smartest character in the book, they’re doppelgangers, family life has made him weak, all that’s crap, the hardness in the eyes, sit for an exam to become a Terminator, need more training, Parker is a stripped down version of a human, there’s no hubcaps, the engine runs great, there’s a crack in the windshield, Parker’s sexual stuff, no sexual need or interest, all he does for three days is fuck, he’s not normal, Sherlock Holmes, A Study In Scarlet, zero interest in astronomy, completely ignores it, he knows about Chinese Tongs and the KKK, that’s kind of Parker too, his definition of what is extraneous is a whole lot more, he has no interesting in that, you’re a fool if you believe it, people call Parker a shark, what he’s not doing, a white sandy bitch named Michelle, completely stripped down, in stripping it down, Moriarty is famous for The Dynamics Of An Asteroid, interested in puppeteering things, he even abandons his face, plastic surgery, his name doesn’t matter, “Call me Joe”, Mr. Brown, Mr. Blue, Mr. Pink, to pull off a big heist, better off with no partners, his human foibles (wanting to have sex with a lady), makes him a bad Terminator, offered to him like a sacrifice to a god, and then he laughs, neat little bow, none of this would have happened, what makes him not a robot, so iconic, so compelling, Mel Gibson is not Parker, Lee Marvin is not Parker, how do you do that tea scene?, only in novel form, what’s the point of this?, made the argument, getting into the philosophy of life, the same appeal, what does it mean to have this kind of person, go through the character list, the least fucked up guy is the cop, the least sketched, he makes a great breakthrough and is killed before he can say it, he figures out, Morry, on Will’s deep question, read these things if you want a point from them, what’s the point of having these people in the world, having unplugged people (from the system), born that way, became that way, the partially unplugged, the craft guy, outlet malls, sort of yet another image of Bartleby (the Scrivner), more active, we can’t be Bartleby because it is humiliating, why is it humiliating, Conan is always an active agent in a story he’s thrust into, literally fights a god, Westlake is torturing Parker and entertaining us, this is not just entertainment, about life philosophy, compared to Reacher, Conan is not a patriot, animalistic efficiency, we animals, tricked into patriotism and friendships, allies not friends, judging them on their reliability, a little out of character, determined to go get this guy, they guy doesn’t know who he is, makes him act stupidly, rewarding the reader, more than one dynamic, Butcher’s Moon, Grofield gets kidnapped, logically he shouldn’t be doing it, taking it as a personal insult, a rationalization, tie up a loose end, he doesn’t know what Parker looks like, he doesn’t know his name, middle sized North Eastern town, Parker is married, driving a Toyota Avalon, commonlaw married, as long as he doesn’t bring it home, Westlake in later life, knows who he is, still heisting, how to be in the world, a knife-edge sort of thing, Westlake is a humourist, literally executes a guy, superstitious, Parker picks up the gun and shoots him with it, please help me, making yourself submit, bureaucracies are not good at helping people, superstitious fool with a dick problem who is a murder, why he is mad at Parker, a lot of sex in this book for a book not about sex, Parker thinks he’s just being logical, he’s restoring order in his universe, not logical that an amateur could beat a professional, a personal affront that must be punished, once you’ve unplugged from the system and be a heister, a lucky coincidence, a little off-topic, bring it in, Jesse does a lot of tutoring, a “leadership” class, pretend that they’re teaching them leadership, it makes no sense, automatically a non-leader, how well you behave, write a land acknowledgment, what leaders do, this land was stolen improperly, insert band name here, that was really bad that we stole it from them, land claims and treaties, that’s submitting to a system, if you control your class with a whip, a classroom full of kids with whips, guns and knives, leadership is really weird, everybody has guns and they can all shoot you at any point, not a real thing guys, an assortment of associates, big cave man energy, where do chiefs come from?, people who don’t have a lot of concrete in their sidewalks, characters of ridicule, similarly strange adjacent jobs, medicine man, wise old woman, takes an active role to try to get the money back, wants to get revenge, a professional is a person who gets wins aka the money, wanting things that an amateur would want, when somebody hits you, hitting you with words, violence is a good solution, a tit for tat, escalating, punishing with impunity, stealing from a football game, an ivy league football game, a charity day, they spent all day, one of the most complicated things to do, passed over really quickly, they focus on the wrong things, the logical scaffolding, the most sensational thing, he doesn’t describe that, his book is a paired down thing, it is four tapes, it feels bigger than it is, time going strange, jump backwards in time, the complication, the complication, the conclusion, fascinated by the character, what he’s saying about people and how to be in the world, the guy drives an old car, he can upgrade to an Edsel, gets a pat on the head, when he goes to his boss, his boss never graduated high school, why would that matter, this is something I understand, the cap and gown shit, a place of punishment, i need to go to university, that’s where the fun is, not playing by the rules, working for Klaus Schwab, obey the laws that make sense, nobody listens, what are they gonna do about it?, insurance, financial insecurity, that money not being in your pocket at all times, an aspect of the larger thing, the book that came before it, years salting away money, gigantic nest egg, the end of the previous book, no faith in institutions, the government is corrupt, taking your good pills, everybody in Parkerland, this person is a really great person, you know what his problems are, very wholesome, revenge is unhealthy for you, resentment is a poison that you take to make another person die, you have to take care of yourself, never see him on a roulette table, he’s not 007, he’s the opposite of James Bond, that James Bond book Westlake wrote, hired to write a James Bond movie set in Hong Kong, actors, rights issues, filed the serial numbers off, Tomorrow Never Dies, Westlake is not Ian Fleming, an engineer not a spy, really long, the writing is never bad, they’re all experiments, a formula always works, he was trying to write a Jack Reacher book, a thick thriller you could sell at airports, Dancing Aztecs, cash-ins, decadent, if you just look at the handwork he does with characters, a little bit about Parker’s attitude towards people’s names, Mutt and Jeff, a clumsy haste, that’s comedy writing there, don’t move, Cops And Robbers, lower middle class cops become criminals, a foile a deux, The Outfit, doesn’t feel like a Parker novel at all, The Stepfather, two sequels, about a man’s mind, Block is more straight up, very cerebral, why do people like reading Stephen King books?, children and children’s psychology, grappling with stuff in fiction, largely about how to live in the United States, a college course out of his books, largely about political corruption, civic corruption, openly mocked, the wrong wing of communism, an imperial country, through the course of life, disidentified with Australia, disidentified with English, a rootless cosmopolitan, probably more Australia, Nice, an anti-Proustian experience, unrecognizable, the basic elements, Hyde Park, Sydney, the opera house, the harbour bridge, the sea and the sky, that particular sea and the sky, an American flag, red paint on the sidewalks, chain restaurants, too big, don’t like Justin, nice people everywhere, Turkey, Kentucky, being rooted, Frederick Heimbach, making digs, not committed, what trauma, personality defect or personality superpower, lose faith in institutions, what patriotism is, love the flag as the symbol of that thing, so many different kinds of Christian, soldiers and anti-soldiers, pacifists?, violence, violence at the dinner table, responses to violence and violation, Parker was on to something, refers to the woman, a receptacle, slightly more than that, a liability, annoying, fuck her while he’s sick, comedy, helping you, keepin you warm, that person seems more well adjusted than Parker, able to hold down a job, their backstory, sex him up, a dry run for Claire, healthy marriage, don’t bring the corpses into the garage, coffee will be ready in 10 minutes, says when he’s done, seen this relationship before, you have your hobbies she has hers, the sex while sick, she never caught, the other woman in the story, the madam who talks to much, always wants to have chats, Hazel?, Madge!, a retired hooker, a cathouse runner, showing up at Madge’s place, that’s not Parker, lovingly, friends or something?, she gets one of the sixths, the beat up spot, Book 1, Chapter 4, less than a hundred bills to his name, outside of Scranton, our president, strange conversation, fun, a Kifkaesque conversation, in her 60s now, when age retired her, too talkative, too nervous, rented mostly by the hour, stay and talk, Parker not being able, I’ll go there, I’ll fix the drinks, everyday was old home week, her gossiping, she never shut it with insiders, beautiful prop work, 4 cassettes, 4 hours 22 minutes, a weird life philosophy going on, we all gotta deal in the world, shut up, maybe, is this how to behave?, self-contained, not completely, people who can’t sit alone in a room with a book, where ethyl was sitting at the desk, mentally retarded, Bob Negly, the second Parker book, best Parker book?, The Score, the sandwich in between two classics, an old communist back in the day, he’s dumb now, a doctor who does facial reconstructions, he doesn’t think real good, the retarded girl, why did he do that, he’s really good with character work, he’s just so strange, it’s not representation, exactly, flawed characters keep people in their lives out of duty, duty, explaining why Parker goes after Grofield, when somebody does something wrong, make things even, rather than revenge, very subtle, nemesis, fate or The Cold Equations, everything is logical and that’s the way things are, correct the anomaly without emotion, a nemesis who takes a personal interest, the god, infringements of the cosmic order, that was wrong, wrong as in it was a mistake, acting improperly, violating the tao, a big part of it, something you don’t appreciate, a violation, rectification, correction, an nemetic, various way of being taciturn, a defect, useful, she doesn’t blab about what she learns, they don’t talk back, a scene where Madge blabs for an hour and a half, sits there and lets her talk, chatter away, Parker doesn’t watch TV, Lawrence Block’s characters read , hangs out on the beach, does job, he needs to know the psychology of people, he sums them up, studies and analyzes and sums up, “Parker didn’t”, often not diding things, that opening is so nice, it went with a dry cracking sound, Parker raised his foot, the door popped open like it was surprised, his plans were loused up now, Parker didn’t want drinks, no to Negly, a joke about vengeance, it wasn’t cash Negly wanted, the amateur first, find out how the situation now stood, “handy”, Parker uses people for his own good, as pieces on a chessboard, manipulating himself, drink cigarettes and eat beer, always in opposition, more of the same, he’s not on the property ladder, playing his own game, what makes you an amateur is you don’t get the money, convincing, why Jesse likes Parker so much, why Jesse likes Conan so much, Solomon Kane is insane, funny that you mention that, the Del Rey collection, wish there had been a lot more, doesn’t write a lot of novels, all about Satan, there’s only his mind thinking there is Satan, morally insane, he think he’s serving god, slays visions, whatever is happening you’re delusional, he never reconciled some of the contradictions, Staff of Solomon, buddy buddy with the witchdoctor, derives his power from Satan, the right hand of vengeance, more vengeance than nemesis, another big gap, better than Conan stories, we did pretty good, the Harlan Ellison tweet, the land of fear, throw out you fucking copy of Finnegan’s Wake, very Harlan Ellison, even when his novel doesn’t gel, heights and insights, not a character guy, he’s good at that, that’s really good, he’s really on to something, let’s rob a rock concert, let’s rob a casino, variations on a theme, the weirdness of how to be in the world, the books exist for the fallout, the heist is never the focus, when the stuff hits the fan, what he likes to explore with these, he was a cop in the airforce, white caps [“snow tops”], Dortmund, a German beer, puts everything he’s experiencing and puts it in his stories, The Green Eagle Score, an unproduced screenplay for that, owned by a major studio, lucky that they didn’t make it, Parker has a brother, no, Parker doesn’t have family, Ransom, Black Ice, Green Eagle, Sour Lemon, Rare Coin, the most violent, torture stuff, mostly offscreen, they didn’t pay for the rights when they made City Of Industry, attempts to try to capture Westlake, there’s problems with it, how many Westlake films were produced, one of the most adapted guys ever, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Brothers Keepers, post show scheduling, a Ray Cummings, Cat-Woman by Ray Cummings, 13 pages, Selina’s Big Score, it is better not to picture Parker, watching the movie adaptations, the best Parker on screen was Robert Duvall, he’s nothing like Parker, The Outfit, the philosophy doesn’t translate, a really good read, Stark, all on purpose, a webcomic called Gravedigger, Point Blank, where to find it now, track everything, real comics, Lee Marvin on the cover, a lady lying on a floor topless, a dude wrapped up in ropes, a trapper’s shack in Yukon, the mad gods laughed at my helpless plight, a murdering ravening beast, shudder pulp, cringe pulp, weird menace, later 1930s early 1940s, a lot of torture, weird cults, Mike Vendetti started getting into it, finally found my genre, sloppily written stories, racism, sex and torture, with deep philosophical reflection on modes of maleness, men want to save women, meet cute, hooded cultists, you go into cave, branding with swastikas, to make them nude, working theory, designed to make men have romantic adventures on how to make girlfriends, not a great prose stylist, the other options on Ray Cummings, Space Liner X-37, renegade Venusian, manacled hands, Mark Nelson, mixing it up with something good, not a good reputation amongst us, Cirsova, bad Alex?, that Alex, one is better than the other?, morally?, you want to pair up?, something that we’ll know it will be good, next open slot, time to research, something thematically related, rising intonation, Terence is powerful like that, Call Me Joe, in the science fiction industry, a collection of planetary adventures, Dragon Queen Of Jupiter, all read by the same narrator, trying to play it cutesy, In The Orbit Of Saturn by R.F. Starzl, Stupendous Spectacles Of The Solar System In Space, Prize Ship [by Philip K. Dick], 1931, the dreaded solar scourge, spend to much time on Mars you go mad, “space madness”, David H. Keller, awful and long, detective tryyna figure out why this chinese religion is so popular, dresses up as a Chinese, underneath the altar, a drug front, he can do wrong, religion is the opium of the people, warping himself, all of the Taine stories, somebody has to do the job, for the collective, liking your tweets because I like your tweets, might even quote tweets, we can have a beef, whistle at tweets, The Gun by Philip K. Dick, a trigger warning, a content warning, Tommy Patrick Ryan, bad idea, unsuccessfully modeled my mind, land acknowledgment, don’t fall for it, don’t like hypocrisy, an Indian community, Indians who take advantage of their status to self-aggrandize, not better people, it’s okay if a woman bombs us, fighting a straw man, am I?, no!, taking advantage, how big a problem, Inuit and the Metis, just above a million one hundred thousands, as a percentage, cultural genocide, actual genocide, less Indian wars, we have to be careful, for what reason?, Paul getting in trouble or not getting in trouble (at the hands of western administrators), it was western liberals, Camestros Felapton?, liberals collaborating with or submitting to communists, just did it, hilarious, back to the Hugos, hott goss, if Paul had won Fan Writer, we shouldn’t have a convention in China because of the Uyghur genocide, if you stretch the