The most recent 20 comments posted to Making Light by anthony:

Peter Watts, hard sf and crystaline prose

caroline:

i also sleep with books in the bed, and even when sleeping with other people, books snuck in. i love reading in bed.

I have read a lot of de Sade, and never masturbated to it, that doesn't mean it wasn't pornographic, and I cannot imagine where else to place Crash.

1984 is a:
a) political essay
b) a speculative fiction
c) erotic text (how come everyone forgets how hot the fucking is in that book)
d) media satire
e) linguistic essay
f) cautionary fable about human nature.

so parts of it can be used by sf critics for their purposes.

Brave New World is a:
a) an essay about pleasure
b) media satire
c) speculative fiction

it is more likely to be used by sf critics for their purposes.

http://www.paulrossen.com/paulinekael/trashartandthemovies.html

I am not making literary notices here. I do not find literary distinctions useful. I am using trash like Pauline Kael did:
Movies are so rarely great art that if we cannot appreciate great trash we have very little reason to be interested in them.

Ballard did not only write SF, if we are going to be accurate about definitions, we might as well call him a pornographer, a mystery writer, a writer of anglo noveau roman, a memorist. All of these are legitimate categories, most of these were first viewed as trash, some still are. Ballard recognized his trash roots and moved thru them with out ever forgetting them.

I am arguing for the expanding, polysemic use of language and genre.

I am sorry if this came across as contempt.

i take the groucho marx view of fandom.

i am not referring to pulp and trash as bad things, as part of the 90 per cent. i am saying that when you elevate the high you forget the low.

xopher

why do you see her as an asshole, acknowledging that the two often coexist

About Ballard:

a) Is Moorcock the only English new wave writer left?
b) I was sort of expecting a RIP thread, and got this, and a side note. Can this be an RIP thread?
c) I think that Ballard is interesting, because of course a lot of it is SF, but I do not think that Crash is, for example, or Super Cannes, or Cocaine Nights, or the Atrocity Exhibition. (Pornography, Comedy of Manners, Drawing Room Mystery, Avant Garde experimental)
d) In fact, one of the great things about Ballard, is his deconstruction of the optimism and joy of certain SFers who cum endlessly to images of a utopian future that would never exist.
e) I am not sure that one should be judged by the company one keeps, that he was published in New Waves is mostly because who the else would publish him. He was a cult writer, some of his cult were SFers, some of them were new urbanists, some of them were perverts, and some of them were none of these things.
f) There keeps being a kind of victimhood obsession in SF, that they get off when people ignore there genre significaitons, they want SF to be litertature, which it can be, which it often is, but it is also pulp and trash, and there is something great about that, that Ballard knew about and which some of the fandom ignores.
g) What is lost if Ballard is not considered SF, what is gained if he is?
h) this is not a critical position, but Ballard spends time in the sf camp sometimes for me because of his technolust, his isolation, how he constructs first contact tales (fundamentally his memoirs of shang hai have that kind of vibe for me), and the feeling i get from his work--this intangible dread about monsters, this (in the most classical sense of the word) uncanniness that unsettles most readers. In this way he is less like Asimov (but I have not read a hell of a lot of Asimov yet) and more like Capek or Lem, who are SF.
i) atwood is not an asshole, she is a crank.

"In the House of the Seven Librarians" by Ellen Klages is totally it, and i loved it more reading it the second time. More please!

thanks for all the fantasy recommendations, i have been enjoying john ford (esp his story about kafka), kelly link, and some other works, including a story i read a couple of months ago, and cannot find again, about a group of witches mentoring a child in a library--i loved that story. (i also found myself adoring smax, by alan moore)

so thank you for hearing me, and thank you for the recommendations, and more like them?

father:
don't let your schooling get in the way of yr education
sacred cows make great hamburger

my mother:
because i have been given much, i too shall give
temperance

Camp Concentration is brilliant, about language, and power, and the construction of narratives, and all of those foucauldian things that I care deeply about (as is the rogue best seller MD, in fact) but the short story Squirrel Cage is a perfect text that out kafka's kafka. He wasn't a great poet, and Brave Little Toaster was a distraction, and i wish that he got his shit together, so he could have written more, better--but those two novels, and 334, are so brilliant, so attached to the way the world works, so devious and so tragic, that i cannot imagine 20th century literature with out them.

anthony #741

What are some other books you've liked and why (any types of books....) and what are things you don't like in books (and what sorts of things do you like--or rather, what characteristics do you like?

what i like in fiction:
Pulp from Post World War II (esp. Noir, esp. the Ripley Novels, but also kitsch porn titles, spy fiction, etc)
New Wave SF (esp. Tiptree, Delaney, Disch)
Novels of manners written by women in the middle half of this century (Muriel Spark, Carole Shields, Atwood's Robber Bride, Elizabeth Taylor, Hilary Mantel, Penepole Fitzgerald,etc)
The weird, uncanny. I like the WTF moment, that moves into allegory. (Marrianne Engel's Bear is a good example of this)
Meta-fiction
Formally Deconstructed/Experimental Fiction,
Blank or heavily ironic work.

