Hal Johnson's Blog, page 29

A garland of quotations XXV

Love passions are like parables,
By which men still mean something else.
•Samuel Butler, Hudibras II (1664).

It’s a Puritan reflex of seeking other orders behind the visible, also known as paranoia.
•Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow (1973)

The South Church of Boston was first heated in the winter of 1783. There was much criticism of such indulgence, and the Evening Post of January 25 burst into denunciatory verse: ‘Extinct the sacred fires of love, Our zeal grown cold and de...

A garland of quotations XXIV

To write in hissing dispraise of our more successful fellow-craftsman, and of those who admire him! that is not a clean or pretty trade. It seems, alas! an easy one, and it gives pleasure to so many. It does not even want good grammar. But it pays—well enough even to start and run a magazine with, instead of scholarship and taste and talent! humor, sense, wit, and wisdom! It is something like the purveying of pornographic pictures: some of us look at them and laugh, and even buy. To be a purchas...

Who really killed JFK?

No book of mine is even remotely like this essay, but you may wish to look them over and see if you would like to purchase or preorder one anyway. I made a beautiful button you can click to see them all!

The shiny, candy-like button

On the fifth page of Superman #1, Superman himself says to a woman, “I thought you might be interested in learning I know that you killed Jack Kennedy.” She killed him, according to Superman’s theory, for “two-timing her,” which is perhaps a plausible motive, given Ke...

New orders of business

Now that we have completed our whirlwind tour of Impossible Histories, the book America loves to love, may I take a moment of your time to direct your attention (once again) to some wholly unrelated books?

These the books: Both Apprentice Academy: Sorcerers and Apprentice Academy: Knights, its companion volume, are now available for preorder. Those links go to bookshop.org, but your favorite larger internet retailer will also have them preorderable, and who am I to tell you what to do or where to...

A garland of quotations XXIII

Preorder my books and save me from the

crippling burden of endless quotation

Literature, instead of being an accessory, is the fundamental sine qua non of complete living. I am extremely anxious to avoid rhetorical exaggerations.
•Arnold Bennett, Literary Taste: How to Form It (1914).

His attempts were like the pawings of an imp, sent from hell to seize and torment some guilty wretch, such as are exhibited in some dramatic performance, which I have never seen acted without remembering my wedding-nig...

Annotations on the Impossible Histories postlude

Man is is love and loves what vanishes.
What more is there to say?

What more is there to say? I don’t really have a lot of annotations for this postlude. I’m glad it’s in there; I think it’s fun; it may persuade you not to attempt to construct a time machine, or if you do construct a time machine, only to use it to visit the future.

p. 387
•epigraph: Perhaps having beggared my powers of imagination, I opted here for the perhaps obvious:

Would we not shatter it to bits—and then
Re-mould it nearer to ...

A last word on epigraphs, more or less

It is possible that I am overfond of quotation (citation needed). [As has already been made manifest many times] I had originally intended to add an epigraph to the header of each chapter of Impossible Histories (buy said book here, or anywhere), a second epigraph at each midpoint “turn.” And then, as the MS. was nearing completion, and clearly needed to be cut down to reach the desired page count, I had a brain wave. Why not add a second quotation to each section, this one taken from the anony...

A garland of quotations XXII

Preorders still available!

To symbolize an unjust and ungrateful man, they depict TWO CLAWS OF AN HIPPOPOTAMUS TURNED DOWNWARDS. For this animal when arrived at its prime of life contends in fight against his father, to try which is the stronger of the two, and should the father give way he assigns him a place of residence, permitting him to live, and consorts himself with his own mother; but if his father should not permit him to hold intercourse with his mother, he kills him, being the stronger...

Annotations on global thermonuclear war

These penultimate annotations are for the final chapter of the book Impossible Histories (there’s a postlude), which you can acquire just about anywhere, including here or your local library. No pressure on that acquisition, but these notes might make more sense with the book in hand.

p. 368
•Global Thermonuclear War: Obviously this is a nod to War Games, because we cannot escape from ourselves.

•epigraph: The epigraph was to be:

Sex can be compared to atomic energy. It is a powerful force. Used wis...

The opposite of alternate history

I got married to the widow next door.
She’s been married seven times before.
•Herman’s Hermits (1965).

To craft an alternate history is generally to indulge in flights of fancy, and outside of the most banal observations (if Archduke Ferdinand had dodged the bullet, WWI would not have happened in 1914) most extrapolations are almost certainly wrong. But maybe it’s worth taking a moment to see how an event really can ripple through the centuries in an unforeseen fashion.

When Henry VIII executed Anne...