definition, vs. actual genocide in Gaza, because they’re cowards, they don’t beleive the video of their eyes, they’d rather believe the government lies, tagging in that word is calling it a cultural holocaust, murder and culture destruction, deliberate and widespread attempt to steal kids and their language, Jesse concentration camp, particularly egregious, the previous convention was in Canada, nobody was all up in arms about dead children in Canada, anti-China hate, Nixon is a lot more reasonable, Nancy Pelosi trying to start WWIII with China, The Mad Planet by Murray Leinster, Demons Of Cthulhu, a concession to will, Starman Jones, a concession to Jesse, The Stone Dragon by R. Murray Gilchrist, sweaty looking guy with a nice mustache, Temple Bar, The Yellow Book, The Crimson Weaver, a great Edge, the Valley of the Willowbreaks, sleeping side by side, fresh gathered heather, wallless bridge, The Domain of the Crimson , a beldame, ossier, enter not the domain of the crimson weaver, behold I was beautiful once, discovered the foulness of her bosom, she is mad, that sounds good, Eldritch Archives, The Werewolf’s Daughter by H. Warner Munn, Farmer friends, you should, Time Is The Simplest Thing by Clifford D. Simak, the beginning premise blew Terence’s mind, Exiles To Glory by Jerry Pournelle, a right wing guy, he’s wrong, because welfare slums, a senior engineering student at UCLA, murderous “youth gang”, kills an inner city resident and has to run, you don’t kill juvies in this town, on the run and all of earth there was no place to hide, 144 pages, 5-6 hours, YA, a response to Heinlein, interested in right-wingers, tarred by people who claim to be left wingers, unacceptable and wrong and hypocritical, patriotic communism, very internationalist, the neighbourhood and the biome, Kentucky is an area in addition to a state, used to be a statehouse, the long view on nations, too soon to tell, Zhou Enlai on the French Revolution, the Chinese Revolution, Mao’s right hand man, educated by a rich Chinese man, studied in France, how do you feel about funding this young man, the just so story, being funded by a rich man, signed up, solved, What Mad Universe by Fredric Brown, how did we get Scott on there?, The Fearless Benjamin Lay by Marcus Rediker, vegetarian dwarf, vegetarianism is a mistake, maybe too soon to tell, Hitler and Benjamin Lay, probably both liked dogs but not to eat, Hitler had two eyes, you like architecture, hey you live in Europe, the stupidest argument, the guy pops out of a hole in a well, and yet you live in a society, as a response on twitter, so stupid, latent patriotic tendencies, an episode of American history, Evan is fiercely patriotic, it is a vice, Evan loves vices, he wants to earn enough money and be a prepper?, Wisconsin, he has failed to Terence properly, Mad Max novelization, might be a problem, motorcycle and biker gangs, one of the finest films, Mad Max II, an extravaganza of awesome, the dog dying, baby schmaybe, the grandma with the shotgun, Cundilini with his hand missing, likes Shakespeare with motorcycle gangs, 1981, rust on the details, Thunderdome is not as good, almost a comedy, fun things, more accessible to children, Tina Turner, the blue lagoon, great character, be the queen of capitalism, that weird airplane, native Australian project, air taxi/crop-duster, who isn’t in to planes?, cars are pretty good too, transformers, they can hide, they’re in disguise, secret identity, secretly millions of years old, I can transform, Dragon Queen Of Jupiter, fascinated by the world of Mad Max, Audiobooks For The Damned, funny names and numbers, all pirate, doing it out of love vs. commercial purposes, Commercialism: The Curse Of Art by Lovecraft’s wife, I must fund him, I must save him, I can save her, she’s like that with Lovecraft, none of us can be saved in the end, recorded in his car, AFTB #68, the account exists in a limbo state, the cancellers, really trolly, I like this person because they like copyright, fuck off, you can’t get me, ignore it, their collection of dung beetle photographs, probably awesome, very interested in the passions of the people, Midwestern Marx, Liger, patriotic communist, who is Destiny?, Twitch, in conversation with other people, Steven Kenneth Bonnell II, it is not genocide if it is during a war, don’t tell him, Omaha, Nebraska, superwhite, most Cubans in the united states, dispossessed, Evan says “I like Vaush”, he likes him, streamers or youtubers, American youtuber, the Hugo kerfuffle, used to have one of those ear gages things, about audiobooks, passionately doing, voting for Biden to help your portfolio, Scott Miller, he’s not an analyzer, 2022 output, Imagination, Planet Stories, episode zero, recording the unrecorded, noble, a perfectionist, make it as good as possible, good at voices, got pretty good taste, I’m in love with you, sir, one everyday, Herland by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, far enough out, one question about Queen Of Air And Darkness, orienting question, some blood quantum Cherokee, just as mentioned, the woman is like let them keep their ways, put them on a reservation, interesting of course, what that’s about, what’s the significance of that if any?, Dercum Audio, Thompson, or Tetty?, for the sake of Will, the name of the author in the files, free audiobooks, Tom Tetty, the last glow of the last sunset, left in the ‘if you your cassette is not working’, collecting stamps, media archaeology, how much tech has changed, Books On Tape, amalgamated and amalgamated, now Audible owns everything, whole scandal going on, Findaway voices scandal, go back to the basics: audiobooks for the damned, an Amber series fan fiction, John Betancourt, costs money, disgusting, how to do a lot of copyright, actively trying to make money at a basically impossible task, megapacks, legal dispute over the word “megapack”, trying to make a living, sad for Paul, he’s playing a rigged game, you know you’re getting scammed, worse and more corrupt, this book sucks, why is it getting a Hugo award, They’d Rather Be Right, Mark Clifton, co authored book, why are you playing, school’s business is not education, obey orders, learn propaganda, babysit you, not the prevailing sentiment, so mean to his students, otherwise you are subject to them, how would you know?, the etymology, solved with drills, shampoo is a scam, why is shampoo a scam?, of course, I’m normal, it smells nice, soap does not have the same effect, axe body spray, bad for them, that they have to use up, that don’t help them, we’re taught it, what did people do before toothpaste?, we just buy the shit they tell us to, a history of shampoo, since ancient times, long hair, a daily indulgence, putting yourself in the upperclass, something people do, learning to play piano, they feel like they need to, it’s all unconscious, what shampoo do you use?, if you’re a girl, get away with having no hair, punish girls in France for having babies with nazis, nazi babies, her hair!, proportional to the crime, a truth and reconciliation process, just solved it with a haircut, as much as a woman values your hair, you can’t have books for six years, a horrible punishment, you’d have to talk to people, what books have you read recently? they have to struggle, some school assignment, can’t we be friends?, people are talking about a book you should read, so rare, do French people read at all?, they read more than Americans, probably dying a cultural affectation, a sociological study of who reads non-fiction cultural books, it is good to learn stuff, some books are not meant to be read, anything written by Barack Obama, briefing books for their activists, Hillary Clinton, report on what’s in there, they don’t know what they’re saying to their ghost writers, a lot of shit for school, get to read Othello, Shakespeare is so fuckin awesome, the sexy one, The Taming Of The Shrew, way in, new theory just dropped, Iago’s the badguy, undermine Othello and his marriage, Iago’s gay for Othello, pretty good theory, I hate the moor, you act like you’re obsessed with him, interpretations, reaching for Desdemona, Iago reaches for Othello, a cool interpretation, a cool tragedy, this last information, shampoo your hair, eating and sleeping, ammonium laurel suphate, rub the glycol all around, people won’t object to your hair anymore, eat more yeast, some problems with flatulence, we’ll book it next time, relationship with shampoo, how often?, how many ablutions per day, once a month?, more than once a week, struggle to say more than that, another product, try never to use it, long hair, big, afro like, get a bidet, bidets are my new religion, buy a second one, very useful, saves money, cleanly, saves time, very Heinleinian, the fresher, oh no!, used to being clean, not covered in paper shit, mandatory, standard, a propaganda campaign, if you learn nothing else: bidets are the way, blog posts, setting up a blog is annoying, manage account names, to give Musk money, longform reads, tweet threads, an opportunity cost, twitter is a reading diary, searchable, shareable, David H. Keller 2023 tweets, a popular magazine, Popular Publications, topics Will could explore, freeform, follow your passion, engaging with audio, get more fiction into you, sitting sucks, not wasting time and money, post there, if you got offline, the internet has been ruined, google doesn’t listen blogs anymore, they don’t exist anymore, defunded, duckduckgo started caving to the baddies, go to the websites, what’s a better search engine?, the dot com, blog search, so focused on extracting money it doesn’t do its service anymore, the guy in the store today, he thought he was a good institution, a part of the community, enjoying the things he provided to the community, mom and pop restaurants still exist in small towns, what happened?, it’s all wrecked, it’s tough, store restaurant gas station, cute and nice, minimal population, cheap land, people with time and interest in being able to subsidize a small gas station restaurant, this doesn’t seem so foreign, a familiar Kentucky thing, Culver’s, ice cream custard?, a thick ice cream, best frozen custard, Dairy Queen Blizzard, Concrete mixer, mix in your rocks, have you ever had a jelly baby?, Doctor Who candy, a dalek, penny candy for kids, shaped like little babies, better flavours, blackcurrant, delicious and subtle, blackberries are free, nobody grows blackberries on purpose, her microclimate is very dry, not a lot of extra water for blackberries, a post a week, the pace, what Will’s doing with his life right now, sequester, a tablet, dreams, no shampoo, eating black currants, look at the list of ingredients and then look them up, Harry’s mens products, accused of enjoying the smell of things to much, overdosed on perfumes, laundry detergent with no scent, unscented detergent, unscented cat litter, you should smell like nothing, stone scented deodorant, antiperspirants, toothpaste, toothpicks, Nelson Mandela’s autobiography, boarding school, ashes, doesn’t sound delicious, enjoying the flavour of toothpaste, there’s no movements like this, veganism is the new religion, anti-scent religion, how sensitive people are to autism, not just stuff injected into your body, covered in rashes, a sensitive organ, the whole purpose is to make fucking money, all products produced under capitalism, how these things go, love LibriVox, recording audiobooks in their basements, a prison project for prisoners to record audiobooks, a serial killer recorded some V.C. Andrews, very interesting, prison book programs, you could study and it is not mandatory, a privilege, turn them all into lawyers, a student today, push a lot of science fiction and fantasy, the excuse is vocab, vocabulary through poems, god forbid, essays, so fucking awful, book introductions, little editorial prefaces, Robert Silverberg’s Worlds Of Wonder, what he thinks are awesome stories, Alfred Bester, C.L. Moore, so good, paid him money, The Monsters by Robert Sheckley, sent to Scott, Scanners Live In Vain, Colony, Light Of Other Days, Day Million, Who Am I Which Are You, The Triumph Of Honest Bellamy, Don’t Forget To Kill Your Wife, Fuzzy Puzzle Odyssey, Six Plots For The Price Of One, I Trusted The Rug Completely, A Boy, A Girl, A Lovestory, 164, respect yes, wobbly publishers, fine feelings, a demi-god, 1953, Philadelphia, Columbia, professional writers, verges are uncomfortable places, immense lobby, Harlan Ellison, a little stir in the lobby, a slender graceful man, that’s Ted Sturgeon, James Blish, Willy Ley, recently skipped an essay by him, grinny broadly, buoyant, envy, admiration, hope, on every contents page, Untouched By Human Hands, with very close attention, role models, his instant rise to fame, tremendously prolific, tabulated by author, 24 stories, only Philip K. Dick had more with 28, he made it all look so easy, just grace, agility, ingenuity, Henry Kuttner, out of the simplest materials, cleverness, delicacy of touch, trading jokes with my fellow celebrities, no story worth reading ever was easy to write, products of anguished revision, keep up a the job day in and out, a lot fore people today, vunderjar, Seventh Victim, scant 4000 words, turning the familiar upside down, wondrous, the dissonance that gives rise to the plot, the tone will be light, it was undoubtedly the newest thing, compact, uncluttered, efficient, a substance resembling fire, an astonishing hook, they slithered down the mountainside together, a murder mystery?, a science fiction story, socially desirable for men to kill their wives, he will need only 4000 words to do the job, the aliens are puzzled by the intentions, suspense, holding his reader’s interest, the ritual slaughter of wives, most of us, too simple, but what? what!, a calm serious manner, are they moral?, this from a man who has just killed his wife, among the other debaters, hideous aliens, morality is very important, the visitors are so repellent, put them out of their misery, lean sparse style, to the surplus female pen, 2 more pages, the important thing to find out, if it has become apparent yet, the moral beings, we’re back with Gulliver in the land of the Houyhnhnm, the misanthropic Swift, fable, plausibility was not an issue, cunning brains and useful hands, doodle up, a lot of people need to learn this, his world of wifekillers, some convincing rationale, pure exposition, married females lay eggs every day, simply a fact of biology there, the problem of surplus women, polygamy, too intricate, a great nunnery far away, the gentlest possible solution, the grotesque solution, serial polygamy, otherwise excluded, casual unthinking sexism, allowed to reach maturity, married sisters, the next group of wives, meanwhile, the leisure to spend their time in philosophical debate, annoyingly deficient in logic, Heinlein would like this, a splendidly logical system, overenthusiastic slaughter, equilibrium, past mating age, mortal combat, we who subscribe, modern India today, wife-murder, governed by high moral imperative, telling untruths, a host of other evil customs, destroy our way of life, decent and righteous customs, so elegantly constructed, parable so deftly, craftsmanship, light entertainment, inspiring esteem and envy, already a master of his craft, that’s how to write an essay, just crank him out, undertaken a program to do so, secret hidden stuff, seeing it and making it explicitly, making you see stuff, vocab words at least, you need to understand what they’re for and what the teacher wants, if they judge you on your dancing, a better hobby than writing an exercise, group dance, usually about half an hour, a movie review, movies are better than TV shows, reviews Star Trek episodes, some good Next Generation, take notes, The Twilight Zone, you don’t know what you’re getting each time, generally science fiction, a fantasy, a satire, social commentary, quite difficult to watch anthologies back to back to back, find the original stories, look at them in that light, very focused right now, easily distract, tutoring, coffee, Connor, No-Man’s Land by John Buchan, fairy cave men, exciting plans, a chapter in The Way The Future Was by Frederick Pohl, the admirable Pohl, teenage dalliance with communism, Amazing Stories novel, The Space Merchants, a rush job, Kornbluth has sharp teeth, a moderating influence?, sleeping in the stairwells, making us laugh, Search The Sky by Cyril M. Kornbluth and Frederik Pohl, The Advent On Channel 12 by C.M. Kornbluth, cheap server, servers in North Korea, servers on a satellite, what the fuck is this?, he’s really smart and he doesn’t play dumb, Ambrose Bierce, tricky, start with the famous one, also a French one, An Occurrence At Owl Creek Bridge, Ambrose Bierce is like Mark Twain’s evil brother, he’s still alive!, 1914 to cover the Mexican Revolution, may have got got, see you in cyberspace.

