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@ukjarry.bsky.social

Just another Matthew on the internet

574 Posts108 Follower39 Folgt
@ukjarry.bsky.social · 2w ago

Peter Barnes Barnes' People II (1984) "Insanity is the first sign of the zodiac" "On account of stupidity this world will be closed till further notice"

@ukjarry.bsky.social · 2w ago

Two decades-long mysteries solved at last! Illustrators I used to see in the colour supplements in the early 80s: Janet Woolley Mordillo

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@ukjarry.bsky.social · 3w ago

Fresh from the pages of Punch, May 1955, it's Capsulysses ! Ronald Searle imagines how a schock film adaptation of The Odyssey might look. scans from the great ronaldsearle.blogspot.com (no alt-text - images too detailed, and half my keyboard is dying)

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@ukjarry.bsky.social · 4w ago

Ancient Gaul's Eye View Of Britain - From Our Own Correspondent, Paris The Times 19 Oct, 1966 explaining the recent popularity of Asterix includes these comments from René Goscinny

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@ukjarry.bsky.social · 2mo ago

I couldn't figure why S. Clay Wilson work seemed so familiar 15 years ago, but today's tributes to John Blanche fantasy and sf gaming illustrations from White Dwarf, Sorcery! Warhammer when I was 9-13 are obviously what I was trying to recall for form, detail, colour, violence

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@ukjarry.bsky.social · 3mo ago

70 years too late some incidental humour relating to reviews of Anglo-Saxon Attitudes by Angus Wilson (1956), missing from Margaret Drabble's breeze block of a Wilson biography. The emotional literateur Elvira Portway in the book is based on Sonia Orwell. (1)

@ukjarry.bsky.social · 4mo ago

Much of Before She Met Me ( Julian Barnes 1983 ) is very funny Here an overly-precise attention to semantics and the changing of social attitudes in which this characer feels slightly left behind captures an era between David Nobbs and Amis:

He also hadn't masturbated, he realized, since the days when people thought about it as 'masturbation': that cool, frowning medico-biblical word. There'd been other words around, no doubt, but 'masturbation' was what it always felt like. Masturbation, fornication, defecation: serious words from his childhood, representing activities to be pondered before being indulged in. Nowadays it was all wanking and fucking and shitting, and no one thought twice about any of them. Well, he used shitting himself; a bit, privately. Jack, of course, talked about wanking quite casually, and fucking as well. Graham was still a little tentative about both usages. ' Wanking ', after all, was such a quiet, domestic, guiltless sort of word: it made it sound like a home craft.
@ukjarry.bsky.social · 4mo ago

The last 10-15 years of conservative writing has delivered some terrible straining prose, habits of style now institutionalised in Grokipedia. A drive-by shooting of an explanation from Ruth Rendell in "A Demon in My View":

The circumlocutions, the polysyllabic words were pathetic. They breathed a tense need for the preservation of an immaculate ego, they smelt of paranoia, fear of retribution, a desire to be thought well of by all men, even strangers. But men like that, he thought, cannot be reassured, their deep-seated belief in their own worthlessness is too great and too long-established…for self-confidence ever to be implanted in them.
@ukjarry.bsky.social · 4mo ago

Stumbling across Celia Dale's earliest story, "The Scream" in "The Bystander" August 25, 1937, the issue also has this glorious photo of Alastair Sim in the play "The Gusher"

Alastair Sim smiles at the camera, a pipe in one hand and the other holding a headhunter's long pole topped by a decorated skull
@ukjarry.bsky.social · 5mo ago

#hhgg Was Marvin the Paranoid Android in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy gay? Would he have been happier out of the closet? Well, not quite… But Douglas Adams did say Marvin was inspired by comedy writer Andrew Marshall’s worst sullen behaviour and in a 2 Oct 1983 NME interview:

Or was, as Adams explains: “Andrew has now left his wife, suddenly decided he’s gay and is now living with a man in Milton Keynes and has cheered up a lot. It’s curious.” So how does he feel about being immortalised as a robot? “He tells me he’s very annoyed about it but he makes sure that everybody else knows it’s him.”screenshot of Andrew Marshall, wearing a trim leather jacket over a white t-shirt, and a trim moustache. The screenshot is from "Film 86" and not "Out on Tuesday"
@ukjarry.bsky.social · 5mo ago

This from Charles Beaumont's "The Heavies - A retrospective appreciation of filmdom's black-hearted bad guys" (Playboy, Feb 1965) perfectly encapsulates the villainous western stereotypes in BLAZING SADDLES

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@ukjarry.bsky.social · 5mo ago

John Sladek – Bugs – 1990 Hoorah for logical semantic equivalences. Multiple times the AI computer intelligence in this novel argues “ Orwell was right “ explaining:

