Hal Duncan's Blog, page 16

Not a Bad Word

Krystal pays lip service to the notion that each idiom has its own standard, claims to be saying that "genre" is not a bad word:


"Quality comes in different forms: there is Cole Porter and there is Prokofiev; the Beatles and Bach; Savion Glover and Mikhail Baryshnikov—the difference between them is not one of talent or proficiency but of sensibility."

As in music and dance, so too in

The Stuff the Idiom Was Made On

So why, specifically, the rhetorical pretense that category fiction is about "story" rather than the sensational? Here's the nub of it:Blunt force disruptions as narrative triggers, stakes so extraordinary as to be incredible, complications solid as a fist in the face, events as physical as an airship exploding... it's only natural that these are more engaging. But that's the rub: they appeal to

The Story of the Return of Story

If Grossman's "literary revolution" is not really against modernism, is it still nonetheless a return to "the good old days of good old-fashioned story-telling, disdained by the modernists"? Do we just need to substitute "contemporary realists" for the last word in that sentence?No. That's geekspeak bullshit, "story" a rhetorical pretense that it's the substructure of narrative somehow being

Faut vous dire, monsieur

Arthur Krystal points to Lev Grossman's Time article:


"Literature, Grossman believes, is undergoing a revolution: high-voltage plotting is replacing the more refined intellection associated with modernism. Modernism and postmodernism, in fact, are ausgespielt, and the next new thing in fiction isn’t issuing from an élitist perch but, rather, is geysering upward from the supermarket shelves. In

Is That So?

Is that so? asks Arthur Krystal.Le Guin's insistence that literature is "the extant body of written art" is actually only a step in the right direction: the correct word is not "art" but "stuff." The sentence, "My doctor gave me some literature to look over," is a perfectly valid sentence, and the particular literature in such a usage is clearly not written art, just stuff -- leaflets on whatever

It's Coloreds. Not That There's Anything Wrong With It!

Last May, a piece I wrote for the magazine about colored people’s new-found respectability caused the digital highway to buckle ever so slightly. Despite my professed admiration for many colored people, I was blasted for thinking that human people are superior to colored people, and for not noticing that the zeitgeist had come and gone while I was presumably immersed in “The Golden Bowl.”

Fuck Gangnam Style!

MAH style is da bomb diggy bomb da dang da dang diggy diggy.



Just so you know.

Icarus #14

Now out:

The Dead Man's Waltz

This is awesome:



Emmeline - The Dead Man's Waltz from William Johnstone on Vimeo.

And I'm not gonna say any more than that. I'm too busy listening to the band's other stuff on SoundCloud.

Vellum, Vélum, Pergament

In the process of spring cleaning the study -- and yes, it appears my flagrant disregard for the diurnal cycle has scaled up to the seasonal; Calendar, you may now join your brother Clock in kissing my hairy arse -- it's become obvious that I have, well, rather a few copies of editions of this book or that in various languages other than English. Like, enough to build a small book fort with and