Heh!You know, based on personal experience, I think that this might be a very lucrative market, but I need to ask Sharon* if it’s prudent for me to offer a more thorough analysis of the potential dynamics of such a publication.
*Love of my life, light of the cosmos, she who must be obeyed, my wife.
Yesterday, I posted H.P. Lovecraft’s quote on Republicans, and I also forwarded it to my Lovecraft-reading family.
My brother, Stephen, aka “No I’m Not Wearing a Wookie Costume, I’m Just Hairy,” asked the question, “Given Lovecraft’s fondness for slimy spineless creatures, it is strange that he didn’t have anything to say about democrats…”
Well, according to the Donovan K. Loucks, the Webmaster at The H. P. Lovecraft Archive, who posted in the comments, the author did make his feelings known on both parties:
“Democrats invariably ape the grotesque crudities of the lower orders and make conspicuous clowns of themselves; jeering at civilised speech, manners, and standards of accuracy and beauty instead of respecting these things and urging their beloved masses to work up toward them. As long as they persist in this position, they will win nothing but the distrust and hostility of men well-disposed toward civilisation and the fullest realisation of the human personality.”
(H. P. Lovecraft to Woodburn Harris, 9 November 1929)
Given Lovecraft’s rather well documented nativist attitudes, though biographer L. Sprague de Camp implies that his attitudes moderated as he grew older, and that some of his statements were a way he taunted people that he did not like, this is an unsurprising statement from him.
Interestingly enough, he was a fan of FDR and an Ardent New Dealer according to the Wiki.
Truth be told, I am kind of torn as to whether, if I had a time machine, I would want to meet him or not.
My record sucks, and I will take Abraham Lincoln’s advice, “Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak out and remove all doubt.”
But I will leave you with a political quote on the horror that is Republicans the man who best understood horror in the 20th century,* Howard Phillips Lovecraft:
As for the Republicans—how can one regard seriously a frightened, greedy, nostalgic huddle of tradesmen and lucky idlers who shut their eyes to history and science, steel their emotions against decent human sympathy, cling to sordid and provincial ideals exalting sheer acquisitiveness and condoning artificial hardship for the non-materially-shrewd, dwell smugly and sentimentally in a distorted dream-cosmos of outmoded phrases and principles and attitudes based on the bygone agricultural-handicraft world, and revel in (consciously or unconsciously) mendacious assumptions (such as the notion that real liberty is synonymous with the single detail of unrestricted economic license or that a rational planning of resource-distribution would contravene some vague and mystical ‘American heritage’…) utterly contrary to fact and without the slightest foundation in human experience? Intellectually, the Republican idea deserves the tolerance and respect one gives to the dead.
H/t Fafblog for the quote, which is being circulated by movie director, and Lovecraft fan, Joe Dante.
*Or at least pre Holocaust, since I believe that it fundamentally redefined horror in the Western world by putting the lie to the myth of man’s moral progress..
Leon H. Wolf reviews Meghan McCain’s book Dirty, Sexy Politics:
This article, of course, is not about capital punishment. It is a book review of Dirty, Sexy Politics by Meghan McCain. However, the above discussion is relevant because I initially had reservations about writing this book review at all. After all, it is clear to everyone who has read Meghan McCain’s twitter feed, her “articles” on The Daily Beast, or her ill-fated campaign blog that Meghan is not a paragon of clear reasoning, exemplar of familiarity with facts, nor a model of English language expertise. And after subjecting myself to 194 continuous pages of her “writing,” it became clear that none of the above-described works truly plumbed the depths of mental vacuity in which Ms. McCain aimlessly and cluelessly drifts.
This presented a dilemma.
It is impossible to read Dirty, Sexy Politics and come away with the impression that you have read anything other than the completely unedited ramblings of an idiot. This being a professional website for which I have a great deal of respect, I searched for a more eloquent or gentle way to accurately phrase the previous sentence – but could not find one.
Sometimes a bad review is a joy, though I would argue that this one is a longer than it needs to be.
Go read.
H/t Ken Silverstein.
There is a reason why the comments at io9 are so rude.
Space Goatse†
The Big Bear Solar Observatory (BBSO) has published what is the most detailed photo of a The clearest photo of a sunspot we’ve seen thus far.
But this is not what I, or many of the folks who commented about the picture.
It was about 50-50 between people who thought that it looked like the eye of Sauron, and people who thought that it resembled a certain unspeakable Internet meme.
Me, I never saw the Lord of the Rings movies, so you can guess where my mind went.
In any case, if you want to review the comments on the thread, and you understand the context,* then you may find significant amusement regarding what is otherwise a straightforward science story.
H/t hedgehog on by invitation only Stellar Parthenon BBS for finding this little “gem”.
*If you don’t know what Goatse is, for the sake of all that is holy, do not Google it!
†Thank SupaChupacabra at io9 for this bit of wit.
There is a site our there called I Write Like, where you post some of your writing, and it says who your write like.
I chose a few posts, ones without extensive quoting, and this had it saying Stephen King, and this had me writing like Dan Brown, and this has me writing like Dan David Foster Wallace.
Meh.
When he died, Samuel Clemens, aka Mark Twain, left instructions that his notes for an autobiography not be published for 100 years.