The Split by Richard Stark

Posted by Jesse Willis

The SFFaudio Podcast #799 – READALONG: Dark Carnivals: Modern Horror And The Origins Of American Empire by W. Scott Poole

Jesse, Evan Lampe, Will Emmons and Terence Blake talk about Modern Horror And The Origins Of American Empire by W. Scott Poole

Talked about on today’s show:
according to the empire, And The Origins Of American Empire , doesn’t sound right, empire should come first, not his thesis, third book by him, Wastelands, a big one, association of ideas, correlation is not causation, a good book, WWI and horror, the Lovecraft one, Evan’s concern, kind of appreciate it, should have read more books, into Heinlein now, it has to be done, Glory Road, what’s the thesis of this book?, escapism, American empire is reflect in American horror, a facile thesis, Mike Nowak, getting judged, its fun, silent conversations happening, South Carolina, written a book about South Carolina, horror ladies from Finland?, Vampira or Suspiria?, promote his book, three or four books came out, when Elon Musk bought twitter, conversations deleted, broken now, the way he emails Jesse, Dr. Poole do you think Trump’s election…, Dr. Poole rights back, really just history, Trump as less an aberration, a synecdoche, he/him, object right away, psychological explanations, political explanations, fits in, dark forces, historical/political motifs, quite anarchic, a giveaway, the first third of the book, that might be the thesis of this book, still working on the introduction, separate essays integrated into a structure, not a cohesive thesis book, more Zizeky, a propagandistic work, in a good sense, a better way, making people free, if he didn’t tell you whether the book was good or not, a lot of judgement, checkmark, needs to be longer, not filler, how he feels about a particular thing, Stranger In A Strange Land, a fascist?, misspeaking, forms a cult, Jesus kills people, he unpersons them, Valentine Michael Smith, The Horror At Red Hook, obviously racist, build that scaffolding, not a metaphor, remembering it wrong, a veteran who goes on another adventure, get it that wrong, Tobe Hooper, Jaws (1975), Amity Island, whitewashing American empire, Poltergeist (1982), Jaws is fun, thesis supported, Peter Benchley’s The Beast, sanding away, box office gold, Get Out (2017), Jordan Peele, not elevated horror, a business marketing thing, people don’t trust academia or reviewers, professional reviewers, massive gaps, Roger Ebert, The Medusa Touch (1978), one of the worst movies of the year, moviemakers usually want to get their movies to make money, Rod Serling vs. Jordan Peele, both hosted The Twilight Zone, ongoing dialogue with David Currie, loves America too much, my greatest neighbour, he doesn’t know he’s in airstrip 1, the DEW line, if W. Scott Poole had added some textual reference, a lot of shitting on Heinlein, vs. short stories that would fit this argument incredibly well, a media studies guy, lots of interesting movie recommendations, more balanced, looking at art, the film canon, paintings, movies and TV, very important, the majority of people don’t read books, a book about movies and TV shows, Gulf War I, little asides, how [Bashar al-Assad] is a bad man, you’re at a university, you want to be supportive, throw around an accusation, undermines everything else, could have been a lot longer of a book, a lot of people are alone, all his colleagues at the University of Charleston, not a scholarly work, riffing on, ultimately useful, morally undermine, mostly Americans, weaken it from within, turn people’s attention to facts on the ground, this book is dated already, 2022, Ukraine is not in here, Israel/Gaza are not in here, Houthis are not in here, Russian hacking in here, a media bubble, undermined him, his colleagues are going to read it, a liberal anti-imperialist book, I saw the signs, a materialist liberal, watching all these horror films, the media realm, the real horrors existing everywhere perpetrated by the American empire, as opposed to idealist liberal, a believable protagonist, protest and vote, horrible at the end, if we’re lucky, the American empire will fight another foe, Biden is not in this book, Trump is all over this book, doesn’t call Obama by his true name, he mentions Bill Clinton, unfortunate, makes the book less awesome, a favourite chapter, the best, the zombie chapter, very solid, George Romero, Night Of The Living Dead (1968), super low budget, Dawn Of The Dead, long, ponderous, Walking Dead episodes, a political speaker, Haitian voodoo movies, Red Letter Media style, watching Poole watch these movies, horror movies are good, The Devil’s Rejects (2005), more like twitter essays, attacking the libs, it was slick, the pivotal scenes, forgettable, Nope (2022), intended audience, white liberals, maybe a lot of black people thought it was terrific, a successful film, Native Son (2019), communists become the foil, white liberals, the equivalent of communists (white liberals), interested in race, the centrality of white supremacy, foundational, class, some nods in the direction, settler colonialism, it aint the white man it’s the rich man, the vast majority of people moving across the landscape, poor whites in the Confederate army, they deserve to die for that reason, false consciousness is a real thing, just gotten together, the planter class, how race worked in America, the idea of American freedom, American Slavery, American Freedom by Edmund Morgan, if you are obsessed with America, written for an american audience, the Strait of Hormuz, the powers in charge, who are they?, they have an agenda for you, it’s going to effect you, respond correctly when they come at you, addressing an American audience, that’s a thesis, other stuff in there too, January 6th, really?, not a big deal, 9/11?, the forever war, traumatized a lot of people, triggered a lot of people, one million percent, Starship Troopers, inserts itself, a science fiction guy, a seminal figure, tying it to the security state, Who Are the Heirs of Patrick Henry? Stand Up and Be Counted!, he was all in, the difference is, when people are wrong, quick to denounce, when there’s a denouncing party in the room, some scary stuff in there, ignoring a lot of what’s going on in that book, he took the book at made fun of it, liberal academics, some people are not going to see the criticism, bad because some people won’t see it as fascistic, Verhoven sucks us in, arent these shiny happy people showering together, Doogie Hauser dressed up in an SS uniform at the end, it’s dangerous, it is dangerous, literature should be dangerous, makes you think thoughts outside of the nannies trying to control our brains, Haldeman likes Heinlein, The Forever War, what he’s pointing to, doesn’t correspond to experience and memory, a tiny possible aspect, a sort of monologue, science fiction as a megatext of dialogue, in dialogue with Starship Troopers, thoughtfully funny, The Sound Of Music (1965), dismisses him, using things to make a , tips his hand, N.K. Jemisin’s now classic novel, an article by David Agranoff, why is this written down for us?, the sensation that the robot was a robot sometimes, robophobic, an exaggerated the broken up and assembled thesis, giving addresses the way a robot would give addresses, jarring, competent robotic, work for hire, experiencing it as we were, deep sense of outrage, sounded robotic, some weirdness in the pauses between paragraphs, weird page breaks?, the style, errors in the recording, relooped, left out little bits, at the end, his memory became a cubist painting, the same historical sequence, he repeats, he can’t do it in order, the kaleidoscope is good, where the writer reviews his own book, starting a new section, some factor about some person or some event, one paragraph, the historical sequence, what the relation is, what has just gone before, a quirk of style, a painting or a photo of something or someone, does it over and over again, a summary of the book from Random House, too much, why even in here, Charles Manson, connected to Heinlein, Stephen King and school shootings, the 2017 clown traumas, little historical anecdote, that IT movie, somebody reads a book, 2 years later taken as gospel, guy reads book, cousin tells main character, UFO stuff,more material, different direction, the aftermath of Roswell, what the 60s were like, an MKUltra experiment, Rage doesn’t indict Stephen King, talking to your lawyer all day, do it in doses, Oberon Zell-Ravenheart, Church Of All Worlds, didn’t kill any moviestars, just a horny guy, a bit of a hippy, gaia thesis, deep ecology, liked Lord Of The Rings too, weird mentions, The Omen franchise, got paid to handle snakes, a girl holding a snake, satanic panic films, Courtney Brown, Emory University professor, put his classes online, Science Fiction and Politics, interesting, read through a bunch of books, classics, novels, remote viewing, nutso bullshit, DARPA is spending the money on it, the Men Who Stare At Goats, astral projection, The Men Who Stare at Goats, Trump is disconnected from horror (except for he clowns), who’s the best the president?, the guy who builds houses, John Adams, that modern people would know, but freed the slaves, Americans can kill each other all they want, outside the borders, fewer people killed than Obama, central America wars, Predator (1987), Commando (1985), we’re a rescue team, you lied to us, Dillon, muscle-off, punished, a good connection and he makes it properly, he didn’t read, supposed to read this, making the phone calls, regular politicians, possibly that’s the reason, didn’t start any new wars, the Mother of All Bombs, assassinated an Iranian general, went back, distanced us from Iran, trying to make peace with North Korea, triggering people, we didn’t have the word, broken brains, ugly truth, at the heart of it the worst thing is true, we’re the bad guys, in the context of, shadowbanned, for his award, he’s the bad guy, point of view, people don’t want to accept, news for the Americans, some Americans, a book with nice examples, a good book, pretty good, good stuff in here, soft touch, trying to keep his job, kick himself off of twitter, this is allowed in history class, conservative historians, demented people, money in the demented industry, how did the 14th amendment lead to Jim Crow?, why this is racist, “No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”, the foundation of American civil rights, gave rights to black people, not capable, excellent answer, a common take on reconstruction, bleeding as a cure for colds, something that was left out, The Repairer Of Reputations by Robert W. Chambers, set in the future, a head injury, asylum, an unreliable narrator, observing the state of 1920 United States, imperial horsemen, the reality that he sees around him, people didn’t classify it in that way, poll numbers at the end, Americans who think the country is on the right track, the British Empire in 1945, the Empress of India is the head of an empire, not a lot about corporations in here, reflected in horror movies, I don’t think people should have guns, keep your job measures, Heinlein thought fighting the Vietnam War was a good idea, don’t get into any accidents, Friday is amazing, interesting themes, the optimism of Space Cadet, he has to focus on the popular and famous, got to attract attention, find them where they are, provide the evidence, back it up, the casual remark, saying something fascistic, peace and love and sex, grading this book, somewhat incoherent, why are you so focused on Charles Manson, Brad Pitt, Quentin Tarantino’s argument about Manson, laugh gleefully as you kill the Manson family, we shouldn’t have firearms, where’d you get that idea, c’mon man?, why attack Bashar al-Assad?, didn’t gas his own people, one third of Syria is occupied right now, one line about Libya being a mistake, denounces Saddam Hussein, got too big britches, Will’s colloquialism, tool of the CIA, being stupid, two items of information, annexing Kuwait, palpable in the hallways, the head of Iraq attacked Kuwait, why do we care about this, carved up empires recarved, why are we involved in this at all, the Red Sea, all goes back, feels a bit muddled, make that case, the invasion of Grenada, Heartbreak Ridge (1986), too young for the Korean War, going 1 for 1, almost gelling, The chainsaw, Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974), looms large, the evil is never defeated, the final girl runs away, the external evil, if we can ferret out his thesis, good book ultimately, Jesse doesn’t denounce Poole, misinterpreting him, the cultural significance, Heinlein’s responsible?, juxtaposition, Wernher von Braun, I Am For The stars (but sometimes hit London), the cynical underbelly, what they’re doing all the time, Fauci’s in the government, comparable, funding Wuhan has had a huge consequence, excess deaths from mysterious other reasons (a vaccine that doesn’t fit), a plan to kill everybody on the planet, not the greatest guy even if he was good at rockets, Fauci more impactful, the sideshow, other than with satellites, space telescopes, ICBMS, V2, too hard to see for most people, under COVID, how fearful he is, conspiracy theories, he does both in this book, doesn’t go into JFK, how its relevant, the CIA did kill JFK, a horror movie example, Stephen King is underrepresented, King has a lot to say about empire, Pet Semetary (1983), American expansionism, the story of the Philippines, our gene Poole, fight for us, part of our great union, insurgents against the Japanese empire, you’re your own, whataboutism, Hawaii is a state now, Puerto Rico, Oklahoma, Guantanamo