When he wasn't being Bacon or Marlowe, of course.

I've had that experience with countless books. Most recently Delany's "Stars in my Pocket Like Grains of Sand," which was so widely-praised that I didn't expect it to be anywhere near as good as it was.

Usually my expectations go down as the hype goes up.
However, from time to time I pick up an overhyped book everyone says I 'just gotta' read and it's very good, which is a pleasant surprise.
I suppose we shouldn't be shocked like this - 'popular' on TV doesn't usually translate to quality.

My latest such realization is Shakira. She kicks serious ass, popular or not.

Throwing myself on the mercy of the assembled--can anyone ID this story?

A research expedition(?) was based near Jupiter(?). To relieve the boredom and isolation, the people had a theater in which each person mentally animated a character. One human could control only one character at a time. The protagonist started to wonder whether the characters had come to life. The story ended with the characters walking off the stage toward the audience.

This would be no later than the mid-1960s, and I think it was shorter than novel length.

Anyone?

Brenda, you are probably right that it was a short story or novella or some such animal, but the plot summary makes me wonder if it might have been a Twilight Zone episode. It just sounds like the sort of thing TZ would have done. And, no, I am not going to do the google-spell necessary to find out the truth. Life's too short.

"All that fellow Shakespeare did was string a bunch of quotations together."

Lizzy,

No, I remember a written piece. For one thing, my family was television-challenged, and I didn't see the Twilight Zone--or Get Smart, or the Monkees, or Mr. Ed, or ... on and on.

The problem with Google in this case is, as you say, life's too short. I can't think of a search string that wouldn't return thousands of hits.

So, I'm still hoping someone will recognize the story.

This is an oddly timely open thread/starter - I've been having a series of interesting conversations, trying to come up with a reasonable (pseudo-academic) description for reputation.

The latest revision is:

"A reputation is a shared valuation about a property of an entity[0] that may or may not be provable"

I'm curious to hear what other folk think.

[0] An entity could be a person, place or thing

Brenda:

I don't recognize the story, but Abebooks.com has a feature called "Book Sleuth" that has done wonders on just such tasks. Readers are asked to help identify books based on partial remembrance of plot, characters, etc. and sometimes even things like "it was a kid's book about gondolas with illustrations in oil pastel."

About 10 years ago, when I got serious and decided to finish my undergrad degree, I found myself in six-credit summer session literature class where we read a book or two a week. I was shocked at how much I liked the big pile of "books you should read".

The biggest surprise of all was how much I liked The Scarlet Letter once I got plugged into the language. I even started speaking in faux-Hawthorne around the office until people started throwing things at me.

Just because it's well regarded doesn't mean it's overrated. Even though far too often it does.

Larry: I believe one feature of the undergrad literary canon is that it's better suited to be appreciated by people who have gone back to school after few years (or decades), than by people who are there on the usual schedule.

This may be true of literature in general, i.e. that the more life experience you have, the better placed you are to understand and appreciate it.

Or is "the more you bring to it, the more you get out of it" a feature that separates great literature from lesser works? (Speaking only for myself, I've found that the Lord of the Rings trilogy, for example, shares this quality, while many run-of-the-mill fantasies do not.)

Or is "the more you bring to it, the more you get out of it" a feature that separates great literature from lesser works? (Speaking only for myself, I've found that the Lord of the Rings trilogy, for example, shares this quality, while many run-of-the-mill fantasies do not.)

Well, quite. But pity the Generic Extruded Fantasy Product - one of the things you bring to it is Lord of the Rings, and all the other Tolkein, and the jewels of Anglo-Saxon you were prompted to read because of it. I often wonder what sadistic streak prompts editors to put "comparable to Tolkein at his best" on a book cover. Seriously, who wins by that copmparison?

Abebooks.com has a feature called "Book Sleuth" that has done wonders on just such tasks. Readers are asked to help identify books based on partial remembrance of plot, characters, etc.

Lila,

This is wonderful. I'm there!

Happily,

Brenda

This may be true of literature in general, i.e. that the more life experience you have, the better placed you are to understand and appreciate it.

Probably, but it makes my prospects for happiness and fulfillment as a college lit instructor seem rather less than rosy. Still, one must try, I suppose...

Mmmmmm bacon.

The appreciation of literature isn't binary, get it/don't get it; many, if not most, works of depth can be read for their pleasures as adventure stories by almost anybody, and returned to when other themes have room to resonate, either against direct life experience or s knowledge of history. The Iliad is an obvious example, Dumas is another. To be crude and nasty, one of the distinguishing features of crap entertainment is that it offers nothing new to on a repeat performance, and nothing new to the viewer who has changed/matured/learned/sobered up in the interval.

The perspective shift (the parallax?) is certainly true of Shakespeare for the reader -- the Falstaff one wants to hit the streets with at seventeen turns into the abandoned scoundrel of a later age -- but it's also true that a high-school performance of Rude Boy Hal (never mind, gor' save 'un, Cordelia's Bad Hair Day) is going to hit different notes than one with older actors, even if the older cast are not vastly more skilled actors. Which is entirely as it should be; student acting can be ruined as an experience (though I think this is much less common than it was) by teachers who are trying to get everyone to hit the marks from whatever taped production the class has been shown as a model, and not find their own modus locopodus, to new-mint the words, in John Barton's phrase.

This has been tonight's performance of Numbingly Obvious Points Theater. What, ladies, gentlemen, have ye no Stephen Colbert to go to?

And of Frank Lloyd Wright one could say that he really was very good, despite his telling us so, often.

"Comparable to Tolkien at His Best"

The Regency Romance version of this, that I long ago -- back in my teens -- learned to cringe at is/was...

"Quite possibly the new Georgette Heyer!"

Aieeee! Pity the poor author.

Being held up as comparable to the person who arguably the invented the (sub)genre you're writing in (whichever, and whoever those may be) is not being well served by your publisher's marketing department. Not at all.

Brenda:
That story sounds a lot (but not exactly) like John Varley's "The Black Hole Passes".

