-Since I’m all for breaking down fences: Six Horror Books to use when arguing with people who claim not to read horror. (Couple this with the discussion of the horrific aspects of The World According to Gard from the other day and you’ve got an interesting conversation.)
-Noir posters capture the pulpy joy of Superhero movies
-“…there’s no place in our culture anymore for greatness of any kind, because greatness usually comes from personality, and personality has become quite unfashionable. It’s all a lowest common denominator culture we’re living in now,”
BOOK REVIEWS
-Odd Girl Out by Timothy Zahn
-Suffer the Little Children by Donna Leon
-Short Story Review: Old Testament Wisdom by Frank Bill
-Year of the Dog by Henry Chang
-Double Cross by Malorie Blackman
-The Hangman’s Handyman by Hake Talbot.
-The Red Seal by Natalie Sumner Lincoln
MOVIE/TV/DVD REVIEWS
-The Shield 7.10
-On Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye, “It’s a cheap, shitty Hollywood ending, and it deserves nothing but scorn.”
MISC.
-Hey look, someone is talking about applying the Bechdel Test to books. Wait, I’m having a Deja vu moment
-On chapters
-Ladies and gentlemen, Cliff Burns
-All sorts of free ideas from Warren Ellis
-Another Free idea
-“I start to write a minor figure and lo and behold, they rise up, howl and grab a larger slice of the action than I’d ever anticipated.”
-“Here we see again the importance of the journey. That may be one final reason for the strange construction of God’s message. Maybe God, above all, wanted to make the command as urgent as possible. Consider the fact that lekh and l’kha have the exact same spelling in the Torah scroll, which is written without vowels. A Hebrew reader encountering these words for the first time, without vowels, might see them as saying “Go, go” – a repetition that emphasizes the pressing nature of the order. Maybe God is saying, Go – GO, already. And so, as with any mitzvah (commandment) we are asked to observe, it is even more important for Abram or for the artist to just get started than it is to immediately and deeply appreciate the journey on all the many levels contained in this rich command. Of course, as artists, as independent spirits, we don’t like being told what to do. But what if “God” was not some external taskmaster but some inner voice, something in partnership with our innermost instincts? After all, the translation of go to yourself suggests that it would be impossible to fulfill this mitzvah in a way that was inconsistent with one’s core self. If this is true, the rewards and the insights will start to become manifest once the journey is underway. Right now, though, the crucial thing is to get started.”
-“I think writing has to do with the love of the story, no matter the length. Every word counts especially in a mystery short story. In real life, crimes are solved rather quickly, or often not at all – otherwise we wouldn’t have all those stacks of cold cases for law students to filter through and discover new technology makes it possible to find and convict a killer that the past let go free. Writing a short story is (for me) like working against time on a case. Within this realm, I can play detective and villain and still sleep at night. And I can be done a lot sooner than when I’m writing a novel.”
-Pg. 99 of Charlie Huston’s Every Last Drop
-Duane lets slip one of his secrets and also asks an interesting question.
