An Armistice Day Wish

A place to stay
Enough to eat
Somewhere old heroes shuffle safely down the street
Where you can speak out loud
About your doubts and fears
And what's more no-one ever disappears
You never hear their standard issue kicking in your door.
You can relax on both sides of the tracks
And maniacs don't blow holes in bandsmen by remote control
And everyone has recourse to the law
And no-one kills the children anymore.
And no one kills the children anymore.

--from "The Gunner's Dream", Roger Waters, 1981

Collision of two LJ discussions

docbrite mentions an idea that she and Chris have been bouncing around for a while:

Shaq must be the next James Bond.

(Poppy's discussion of the reasons for the perfect, obvious sensibility of this perfectly obvious, sensible choice comprises several excellent points but conveniently overlooks the fact that Shaq's film career comprises several films widely considered to be among the worst ever made, including both Kazamm and Steel.)

And crowleycrow has been discussing one of his brushes with magical things from a past time--specifically, how HPL actually pronounced the name of his most famous topic:

Cthulhu. Well of COURSE you want to know how it sounded as passed from Lovecraft to de Camp. Unfortunately, though the sound he made lingers in my haunted brain unerasably, the sound itself was... was... indescribable. It was not merely a matter of accent or what letters were silent. It was a sound like no other. Would to God I had not heard it!

What made these two things collide in my head, besides the fact that I am generally sleep-deprived, is the conclusion of Poppy's post:

If you like Shaq or James Bond, I think you'll see the beauty of it. If so, spread the word. You never know ... like Tinkerbell or that giant oyster-thing in Robert Arthur's "Do You Believe In Ghosts?",if enough people have faith in it, maybe it will come true.

What if the Lovecraftian horrors were not true, but are becoming true because of our belief in them? That would make the opening sentence of "The Call of Cthulhu" even more dreadful, and would help explain why his protagonists are so often desperate to keep other people from learning more.

Making Lists

james_nicoll points to a discussion of the SFBC's list of the 50 most significant works of fantasy and science fiction of the past 50 years which bemoans the fact that there is only one work of fantasy on the list from the last 20 years (Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone) and wonders what this says about the creativity of fantasy.

Of course, of the fifty books listed from the last fifty years, only two of the sf are one of the sf is from the last twenty years (Snow Crash, 1991; I had mis-remembered Ender's Game as 1986, but it's 1985). For that matter, only 15 of the works on the list as a whole were published in the last thirty years (and one of those was written decades earlier and not published until the author was successful enough to get a second look for it), meaning that more than twice as many of the major works of sf and fantasy were published in the first two decades of this period than in the three decades since.

Which indicates that, of course, fantasy and science fiction were vastly better when I was a kid than they are now, and the music you punks listen to is just noise.

This type of list is always going to be slanted towards older works, for three reasons. One is that the older works have had longer to find their audience and show their influence. Does anyone think that someone making a list like this in 1982 would have put The Book of the New Sun or The Mists of Avalon anywhere near the top ten? I mean, the brilliance of the former and the popularity of the latter were both instantly obvious, but New Sun was assumed to be too much its own thing to ever be influential and the latter was dismissed as minor and likely to be forgotten. It takes time to see what time is going to say. In fifteen years, Perdido Street Station will have pushed something off that list.

Another is that the canon is a pyramid. As a genre, or art form, begins, the audience is smaller and each work is more likely to contribute something huge and shaping to the body of work. The canon begins to cement almost immediately, and works in it at the start are likely to continue to influence it, for better and worse, for a long time.

Combinging the above, of course, is the fact that the golden age of science fiction is twelve.

These effects are visible in almost any list of this kind--the VH-1 "100 Greatest Songs of Rock 'N' Roll" a few years back had only one song from the preceding decade, and only five from the decade before that. (It was a fairly good list of the Greatest Rock Songs 1963-1983, though.) The AFI Top 100 Films list in 1998 did a better job of including recent works, including eight films from the 1990s--but of those, only one finished in the top sixty.

What this all says to me is that the makers of this kind of list should automatically disqualify any work less than N years old, and the list-makers should make conscious efforts to resist the "of course it's important, it has always been important" effect that keeps minor works like Fill in the Blank Here on lists like this instead of Much More Important Recent Work Here. And I stand by that.

Best post-election cartoon I've seen so far

From the always reliable Tom Toles:

My American Accent

No surprise, given that I learned to speak in Ohio and have parents with no identifiable accent*.

What American accent do you have? Your Result: The Midland "You have a Midland accent" is just another way of saying "you don't have an accent." You probably are from the Midland (Pennsylvania, southern Ohio, southern Indiana, southern Illinois, and Missouri) but then for all we know you could be from Florida or Charleston or one of those big southern cities like Atlanta or Dallas. You have a good voice for TV and radio.
The West
The Inland North
Boston
North Central
Philadelphia
The South
The Northeast
What American accent do you have? Take More Quizzes

*Actually, my father has a very deep Bostonian accent, but only if speaking with another Bostonian or if he is physically within 60 miles of Boston Common.

My generation's Joseph N. Welch

Those of you who care about this have probably already seen or read it, but for my own records so I can find it later:

Keith Olbermann's "There is no line this President has not crossed--nor will not cross" speech.

And finally tonight, a Special Comment.

On the 22nd of May, 1856, as the deteriorating American political system veered towards the edge of the cliff, Congressman Preston Brooks of South Carolina, shuffled into the Senate of this nation, his leg stiff from an old dueling injury, supported by a cane. And he looked for the familiar figure of the prominent Senator from Massachusetts, Charles Sumner.

Brooks found Sumner at his desk, mailing out copies of a speech he had delivered three days earlier — a speech against slavery.

The Congressman matter-of-factly raised his walking stick in mid-air, and smashed its metal point, across the Senator's head.

Congressman Brooks hit his victim repeatedly. Senator Sumner somehow got to his feet and tried to flee. Brooks chased him, and delivered untold blows to Sumner's head. Even though Sumner lay unconscious and bleeding, on the Senate floor, Brooks finally stopped beating him, only because his cane finally broke.

Others will cite John Brown's attack on the arsenal at Harper's Ferry as the exact point after which the Civil War became inevitable.

In point of fact, it might have been the moment — not when Brooks broke his cane over the prostrate body of Senator Sumner - but when voters in Brooks's district started sending him new canes.

( Remainder of the text behind the cut. )

Also surprising no one

You paid attention during 100% of high school!

85-100% You must be an autodidact, because American high schools don't get scores that high! Good show, old chap!

Do you deserve your high school diploma?
Create a Quiz

I might or might not have noticed that the quiz misspelled "Twelth Night". Other than the Shakespeare, most of this was junior high stuff.

Tired of feeling old

I'm tired of having thoughts that start "Just a couple of years ago--no, wait, make that decades." Everything I did in college is a minimum of 20 years ago next month; high school, 25.

I'm tired of realizing that I'm older than FOO was when FOO did BAR. This week, it was realizing that I'm old than Ed Asner was when he began playing the gruff, burned-out but angrily avuncular Lou Grant.

But most of all, I'm tired of people dying around me. I was never close to Jack Williamson, but I felt his presence in the field. I'm much more personally affected by by the death of Sondra "Sandy" Swift, an accomplished literary scholar who did some wonderful work on John Crowley. Sandy was one of the first people I met completely through the ICFA, and I will, cannot but, associate it with her until I, too, am dead.