I've had that sort of experience (really quite astonishingly good even though everyone says so) with Marquez recently. I mean, I'd known of him for a long time, and a name as lyrical as "Love in Time of Cholera" is hard to forget, but for some reason I'd always assumed I wouldn't like him. Saw the Cholera book for real cheap in a local bookstore, grabbed it, and was in turn grabbed by it. It would not let me go. I hadn't been this hooked on a book for a long time. Finished it in a few days, too.

how can you not like shakespeare? has anyone seen that one animaniacs short where they compare shakespeare to a modern day famous movie producer in hollywood?

"Comparable to Tolkien at His Best"

To crib from Douglas Adams, the comparison would probably be along the lines of "This book, unlike Tolkien at his best..."

My old editor was always emphatic about the distinction between "compared to" and "compared with". "Compared to" emphasises similarities, "compared with" emphasises differences. This may have been just a foible of hers, but it does allow a new sort of reviewer snark - "Comparable with Tolkien at his best" - along the lines of "this book fills a much-needed gap".

The girls today in society go for classical poetry,[...]

"A reputation is a shared valuation about a property of an entity that may or may not be provable"

It's good, but a question: must it be a publically shared valuation? I'm not sure it's a reputation if the valuation isn't present in the discourse on the subject.

"Comparable to Tolkien at his best"

Didn't Michael Moorcock use that blurb to mean "I really, really can't stand this book" ?

Robin, I think "shared" implies "shared by a relevant group," not just me and the squirrel in my pocket. In that context, a scholar may have a reputation among people who know her field, whether or not people outside that group have heard of her. A novelist may have a reputation, again for good or ill, among fantasy readers without being known to scholars of Anglo-Saxon (or, I suppose, vice versa).

Very few people are known, for good or ill, to everybody, or even to a meaningful approximation of everybody. And when they are, it's likely to be that lots of people have heard of Agatha Christie or Tolkien, rather than that they have any opinion of their works, whether based on having read them, on adaptations, or even on "my grandmother/cousin/teacher said."

Lila wrote: I often wonder what sadistic streak prompts editors to put "comparable to Tolkien at his best" on a book cover.

That reminds me of a book review I read in a fanzine back in the Seventies. I can't remember which book it was, but I do remember that the reviewer was rather amused at the book's blurb describing it as being in the grand tradition of Tolkien AND Robert Howard.

"Shadow Show" by Clifford Simak.

Brenda, if abebooks fails you, drop a post on the Usenet group rec.arts.sf.written with the subject line "YASID" (Yet Another Story ID). I'm always amazed at how consistently someone can identify a story from what can be, at times, extremely sketchy details.

"Where's your Willy Shakespeare now?"

He's a good read. Sometimes I reluctantly agree with Shaw's criticisms, but I always agree with his praise of that word-music. (Which reminds me, W.W. Norton kindly put a heapin' helping of Shakespeare music mp3s online as a supplement to the CD included with the Shakespeare songbook. There are also other sound files of readings from English lit, as long as I'm mentioning it. Anyway, I've always kind of wanted to see the last act of "Cymbeline" that Shaw rewrote, just to show how Shakespeare should have done it. Shaw gives good Fakespeare, imho.

"Hey, to be or what!?" [Sir Robin of Williams, SNL]

Graves strikes me as slightly uneven. When he's good, he's very, very good, and writes I, Claudius. His memoir, Good-Bye To All That, is worth multiple reads, too. Some other things that I've read by him didn't blaze quite so brilliantly, though I seem to recall enjoying his retelling of The Odyssey from the point of view of one of the crew (Hercules, My Shipmate). The Islands of Unwisdom was interesting to read, but left me without any strong feelings. I keep trying to start reading King Jesus, and always end up putting it back down. Something to do with the minutea of Goddess cults, perhaps. I start to blur. Speaking of which, time to stop writing, I think. I do need to go find more of Graves's poems, though. (Note to self.)

A horse! a horse! my kingdom for a horse!

Best last words ever.

"Count Belisarius" is good. "Goodbye to All That" is well written but doubtfully true. Did soldiers really welcome offensives, because the chance of getting a serious wound was higher? (In a trench, Graves points out, you tended to get shot in the head and killed; in an offensive you could be shot in the leg and sent home to England, which was the best option if you assumed that you were stuck in the war indefinitely.)
You can't really tap out Morse messages in machinegun fire by removing rounds from the ammo belts in set patterns, because as soon as the gun reaches an empty loop, it stops firing. (The explosion of one round provides the force to load the next one.)
Nor can you make tea from the cooling water in a Vickers gun - at least, only undrinkably oily tea.

So I wonder how much else he made up...

Anybody remember the episode of Moonlighting titled Atomic Shakespeare?

Serge: We hate iambic pentameter!

I adore Shakespeare. I just wish highschool teachers would keep him in drama class where he belongs. Shakespeare's works were plays, not poems, and they were never meant to be read (sonnets aside, but even those were recited). Certainly the words are important-- theater goers in Elizabethan England went to hear plays, not see them-- but until you have some understanding of acting and theatercraft, you can't appreciate the true genius (or lack thereof) of famous playwrites.

My favorite example comes from the beginning of King Lear: "I Heard myself proclaimed, and by the Happy Hollow of a tree escaped the Hunt." English teachers look at that and go "Alliteration! take notes-- that's important." Actors look at the same line and say "He's out of breath from running. Putting panting sounds in the dialogue helps the actor communicate that without stumbling over their lines." You look at it from a theater perspective, and suddenly it's a concrete, logical device instead of an abstract concept thrown in to torture tenth graders the world over.

Same with the rhyming couplets at the end of a scene-- If you know the line rhymes with the line previous, it's easier to figure out what the heck the actor's saying. This is especially helpful when you're in a house where no one's bothered to invent microphones yet and the actor is probably facing away from you as they exit the stage.

If actors taught shakespeare instead of English teachers, fewer highschool students would hate him so.

"Reputation is what others know about you. Honor is what you know about yourself." As Aral Vorkosigan says. Reputation not necessarily being true, just what others THINK they know about you.

Robin Z:
"A reputation is a shared valuation about a property of an entity that may or may not be provable"

It's good, but a question: must it be a publically shared valuation? I'm not sure it's a reputation if the valuation isn't present in the discourse on the subject.