is empire, July 1st 1776?, the American Empire started before America did?, the treaty of Paris, where are the horror films for that part, Ravenous (1999), ramps up in the 70s and 80s, the less solid it is, enjoyable and interesting, Poole sold me this thesis: Lampe write a book, Charles Brockden Brown, Edgar Allan Poe on empire, all from 2022, goodreads?, reviews online?, The Narrative Of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, Young Goodman Brown, Weiland, those stories are part of this, James Fenimore Cooper, a propagandistic work, nobody’s going to read that, sadly non one cares, responsible for the title: Ray Bradbury, he wrote the book, he owns it now, in reference, just in the air, Insane Clown Posse, Insane Clown President, facepaint and faygo, a michael Jackson tatoo, Matt Tiabbi’s important work, could have done without all of those, endorsement, get his colleagues, I got checknamed, feels like that, academia is very weird, people don’t have the kind of job security they want, his job and his privilege, being privileged, a popular professor at a fancy school, Gay lady got shitcanned, Claudine Gay, cheating on her homework, that was the excuse, they dug up her shit to shitcan her, the mostly kindly possible way, her performance, she did nothing wrong, he aint a cheater, he aint a liar, trying to be careful, a sense of paranoia amongst adjunct professors, pretty good writer, pejorative, bad speculation, Ray Bradbury, The Pedestrian, guy goes for a walk, police car arrests him, just a robot, wonderful, FBI following Ray Bradbury for ten years, Philip K. Dick informing on people, learns to drive from an FBI guy, cultural horrorshow, I would like decent government, Nixon has it in him, in the 2020s, a big Bradbury man, 55 and 60 years ago, stalked or studied by the FBI, the stark aspect of his work, influenced by [George] Finney’s The Circus of Dr. Lao, a dark circus, notable by its absence, demarcate each epoch, the Iraq War, video game simulation, weak, the Gulf War didn’t take place, Independence Day (1996), ah, yes, recognized the name, vaguely interesting, just the idea of the dark carnival, didn’t do much with it, the polarity between Jaws and Texas Chainsaw, several other polarities, a film review of Zone Of Interest (2023), presenting the horror without showing it, Shoah (1985), comestible, making a Nazi a nice guy, a way of reading it, a hate on, seems to hate Stephen Spielberg, they’re twee, a comestible catastrophe, an item of food, make it palatable, Welcome to earth!, PUNCH, Alien (1979), an alien in the horror mood, a class movie, mentioned, fragmentary, an assemblage of fragments, readable in slices, why are you putting that it there, #BrassBra, it passed the time, it was comestible, walk out of the movie theater of this book, Valentine Michael Smith is a fascist?, WTF, triggered but for what purpose, the Our Opinions Are Correct ladies, and Poe is a third rate writer?, just trying to trigger people?, received opinions, probably not the worst person on the planet, why is he mentioned at all?, Americans created a vacuum, his dad died, I’m gonna run my own country, you were supposed to do what you were told?, the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, regime change, Russia, the “brutal Assad regime”, making Kurdistan its own thing, not even tied to a horror film, The War Of The Worlds, vs. vs. vs., that thread back to the original War Of The Worlds, doesn’t read texts very much, did a lot of other stuff on the side, he’s space Jesus, I don’t think that’s very nice, the second season of Reacher, a consensual, disincorporates people, not a good season, good riddance to the villains he gets rid of, judge and jury and executioner, just provide the evidence, provide the data, a wicked joy, you think he’s a libertarian, libertarians are bad too, they’re bad, sideburns and Boris Johnson’s hair, sister is first lady of Argentina, fun to see what happens, America might become fun again, barring health issues, barring assassination from the conversation, when and if Trump is assassinated, what’s our reaction supposed to be, bemusement?, he’s not a threat, he called a lady bird brain, he was president before and nothing happened, he’s gonna be wiser, he’s seen the deep state for what it was, if he’s assassinated it was because he was mean to them, you threaten everybody getting paid, I’m making deals everywhere, it’s so meta, weird, are we supposed to be rocked to our core, they sent everybody home in fucking Canada, this is a foreign guy, he was JFK, if Regean or Obama had been assassinated, a child in Australia, are they gonna commemorate the assassination of Trump?, we’re so fucked it has become comedy, the dangerous clowns, not so worried about the clowns, an addenda, better update it, wanting to Scott Poole’s tweets right now, are there any 2020s horror movies, Timerider: The Adventure of Lyle Swann (1982), fun, Suitable Flesh (2023), the hot lady, couple hot ladies, Heather Graham, and Barbara Crampton, the bodies of women turn you off?, bought a DVD, Will and Maissa, Marc Singer from The Beastmaster, 1976 TV play for television The Taming Of The Shrew, meeting Catherine, commedia dell’arte style, Scaramouche by Raphael Sabatini, such a hot body, goddamn his body’s hot, wonderfully performed, available and complete but very low rez, awesome so heat, was he in V?, didn’t have his shirt off in V, loincloth movie, the Andre Norton book, the last Navajo?, read it in German, why don’t we do this book?, how do we convince Evan, maybe, Othello, the beast with two backs, Iago and another dude, Othello’s father in law, Shakespeare is gold, the teachers and the school boards have no clue, the ass scene, Romeo wanting suck and fuck Juliet’s ass, pomegranate things, so hilarious, they don’t focus on that scene, kids love it, read it back in their own words, he’s based, the time zone effect, Chinese New Year, starts off well, dig Hoffmann, The Tales Of Hoffmann by Jacques Offenbach, an adaptation?, wrote many tales, nobody reads books, try talking to people about Hoffmann, you have 20 English teachers, they’re the ones who read Shakespeare and don’t see how sexful it is, computer games and Xboxes exist, you don’t need to do much to be an academic anymore, punished by a lot of reading, you inhereted money, you’re going to your mom’s school, Evan as president of Harvard, delete his twitter acount, when this podcast comes out in 7 months, so many Hugo awards it’s going to be unbelievable, sympathy Hugos, tit for tat Hugos, when you just read Scalzi and don’t read anything ten years ago, David Agranoff is going to win a Hugo and you’re going to be sorry, he stopped calling Evan, set up a slack then Evan will show up, contact me on tawianese wechat, Kakaotalk, cute like everything from South Korea, purify yourself, self love, hot funny stuff, dig out my Bleiler, The Scarlet Planet by Don Mark Lemon, really funny and good, kind of a slog, Wonder Stories Quarterly, never reprinted, a spider woman story, The Mansion Of Forgetfulness, not well remembered, a proper science fiction story, Mike Ashley, free expression, spoof on male dominated society, editorial comment, realistic rather than satirical, boys will be boys, SF should seek to realistically portray the impact, the little corporal, pretended suicide, no emotional impact, planet plane, make them rich and live forever, secretly acting under orders of a fraternal reference, the Basques, master criminal, insubordinate comrades, radiocycles, feeling Ringworldy, totally down with it, keep getting into fist fights, chasing monster girls, is it funny?, same joke over and over again, back and forth for 60 pulp pages, a novel, red blooded masculine impulses, women and girls are objects to be conquered, a progressive opinion, our public opinion, but what will we say in our private slack?, it takes two to tango (and conquer), it takes two to Conga, marry once they return to Earth, acting according to their nature, the little corporal must have been a phrase, mostly repetitive, reflections on feminine youth and beauty, crystalizes their bodies, a giant tomb of crystalized girls, She, Gulliver Of Mars, a glacial region, Edwin Lester Arnold, Robert W. Chambers, petrifies items dipped in a bathtub, a sculpture that is fake, the artist model goes in the bathtub, you know this guy is a good writer: his focus is aesthetics, Lovecraft, that’s a story about art, when it isn’t, him doing the art in the writing, literally was an artist, writes about artists, same with Poe, writes a story to fit the drawing, The Philosophy Of Composition, The Philosophy Of Furniture, why are you talking about this, Poe?, is there anything there?, he’s all about aesthetics, an educational tangent, Mark Of The Beast, the entire entry, a lot of sympathy, pulps from the turn of the century, attacked as surreptitiously erotic, Hugo Gernsback flew into a panic, lots of blood drinking, destroys memory cells, ease the suffering to the bereaved, died at sea, the woman is Morella, the lovers will start afresh, Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind (2004), 1907, The Spider And The Fly, The Thrill Book, the way you think about women, a particular crooning noises, two hammocks, Julia is a spider woman, you have not tamed her, you’ve fallen into her web, sometimes Terence wins, you only have to hammocks twice, my spider friends, overrated, investigating Lego Minifigures, spider women stories, the snake woman, the gorgon, snake women, snake bodies but with breasts, ancient Greek Mythology, Arachne, sueey!, suddenly realized, warthogs, suidae, big lightbulb goes off, it’s about weaving, fun politics, more Don Mark Lemon, good ideas, The Sale Of Shakespeare’s Ghost, isfdb is great database, how could this not be on ISFDB?, corresponding French site, noosfere.org, Chuck Tingle?, a guy with a bag over his head, the unknown comic, free in ways we will never be, freer than Chuck Tingle, he would feel unfree, if anything was going to be censored from the Hugo, space butt invasion, unionized in the butt, unicorn tinglers, Campus Damascus, an aspiring proctologist comedian, likes having his prostate exam?, thinking about Trump being assassinated, who killed Trump?, so silly, why is this considered science fiction, kill somebody in central park and get away with it, invent quotations, funny as it is, even with Elvis, self-referential piece of writing, he deserves something, a Hugo, relativizes people’s self-importance, Sad Puppies, this is considered in the same, too long, that’s the word, some salty bits here and there, don’t put in so much rosewater, happy that he read it, in an actual bookstore, pretty short, Terence knows where to get it, multiple Bleiler books, he’s a hero, very happy to be pirating his stuff, Guide To Supernatural Fiction, Checklist Of Fantastic Literature, these are from the 1990s, if you look at the text, Science Fiction The Early Years, the most interesting part of our podcast, 1000 pages, very tightly spaced, review after review after review, he read everything, The Gorilla, you see where this is going, obsessed with blood, very mild mannered, acting like an ape, the reader may assume, 1905, gonad transfusions, conquering woman, becoming a goat, at the wrong time, Confessions Of An English Opium Eater, a real believer in illustrations, include them in your tweets, said something in French and disappeared, other sources, it shouldn’t have any repeats, LibriVox, Martin Geeson, 5 hours 21 minutes, visit not contact, slow but delectable, like opium, look at the comments, this guy is horrible, this is absolutely divine, the best narrator I’ve ever heard, positively fantastic, “performance”, spelling mistakes all over the place, another perfect pairing of narrator and narrative, weird youtubes, book reviews, Superboy comic review, Edward Rice Burroughs unboxing, he gets dressed up for it, fun to know, being bossed around and shit on, fuck right off, that CBC thing, Jesse had to go to copyright school, what are Happy Tree Friends?, a less popular Spongebob?, the right Spongebobby age, evil google, Bryan Alexander tweet from Qatar, Qatar sounds painful?, he’s doing his normal thing: consulting, consulting about consulting, universities going out of business, he’s not there to join the Houthis, getting paid to be there, Bryan is very careful, doesn’t say radical things, liking gothic horror like Weiland, for work, adjunct professor guys, the middle class’ fear of falling, there’s concerns, he doesn’t have a bank, free to make his jokes, he has to be anonymous to be free, getting off the airplane in Chengdu, especially Chinese ones, an unemployed layabout, fun work, might work for a living at some point, mental health episode, wealthy lawyer, spouse who works, cheap shipping, a comic book store yes, new Philips Brubaker book, Charlton girl comics, Teen Confessions, Where The Body Was, Eisner Awards, Ed Asner gives out the Eisner Awards, he’s like the Hugo Gernsback of comics, Jack Kirby, Will Eisner’s studio system, an early comics guy, Tara from Planet Comics, she’s public domain, mostly badly written, Tara Outlaw Of The Universe, text features, text pages in comics (are garbage), nobody is supposed to read it, just a rip off of Farmer In The Sky on one page, Farmers on Ganymede, fast writing, shooting hoops, write 5000 times, this is not a good story but it is good, the way Jesse solved a problem, The Cat’s Advice by Jesse, such a good story, a Bros. Grimm story The Cat And The Miller’s Son, written in 7 minutes, stupid and good, the mill’s mouser, Will’s all in, structured, everything is perfect, the cat