Ted Rabinowitz's Blog, page 28

Like Medieval Manuscripts?

So do I!

So check out this blog from the justly world-famous British Museum.

The Most Banned Books of the 21st Century So Far

Read 'em and weep.

http://www.ala.org/bbooks/frequentlychallengedbooks/top10

Notice the frontrunner - Captain Underpants.

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Then FEATHERBED is for you.

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All our FeatherBedders are dressed in appropriate work clothes and schooled in corporate etiquette (if you are an IT specialist, more schooled in etiquette). As liberal arts graduates in an economic downturn, they are guaranteed to be 100% happy to be at your desk, and 100% unable to take your job from you.

Why should you fight boredom-coma, be forced to play in a sports fantasy league, or laugh one more time at your boss's retelling of Conan O'Brien's monologue? Let FeatherBed take the weight off your shoulders!

FeatherBed - for the rest of your life.

I Just Saw History's Creepiest Romantic Comedy on Cable

Rumor Has It.

It was made about eight years ago, with an all-star cast and crew: Jennifer Aniston, Mark Ruffalo, Kevin Costner, Shirley Maclaine. Rob Reiner directed it. But A-Listers notwithstanding....

Creepiest. Film. Ever.

The story was serious, psychologically incestuous dysfunction treated as a lighthearted romp,  as a "cute confused girl realizes she made a mistake, and everything turns out all right in the end." Made me want to take a shower afterward.

Middle Age-

-is Nature's way of saying "I want to see someone younger."

Top Seven Places To Find Cthulhu

1. On the Internet, of course. That is not dead which can Googled be...
https://www.facebook.com/iaiacthulhufhtagn
http://www.cthulhu.com
http://lolthulhu.com
http://hub.yourtakeonwords.com/hub/cthulhu
http://www.cthulhu.org
http://www.callsforcthulhu.com
2. Oklahoma City, OK
3. Cthulhu on eBay
4. Cambridge University - We thought those Brits looked kinda fishy:
5. Providence, RI - Of course - Lovecraft's hometown. The Necronomicon is held there every August.
6. Salem, MA - the witchy model for Lovecraft's infamous Arkham, MA.
7. Goose Island Brewpub, Chicago - for its limited run Cthulhu beer.

Top Seven Places To Find Chulhu

1. On the Internet, of course. That is not dead which can Googled be...
https://www.facebook.com/iaiacthulhufhtagn
http://www.cthulhu.com
http://lolthulhu.com
http://hub.yourtakeonwords.com/hub/cthulhu
http://www.cthulhu.org
http://www.callsforcthulhu.com
2. Oklahoma City, OK
3. Cthulhu on eBay
4. Cambridge University - We thought those Brits looked kinda fishy:
5. Providence, RI - Of course - Lovecraft's hometown. The Necronomicon is held there every August.
6. Salem, MA - the witchy model for Lovecraft's infamous Arkham, MA.
7. Goose Island Brewpub, Chicago - for its limited run Cthulhu beer.

Secondary Flowers

What is it about secondary-world fantasy that makes people write such stilted, archaic prose? It seems that the cruder the technology, the more ornate the language becomes. It's almost as if some writers imagine that they're writing medieval chronicles...without ever considering that maybe, just maybe, those chronicles sounded fresh and contemporary to 12th Century ears. Kind of like this:
In one Age, called the Third Age by some, an Age yet to come, an Age long past,  a wind rose in the Mountains of Mist. The wind was not the beginning,. There are neither beginnings nor endings to the turning of the wheel of time. But it was a beginning. Born below the ever cloud-capped peaks that gave the mountains their name. the wind blew east, out across the sand hills, once the shore of a great ocean, before the Breaking of the World. Down it flailed into the Two Rivers, into the Tangled forest called the Westwood, and beat at two men walking with a cart and horse down the rock-strewn track called the Quarry Road. For all that spring should have come a good month since, the wind carried an icy chill as if it would rather bear snow. (Richard Jordan)
Or, if you don't have a lot of time:  Two men walked down the Quarry Road. An icy wind blew on them.
For the record, I've got no problem with ornate language. I'm a writer, damn it. I love words; Roger Zelazny is a god to me, and Ray Bradbury at least a saint. What I have a problem with is language that's flowery to no purpose. So compare that flowery to this flowery:
The island of Gont, a single mountain that lifts its peak a mile above the storm-racked Northeast Sea, is a land famous for wizards. From the towns in its high valleys and the ports on its dark narrow bays, many a Gontishman has gone forth to serve the Lords of the Archipelago in their cities as wizard or mage, or, looking for adventure, to wander working magic from isle to isle of all Earthsea. Of these, some say the greatest, and surely the greatest voyager, was the man called Sparrowhawk, who in his day became both dragonlord and Archmage. His life is told of in the Deed of Ged and in many songs, but this is a tale of the time before his fame, before the songs were made. (Ursula LeGuin)
Actually, it isn't even flowery; it just has that incantatory music that Jordan tries for, and fails to achieve. One line less, too...but how much more solid detail it conveys. You learn about the main character; you learn about his home island; you learn that his world is filled with islands, oceans, and magic; and all in one line less...

The Awful Possibility That Fantasy Is Dying

I know, how can I say that? Bookstores (the ones that are left, anyway) are practically vomiting fantasies, from Twilight to Potter to Tramp-Stamped Werewolves in Heat (I swear I'm going to write that one, so watch out) to the latest Gaiman to the latest angel/demon/ghost/zombie/fanwank.

But the number of genuinely shocking ideas in fantasy is plummeting...at least the ratio of ideas to verbiage is plummeting.

There was a time, back in the 1980s, when the very notion of contemporary fantasy - magic in the here and now, as opposed to some alternate world - was mind-blowingly original. After decades of nothing but Tolkien and Hildebrand, Conan and Frazetta, Emma Bull had written The War for the Oaks, and Matt Wagner had published the first (and best) Mage serial.

Then Tim Powers and James Blaylock came up with their unique takes on magic. (Powers practically invented a new system for each of his novels.) Neil Gaiman started The Sandman, which, in addition to reviving Arabian Nights-style meta-stories, presented a cosmos that was practically animist in its reliance on embodied universal forces. Alan Moore took the supernatural plot devices in comic books and turned them into an entire mythos of its own, and Jamie Delano and John Ridgeway extended his vision into a critique of Thatcher's England with Hellblazer. (For those unfamiliar with that first grotesque year of John Constantine, run out and buy Original Sins, which proves that those first issues still carry some of their punch, a quarter of a century later.)

All of these were filled with brilliant ideas...so brilliant, they're still being copied, twenty years later, over and over and over, and each duplication is a little more faded, until books like My Demon Lover or Earth Angel or Tooth and Claw (and no, these aren't real books, I hope) crowd the F/SF shelves. They depend on the power of their central ideas for a lift - borrowed interest - and those ideas aren't in the least original. They've aged from originality to convention to cliché to...well, frankly, fetish. ("Paranormal romance: It's the soft-core porn with extra bite!")

Why the Original "Star Trek" Was So Much Better Than the Subsequent Series

The Mission Log Podcast has uncovered this third-season memo from Gene Roddenberry to the writers about maintaining and enhancing the characters and their relationships. Basically, everything he suggests is the OPPOSITE of what they did in The Next Generation. They ENCOURAGED inter-character conflict. They demanded-

Well, read it for yourself.