I don't think it needs to be a publically shared valuation - if you think about it, there's plenty of backroom whispering about reputation ("Joe's got a rep that get can get you anything ... for a price") - but I think the valuation needs to be there as well.

Carrie S... I take it as a yes, that you do remember that episode of Moonlighting. It had everything, including ninja fights and glass-wearing horses, and Petruchio showing up at Kate's door and an exchange ensueing about piano-tuning and pianist envy.

"A reputation is a shared valuation about a property of an entity[0] that may or may not be provable"

Reputation is what other people think of you, whether you share it with them or not. What they think may or may not be provable, and it may be completely subjective, making it beyond proof.

Oh, and to the new open thread, I just have to say: "I CAN BREATH!"

O give me land, lots of land, and the starry skies above, don't fence me in.
Let me ride through the wide open country that I love, don't fence me in.

I posted the link to that poem on another discussion board and someone remarked, "That's the poetry version of I write the songs."

I smacked my forehead!

remember that episode of Moonlighting. It had everything, including ninja fights and glass-wearing horses

gawds. I watched Moonlighting every night for years, and all I can remember from that entire series are two scenes.

First one is when Dave's brother shows up in town being chased by bad guys cause he took some money from them. The bad guys had stuffed it under the good of his car, and when he opens the hood, "For the love of money" plays. Specifically the line "money, money, money". He closes the briefcase and the music stops. He opens it agains, and then the music plays "MONEY!".

The other scene has Dave and Maddie talking back and forth, about a man with a mole on his nose, who do you suppose, that anybody knows, about the mole on his nose. They go back and forth liek this for a while, Dave always rhyming off of whatever Maddie says, and Maddie gets frustrated and asks him "How do you do that?" or something. And Dave replies "Read a lot of Dr. Seuss."

Everything else is gone. Harddrive crashed with no backups. I'm sure I saw the ninja episode. I just can't remeber it. It think it might have gotten pushed out by more 80's TV stuff, like the pink helicopter in "Riptide" or something.

Yeah, I remember that episode and the one they did as film noir, and approximately three other scenes, and that's it. I know my mom and I watched Moonlighting every week for pretty much the entirety of its run, but aside from those few bits it's a total blank for me.

Re: "Comparable to Tolkien at his best ..."

Tolkien left readers hungry for More Books Like That. Problem: there were no other books like that. For a while, all sorts of old fantasy was getting exhumed and reprinted, because that market segment would buy it. (I was sold the Perelandra books on that basis. I'm still indignant.)

Tolkien also made an overwhelming impression on writers. It took a long time for some of them to fully assimilate it. During the years when they were still processing it, they tended to be a bit derivative.

In the years since LOTR hit big in the United States, the audience it's left behind of readers hungry for More Books Like That has bought and read the next best thing they could find: and thus the sell line in question.

I'm pretty sure that most of them know it's not really as good as Tolkien. For the ones who can't tell the difference, it's a true statement. For the rest, what it says is "These books do their best to deliver that same experience."

And just to get back on topic :), I think I can say with certainty that my taste in yarn and Kate Salter's are alike in that way that's almost but not quite completely different. There was exactly one skein I'd consider buying, if I had money to spend on yarn and had a project in mind for it.

(Re my comment in Open Thread 67 yesterday): Viva la revolucion!

As for that "Gee, it actually is good!" experience, it happens to reviewers too. For a future Locus column, I've just read a bunch of seriously hyped first novels -- one with a pre-publication ad in The New Yorker and a seven-figure deal, two with seven-figure movie deals (and one of these is just the first in a seven-book series), one with a six-figure marketing campaign (including an online RPG), and yet another plugged on the galley as "immensely commercial heroic fantasy". And gorblimey (blush), I liked them all!

More geek knitting! Spirals, hexagons, pentagons, and those double spirals you get in sunflower centers and pineapples. IME "fun to knit" and "worth wearing" are mutually exclusive, but not this time. If you're near a bookstore, check it out!

Comparable to Tolkien at his pretty good!

For the genterations of fans who have been waiting for a book that was enough like that other book, there is now

Faucets of Grignr: the Hyoids and the Critics

Read what startled priests of Magic-Like Realsim have to say:

"Furthers Argon studies further than they have ever been furthered before."
"One of the most startling papers to cross my desk since I unwrapped my lunch."
"Woo."

Available now from discriminant sorces, in an edition with genuine binding and a dynmanic cover painting in two colors by E. R. "Ted" Frozetta (no relation).

Okay, a small defense of comparing one author to another. I publish poetry. I even try to sell the poetry, and my sales reps always ask me who each author is like. It allows them to explain the book quickly to the bookseller (who is likely an independent bookseller, and has given the sales rep a half an hour to talk about everything.) It also gives the book a frame of reference for the buyer. I stock so and so, so I'll try this new author.

Now there are lots more people reading fantasy than there are reading poetry, but that makes it even more necessary to have a quick understanding of a book. Very few people expect the blurbs on the back to be (completely) honest. The blurbs just need to strike a chord that will get you to read the first few pages if you're the reader, or put the book on your shelves if you're the bookseller. Then we hope the sheer brilliance of the writing will do the rest.

And then there's the whole new Bob Dylan thing.

Augh!

A pox on publishers who don't indicate clearly on a cover that a book is a sequel!

I picked up Lois McMaster Bujold's "Paladin of Souls" this weekend. It mentions "Curse of Chalion" on the inside cover, but not that "Paladin" is the sequel.

I'm really enjoying "Paladin" (am only about 1/4 of the way through) and was looking forward to more in this setting, but now "Curse" is totally spoiled for me.

Naw, not spoiled. A little spoilered. But how they got there will still be fun to read. Not to mention what they did along the way, and how they got into the mess in the first place. Don't skip it; it's a great piece of work.

Xopher... Your experience reminds me of the early Seventies when, for reasons unknown, I read the second Foundation book first. Didn't spoil anything, but it caused some confusion to yours truly at first.

(I was sold the Perelandra books on that basis. I'm still indignant.)

I had almost the opposite experience; I loved a lot of the books wrongly marketed as Tolkienesque. I particularly liked the way that the Gor series looked just like any other fantasy novels, so I could carry pornography around junior high with no problems, but I also enjoyed even such unlikely teenage fare as The Worm Ouroboros.