is touching him, should be hitting Will in the feels, they pressed Hans into their service, the cat was right, he was put on a path, he does what his father tells him to do, the state?, some other state?, killed his dad and raped his sister, child soldier, how do you like that?, get up in those clouds and become untethered, all the apostrophes, the cat doesn’t have a name, not owned by the mill, take whatever you’re given, no thinking, on your bag is a pin with a bicycle, little schoolboy holding ramen, he won the rabbit from a wizard, takes the chopsticks, in the undergrowth, a calico cat, it only works for here, the way that story is solved, anime or manga level, next issue, never an end, that will be resolved next issue, for the idea being expressed, you gotta do something or someone will choose for you, to thy own self be true, adults will give you advice, wrong and right, go get passionate about something, three hours is probably the ideal, break them out of that, read something that’s at least 20 minutes long, she’s not engaging, the material is terrible, supervisor nearby, outsourced stuff, stack of Lovecraft poems, she lit up like a sparkler, 100% down with meter and metaphor, brain level is right but vocabulary isn’t, the rhyme and the meter, polished, almost nobody in English ever think about, saying the same word over and over again, about how long the word is, to fit a meter, dreamed vs. dreamt, saves a character, microblogging, poets are very focused on this, o’er, where text and speech are designed to go together, narrating as a job, it doesn’t flow, definitionally prosaic, prose need not be prosaic, there were points when, dialogue that almost feels like Shakespeare, this is Inception (2010) level of interesting, engaging with Poe in a science fictional mode in the first decade of the 20th century, brings his own shit to it, all a coincidence, hooded or something, zaps himself, brings a layer of Poe upon it, buncha other Poe, this is why Jesse loves being a tutor, finding the spark is amazing, lighting up with these reviews, stories from the 20s, 30s, 40s, the Campbell era of Astounding, the pre-Campbell, important but not that cool, personality quirks, difficult upbringing, the psychology of Campbell, a domineering trickster, pretend to be each other, Who Goes There?, interesting but very stilted, people getting paid for cash, banned space opera, to serve different audiences, a blurb about the author, so many fuckin lies, responding, women didn’t use their own names, why is that a persistent thing?, nice narratives persist, I don’t think I should pay any attention, not motivated to do so, strangely, uninteresting at this point, The Golden Globes, conceive of them, European journalists rewarding Hollywood, French guys who liked a movie, pretty hilarious, when Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize then went on to become the drone king, be dismissive of all this stuff, need to talk to Paul, banished from China, smoking cigars, if it makes you happy, cinnamon bun, sugar is bad for you, which guy should I be, it’s your fuckin life, look into it, doesn’t react well to text, well quoted in The Guardian, a dramatic thing is about to take place, the drama was very one note, develop further, Hugo Book Club predicted, that’s pathetic, rewarding Paul for being snubbed by China, rewarded for the meta-situation, Jon Stewart said mean things about George Bush, Cirsova was using his mind over it, Daily Show and Colbert Report, he’s a shitlib of some kind, a science fiction freak, a Tolkien freak, Elon Musk is more science fiction than anybody else that’s famous, D.D. Harriman, Requiem, the evil that is libertarianism has infected his brain, somebody is going to heckle Musk well and give that person an award, tried to make a media career, you got tweeted at by Donald Trump, Jesse’s uncle’s neighbour is a youtuber, very offended right now, as a communist you’re responsible for this, building civil society ties between the West and China, fuck around and find out, we don’t have the full picture, entirely plausible, a big deal, when the shoe is on the other foot and Israel’s doing a genocide in Gaza, these are not fake, these are all real, some guy says, look at this satellite photos, are these graves?, because words have consequence, you didn’t get your cigar, at least you got cinnamon buns, the cigar of the Hugo award, lose a family member, incomprehensible, the gum you like, twinkies are out of business, a recognition, an affirmation, it’s dangerous, more follower and more likes, more engagement, very good friends, I can’t smell you but I don’t need, Jesse might smell like curry, an excuse, good work on deleting people you’re following, Pulpcovers is a standard for one direction, technothriller heaven, this guy likes books, I like books, we can be friends, Cirsova’s account, marketing something, a shitposter is the opposite of being careful, Bryan Alexander’s youtube account, that is telling you something, YouTube is not where its at, a very good ratio, obligatory thank you tweet and lifelogging, foreign universities moving in, money in educating the ruling classes, non-client states, part of the alliance or whatever, part of the Empire, host Al Jazaaera, Kurdistan a good idea?, astride five different countries, using the Kurds as an excuse to control the area and fuck around, Deutsche Welle, propaganda cutout, a little doc, interviewed three ladies carrying AKs around the deserts of Syria, who blew up the Nordstream pipeline, Biden saying Nordstream will be ended, did one on Philip K. Dick, Roog, that’s the art Jesse did for it, a fence and a garbage can and aliens, gravitation beam, that German propaganda company stole Jesse’s art, snitching, Heinlein estate you should be paying attention to this, bizarre consciousness, very common, reject the idea The Green Odyssey is in the public domain, in their fuckin interest, get rich from their copyrights one day, Edgar Rice Burroughs Inc., hiring good artists, Joe Jusko, so locked down, can’t do shipping, Diamond, out of the loop since COVID, three distributors, three times the work for your local comic book store, the Previews phonebook, lines with numbers and a name, a hoped promised date, lies or false, incentive covers is where its at, guessing what Jesse wants, same dudes, comics books are fucked, Comics MATTER w/Ya Boi Zack, Windows Tiny 11, weird computer software people are transgender, Tiny 10, completely stripped down, tubi with no ads, youtube with no ads, the good stuff, Iraq War guy with bad lungs, kickstarter, 104k followers, twitter drama, reads comics, very interesting, explains why comics are unreadable, Hugo style drama, mainstream American comics, quality of those has been going up, it all works as long as you’re in the ecosystem, pretty pricey, new canonical ERB novels, to develop ip to pitch to movie companies, The Cave Girl, a cat in a forest riding a bicycle, can’t write it very well, doesn’t stop them, it’s a math thing, writing about math, the singularity in math, the characters disappear, symbolic logic, unreadable, you have to have a base level of connection with the material, Jesse’s best joke, break the ice, very ESL or very young, I don’t like female sheep, why, dam, ewe, dam, ewe, in retrospect it is humorous, cocks and hens, what’s a female peacock, peahens, peawfowl, foul is bad, why are ducks such bad actors?, because they perform fowl plays, brilliant!, dad jokes, father to many students, baby raising industry, cuckolded by the planet, forced to raise them, a simp?, a silly or foolish person, simp verb, urban dictionary, someone who does way to much for a person they lake, here is the entire public domain of Terror Tales, shudder pulps, a Ray Cummings, Mike Vendetti, really going fast, the art is amazing, forthcoming, Beauty And The Butcher, Bride Of The Serpents, Cat-Woman, all of these have nudity, Kiss Of The Flame Blossom, Mistress Of Satan’s Hounds, Pleasure Cruise To Hell, When The Banshee Calls, Test-Tube Frankenstein, Mistress Of The Dark Pool, Where Dwell The Living, the interior art is accurate, Test tilde Tube, a monster engulfing a woman, this man was not my old friend Chester Vermis, late 30s, Lovecraft’s shadow, horror science fiction movies, fetish stuff, fetishy, Veil Of Tanit, [Jesse is shadowbanned], the latest set, can’t argue with the length, finally got some traction, racist and very interesting, supposed to shudder when you read them, a lot of salacious, “weird menace”, generally feature heroes pitted against villains, cults, I didn’t want to do it, very base (not based), all that she wants, babies mysterious disappear, that’s what the hook says, Dime Mystery Magazine, Grand-Guignol theater, a simp for art of all kinds, Shudder streaming service, seems to have a lot of cash, Midnight Pulp, more for Meg than for Will, a horror head?, she’s a keeper, horror movies are scary, not to infect your dreams with horror, parents had a rental property, had to go clean it up, had mold in it, not threatening, Tetris dreams, playing Tetris too much, a CPAP machine, quite a production, sleep test, moderate sleep apnea, wrecks your dream, low blood oxygen, is it worth it?, die from cinnamon buns, Jenny Colvin may have died from Jesse’s joke, 2019: why do bibliophiles prefer loud deaths in libraries?, funerals, hearse, another duck joke, too many tweets, duck attack, Remarkable Story Of Chicken Little, so fuckin smart, mysterious, my new joke, where does Red Lobster get their breadsticks?, what did FDR say?, popular with nobody, what has tulips and kisses?, I don’t know much about wolves?, what does a suddenly deshelled bivalve say?, technically excellent, what kind of food do Chinese cannibal dogs eat?, pretty good, so petrified, why do robots never need haircuts?, theoretical physicist, some people are neutral about uranium, a science fiction jokes, why don’t cows wear shoes?, ex-spy didn’t like it, former spook didn’t, what is the name of the magazine for people who like simple or elegant aircraft?, which kind of nut do impoverished cobblers most prefer?, I was impressed by the British Navy’s recruiting methods, why are math students the best protestors?, if digital watches made any sense, I asked the captain to stop eating popcorn, he was so smitten with her, a domestic violence joke, running out of jokes, certain people at this table, what do you call a severe wound on a highly ranked army teen, how do horses greet you when they have food in their mouths, nice inside baseball, took so training, trying to make kids not hate school, what does the masticating train say?, why do barbers not allow their customers to trade their hair?, looking forward to it, happy to hear, Walmart catfood, meat or kibble, Walmart brand, congregating in the catfood aisle, 7 -9 cats, old ladies, I’m a tad annoyed, a shaggy dog or cat story, Jesse’s other podcast, pretty good, it’s short and deep, he thinks things are deep, funny and deep, a long joke that’s is in the end not funny, a longwinded anecdote, terminated by an anti-climax, useful term, something wrong with it or something wrong with you, flummoxed, setting you up, mad at Jesse, Roger Zelanzny’s A Night In Lonesome October, Ulalume by Edgar Allan Poe, a jokey funny book, health problem, wanted to like the book, it’s a trick, you’re being trolled, this is a long story and nothing really happened, a monster rally, meet Abbot and Costello, to feature the monsters, Norm MacDonald’s jokes, it’s a troll, a real genre that’s been around forever, being trolled over a novel, a novel length troll, you don’t read a troll book, “Aliens Invade My Butt”, maybe those Chuck Tingle books aren’t novels, why would I do that?, gets attention, Trish and Paul were not happy, Jesse got trolled too, like judo, how did that happen?, weird genres, tae kwon do, they’re all doing Brazilian ju-jitsu, another reason they don’t like Trump, fighting is base, MMA things, just bring a gun or a taser, no swords, karate’s a thing, hitting points, the victory conditions, scored on hits, putting people into a submission, wrestling, tap three times or pass out, it works because people can fight and make it happen, judge you on your form, the 85 year old kung fu master, tai chi, very base things, shudder pulps are interesting because they are very base, zombie preppers, magazine rack, becoming a mercenary, firearms magazine, prepping is a popular activity, ways of spending cash on your money, a lack of faith in the government, do you want to be caught without food or electricity, you don’t want to be subject to the new M-rays, keep your boosters up, seeing it as racist, tap dancing towards, zombies are dangerous whether they are black or white, because of the police, the next one [Dawn Of The Dead], solidarity as a human species, institutionalized racism, fear of the cities, “inner city”, Jesse’s buddy Jimmy Dore, [Stef Zamorano], Chicago is the worst place in the world, always picking on Louisville, still pushing on the race button, a thing in conservative spheres, they think laws are important, understand this instinct, incompetent and sold out buttons here and there pressing buttons, not exactly what Scott Poole’s seeing, Trump did the same thing, using the terms that they refer to, what Terence meant, when Trump gets assassinated, how are they going to stop him?, increasingly unable, their goal is to put Trump in jail, the fire sale that is the United States right now, that student debt thing he just promised, infrastructure bill, so many new construction projects, so far behind, railroad disaster in Ohio, economic disaster everywhere, see you in cyberspace.

