Hal Johnson's Blog, page 32

Notes towards an alternate history: Clive of India

What I like about Clive
Is that he is no longer alive.
There is a great deal to be said
For being dead.
•E.C. Bentley, Biography for Beginners (1905)

In his youth, sometime around 1960, Garrett Trapnell decided to kill himself. He placed a pistol against his heart, but then reconsidered, deciding he did not deserve a quick death, and shot himself in the stomach. A quick trip to the hospital, and Trapnell survived, to become Canada’s most notorious bank robber and hijacker. He died in prison, and much...

A garland of quotations XIV

Poets of the past
are the children of my concubines.
Poets to come
are infants of my pity.
The poets of the sky
are babies in my cradle.
•Allama Prabhu, Vacana 550 (C12); from A.K. Ramanujan’s Speaking of Siva.

Of course she sets up spurious miracles, but what is a woman of genius to do in the nineteenth century!
•Yeats, on Blavatsky, quoted in Bloom’s The American Religion.

Says Tom to Richard, “Churchill’s dead!” Says Richard, “Tom, you lie:“Old Rancour the report hath spread, “But Genius can...

Annotations on Romanticism

These are annotations for the twelfth chapter of the book Impossible Histories. I’m not saying you need to keep a copy of IH open next to you as you read, but it might make some things clearer?

p. 227
•epigraph: The epigraph was to be:

I think ill of the world, (continued Byron,) but I do not, as some cynics assert, believe it to be composed of knaves and fools. No, I consider that it is, for the most part, peopled by those who have not talents sufficient to be the first, and yet have one degree to...

Apprentice Academy: Sorcerers

Coming August 1, I’ll have a new book out, one that is completely different from Impossible Histories in every way (except for the fact that it is also from Macmillan/OddDot). This’ll be Apprentice Academy: Sorcerers, which is partially a handbook for students studying magic and partially a whirlwind tour of magicians from myth and legend but mostly a guide to cheating the system when the system is run by powerful wizards with long beards. It’s for “middle grade” kids and had great illustrations...

A garland of quotations XIII

His friends all called him Hal. ¶ It suited him exactly. He was as American as ham and eggs and as indistinguishable as everybody else.
•Whittaker Chambers, Witness (1952).

The disease of our times is an artificial and masochistic sophistication—the vague uneasiness that our values are false, that there is something wrong with being patriotic, honest, moral, and hardworking.
•Spiro Agnew, quoted in Wm. Manchester, The Glory and the Dream.

Think ’t the best voyageThat e’e...

Annotations on the First Crusade

These are annotations for the eleventh chapter of the book Impossible Histories. I’m not saying you need to keep a copy of IH open next to you as you read, but it might make some things clearer?

p. 210
•epigraph: The epigraph was to be:

Q.: Describe the hardships of the Crusaders on their way to the Holy Land.
A.: Many of them died of Salvation.
§Alexander Abingdon, Bigger and Better Boners (1952).

p. 211
•Druze: My original (or not original original, but early on) plan for this book was to make it a ...

A brief history of violence

For most of history, violence was really cool. The concept of cool didn’t exist yet, of course, but the concept of violence sure did; and man, was it boss. Violence was redemptive. It was wacky fun. Remember: When the three musketeers meet a new friend, first they try to kill him, and only afterwards does everyone shake hands.

This state of affairs lasted for a long time. There are only three real events in the history of violence since then: the humanist/imperialist dialectic; World War I; and t...

A garland of quotations XII

It is not liberty not to bury the mess one makes, he thought. No animal has more liberty than the cat; but it buries the mess it makes. The cat is the best anarchist.
•Ernest Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940).

Nihilism and bolshevism differ, but only in spelling.
•Edgar Saltus, The Imperial Orgy (1920).

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•1940 ad.

The anarchist was courageous; he risked his life to take a life. The nihilist was a man, despite his crimes o...

Impossible Histories annotations on Henry Wallace

p. 185
•What if the DNC chairman lost his gavel?: I thought I was so clever when I came up with the Wallace what-if, but it turns out that everyone else had already thought of it before me. Even in a non-counterfactual (i.e. factual) not-an-alternate-history context, Conrad Black wrote—this is in a “straight” biography of FDR—“Of all the hypotheses of American history, a Wallace presidency following the death in office of FDR is one of the more chilling ones.” [Black, Franklin Delano Roosevelt: C...

What if comics books raised their cover price?

Defenders of the comics medium have a tendency to rummage through recognized remnants of mankind’s vast history to pluck forth sanctioned symbols which might create among the cognoscenti the desired shock of recognition. Prehistoric wall paintings, oriental ideographs, Egyptian hieroglyphics, Medieval tapestries, illuminated manuscripts…
•Les Daniels, Comix (1971).

You can’t judge anything while it’s happening. Only retrospective truth is true. In 1984, People Magazine released a look back at the ...