But when I read The Sword of Sha-na-na, I was so pissed off at its shameless Tolkien imitation that I literally burned my copy, Hildebrandt color plates and all. (I was a rather overdramatic teenager.)

Not to nitpick, but Hercules, My Shipmate is actually a retelling of the Argosy, not the Odyssey. Count Belisarius is best read just after reading The Secret History, by Procopius (which I also highly recommend: did you know that Justinian and Theodora were actually demons -- there were eyewitnesses! Even the most unhinged Clinton- or Bush-haters don't go that far. Usually.)

I still have fondness for The White Goddess (non-fiction, more-or-less) in spite of its being twaddle. It's good twaddle.

Yeah, I'll probably read "Chalion" anyway, maybe after I've finished "The Historian" and started "Melusine" so that I might have forgotten a little of "Paladin".

It's certainly (sadly) unique to have a 40-year-old heroine, but the novelty is lost now that I know the series started with her as a young woman. Luckily from what I can tell, Ista didn't start as a standard issue innocent-yet-spunky-young-heroine-in-a-chain-mail-bra, thank Lois McMaster Bujold for that!

And she wasn't a young woman when the series started. She's a young woman only in flashback IIRC.

I'm really enjoying "Paladin" (am only about 1/4 of the way through) and was looking forward to more in this setting, but now "Curse" is totally spoiled for me.

I take it you never watch Smallville and skipped over Revenge of the Sith, then.

"But when I read The Sword of Sha-na-na . . ."

(Supresses taste of bile at back of mouth.)

I spent so much on the pricey trade PB ream of mediocrity that burning it would have been out of the question . . . I vaguely recall wondering if I could return it, or who I might regift it to.

It's certainly (sadly) unique to have a 40-year-old heroine, but the novelty is lost now that I know the series started with her as a young woman. Luckily from what I can tell, Ista didn't start as a standard issue innocent-yet-spunky-young-heroine-in-a-chain-mail-bra, thank Lois McMaster Bujold for that!

No, no! The first book takes place only a few years before the second and does not center on Ista at all. She is a fairly minor character who makes a few appearances and at one point describes important past events, but she is never a young woman in the book. The young woman heroine of the first book is her daughter Iselle, who never appears in Paladin. You've been spoilered, but not unbearably, really.

It's not really a series; it's a set of books (five intended) all set in the same universe. The third book (The Hallowed Hunt) takes place in a different century and different country and has no overlapping characters at all unless you count the gods.

I'm trying to sell this series to a senior person at work who doesn't appear to be much of a genre reader art all but has somehow stumbled across the Thomas Covenant books, of all things, and seems to be enjoying them.

Well, I don't watch Smallville anyway, but mostly because I find Superman the least compelling superhero ever. ROTS (how appropriate an acronym!) I saw pretty much because I had already seen the other two crummy prequels, and I had to see the last (slightly less crummy) film.

Pre-quels are (or at least should be) different than previous chapters of a story. In the first-of-a-series, there's foreshadowing that pays off by the end. I've read some books (don't remember which) in which the foreshadowing is such a big part of the story, when I went back to them with knowledge of the payoff, there wasn't much to them.

It's the same idea with re-reading books. Some books I've enjoyed don't hold up to a second reading. For me it all comes down to characterization - I'll re-read Martin's ASOIAF books even though I know what happens because the characters are so well-drawn and complex. Harry Potter books, which I do really love reading, generally don't get re-read.

With these books, I get the feeling that they're well-written enough that it won't matter. Still, I would have liked to have known that Chalion was the first when I was trying to decide which two of the five paperbacks I had been juggling I was going to buy; in the end, I believe it came down to which book was longer.

Curse my limited book budget!

Any James Alan Gardner fans here? I picked up Hunted last night out of my giant stacks of unread books. While I'm enjoying it in a mild way, it's also giving me a huge and nagging sense of deja vu. Most of the plot rings no bells, but some of the flashback parts and the names of the (mostly deceased) aliens do. I can't believe I wouldn't have remembered the rather startling opening chapter if I'd ever read it before, and one of the major characters is totally unfamiliar, but the further I get into the book the more there's a sense that I know what happened and that I know parts of what comes next. And that's weird. It's not the sort of book I'd generallly pick up. I have no idea how I ended up owning a copy, in fact. Why do parts of it feel so familiar?

It's possible I've just read it before, but my memory is not usually this scattershot, and the book only came out in 2000, so time can't account for lack of memory. But I also wonder if perhaps there was a short story or novella that was later expanded into the novel. None of his other books seem to fit, and his bibliography of short stories gives me no clues.

This is driving me insane.

Glenn Haumann writes: I take it you never watch Smallville and skipped over Revenge of the Sith, then.

Why would anyone not want to skip the latter? After seeing The Dumb Menace, I realized I had just seen a Lucas-involving movie even worse than Return of the Jedi or Howard the Duck, and decided that never again would I add to Georgie's wealth. I caught the end of Attack of the Clowns on some hotel's movie channel and knew I had made the right decision. Last summer, while waiting for Fantastic Four(*)'s showing to begin, I suck in and saw Revenge on The Spit. Its big duel cum lame verbal exchanges made me wonder if Lucas had totally lost it.

======

(*) Don't get me started on that one.

Speaking of things to drive one insane, I'm trying to nail a song with these lyrics:

While the blossoms still cling to the vine,
I'll eat your strawberries,
I'll drink your sweet wine.
A million tomorrows will all pass away
Ere I forget all the joys that are mine today.

That's about all I can remember. I learned the song the summer of 1974, if that's any help. I'd really like to know the title, composer, lyricist if possible as I'd really like to get a recording of this.

Oh, yes, and my google fu is pretty good, and I'm not getting this information there - just partial copies of the lyrics, proving I'm not imagining things.

Thanks!

While the blossoms still cling to the vine,
I'll eat your strawberries,
I'll drink your sweet wine.
A million tomorrows will all pass away
Ere I forget all the joys that are mine today.