Dark Carnivals by W. Scott Poole

Posted by Jesse Willis

The SFFaudio Podcast #795 – READALONG: Such Men Are Dangerous by Lawrence Block

The SFFaudio Podcast #795 – Jesse and Scott Danielson talk about Such Men Are Dangerous by Lawrence Block

Talked about on today’s show:
Reading, Short And Deep, 1969 novel, Paul Kavanaugh, only one other Lawrence Block, a blowjob under a table, a pretty late one, the finest gift was Donald Westlake, a fine fine gift, so good, in that same territory, a little uncomfortable, a psychopath?, dangerous, killed 19 innocent people, a similar quality, they’re paperback writers, tweeted about this book, Lawrence Block doing Richard Stark, a darker Westlake, Stephen King’s darker half, Richard Bachman, the main character’s name is Paul Kavanaugh, kills a bunch of people, betrays the United States, sets off nukes, in the drugstore getting your cigs and malt, this is a true story, at what point in the book, a whole lot, pre-Watergate, very Watergatey, Vietnam, in Cambodia for 10 years, little brown men chasing after him, a super-competent crazy man, he has no idea where he wants to be, encounters with women, the colonel’s wife, she’d kill herself on the way home, psychotic?, we keep learning that, things seem to be going more smoothly now, nope, this is our man, Small Town, 2003, older guy getting into a relationship with a woman, a meditation on New York, much more like a mainstream book, a weird exception, Tom Wolfe or Mario Puzo, The Man In Full, Lawrence Block short stories, Scott edits that, recurring characters, a bunch of series, he resists it for quite a while, editors were demanding series, twins in ability, they were friends, sharing keyboards, co-authored stuff, publishers would be asking, exclusivity, The Hunter, give me three of these a year, two more, a difference, the second one, The Evil That Men Do?, travelling around the USA, Not Comin’ Home To You, free and white and 22, killing spree, two dudes, Natural Born Killers, Woody Harrelson, real life dad was a serial killer, may have been involved in the murder of JFK as well, a researching rabbit hole, In Cold Blood, Truman Capote, the Clutter family, the short lived writing career of Paul Kavanaugh, Maissa Bessada, the first Burglar book, Burglars Can’t Be Choosers, 1977, it’s a cozy, a hardboiled alcoholic detective living in New York, like Agatha Christie, much more Poirot, models on the Raffles books, brother in law to Arthur Conan Doyle, explicitly modeled on Sherlock Holmes, a burglar and his gay lover, dress up in women’s clothes, country jewel thieving, identical to Holmes and Watson, the lover tells the story, the enigmatic one, homosocial, no sex on screen, a lesbian sidekick, a dog groomer, a Lawrence Block hobby book, The Burglar Who Thought He Was Bogart, The Burglar Who Met Fredric Brown, The Burglar Who Traded Ted Williams, if you can only handle the soft, Matthew Scudder novels, trying to get dry, an older man, aging with Block, The Autobiography Of Matthew Scudder, the writing on this, effortless, listening to it, not a chance on this one, very smooth, can always listen to a Westlake, velvet prose, easily page turning, kept being surprised, goes to his island, makes his rules, back and forth to get his eggs, that came out of nowhere, we’re living in the shire and Gandalf shows up and he’s got a handgrenade, he says the thing I was thinking, you are me and I am you, what’s the difference between Paul and George?, not all there either, his Minnesota exams, go any places, we’re in Paul Kavanaugh’s head, his face or his back, all the decisions he’s not going to make, Lawrence Block doesn’t have a complete skill set but he hides it so well, M-14, Thompson, the new guns in Vietnam, sketch-it lightly, it isn’t a gun book, he doesn’t know anything about the army, his brown skin, his hard muscles, he’s the master at the paperback, the length, 10 hours at least, James Lee Burke, his books are twice as long, Lee Child, the Reacher books, he’s working in the 2020s, writes for the market, you can write books that way, extra stuff, the story doesn’t get better by being longer, the lady he almost marries, he’s thinking about her, I wonder if I should go think about that, think about the rules, as insane as he is, he’s smart and he’s good at his job, went to his bed, puts the pillows under the sheet, we know it was coming, so good at distracting us by not hiding things, after the colonel’s wife, he did some weird stuff there, turning the sheet inside out, he gets his eggs, he gets his sausage, the shopkeeper, here’s your paperbacks, a whole philosophy, that grenade went in the sea, inconsistencies on my list on my island, I kill you!, you came to my island, you’re the one who started this man, a PTSD book, really good at observing, on a bus, he reads the newspaper, makes some sausages and eggs, thinks about a relationship, if he were a different kind of person, Laos, the maps on the roads, heist books, Dortmunders are soft and fun and funny, there’s something wrong with Parker, that’s not efficient, he has to go, once they lie to you, having one the guys not follow the philosophy, authors get tired of series, makes it about baseball cards, Humphrey Bogart, pretty obscure, people are just trusting Lawrence Block and buying blind, translate to movies really easy, Eight Million Ways To Die, Whoopi Goldberg, Bobcat Goldthwait plays the lesbian dog groomer, gender flipped it, A Walk Among The Tombstones, My Blueberry Nights, short films, there was a script for this, happened and happens a lot, soon to be a motion picture, Up Your Banners, another marketing thing, get the paperback before you watch the movie, goes to the movies, goes to the drugstore, he really needs a dictionary, define everything perfectly, he won’t be insane, very very well structured, a super-instinctual writer, lucky, incredibly smooth, the first Scudder novel, The Sins Of The Fathers, 2 cassette Penguin Audio, on sale, these will be good, running a bookstore by day, reading a character reading a book, a real book, I’m sold, knew each other well, the tight tight crew, Silverberg, Block didn’t write much science fiction, Block was just not a science guy, Make A Prison, doesn’t know a lot of science, careful observation of society, Block loves short stories, used to be Ellery Queen or Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, Writer’s Digest, Block has couple of writing books, he’s the writer of them, a bunch of short stories, a fixup, just doing novels now, Hit Man series, then he surprises us, White Plains, New York, the mob, Des Moines, describes all the people, goes to a Pizza Hut, goes to a hardware store, we’re in the bedroom, a nice vase, then he murders the guy, so soft, it’d been six days since I had any work, then I got call, can’t hold it together, so level headed, murdering people for a living, interviews with Block, he has a vivid imagination, he gets bored, why did you write this book, short on cash, what if I became a burglar, sat down at the typewriter, stamp collecting, Lawrence Block is a stamp collects, the hobby of kings and king of hobbies, so many, riches, the cover has What Mad Universe, 2022, a Subterranean Press with a really good cover, a writer’s writer, Jim Roberts, Martians Go Home!, Arena, the Star Trek episode, two sentence story, The Last Man On Earth Sat Alone In A Room. There Was A Kock At The Door, can you be more out of fashion?, he’ll make it good, Harlan Ellison, not magical oh I must write, The Inklings, the difference is class, Oxford Dons, my next book is about Jesus but he’s a lion, a fawn with no genitals, porn stories, that would be great book, a non-fiction book, possibilities out there, Hard Case Crime, Alex Nevala-Lee style person, Rick Jackson, Wonder Audiobooks, The Fabulous Clipjoint, super-readable, a writer’s-writer, worshipped at the foot of Westlake, trauma they’re working through, insurance, different results but the smoothness is the same, go to Clarion, hubbub, get my awards, a very different writing school, the Oxford Don worked out, Charles Williams, Owen Barfield, comic books, big little books, radio drama, Paul di Filippo Lost Pages, also Donald Westlake, The Outfit, a heist, an armoured car heist, The Man With The Getaway Face, designed to be ended, fundamentally change the character, a revenge story, angry that his girl stabbed him in the back, adapted to movies 3 or 4 times, good news, a movie seroes and television series, John Wick, a ripoff of Payback, John Wick movies, they killed my dog, gun-fu, a club, everyone is wearing neon, Face/Off (1997), like an opera, married now, no ability to emote with humans, he has rules, don’t bring the stuff home, this is a guy out of time, driving a Toyota Avalon, still smooth and still good, a testament, look at that Westlake, listen to them, they tell you truths, why have you said writing a novel is like going a distance to take a small shit, jumped the shark, how many novels?, zero?, all in his early career, the training school, efficiency, hotel room away from their wives and girlfriends, in a weekend, get to the point, filling pages yes, have people buy the book, they’re capable of doing something with it, when it is is not science fiction, Ringworld is a great book but it’s not much of a story, getting home, that tantalizing thing, I could do it again I guess, diminishing returns, not true with crime books, what makes this book not science fiction, nuclear mortars, Aural Noir, exploring the idea, so paired with science fiction, crime is an alternative way to view society, not right towards the CIA, won’t take orders and do them blindly, not a patriot anymore, you need something to do, you go crazy and have to live on island away from everybody, drown em a few times, why you must die in the end, there are other ways of living, what is my relationship to the bank, floating through our lives, doing chores, distracted by this, you didn’t see it coming, what if somebody robs the bank, how would I rob this bank?, different outlook on reality, being impinged upon us, yeah, what about that?, Silverberg don’t know much about science, I like Joseph Conrad, a riposte, immortality through my books, that one will make me immortal, in a different setting, crime and mystery fiction, make us think about reality differently, what did you learn?, why is this a good book?, entertaining, passed the time, just personally compelling, what did I learn?, a heightened experience, a mode of being, a psychology book but you don’t know that, experiencing somebody’s psyche, how does Block do that, the unconscious coming out as plot and action without telegraphing it, there from the beginning, their sex books, not designed for that, very very tame, how tame is the sex, no nipples, he aint shyin away from it either, the literary crew, classes for analysis, defying analysis by just being so good, super-readable, when in doubt put on one of these, good page turns, a book is a companion, a book is a friend, on Vancouver Island, you came to my island!, you wouldn’t hesitate to recommend except, highly inoffensive, a lot of moral horror, he half accepted she wouldn’t make it home, thumbs on jugulars, plays his politics close to his vest, wise?, aloof?, Stephen King is not playing close to his vest anymore (if he ever did), annoyed, Trump in his novels, triggered, Blaze by Richard Bachman, one of the bad guys saying how bad the Republicans were, Lenny and the bunny, a retelling of Of Mice And Men, the Smurfs, a good book made worse into a bad book almost, meddling triggered hands, minds broken by Trump, Harlan Ellison get TDS (Trump Derangement Syndrome), politics are important, time of assassinations of JFK, RFK, MLK, dressed to the nines, take whatever you like, a product of its time, time travel back in time raid the drugstore spinner rack, good reads, a Saturday, What Mad Universe, March and April, them types, a scheme, a Burglar book or two in between, goes down so smooth, girlfriend gives you Campbells soup, hoping to book a show with Connor, The Devil’s Elixirs, Paul might want to be in on that one, used to read Fredric Brown, the church stuff, at its most active, January through Easter, Richard Stark’s The Seventh, 2000 year old books, Passage by Connie Willis, the Titanic, what it’s about is a little complicated, timey-whimey stuff, The Book Of The New Sun, talking about it as we go, one of those big jewels, Catholic guy, queen mother, coldly interesting, looking at a Rubics cube, on kindle, its a series, broke it up into four small books, so much going on in it, telling me something but I’m not sure what it is, a New York Times Cross Word puzzle, books written about this book, Charles Bronson movie, The Triumph Of Evil, from Julius Caesar by William Shakespeare:

Caesar
Let me have men about me that are fat,
Sleek-headed men and such as sleep a-nights.
Yond Cassius has a lean and hungry look,
He thinks too much; such men are dangerous.
Mark Antony
Fear him not, Caesar, he’s not dangerous,
He is a noble Roman, and well given.
Julius Caesar
Would he were fatter!

pushups and sit-ups, not fat and happy, five key political figures, Miles Dorn, a fast paced thriller, a similar short length, book it?, good men do nothing, misattributed to Edmund Burke, alleged quote, thinking makes it so, you can tell by the backwards grammar, Hamlet, generative AI, remark known to have been made, John Stuart Mill, bad need nothing more, pretty close, thoughts on the cause of present discontents, an unpitied sacrifice, Alexis de Tocqueville, digging into Heinlein quotes, Robert A. Heinlein, from novels, something always off about it, women and cats, rooster crowing, Tanya Daviti, will do as they please, men and dogs should relax, the word that triggered Jesse is: relax, Farah Mendlesohn, alternative claim, game show host, 1896, for plain women only, beautiful woman can do as they please but a plain woman must do a great deal, The Present Profession OF Robert A. Heinlein, Expanded Universe, attributed to Lazarus Long, has never dealt with a cat, protocol, almost correct, Little girls, like butterflies, need no excuse, fake and garbled quotes, a huge thread, Glory Road, a quote inside a quote, it means, attributed to Heinlein, translated from another language inside of a fantasy book, people collect quotes and put names attached to them, a pathology, an addiction, gut punch, it hurts so bad, make some pushes, otherwise good men won’t do anything, just hang out on the island eating lots and lots of eggs, reading paperbacks, rowing, took the title and then he wrote the book, a dangerous thing to do, a great pull quote, Othello, the language man, the beast with two backs, unbelievable, amazing, what a hero, negative capability, The One Who Waits by Ray Bradbury, accept uncertainties, John Keats, 1817, am intellectual confusion, the writing style of Block and Westlake, they’re in the typewriter, make some coffee, grew up on computers, Arsenal lost some nuclear weapons, the best name for a sport team that has ever been equipment, they don’t even use their arms, in The Hitchhiker’s Guide radio show, he captured something there, a really good read, of late, a few months here off, The Good Story Is Hard To Find podcast, In Our Time on Edgar Allan Poe, SFBRP, Heinlein, hasn’t listened to Luke in ages, the fever has broken, the latest Martha Wells, this is kind of shit, why this doesn’t work, saying mean things about other people, lots of really good things to say about Venomous Lumpsucker by Ned Beauman, British humour, extinction credits, Juliane, a way to keep up on the torwave/squeecore, ok modern books, say high to the chickens and the cows, everything with four legs or less.

Such Men Are Dangerous by Lawrence Block

Posted by Jesse Willis

The SFFaudio Podcast #794 – READALONG: Travels by Michael Crichton

The SFFaudio Podcast #794 – Jesse and Scott Danielson talk about Travels by Michael Crichton