what i like in non fiction
Microhistory (Christopher Hill,Alain Corbin)
Diaries and Memoirs,
Popular culture esp. of the American West, Religious History of American New Religious Movements
Sacramental Theology
Esoteric and Occult studies,
Urban Studies (esp. in its realtion to sub/urban and exurban devolpments in the new west),
Conceptual, Language Based, Photographic, and Interventionist Visual Arts of thge 70s.
I tend to read about the subject, rather then the subject itself.

what i like in poetry
Anne Sexton
Geoffery Hill,
Frank O'Hara (my favourite poet, and the one i have done the most work on; Ashberry is the only one I don't like in that school)
John Clare
Auden
Ishmael Reed
Roman Satirists, Greek Pornographers, Underground folk poetry, Childe Ballads, Blues Lyrics, Caroligians.

miscellaneous.
I loved the most recent translation of the psalms (Alters),
I would prefer interesting writing to world building or narrative and really interested in the formal qaulities of language.
My favourite bit of Sandman is the cat story in the third volume, My favourite Moore is League, and Jess Nevin's work on the annotations might be my favourite peice on it. My favorite new speculative fiction in the last few years has been Fowler's Black Glass, Danielewski's House of Leaves, and Doctorow's Someone Comes to Town Someone Leaves Town.


It is my interest in the occult and the gothic that makes we wonder about Fantasy.

Two things:

1) About the FLDS: I think that both churches have a (understandable)wariness about the state, coming all the way from how Smith was treated in Kirkland and Navouu. In the midst of protestant mainstreaming the LDS has tried to forget that, but the FLDS never has had reason to. From my reading, I think the line between quiet religious community, prone to collective order, but not really dangerous moved when Jeff's became involved. He seems to be the impetuous to almost all of the more dangerous elements, from the clothes to the hospitals to the lost boys to the sexual exploitation of teenagers, to Arizona's relationship with BC, all of it went squirrelly post Jeffs. Which leads to the question, of how Jeff's managed to weasel his way in there--and the new issue of Dialouge makes the argument that there was a set pattern for people to exploit from the 1940s onward, which makes a defense of the FLDS more difficult. these
two entries about the problem on the v. good, but orthodox LDS group blog, By Common Consent, provide some useful context.

2) About the recommendations. I appreciate them immensely. Just a data point or two. Firstly, I tried to get through Johnathon Strange, because it struck me as right up my alley. I found it oddly officious, technocratic, and dull. I think that might be its point, but I could not get past 100 pages or so. About Terry Prachett, I know that he has a rep as a great comic novelist, so I might be stepping on some toes, but I found the work to be repetitive and twee. I knew where the jokes were going, miles before they got there. But I have printed off the books I have not read, and taken them to the library. May even report back.

This seems like a good place to start, and it is an open thread. I have read some SF but the only fantasy i have read is some Gaiman (Sandman, American Gods, Anasi Boys, Smoke and Mirror), the His Dark Materials trilogy, Harry Potter, CS Lewis and the Hobbit. I liked some of Gaiman, loved the Dark Materials, was mostly bored by Potter, hate Lewis deeply, and the Hobbit's politics and aesthetics were difficult for me to swallow. As part of my general goal to be a well read human being and to read widely w/i genre fiction, I want to read some fantasy. Robert Jordan and their ilk make me really nervous, for a a variety of reasons, including time commitment, concerns about the quality of writing. Making Light readers have steered me right before--where would people recommend for reading fantasy or even about fantasy?

I keep hoping one of the cable channels will be brave and show I Dismember Mama, but instead me and my mother watched Torchsong Trilogy. It is sort of a ritual.

As someone who does street photography for a living, it is strange how terrified you can get after taking photos. A couple of anecdotes from my recent trip to San Fransisco:

!) I really wanted to shoot the giant American flag beset with plastic eagles, in the airport customs line. It was a fantastic example of kitsch, and looked disturbingly like similar objects in Mussolini's Italy. I did not want to get delayed, or turned back on the flight. So I self censored.

2) I did take a photo of the new federal building on 6th Street, including the security zones. I was convinced as I set up my shots, that secuirty officers or police would get in, and arrest me. That the ear bugs of paranoia seem so natural to me is so science fiction like.

I get stopped maybe twice a month to delete photos, or to stop taking photos, and I often get threatened with physical harm. There is a number of other anecdotal evidence that suggests that other street photographer's have had similar experiences.

Aside, from tourists, 150 years of photography has rested on the ability to take photos outside, of common things. I wonder what would have happened to Eugene Atget or August Sanders or Gary Winograd or any of the New Topographers if the circumstances were the same?

It is this surreal push and pull narrative. Because we also have the Abu Gharib situation. Everything is documented but documentation has become more and more dangerous...

Anyways, the photo is excellent.

Bruce:

I will make more conventional my capitalization and the like. When I
don't, it is the distinction between chatting and informal information
seeking versus more formal discourses. I found the paragraph about
searching and not seeking, moving, and the best argument in favour of
that work.

Thank You

Anthony

marilee

i have enough anecdotal evidence to suggest that rama is vital, i just dont know why?

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