Aaaah! Aaaah! I learned that song too! At summer camp in Texas at about the same time, or maybe a few years later. Now it's in my head too! And it isn't driving out the Gardner; now I have brightly-colored lobsters singing Girl Scouts campfire songs in my head!

Maybe I will have better google-fu on this one.

Do any of you clever people have to hand the dates of original publication of poems by Robert Graves? I'm looking for:

A Phoenix Flame
The Hearth
Vanity
Mermaid, Dragon, Fiend

Thanks --

The song is called "Today", or at least that's the title I learned it under at Girl Scout camp in ~1988. This page claims words and music by Randy Sparks, and if you like I can make you an audio recording of the tune I learned--complete with optional soprano harmony if I can find another soprano who knows it. :)

Margaret, Susan, it's called "Today", it was recorded by the New Christy Minstrels, and it was featured in an otherwise forgettable movie called Advance to the Rear.

Furthermore, you've now got it stuck in my head too, and I know the whole damned soppy thing. Bleah!

Here are the lyrics.

Serge -

All I took away from Fantastic Four was Ioan Gruffudd Pretty! But since I already knew that from watching the Horatio Hornblower series, it was kind of a waste of $14.

Finally completely viewing Lucas' bizarre attempt at prequels made me a believer in fanfic; I don't read a lot, but the stuff I do has a lot more respect for other people's source material than he did for his own.

Google comes through: "Today".

Now I have some truly horrible camp songs richocheting around in my head.

Shakespeare is an endless source of metaphors. The Tempest, for example is the source of two of the most significant metaphors in the Americas-south-of-the-Rio-Bravo, the metaphor of Ariel and that of Caliban.

Ariel is the title of an essay by the Uruguayan José Enrique Rodó,in which Ariel represents Latin American in contrast to Caliban who inhabits a certain country in the northern part of the two continents.

Both Aimé Césaire and Roberto Fernández Retamar have used Caliban as a metaphor for the condition of the colonised (and enslaved) populations of the Americas.

That's just one play.

Oh good lord.

I knew those crappy lyrics were familiar! While I didn't sing them at camp (mormons frown on signing songs with references to wine) but we used it as a warm up in HS choir. I can still remember the freaking alto line.

Blech.

Brenda, I think your story is "The Saturn Game" by Poul Anderson. It was in Analog in 1981.

I came across it in an Anderson anthology called Explorations.

nerdycellist... If Lucas had any humility left in him, he'd have stepped aside and let real SF writers cook up the damn story for him. I betcha there are plenty of SF pros who would have been willing to do it free of charge.

nerdycellist (cont'd)... It appears that the 2nd FF movie will have the Silver Smurfer in it and guess who'll show up near the end? (Hint.. He has a big appetite.)

The one redeeming moment of the last of the Star Wars prequels was the Vader mask coming down over Anakin's head. That minute of film Really Worked for me.

Actually, I think that may have been the only redeeming moment in the entire prequel trilogy.

I escaped from the official SW universe in early 1983 and went off into fanfic, where I found versions that were more clearly The Real Story.

Serge: Your mention of Howard the Duck reminded me of the only funny thing in it: the revelation that the cafeteria trashed at the climax (if that is what it was) of the film was a 'Cajun Sushi Restaurant' -- I've wondered ever since how you blacken raw redfish.

My Bantam paperback of Connie Willis's 'To Say Nothing of the Dog' has the following on the cover, above her name and the title (in caps):
"The most hilarious book of its kind since John Irving's The Water-method Man and A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole" * (as far as I can tell the * is resolved on the back cover as 'Des Moines Sunday Register').

What were they thinking?

I just re-read this book (for at least the 4th time) and if any of you haven't read it you should.
If I had to describe it in terms of other authors would be as a mashup of Jerome K Jerome's "Three Men in a Boat" with Heinlein's "By His Bootstraps" and Dorothy L Sayers in her prime, but that misses out the love stories threaded ingeniously through the plot.
But really, why put that on the cover?

"Today" was a summer camp staple for me in the mid-60s in Kentucky. What I get, I guess, for going to a camp whose music counselors were all into folk music and had the acoustic guitars to prove it.

After we moved from Texas and I no longer had access to the relatively good Girl Scout camp (where I learned "Today" but also got to spend most of the days in the lake doing the only sport I'm any good at), I was sent off to a horrible camp with no lake and the appalling concept of Color War (just in case I wanted to relive the constant school year experience of being the one no one wanted on their team). And there I learned a dreadful song called "B.L.T." which probably permanently damaged my sexuality along with giving me a certain horror of the sandwich.

Anyone know the source for these brilliant lyrics?

I took my baby for a big night in the city
I paid at Joe's for the biggest meal in town
And over a sandwich, I asked my baby
"What do you think of me?"
She said, "Baby you're a ripe tomato,
"And I'm your B.L.T."

It's always nice to know that I haven't yet hit absolute rock bottom in romantic dates and seductive conversation.

Next up from the sludge of my memory: Vi-o, vi-o, vi-o-LA!

As admirable as Ezra Klein's Particulated piece is, I would note that the op-ed page is not a dojo. A dojo is where people go to learn things that they do not already know, an yo' occasionally gets smacked upside yo' fool head by yo' sensei dude. A dojo that merely reinforced its students' novice beliefs would collectively wind up like the guy from Star Wars who tries to push Yojimbo around.

The op-ed page being spoken of is Street Fighter, perhaps aspiring to be Tekken.

And Patrick beat me to the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Typo.

Yes, it has been a long day. Why do you ask?

The one redeeming moment of the last of the Star Wars prequels was the Vader mask coming down over Anakin's head.

When it happened in episode 4 and again when it happened in 3, I had exactly the same thought: can't the guy put his own damn helmet on??? Wouldn't a machine pushing a helmet on just shave your ears right off?

Eps 4,5,6 had humor in them. Eps 1,2,3 took themselves way too seriously. The life had gone out of them for me. Post analysis for me determined that the "life" of that world was the myth of the Jedi and their near extinction. To actually try and film the myth made that world a lot less rich, not more rich.

The only moment in the prequels that I liked was in Ep 3 when Ewan McGregor screams "You were like a brother to me" and I could hear the anguish, simultaneous pain and anger, in his voice. In other words, he was acting in a scene that required acting. Everything else was simply people going through the motions to get to the destination.