Talked about on today’s show:
non-fiction book, autobiography, memoir, surprised by it, expecting just being about places he’d travel, astral travel, such a spiritual guru guy, spiritualism, mysticism, astral planes, past lives, auras, meditation, hanging out with Michael Crichton, Jurassic Park, the movie, Timeline, later ones, The Andromeda Strain, around my house, Coma by Robin Cook, Drug Of Choice, eerily close in plot to Coma, very much a Michael Crichton movie, an interesting path to that, life as a medical student, this is not quite what I thought it would be, life as a medical student, advisor taled him into staying, making a living by writing, John Lange books, Hard Case Crime, late 1960s early 1970s, amazing an excellent, a garbage book, trying to do something, Binary, crime, political theory idea, a government agent, modelling something that’s happening, murder the republican candidate for president, similar impressions and intelligence, mirrors of each other, an explosive, a well executed short crime novel, set in Egypt, having climbed the Great Pyramid, when he was young, taking him all over the world, books set in France, Spain’s riviera, Mexico and Europe, The Venom Business, nasty cruel rich people, genres that work like that, dynasties, nasty and horrible, his dad was a “journalist”, wealthy enough, might have been a CIA guy, his brain is amazing, broken by his dad, psychological and spiritual journeys, ghost is haunting him, the demon he takes with him wherever he goes, an extraordinary thinker and writer, an interesting man, a great writer, a great film director, a novelist who’s also a film director, William Shatner as a director, Star Trek V, not the greatest entry in the franchise, not demonically driven to learn, expresses interest in learning, in medical school, how the other students get and how the other doctors get, surgery on a guy, a series of procedures, not thinking about other people and their experience, becoming masters of that technical thing, a fact about viruses or chemistry, becomes obsessive for him, not shelved in science fiction, almost a Philip K. Dick novel, would limit the sales, what makes him different, the feel different, a science fiction novel not written by a science fiction author, not Margaret Atwooding, disconnected except where he’s not, the person in history he’s most like is Arthur Conan Doyle, kids with paper fairies cut out of magazines and a camera, in a way that made him a fool, comes to believe in at least a lot of it, a speech he was going to give to a skeptic’s organization, university degrees, things that blind people, this passion for putting himself in positions where he’s going to be learning something (about himself), it results in sparky writing, the artifacts of his books, decades after he’s dead, intellectual curiosity is still with us, not writing for a living, compelled to write, he leveraged that into doing other things that he wanted, Larry Niven, California boy, rich, all the film directors of the 20th century, some of his movies are excellent films, The Great Train Robbery (1978), one of the best movies of the 1970s, the opposite of the Robert Jordan series, The Lost World, took the text of the film for the text of the sequel, abandons the original novel, Arthur C. Clarke did for 2010, interest in the paranormal, a really interesting phenomena, raining fish, seems to be pretty strong, why would anybody want this, a pretty excellent attitude, sit in an ashram and talk to cacti, came up with stories that helped him in his own life, worked through his childhood trauma, very healthy, wise, he didn’t waste his time smoking dope and drinking himself to death, human flourishing, this is great, Scott is a Catholic guy, where this conversation would end up, brushes up on things Scott does beleive, scientists being blind, Fauci is science, I am science, when they attack me they attack science, this book from 1988, Jesse Willis paints you all in the same spiritual box, Utah, Mormon religion is the biggest religion around, a lot of the arguments against Mormonism, like an atheist would use against Scott, a closed door, anything I can’t measure doesn’t even exist, he was gentle, the new athiests, Bill Maher, Richard Dawkins, the mediation guy who doesn’t care if Biden’s son is torturing children in his basement (Sam Harris), using religion as a weapon of control, that isn’t Michael Crichton’s hobby horse, an intellectual curiosity, auras, a lot of talk about auras, with regard to art or sex, you can’t make the creativity come without being in the right mood for it, use lube, good at poking holes in the conventional experience, right not to become a doctor, evil practices he was witnessing, evil practices in tourism, a sex tour in Thailand, child sex slaves, let’s get out of here you guys, smokes a cigarette, doesn’t convey any judgement, his school years, the practices that the doctors were doing, morally questionable, very morally questionable, judging people, these people need to be condemned, bringing that topic up in this book today, canceled again, canceled before, his “climate change book”, an honest investigator, he goes down a path Jesse doesn’t like, rich evil self-destructive people, drawing on his own life-experience, what do you do?, work through it in a novel?, State Of Fear, writing stuff for money, an homage to his hero: Conan Doyle, what he’s riffing on in the first one, playing in his own sandbox, Lawrence Block, Donald Westlake, Robert Jordan, Elantris guy: Brandon Sanderson, did their toe into it, consistently different, Congo, you can see where that came from by reading this book, time with the mountain gorillas, forgteable and bad?, he didn’t direct that movie, Sphere, Rising Sun, Disclosure, Airframe, A Case Of Need, Five Patients: The Hospital Explained, Electronic Life: A Layman’s Guide To Computers, The Terminal Man, seizures that cause killing sprees, a viscous learning cycle, 1972, very interested in computers, they use an IBM computer to plan all the scenarios that could go wrong, thing of interest, coming at it from a perspective outside of science fiction, Deep Thought, another guy who liked to travel, Douglas Adams, not as productive, produced a ton of novels, The Venom Business, these heroes, intellectual heroes, authorial heroes, Eaters Of The Dead, Ibn Fadlan And The Land Of Darkness, Arab Travellers In The Far North, a retelling of Beowulf, let’s do it, a physical copy, fiddled with the metatext, he’s just the translator, playing with the medium, the images from the serialization of The Lost World, for challenger himself, they lose the camera, photographs, sketches and paintings, plays into the end of the book, pterodactyl, participating in that in the book, fiddles with the copyright page, an old tired writer, a young invigorated guy having fun, a new posthumous publication with James Patterson, a dead man writing a book with a living man who has a ghost writer, Dragon Teeth, fossil hunting in the wild west, 2008, a pirate novel, Pirate Latitudes, Micro with Richard Preston, The Andromeda Revolution, Daniel H. Wilson, Atul Gawande’s Being Mortal, chemotherapy is poison, take the family to Disneyland one last time, what do you want your last few years to be, most people, learning the corpse, learning to memorize where all the people, cars, a house, a vacation home, this seems wrong, one of the biggest cultural influences: ER, very different from other TV shows, turned into a stat because of that show, the storytelling on that, here’s a case, we try all sorts of things where nothing works and the person dies, spawned a ton of shows, like House, another Conan Doyle influenced show, interest and approach, very different and special compared to other writers, gutter books, never came up, not even close, he doesn’t care, pursuing his own passion, a lot of diving and mountain climbing, he goes places you wouldn’t expect, diving with my sister, I’m dying I’m dying, an urge to have sex and unfortunately he’s on vacation with his sister, traumatic incident, you must reproduce, a detachment in the way he tells things, he himself is that way, his relationships, Jamaica, girlfriend or wife, a similar experience, Tucson, Belize, an object called a relationship, he seemed to know at the time, the argument he got into, severed that connection, unrecoverable, talking about women in Hollywood, the hunters, sexual hunters, this is what they want in a relationship, men being romantic, he might be right, the friend who says that to him, that’s really interesting, Arthurian romances, men and women are exactly identical, some do, a lot of weird people but generally people are pretty much the same, adventure vs. romance, Disclosure (1994), the kind of movie I would have watched, business equals, when he gets an idea between his teeth, seeing if he’s got something there, this isn’t an autobiography, doesn’t cover his childhood at all, his dad was rough on him, not a lot of details, that end speech, simplistic, John is a six foot tall man, taller than 5’11, we’re talking about today, except for that time when his football team lost the game, the tailor, the magic of fiction, this further conclusion, reading a Lord Dunsany novel, we can always go back to the text, this is in there, that sentence exists, that is more true than Jesse’s own hair, things change, but not in fiction, an extraordinary thing to think about, we can find truth easier in fiction, it’s a canid, it can breed with other canids, not really half, the more fine grained you drill down onto it, some good wisdom and insights that a lot of people are pissed off about, team science, team spiritualism, he will not submit to any one thing, these very clear scenes recalling dialogue for incidents in his life, him as the dumb guy, memorable to him because he was learning something there, a new spiritual high, six months, a house by the beach, snakes, rattlesnakes in his yard, switching attitudes, different perspectives, a journey of perception and experience, after climbing Kilimanjaro, and yet he does, he does it with lovers and family, very happy that this book got published, a nice record of a man, he has brothers and sisters, they’re not the focus, the family lineage, a little bit about Sean Connery, a little bit about specific movies and books, filming in Ireland, I’m done riding these trains, you have everything he needs, didn’t care about certain things, going way faster and him being right, cool stories, he didn’t dwell there, not showing off his celebrity friends, dating a famous film actress, Linda, aloof in his own life, looking at it from a higher perspective, making a fool of himself often, I feel stupid talking to this cactus, mad at the cactus, fringe experiences, Jesse doesn’t disbelieve him, some of these people are wise teachers, there’s no good answers, becomes a medium himself?!, not the guy Jesse thought he was, Scott’s whole reading life, known something about him, could have been written by anybody, he saw a psychic, a TV movie called Binary, he made money from it, Coma is what he showed the Anglo-Irish crew, Robert Wise, precise control, how everything is connected, Thailand, a travel website, Westworld (1973) he wrote and directed, Looker, Runaway (1984) is kind of a crappy movie, Gene Simmons is the bad guy, directs Burt Reynolds, Twister (1996), directed some reshoots for The 13th Warrior (1989), more books like this, enjoy a good memoir, the HBO Westworld, a tiny wikipedia entry for the book, VincentVacations.com, travel agencies come up quite a bit in his early books, in Binary, San Diego, spent a lot of time at travel agencies, a reprint from a website, a blog from 2005ish, how he came to write, a column related to travel published in The New York Times, a modern age explorer, began as a series of travel pieces, it wasn’t supposed to turn into anything, almost evasive, some medical stories, pretty ancient history, a kind of keeping a secret by never writing about it, the following is by Janet Berliner, 2010, 1993, where his career went after this interview, write something specifically for children, Treasure Island, So Dear To My Heart (1948), it doesn’t have any adventure, a contrast between, that mushy stuff, maybe that’s Pirate Latitudes, solutions to our problems to society, addressing questions, something that is compelling, another Travels, Travels is the favorite of my books, stainless steel high tech person lecturing on the subject of robots, so much early attention for books, popular perceptions, bad transcription, two historical novels in the mid-1970s, a great sense of relief, its implied by a lot of this material, the narrator is now behaving differently, glib answers, worth thinking about and putting down, poking around in the backs of closets, Sphere was published, 200 pages of a manuscript, revise and correct what I did from memory, a few little acronyms, odd feeling, it went along for months, the first draft took 5 months, a common experience, not entirely processed, a need to objectify, creating a persona, eliminating extraneous and complicating details, a US president biography, Decision Points by George W. Bush, the official biography, many years, it is always that way, my experience of the past now, oh my my what an interesting person must have written this book, a quarter of a century, how to discuss the “fringe phenomena”, all the words are corrupted, the press tour, the most discussed aspect, critical of that part of the book, in just those words, Electronic Life, Marvin Minsky, Society Of Mind, meditation is a kind of delusion, a physiological state, so tremendously interested, music, sports, no one can throw a little piece of letter 100 yards, it happens every Sunday, think of Travels as a bet, this book is going to look prescient, a serious bet, exotic places, going for research, always drawing from your life, a domestic argument, that’s good! remember that you can use that, James Thurber’s wife, Thurber, stop writing!, off the clock, in the end it wasn’t, the colours of policeman’s uniforms, becoming too detailed, she won’t even take photographs, an abstraction, a bold decision, also practical, very helpful to go some place some place, have this fresh experience, more informed experience, all the things he would bring onto the airplane, facecream, typewriters, I haven’t been to Israel, Egypt, the former Soviet Union, Asia, I’m so tall, left to my own devices, Italy and Greece, Disclosure, Congo, Jurassic Park, the most successful movie in history, it is going to happen, the Jaws series, protecting your own work becomes important, probably gotten a lot worse, you don’t really decide until you have to, there will come a point, I’m not there yet, my income has declined somewhat, 20% less, not as well paid, when America was richer, an intellectual prospecting that happens, when you finally get a nugget, sometimes talking about it dissipates it, Rising Sun and Disclosure were set in high-tech, novels of social commentary, the possibilities are limitless, after his success, those paperbacks in the late 60s were disposable, even so, the economy is not as good as it was, we’re feeling that now, for sure, did he win his bet, the mystical aspects of it, the medical stuff, the more you investigate what’s going on the more you realize there are a bunch of scams going on, on team scam means you get to keep your job or you’re ostracized, lose your twitter account, coronations, institutions, the FDA, drug companies, make cash, countries can reap rewards, the pressure to makes drugs mandatory, makes 100 billionaires, lie dispute and legalize, pretty amazing, he would be shitcanned again, maybe he would have been big enough to weather that, comedians that a re big enough, musicians that are big enough, can’t cancel them permanently, Michael Caine’s biographies are really great, narrated by him, The Moon Is A Balloon by David Niven, Blue Highways by William Least Heat-Moon, travel writing, memoir, they go together, The Old Patagonia Express by Paul Theroux, On Writing by Stephen King, made it even richer, out walking with his dog trying to finish The Stand, running home, a student coming, The Mosquito Coast (1986).

Posted by Jesse Willis

The SFFaudio Podcast #791 – AUDIOBOOK/READALONG: Through The Gates Of The Silver Key by H.P. Lovecraft and E. Hoffmann Price

The SFFaudio Podcast #791 – Through The Gates Of The Silver Key by H.P. Lovecraft and E. Hoffmann Price, read by Ben Tucker (for LibriVox). This is a complete and unabridged reading of the story (1 hour 29 minutes) followed by a discussion of it. Participants in the discussion include Jesse, Mr Jim Moon, and Jonathan Weichsel