Well, time’s up, he died in 1910, and plans are being made to publish the 5000 some odd pages of his notes intended for his memoir:
The creator of Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn and some of the most frequently misquoted catchphrases in the English language left behind 5,000 unedited pages of memoirs when he died in 1910, together with handwritten notes saying that he did not want them to hit bookshops for at least a century.
That milestone has now been reached, and in November the University of California, Berkeley, where the manuscript is in a vault, will release the first volume of Mark Twain’s autobiography. The eventual trilogy will run to half a million words, and shed new light on the quintessentially American novelist.
It goes on my to be read pile.
Specifically, Tom Harkin is proposing a an amendment to the finance reform bill to limit ATM fees to 50¢.
I approve of the idea, particularly because it’s an in-your-face to the free market worshippers, but I’m not sure if it is a good idea for the finance reform bill.
As to the Al Franken book in question, it was the book Why Not Me?
Hw wrote his (fictitious) successful quest for the presidency using populist anger over ATM fees.
April Winchell, the “21st funniest person in Los Angeles,” has uncovered a gem.
In Barack Obama’s memoir, Dreams From My Father, he quotes some of his friend Ray, who, “Cursed like a Motherf^%$er.”
Well, that’s not special, except for the fact that Barack Obama recorded the audiobook, so you can go to Ms. Winchell’s site, and hear Barack Obama saying things like, “There are white folks, and then there are ignorant motherf%$#ers like you.”
Snerk.
So says Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, as well as a number of news sources.
We are so due for some sort of divine smiting right now.
I really can’t speak to the qualities of Atlas Shrugged, though I did read Rand’s treatise The Virtue of Selfishness, and found it extremely unpleasant, both from the writing and the underlying philosophy.
As such, I find this bit from South Park (1:13) funny.
It bears noting, though I do not particularly care from a literary perspective.
I hated Catcher in the Rye.
There is an author named Bill Martin, who wrote a political treatise called Ethical Marxism: The Categorical Imperative of Liberation
There is another author named Bill Martin, who wrote a children’s book called, Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See?
They are different authors, but it appears that the the right wing morons who control the State Board of Education did not realize this:
What do the authors of the children’s book Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See? and a 2008 book called Ethical Marxism: The Categorical Imperative of Liberation have in common?
Both are named Bill Martin and, for now, neither is being added to Texas schoolbooks.
In its haste to sort out the state’s social studies curriculum standards this month, the State Board of Education tossed children’s author Martin, who died in 2004, from a proposal for the third-grade section. Board member Pat Hardy, R-Weatherford, who made the motion, cited books he had written for adults that contain “very strong critiques of capitalism and the American system.”
Trouble is, the Bill Martin Jr. who wrote the Brown Bear series never wrote anything political, unless you count a book that taught kids how to say the Pledge of Allegiance, his friends said. The book on Marxism was written by Bill Martin, a philosophy professor at DePaul University in Chicago.
You see the phrase, “Brown bear, brown bear, what do I see?” is just so similar to, “that would in effect overturn the imperialist system, and that would depend on creating, as Mao saw, self-reliant economies, not liable to exploitation.“
The stupid, it burns us!!!!!
H/t La Figa
Robert B. Parker, author of the Spencer detective novels, and Erich Segal, author of Love Story have both died.
I don’t mean to imply that they were bad authors, I rather enjoyed reading the Spencer books, and I have never read Segal, and so cannot comment on his work at all, but rather I am saying that their books were decidedly mass market, as opposed to the more erudite stuff that you see reviewed in gushing tones on NPR.
When he says:
When you peel back the pretty, shooty layers of the Palin onion, there’s no onion. It’s just a conservative boiler plate mad lib: ‘Freedom is good and taxes are–ooh I need an adjective–how about, I don’t know, silly?’ And the worst part it’s a mad lib delivered as though it were the hard-earned wisdom of a life well lived.
It’s just magical, and it starts at 3:40, though the first part is amusing too.
It’s not as good as Stephen Colbert’s takedown of her (scroll down). But it is very good.
Brilliant
‘Moby-Dick’ to be Rewritten in Emoticons
Someone needs to get a f$%#ing life.
Too True.
I tried to download Atlas Shrugged on my Kindle but all you get is a file that says “Grow the f#$@ up.”
12:17 PM Mar 10th from web
(#$@ mine)
It appears that, according to Matthew Lynn, the credit crunch was not caused by Lap Dancers, Cocaine, £900 bottles of wine, sexual promiscuity, and general hedonism.
Whoa, that’s such a relief.
Actually, it’s not a relief, because fixing this problem will be much more complex, and much more painful than anything we would have to do in the hedonism scenario.
Well, it’s time for the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, 2008 Results.
I’m relieved that there people who write worse than I do, even though they are trying to write badly.
The winner, if you can call it that, was one Garrison Spik of Washington, D.C. :
Theirs was a New York love, a checkered taxi ride burning rubber, and like the city their passion was open 24/7, steam rising from their bodies like slick streets exhaling warm, moist, white breath through manhole covers stamped “Forged by DeLaney Bros., Piscataway, N.J.”
I’m impressed….Horrified, but impressed.