"Comparable to Tolkien"

The equivalent in baseball is "The Next Mickey Mantle! The Next Willie Mays!"

Cursed be the player so acclaimed.

RCT, I don't think "The Saturn Game" is the story Brenda is thinking of. It's got similar features, but it's not the same.

(Though if she looks it up herself to see, she won't be poorly rewarded for her effort--it was awfully good.)

Greg London said about Star Wars that Eps 4,5,6 had humor in them. Eps 1,2,3 took themselves way too seriously.

One of the things that really bugged me about the prequels is that they had nobody like Han Solo to deflate the Self-Importance of the other characters.

Less than 150 hours to the Hugo deadline: is there an intarweb thread discussing it? Haven't seen much recently on the r.a.sf.*s.

I am concerned that a certain non-stand-alone novel could win. Concern based on one random comment in a 'Please Vote' thread on a nominee's blog. It wasn't appropriate to discuss such things on that blog, and I haven't seen the subject around elsewhere.

The commenter claimed that 1. The n-s-a novel has an active fandom and 2. The Science Fiction vote will get split 4-ways among the strong field. (If a science fiction novel ever got nominated for the World Fantasy Award, would it do the same there?)

As I wrote in ot67, the Hugos imply "this is the best we have in SF." So, for the 21st century, the best we have in novels is fantasy?

Gah. [waves stick to get kids off lawn]

Shakespeare wrote just about everything that needs to be said about the human condition, and said it better than most of us can ever hope.

But, to borrow from a much later dramatist, that shouldn't stop us trying.

Kathryn:

My choices are here, if you're interested. I don't have a problem with one of the nominees being fantasy--fantasy has been winning Hugos since "Ill Met In Lankhmar" at least--but the n-s-a aspect bugs me a bit. I try to read everything that's nominated, but in this case I would have had to read two very long books in a series I'd already given up on, so I punted.

Ah, summer reruns.

'Cajun Sushi Restaurant' -- I've wondered ever since how you blacken raw redfish.

Hmm, that actually sounds intriguing. I'd rub the spices on. For some of them, just for fun, I've got this here torch in my silversmithing kit (just a bit more butch than the ones they sell in kitchen toy stores)... there's no reason not to play with fusion styles when putting together sushi, after all. Isn't it part of the Tradition?

Tim, I love you for your music wonkery; but hearing you burned said Sha-na-na just makes me smile for the rest of the day.

First my sincere apologies for infecting a number of people with an earworm.

I learned the song on a Campfire Girls camping cruise through the San Juans (we were out far enough that we didn't know Nixon resigned until two days later - I've been behind on things ever since). The high point of the trip for me was waking up one morning to shrieks of, "It's eating my tarp! It's eating my tarp!" as an eastern Washington (think semi-arid steppe) girl got upclose and personal with her first banana slug.

The Science Fiction vote will get split 4-ways among the strong field. (If a science fiction novel ever got nominated for the World Fantasy Award, would it do the same there?

The WFA is juried. There is voting (open to WFC members) for two spots per category on the final list, but the award is decided by the five judges. So no, that particular sort of vote dilution is not possible.

For an assortment of reasons, I'm not going to discuss this, but you might want to read Debbie Notkin's essay on the topic from Emerald City, here.

Oh, and I should say that Graves comment applies to Cervantes as well - I just read Edith Brooks translation of Don Quixote, and I can see why so many people like it.
Serge: David Brin did write an outline for a proper episode III denouement:
I could scribble a 3-paragraph outline that would save Lucas. It would explain every awful inconsistency/paradox in his universe. It would make the #!#*& coincidences all work out... including the totally predictable lunacy of having Obi-Wan grab baby Luke and hide him from his darkside father... on Darth Vader's home planet, in his old home town! This is the core scenario that we know will happen in "Episode Three" and it is the most towering of three dozen real plot horrors. But the amazing thing is that I see a simple way for Lucas to climb out of this hell.

In fact, a scenario is possible, if Vader and Obi-Wan conspire together against BOTH Emperor and Yoda. Go on, follow all the movies with this possibility in mind.

Why else would Obi-Wan 'hide' Vader's son in Vader's home town? Their final 'deathfight' distracts the guards to let Luke/Han/Leia get away. How else do you explain that Vader grabs/interrogates Leia, yet never detects her force? Watch carefully... Vader's 'chase' of Luke in the first film clears all the other Imperial fighters off his son's back and halts the antiaircraft guns, giving the kid a clear shot! And guess who's the only Imperial survivor?

It goes on and on! (Including the coincidence of whose droids carry the message.)

I once spent an hour scribbling notes -- the plot for Episode Three writes itself! (At least, I see it clearly with a professional's eye.) Almost the entire list of awful coincidences and silly paradoxes can be eliminated in a certain clever way that would make George Lucas's entire universe make incredible sense! It could even go down in history as something profoundly moral and clever.

Oh, it's delicious! There's a way out... and GL could claim "I was planning this all along!"

Oh, and Josh (first comment):
Bacon Bacon Bacon Bacon Marlowe, Marlowe, Help help its a Shakespeare!

RuTemple: That sounds intriguing. But would it still be sushi?

Kevin Marks... Brin's proposal would have definitely improved things. Then again, bringing Irwin Allen back from the grave and putting him in charge would have done it too. But seriously, I like the idea of Vader & Kenobi being in cahoots. When I saw the first prequel and took a look at Liam Neeson, I thought "OK, George is going to surprise us and we're going to find out that HE will become Vader AND Luke's dad." I was naive, I guess, but not so naive that I believed George's BS that he had planned the whole thing all along.

I have a publishing question, though it's a not about fiction or large markets. But you folks are some of the most knowledgeable and humane people I know, and this is of some personal importance to me, so here goes:

My mother has written a book, a biography of an early-twentieth-century San Francisco environmentalist. She has done this primarily as a favor for a friend, who is the subject's son. The friend is now in his mid-eighties, and she would very much like for him to have a copy of the book in his hands before he dies. Also, one of the non-profits the subject co-founded would like to buy perhaps a thousand copies to give as membership gifts, and are prepared to put up money to support publication. My mother has put a year of her life into this book; I'd like to see that she gets compensated for it.