Talked about on today’s show:
Weird Tales, July 1934, a lot of Lovecraft, The City, a nice little poem, kind of a Christmas story, a miracle happens in the winter garden, blooming flowers, holly and hollyberries, a little Christmas image, The Nameless City, one of his terrific stories, The Outsider, so sequelly, all the greatest hits, the pillars in Irem, The Statement Of Randolph Carter, The Festival, The Silver Key, a lot more, Hypnos, spheres of reality out in space, what happened here, hey I love you fiction, favourite Lovecraft story, a long correspondence, Clark Ashton Smith and Robert E. Howard, visit him in New Orleans, he had a car, give it a go, play with his ideas, supportive of that, Crypt Of Cthulhu, 6000 words, as he is wont to do, less than 50 words of mine left, keep the core concepts, the facets, the ultimate gates, very theosophical ideas of souls being reincarnated, scattered all through time, ran with them, the missing link between Dreams In The Witch House and The Shadow Out Of Time, everybody in the room in Carter, matrilineal related, a Sackville-Baggins sort of scene, not huge into Lovecraft, stupendous, they’re ok, the plastic and the dream world, weird cosmic, weird juxtaposition, more artificial in the sequel, you know what I love is character, the idea, a book about a guy who remisces too much about his childhood, does dreamwork, The Tomb, super-lonely and isolated, he is wrong, some aspect of him is trying to be another aspect of him and be him, The Case Of Charles Dexter Ward, am I not myself?, Harley Warren always dominated me and I feared him, trying to recapture golden youth, a startraveler and an immortality, is the guide he has a night gaunt?, what night gaunts do, maybe that’s even Carter, gone beyond the ultimate gate, he’s every character in the book, By His Bootstraps or All You Zombies, any females in this book at all?, yithians have no gender, a repeat of the scene with the camera in a different place, come with me, ok, ugly, at the very end, goes in a circle, Farnham’s Freehold, The Door Into Summer, he steals his own car, less time travel, about the frame, does it help the story?, okay but how does this Indian guy know this story, annoyed rather than made curious, disappointed in it, being a teenager, the lore, little glimpses and hints, it’s not a Call Of Cthulhu or a Pickman’s Model, very Dreamlandsy, Dreamlands 2.0, completely cosmic, drawing a lot of these ideas from, Philip K. Dick kind of cosmic encounter, Agatha Christie style denouement, Poirot, like Glass Onion, Randolph Carter behind the mask, mittens?, cheapens the other ones, The Festival, this friendly guy behind the mask, invites you into his house for Christmas, he’s not human, a King In Yellow situation, that’s not as good, mythos, some basic, R’lyeh gets a mention, nods to other stories, super-cosmic mystical context, awesome and terrible, not alien monsters, weird things in robes in cosmic hyperspace, a bit new age, alienation, cozy alienation, everybody is everybody else, a source of real horror stories, the new horror, the next horror, the greater horror, no evil here, the annihilation of ego and self, Ex Oblivione, a mini-version of The Silver Key, it’s great to be non-existent, thrust into a body once again, re-incarnation is the horror, writ large, everybody gets to be a king, more fanboy than it should, Lovecraft’s literary manifesto, a character based on him, we lose that in the sequel, it doesn’t feel like Lovecraft really, he’s made himself the chosen one by being such a prodigious dreamer, other people around the table, dividing the estate and getting the money, a more traditional narrative, The Wonderful Adventures Of Phra The Phoenician, 1890, reincarnation, The Star Rover by Jack London, experiencing life on earth, his own past, nostalgia, other worlds and living on other worlds, The DreamQuest Of Unknown Kadath, going to space, 100,000 years, a rocket ship and cloak yourself, through other dimensions, astral plane and the ethereal plane, Hell is not down it is out, another planet, that’s what this book is, having fun with this, Randolph Carter is his stand-in, Samuel Loveman, bits added, The Unnameable, some milksops complained, The Loved Dead is so funny, mad recluse who was incredibly uptight, he seems like just a regular writer, good at selling stories, his interests are in here as well, loving time, a phrase that only repeats twice, the unknown outer sky, in the context of the story, about self-revelation, losing the amnesia that you had, an astonishing achievement, a lot of repetition, to make it more clear?, saying the same thing twice, a very similar form of repetition, when he went long, saga mode, it doesn’t quite work, less the sum of their parts, the structure of the story gets a bit too loose, a lot of action, not orchestrated, run to the end now, a torrent of images, when Jesse co-writes with somebody, not trying to steal the show, to help someone else, a fan boy, the Lovecraft legacy, Stephen King’s It, told through the mode of Stephen King, collaborations, The Mound, Zealia Bishop, bombarded with all these images, what it would be like to float disembodied through the cosmos, layers of reality, to what effect?, the same effect by having a montage, you don’t actually have to show it, flip between them, he does do this at points, I spent 10,000 years on this planet, pick one idea to develop, oh that’s a story I’ve read, an annotated one, this is a reference to some other story, I love you work, I wrote this thing, oh my dear boy, out of control, writing for me, writing for someone else, they have a hand in it, a failure on Lovecraft’s part, shorter, comic book adaptations, you’re better off sticking to the team, The Nameless City is so solid, it turns into The Silver Key, this is really good, an inherited view, that terrible biography by L. Sprague De Camp, the proper Lovecraft, not right at all, it could be Cthulhu if you want it to be, not a word misplaced, it’s building, where is this going, he’s gonna crawl out of here, at the end how is he even telling this story, some cop comes up in the park in the middle of the night and pokes a bum with a nightstick, sleep it off, fun things in it, cozy, not the Lovecraft that Jesse really really loves, a masterful self-analysis, an adventure with some of the ideas, the math stuff that’s in here, more successful in some ways, Magic Carpet Magazine, Spicy Detective Stories, Spicy Western, published in the 1970s, a renaissance in the 60s and the 1970s, I’ve got some new stuff, The Devil Wives Of Lee Fong, his lovely wives were really serpent demons, 1979, alive til 1988, either in Weird Tales or Oriental Stories, a much more felxible and salability, co-writing, Adolphe De Castro, a sudden scene where it’s actually good, back to the crap writing, since you don’t pay me, fix the punctuation and the grammar, cthulhu monster, competent, with great taste, more to be said, disappointed, don’t read sequels, maybe there’s something great in it, gonna forget it, missing that x-factor, that one is beautiful, true beauty in it, how much nostalgia is poured into it, that aspect, somebody from the past is trying to dominate you, that isn’t in here, Randolph Carter’s back because they don’t want Bag End to be sold, bodiless, using it like a magic wand, a lot in here, you don’t think of Lovecraft this way, such a different portait of the time, the 1920s and the 1880s, Steinbeck, The Grapes Of Wrath, the Dustbowl, makes you look at history different, one of the great benefits of reading Lovecraft, the reality that was his, the racism is what most people latch on to, some of that in them too, where is his power coming from, way more horrific, says the occasional word we don’t like, didn’t hurt anybody, very kindly, [Lovecraft Country] a way to get angry about stuff, this is beautiful picture, how cozy his youth was, for us to time and space travel, Providence, Boston, Randolph Carter was richer, a dilettante who can go on adventures, he had a car, there’s King Carter, Kuranes, to reign as a king, 11 beings from earth, 7 of them humans, half of those guys are carter (if not more), there is a gold piece in here, a cool idea, so filled out and so decorated and so checkboxy, collaborative works that are good, more responsible, just the premise, picked up and ran with it, more out of it, just doesn’t pull everything together, a structural pacing problem, heavy metal, heavy rock, ding ding ding ding ding ding ding, once it gets up to speed, gone to 11, no where else fore the story to go, after the cosmic voyage sequence, an invasive demon, great wizards, getting notes, a precis of the story, feeling it sentence by sentence, the descent, blind and then he see, revelation, all being told in past tense, one guy at the meeting, if you insist on proof I’ll give it, Clark Asthon Smith does this a lot, Sadastor, an incubus makes a succubus have a baby, everybody’s evil, they like evil, a flight of imagination, as a decorous thing, what August Derleth is doing, all connected into one big thing, the easy instinct, the Cthulhu Mythos section of Deities And Demigods, takes the mystery and delight away, take the dreamlike quality and make it plastic, one big pantheon, Abdul Alhazred, the more constrained, who tore Abul Alhazred apart?, the alligator cat bulldog people, it’s symbolic, his yogsothery, happy to contradict himself, built that in as a feature not a bug, the real bad boy was Lin Carter, couldn’t leave a reference alone, dim visions through the window, size, weight, eye colour and phone number, editorial introduction, an utterly amazing novelette, so far transcendence human experiences, titanic!, for sheer imaginative daring, the joint product, rejected originally?, some sort of fight going with Farnsworth Wright, a beef against Lovecraft since the beginning, not been able to produce a magazine, most of them are dross but you have to fill pages, competent but not memorable, everybody has their thing, if he could just bring himself to move to Chicago, editing a magazine of weird fiction, no, can’t do it, editing a magazine, the problem is he’s kind of broken, broken is a way that is beautiful, able to do some great work even when he has nothing to say, seeing greatness in other people’s writing, other than taking Lovecraft, in the early issues of Weird Tales, occasional gems from unknowns, fanboys and girls of Lovecraft, Seabury Quinn on the cover?, not commercial at all, wary of taking on the role of editor, rejecting stories by people he liked, not the same guy, he’s so fuckin weird guys, he can’t do some things, his first fictions to weird tales, take em or leave em, these are pieces of art, live on beans rather than compromise his artistic vision, the City Of Singing Flame, not a real sequel, a semi-sequel, Jungle Jitters, the Action Girls, a movie within the world of the book, rethinking a lot, this scene goes here, tedious busy work, that first revision is where the magic happens, Mr Jim Moon as a podcaster, more than the regular, the monster movies, 17 weeks homework, that one sounds great, wish there was a checklist, audio of Jim Moon stories into the feed, dabbled with writing, took stock, about 20 now, a new ghost story for Christmas, releasing them on your podcast, no spelling for these things, pioneering a lot of stuff, podcasts that come and go, the best of the 2020s, doing your own thing, an interesting phenomenon, don’t know what everyone else is doing, research, writing the music, coding and design work, coding and designing for your own podcast, chasing trends, a true crime podcast, BBC is producing another Lovecraft story that’s not Lovecraft at all, comedians get their shows announce their dates and interview each other, releasing your fiction through your podcasts, 3 shows released today, the audio advent calendar, The Signalman, a Commentary Club episode, most of December off, a lot of catch-up to do, transcribe podcasts, so much work already done, ghost stories, general weird fiction, a novel in 31 parts, huge narrative chunks, a cozy zombie story, Beating The Bounds, a Christmas sequel, Cirsova magazine, an anthology called Mighty Suns Of Hercules, write a few short stories, magazine credits, a fun way to get your stories out, Anvil Magazine, it feels good to get published in a good magazine, doing it very differently, Hypnobobs, 15 years now, scrolling back 17 years on a weekly show, The Adventures Of F. Bolger, the hobbit who stays behind, waves goodbye to the other hobbits, he goes shopping sees farmer maggot, gets some pipe weed, runs into some ringwraiths, they have a smoke, don’t know nothing about Mr. Frodo, huddling like it’s COVID, the other Hobbits come back and completely ignore him, Pippin and Merry are a foot taller each, a cozy story, a cozy fantasy, Thomas Burnett Swann, centaurs, fauns, nymphs, panisci, satyrs, and they all have sex, a professor in Florida, studied ancient stuff, most of his books were not published until the last few years of his life, 1967, archive.org, published in the U.K., compared to J.R.R. Tolkien, a connection there, too risque for swan, Henry Treece, The Viking Trilogy, viking kid joins crew of vikings to viking, a quasi-fantasist, The Green Man, 1968, sword and sorcery and savagery in King Arthur’s time, Piers Anthony, how can I make this popular?, a good amount of sex, cuter, funnier, a classical feel, more conventional, too weird for a lot of people, weirded out, uptight, A Spell For Chameleon, bawdy humour, grotesquery, ribald jokes, a coming of age story, you say people…, mythological creatures, everybody has a magic power, gonna be banished, exiled from the land, a classical setup for a myth, Joseph Campbell, The Weirwoods, laughed out loud many many times, there’s no way to read this without thinking its supposed to be funny, pure treasure, very subtle, an irony there, almost all Eddy, other people are allowed to write terrific stories too, Pity Me! by Bertha Russell, sex with the dead bodies, a Spanish lady had died, get the goop in, she fell on me and she was alive, I finished the job for you, let me tell you about how depraved I am, a tombstone for his writing desk, nothing funnier, got Weird Tales in trouble, pulled from the newsstands, Eleonora, The Canal, Everil Worrell, angry a long time ago, what Evan said, the tightness, more free flowing, it must exist, a PDF of The Green Man, unjustly forgotten, a lot of historical fiction, considered juvenile, caveman boy story, C.S. Lewis gets all the rest, no champion, the estate is defunct, get neglected, it’s not fair, treasure that’s hidden, in a limbo, we need more Henry Treeces, more Swanns, you do need a champion, Edgar Rice Burroughs has Moorcock, Nevil Shute doesn’t need a champion like Henry Treece does, little dog for a last walk, big snow, a good book, had a lot of fun with that one too, guy goes for a hike in California, discovers a weird spot, ends up in another dimension, a moth to the flame thing, more coffee and more sandwiches, discovering a whole other moth people and aliens, throwing themselves into the fire, The Bright Illusion by C.L. Moore, Logan’s Run, more Howard than any of them, that kind of fantasy, Lord Dunsany, so weird cosmic and trippy, an emotional core, goes to that cursed thread, Cultural Critic, 25 books that should be on every school curriculum but isn’t, The Gulag Archipelago, I think I can dismiss this list, 75 hours long, twitter accounts fishing for attention, not making serious suggestions, exercise account, makes fun of these things, getting his account banned, a way to have fun, 25 more books, is this a list this person has read?, Think And Grow Rich, Guns, Germs And Steel, a list of books, how to do 17 crunches, post a wrong answer to get a right answer, playing for engagement, why would you retweet that Jesse?, part of conversation we’re already having, this isn’t nonsense, more like hyperbole, every school child should read the history of The Decline And Fall Of The Roman Empire, a really good way to send links, things to scan, people to be on a podcast, Alex P., interesting tweets, manga mindset, good to be in touch, a cynicism that isn’t depressing, skepticism, Robert Ingersoll, that’ll make you cynical, a fellow who you can really see is not lying, Ambrose Bierce’s Devil’s Dictionary, Ingersoll quotes, a Christmas Sermon, totally depraved, tormented in eternal fire, against organized religion, as an adult, how to deal with bad ideas, you literally have to learn that, why kids learn to lie, just like the sun being in the sky, child abuse, harmful and hurtful, when people don’t have full access to the facts, learn intellectual self-defense, people who are miserable, things imposed on them that they have no defense against, how gender affects climate and climate affects gender, everybody’s good at the table, falsities, Sylvester Stallone is frozen, goes into the future, Demolition Man (1993), people don’t know how to deal with violence, they predicted, the plot is stupid but the world is quite interesting, form a cult and takeover the world, create a lot of weird beleifs that make absolutely no sense, cut people off from everyone else, very insular, dietary restrictions on them, bottom up, these ideas come from the internet, from the media, magazines and articles and tv shows and movies, I’m gonna be a vegan, comes out of vegetarianism, being closer to god, deprecating the body, animals are nice and cute, why should we eat them, you’re a meat eating animal, how do you reconcile this?, they might not know it comes from an animal, nobody says, meat that I slaughter myself, a slaughter house is really depressing environment to work-in, scream and die, somebody will lose a finger, that’s not the end of the story, just one thin that’s happening.

Through The Gates Of The Silver Key by H.P. Lovecraft and E. Hoffman Price

Posted by Jesse Willis