The second in our apparently-ongoing series of baroque octopoid lighting fixtures, here is a lovely example of neo-Goth-octo home accessory art. I can hardly wait save up my $8,500 US and gibber away the hours happily under its mellow glow.
Link from Defrost Indoors at Bridlepath and via Neatorama.
None. I stole the quiz from Pharyngula, though, so I’m not ruling out the possibility that he is a marine biologist and athiest missionary to the People’s Republic of Washington DC.
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I am:
Few have had such broad commercial success with aggressively experimental prose techniques. |
Which science fiction writer are you?
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Well I, personally, didn’t marry a spy, although there’s still time (interested parties leave contact details in comments section, plz). No indeed, this is a piece from the Guardian, interviews with three wives of, all of whom are well past their “tempt the Russian delegation with your best meatballs, won’t you dear?” stage, and only some of whom have recovered. Fascinating reading, if only for the satisfaction of thinking to yourself Well, I’d at least have shot someone for fuck’s sake! Might as well stay in the playgroup, you lot of wankers.
Special bonus pointlessly salacious and juvenile tidbit: the interviewer’s name is Fanny.
In 1939, 18-year-old Betty Farmer was being wooed by a man who was not only good-looking and charismatic, but also, apparently, had a job “in the film business”. When he whisked her off for a few days holiday in Jersey, she was surprised by the two rather shady looking men who accompanied them, but kept her concerns to herself.
On their second day away, over Sunday lunch, with the sunshine dancing on the sea outside, Betty‘s paramour kissed her briefly, before hurling himself through a closed window and running down the beach, chased by the police. Betty had no choice but to rely on his repeated promise: “I shall go, but I shall always come back.”
With a lede like that, how can you not finish the piece?
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There are an infinite to the power of ten number of games, tricks, memes, generators, and other gizmos to give writers the well-deserved smack on the bottom or the top that they need to be really creative, including Flash Fiction. One of the best Flash Fiction sites is David B. Dale‘s, and fortunately the standard there is high enough to give some feeble hope to us skeptics. Not enough, though, to override my belief that in very few cases do these artificially confining pretences lead to actually great writing. I can think of Ramsay Campbell‘s short story, “Heading Home,” which literally could not have been done in any art form other than writing. It is the least-filmable piece ever committed to mass market paperback. There is also the great Dorothy Parker‘s perfect poem “Two-Volume Novel,”
The sun’s gone dim, and
The moon’s turned black;
For I loved him, and
He didn’t love back.
But this, six-word flash fiction, and perhaps the most restrictive of those challenges, takes inspiration from this great work of Ernest Hemingway‘s
For Sale: Baby shoes, never worn.
How much daring must a human being have to go up against competition like this, or even to exist in the same sphere? Hemingway himself said it was his best work, and he was no slouch in the work or opinion departments, for all his boozing.
This is the roundup that Wired magazine collected from some of the top SciFi writers today(stolen from Wil Wheaton), and I must say that, however neat the idea, this is one sad sack of sentences. While some of them would make a good first line for a conventional novel
Kirby had never eaten toes before.
– Kevin Smith
most of them are rather laurel-resty
Don’t marry her. Buy a house.
– Stephen R. Donaldson
Hearteningly, a scant handful actually live up to the challenge and do justice to the reputations of the writers. It lights a fire in my soul and the souls of all good readers and writers when we see good or great writers writing this well:
It’s behind you! Hurry before it
– Rockne S. O’Bannon
Longed for him. Got him. Shit.
– Margaret Atwood
Machine. Unexpectedly, I’d invented a time
– Alan Moore
And here, to leave you with our ambiguously depressing thought for the day, is Hemingway’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech, as read at the banquet by the American ambassador to Sweden. At two minutes and ten seconds, it is in its own right Flash Speechifying, but nonetheless eternal for that. If the player doesn’t work for you the text over the jump, and here is a Realplayer version of Hemingway himself reading it; if any of you can convert that horrific medium to an MP3 I would be much obliged.
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Look, he’s got a new campaign manager! This should be teh awesomeness!
I always wondered what Dean was yelling. Stolen from It’s a Definite Maybe.
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raincoaster 