Two small presses in the area have seen the manuscript and passed on it, claiming that the content is fantastic but the market is wrong (it will never be a runaway hit -- local interest only and my mum estimates the audience at perhaps three thousand copies, tops); one of the publishers tried to point my mother to AuthorHouse and iUniverse (!!). I persuaded her away from that course of action, citing my many knowledgeable invisible net-friends in or near the industry. (I myself worked in computer support for a vanity press when I was broke and starving in the early '90s -- that and enough knowledge of LaTeX to typeset my math homework at Berkeley are the closest I have to real credentials in this matter. Not nearly enough.) The only problem with that persuasion is that now she regards me as a publishing expert, at least by proxy.

The manuscript is finished -- it needs a thorough copy-editing (my mum's spelling and grammar are fine, but it will need looking over for typos and overall tightening for sense). I can see several options from here:

1. Do the copy-edit myself, throw the text into a minimalist LaTeX template, run pdflatex on it, get an artist friend to help me put together a cover, and publish it through Lulu. Pros: maximum control, minimum reliance on other people. Cons: I have a more-than-full-time job, and this would eat my evenings and weekends for at least a few months. Every communication with my mother from now until it was done would be fraught with deadline-fu. And if the product came out looking awful, my mum (and her friend) would have no one to blame but me.

2. Hire a freelancer to do the copy-edit (and perhaps a designer to do the cover), and then make a PDF from the result and proceed as in Step 1. Marginally better, but neither my mum nor I can afford to hire freelancers at this point; the non-profit sponsor would need to step in. Pros: I'm not directly responsible for the content. Cons: Much more reliance on other people to get it done, including money sources.

3. Keep banging the bushes for a small publisher who would take the job on without violating Yog's Law. This one runs into the deadline problem; my mum would really like to have at least a proof copy by the end of the year, for the above-stated reason.

4. Offer the manuscript to the sponsor for a set price, and let them deal with finding a publisher for it. I'm not at all sure they'd go for this, but if they can be persuaded, it's the least hassle for both my mum and me.

Is there anything obvious that I'm missing? Does anyone have any relevant suggestions? I'm feeling a little in over my head here, as you can probably tell. Thanks very much in advance for any advice/help you can offer.

I think Nancy Lebovitz already posted the answer - look back above. (The story description rang a bell for me but I couldn't place it. Simak fits the emotional tone of what I think I remember.)

There was something I wanted to post when I came to this thread, but now I've forgotten. Oh well, thanks to whoever mentioned Viriconium recently; got that from the library and discovered I'd read and enjoyed The Pastel City - though had not remembered all the Eliot/Wasteland references - but I had no idea of the other books and the much odder and more intensely "literary" places they are going.

This year, it is possible to have both the theoretical science fiction of WorldCon and the applied-SF of Burning Man. Next year there's a conflict, as happens for any labor day weekend Worldcon.

For those thinking they might like to go to Burningman... yes, go. I'm happy to write up why from a fan's perspective- for one, you get to experience what post-scarcity life feels like- via email.

[can also give my take on the Survival Guide (http://www.burningman.com/preparation/) and what basic preparation takes in time and money. Main thing is that preparation means deciding to go now: it is not at all a last-minute event. Hence this comment.]

The village I'm camping in is going to have giant mechanical spider vehicles, and g-m-s-v battles. (We're also going to have a stage w/ acoustic music, a drivable mammoth skeleton, and other shiny items.)

Basics:
Monday the 28th to Mon. Sep. 4th. But Burning Man is holographic, so a shorter visit still gives you the whole event, just fuzzier. Tickets are currently $250 through mid-August. Black Rock City: 35,000 people (by the 30th), 2 hours drive north of Reno, Nevada. Flights to Reno are 1 hour from the Bay Area, 1.5 from Los Angeles.

Teresa,
Not much luck, I’m afraid – all of the Graves collections at my library are checked out ATM (did Oprah mention him recently or something?!?)

But assuming that this online text is transcribed correctly, "Mermaid, Dragon, Fiend" is 36 lines long. I would have cross-checked in a printed collection, but as noted above, they’re all out.

Sidenote: in Swifter than Reason, Douglas Day says that the poem "Old Wives’ Tales" from Whipperginny was "retained, with much revision, in the canon as ‘Mermaid, Dragon, Fiend’" and "incorrectly assigned" by other critics to The Pier-Glass (ah, I love the smell of academic condescension in the morning) -- Whipperginny dates from 1923, so that gives you a terminal point of some kind. Day also says that the last line was changed to the form quoted above in 1938.

Dave L said: I still have fondness for The White Goddess (non-fiction, more-or-less) in spite of its being twaddle. It's good twaddle.

Heh. I manage to retain my enjoyment of The White Goddes by thinking of it as historical fantasy.

Strictly speaking, "sushi" refers to the rice, not the raw fish (which is why unagi and inari-zushi are still considered sushi).

Carrie S.: I'm in for the optional soprano harmony. I learned it c. 1981, at -- where else? -- summer camp.

Now that we've got that one nailed, can anyone provide me with independent confirmation of a final verse to "Cruel War" that I swear I learned a little earlier, but I've never found in things like "Rise Up Singing" or the Digitrad database? I don't remember all of it, naturally, but the main part of the verse is

They marched into battle
Towards the rising sun
And were buried together
When day was done.

It'd be great to have someone tell me I didn't make it up out of an fifth-grade imagination with the usual pre-adolescent delight in morbid sentimentality.

Of course, it had to be the open thread on Shakespeare that I delurked for.

@Annalee, way way up there: "I Heard myself proclaimed, and by the Happy Hollow of a tree escaped the Hunt."

A Very Good Professor at Berkeley taught me to look at that and see the connection between Heard and Hollow (like Hallo!) and then Hollow and Hunt...like hunting calls (hollers). I think his thesis was that Shakespeare was so good because he was fantastically talented at making these kinds of semantic insinuations.

*relurk*

Karl T, I know nothing about publishing, but one of my better choices in vacation reading while traveling through Northern California was The World Rushed In,, a book with (I'd think) mostly regional appeal. It's a story of the Gold Rush based on a diary of one of the people who walked(!) from the Midwest to California. It was published by Touchstone in NY in 1981. I don't know how receptive they'd be to another regional book, but FWIW, they published one.

Ahh... an open thread. :)

I've been wondering for some time now, but has anyone else suggested that Making Light move to a threaded format for its comments? It would make things a lot easier to follow when there are hundreds of them for a given entry.

Carrie, Kate mailed me a luscious cone of yarn this morning. It seems unlikely that it will be as wonderful in person, but I bet it is.

Susan, there's a Jane Austen Ball in Alexandria next month, are you coming down?

Karl T.,

I'm going to ask a really obvious, possibly stupid question: Have you tried Chronicle? Big as they are, they do a certain number of books that don't have an apparent large audience, and this might be one for them.

I will add this: My wife, who is a professional book designer, has done a book or two like this--good enough that, given time, a small press would probably take it on, but the author had the money to print it and no time for the waiting. (I'm thinking of one that was quite publishable, but the author was pushing eighty. Self-publication was right for him, and it expedited getting a forward from a Very Important Person.) She sent it to a regular printing company; Lulu wasn't around at the time.

If you find someone good and ethical (the wife's overbooked [heh], so it's not her) to do your packaging for you, consider it.

You might also find a small press with a regional line that might consider a subsidized publication. Sometimes they'll put their own imprint on it; other times they put it out under your own imprint. I imagine the costs are similar to getting a free-lance packager--probably a little higher, but you're getting a more known commodity, so your risks are probably a little lower. I'm strictly an informed amateur, though, so take this all with a grain of salt.

Tolkien left readers hungry for More Books Like That. Problem: there were no other books like that. For a while, all sorts of old fantasy was getting exhumed and reprinted, because that market segment would buy it. (I was sold the Perelandra books on that basis. I'm still indignant.)

Heck, I expected Perelandra to be like Narnia. It wasn't that, either. But I bought a number of Ballantine Adult Fantasy titles back in the day, "the day" being the 1970s, trying to find out what was good besides Tolkien, Lewis's Narnia, White's Arthur, Beagle's The Last Unicorn and Bellairs' The Face in the Frost. Maybe none of it was More Books Like That, but Lin Carter did a public service trying to supply that demand.

Susan, there's a Jane Austen Ball in Alexandria next month, are you coming down?

Almost certainly not - didn't know anything about it, and - alas - most "Jane Austen" balls suffer from, ah, a complete lack of actual Jane Austen-era dancing. "Most" in this case means every ball in North America that I know about other than the ones I'm running myself. They do better in England.

If you would be so kind as to post the relevant information or a pointer, I can point some of my friends who live down that way and won't mind an S&M ball at it, though.

I think I'm down to only three free weekends for the rest of the year; much of this represents what passes for roaring success in the itinerant dance historian world.

Right now I am happily thinking about what a lovely, versatile thing a box step can be in the early 20thc tango. I never truly appreciated this before. I feel bad that I have previously dissed the box step. I should have remembered that it has a much more romantic name and many good uses. I shall think warm thoughts about it and maybe write up a handout.

Kip W.
Anyway, I've always kind of wanted to see the last act of "Cymbeline" that Shaw rewrote, just to show how Shakespeare should have done it.

How did he rewrite the last act? I spent an entire summer research project on that play, so now I'm curious as to what another esteemed playwright would have done differently. (Especially since my paper got a great deal of mileage over the appearance of Zeus in the last act, which so many productions cheerfully cut out, and I can't blame them for it. One does not usually expect the deus ex machina to be quite so literal outside of Greek plays.)

Herewith ane lynke to a Project Gutenberg edition of Shaw's ending, along with his notes thereon. I will assume you are familiar with Shaw's usual tone when writing about "Shakespear," as he spelled it. If you're not, you might want to pour yourself an intolerable deal of sack first.

I saw Peter Hall's production a number of years ago, and thought it quite well done; Peter Woodward was Posthumus, Geraldine James was Innogen (as they had it), Tim Pigott-Smith was Iachimo, and Eileen Atkins was the Queen.

Hall was retiring from the NT, and his finale was "The Late Shakespeares," Cymbeline, Winter's Tale, and The Tempest with the same cast. (It was a nice time to be a theater geek in London.) They were very straightforward, minimal-staging productions -- not quite the new Globe's "original practices," but trying for something close to what you would have seen at the Blackfriars or the Globe, without the rain and the Rat Onna Stick vendors.

And it did not contain quite these lines:

"Put yer hat and sunscreen on,
British Gas will warm yer hovel,
Labour (and the party's) done,
So pick up yer bloody shovel;
Time runs out for maids and blokes,
Th-th-th-th-that's all, folks."

(Apologies to Shakes. Eliot's on his jellicle own.)

So tell us, Susan, what is the romantic name for the humble box step?

Following up Margaret's OT67 comment on ink: it's one of those words that has lost almost all of its origin -- not as bad as "bus" but close. The source is "incaustXX", ~"burning in". OED and an American dictionary both say it originally applied to a colored effect used by emperors, i.e. "I mean this!"; "ink" meaning paint-on-a-{point,plate} was much later.

RuTemple:

Tim, I love you for your music wonkery;

I knew that smooth, firm, tightly packed iPod would attract the babes.

Kathryn:

I'm also going to Burning Man (for the first time) post-Worldcon, and just found out that I'll be playing the Center Camp Café with a subset of dud immediately before the Man burns. I don't know if that means that everybody will be there, or nobody will be there.

Nancy, Suzanne, Clifton, et al.--Thanks much. I tried for a plot summary of "Shadow Show," but no luck at the moment. Simak sounds like the right time period, though--enough time for a book to have filtered into a school collection, a few years after it was written.

(Someone mentioned 1981--by then I was earning a living. This was a junior-high-school experience.)

I'm off to the wild unbooked, so it will be a few days before I can check this out--but thanks again.

Brenda

Tim Walters writes:
fantasy has been winning Hugos since "Ill Met In Lankhmar" at least

Okay, I had to check: "Ill Met in L