War is peace. I have looked it up in my own approved thesaurus. War means combat. To combat is to grapple. Grapple means grasp, and a grasp of English is a command of English. A command is an authorization. Authorization is consent. Consent is agreement. Agreement is harmony. Harmony is peace.Freedom is slavery. Because freedom means leeway, and leeway means play. To play is to venture, but a venture is a pursuit. One’s pursuit is one’s work. Work is labour, and labour is slavery.Truth is a lie. I looked it up in the thesaurus. A truth is a fact, a fact is a thing, a thing may be an event, an event is a stunt, a stunt is a trick, a trick is a lie.Love is hate. Because love is concern, concern means care, but care is apprehension, apprehension is horror, horror is aversion, and aversion is hate.
@ukjarry.bsky.social · 5mo ago

Theodore Sturgeon 26 February 1918 – 8 May 1985 Over 15 years ago I wrote (and wrote and wrote – approx. 30,000 words) on Sturgeon’s life, struggles, marriages, novels, stories, reviews, scripts, teaching, criticism, ghost-writing, writer’s block and so much else. Some excerpts:

Photograph of Theodore Sturgeon, probaby from the 1970sTheodore Sturgeon’s pre-eminence in the first half of his career bred the widespread assumption that he would be the break-through artist, the one writer sure to cross over into the mainstream, forcing audiences to realise the worth of science fiction. Sturgeon was one of the giants of the Golden Age of Science Fiction. He was regarded with awe by his sf contemporaries, Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, and Ray Bradbury. In his earliest works in sf magazines he was notable for sprezzatura and a refreshingly askew approach to his stories. In his prime, Sturgeon brought artistry and emotion to sf. He introduced love and sex and challenged his audience’s assumptions. Sturgeon was passionate about artistic challenges but cognisant of the demands of the genre. The sf critic James Blish wrote that Sturgeon ‘has made himself the finest conscious artist science fiction has ever had’. This was during the decades when science fiction and its writers were unregarded, unrecognised, and barely profitable, consigned to disreputable, lurid magazines. His friend William Tenn noted that Sturgeon ‘aspire[d] to starve for art in the pulps’. Sturgeon’s hopes, themes, and interests found natural expression through the accessories of fantasy and science fiction. But he could never write a typical genre set piece, and so each story was a new struggle with form, character, narrative, and resolution. Each story required him to find a new mechanism through which the characters, and therefore Sturgeon as the writer, confront their emotions and responses to the world. Each story had to become a solution found in the pressures and necessitous spontaneity of short story writing. Even at the very beginning of his career, his personal notes and letters to friends, family, and editors reveal the perpetual pattern of his intense, almost self-destructive working methods. He despairs that when he isn’t about to miss a deadline then he’s already late and so is reduced to frantic all-night sessions at the typewriter. Yet it is then that he can wring out lengthy works of great quality and insight, long short stories in a couple of hours, novels in barely a month. But still he finds he can never produce on demand in a regular manner, shamed by all his mechanisms for delay, avoidance, and distraction, with inevitable knocks to his faith and confidence in himself a writer, and the resultant guilt about unmet responsibilities.Sturgeon ‘lived on crisis, and if he wasn’t in a crisis, he’d create one for himself. His life was completely disorganised, so it was impossible for him to do his best work consistently’ was the assessment of his friend Alfred Bester. Sturgeon was a man of practical talents who couldn’t direct them, and so his skills acted as more of a hindrance. Being easily distracted by his ability and ingenuity in solving the little problems life threw at him was a consolation and distraction from his inability to face up to larger tasks. An eccentric way of apprehending the world channelled into a personal delight in carpentry, engineering, and radioelectronics is little compensation for an inability to handle money, live up to the responsibilities of his contracts, or the long-term commitments of a family. ‘I’m not a writer,’ he told Judith Merril, with whom he had an affair in early 1947. ‘A writer is someone who has to write ... The only reason I want to write is because it’s the only way I can justify all the other things.’
@ukjarry.bsky.social · 6mo ago

Bradley Denton - Buddy Holly is alive and well on Ganymede - 1991 A Charles Portis-influenced odyssey less gonzo sf than deeply-rooted chronicle of Boomer coming of age and aging. An appealing colloquial humorous tone (ala Howard Waldrop). The intro to a great fundamentalists bust-up over rock/pop:

Vacation Bible School. Every Protestant church in the Midwest runs one of these. Some last only a few weeks, and some last the whole damn summer, but all have several things in common: A lack of air-conditioning. "Bible Heroes" coloring books. "This Little Light of Mine," an inspirational song written for three-year-olds but forced on persons up to the age of ten. The Children of Israel's Escape from Egypt. Blue-haired teachers with fat arms and cheek rouge the color of red M&Ms. The walls of Jericho. King David. Construction paper. The baby Jesus. Elmer's glue. The adolescent Jesus. Crayola crayons. The adult Jesus. Rounded-tip scissors. The crucified Jesus. Severe discipline for the unruly. The dead Jesus. Warm Kool-Aid and stale cookies. The resurrected Jesus. Bible-quiz contests ("What is Jael best known for?"). The ascended Jesus. Why the Devil (aka Satan) is bad and how to avoid him. Jesus, Jesus, Jesus.
@ukjarry.bsky.social · 6mo ago

Gene Wolfe - Castleview - 1990 Some prose that is more John Crowley than most of this novel, which is more interesting and exciting for its novel pacing and structure, offering experiences for which are there precious few "why"s proffered

She was watching the black, wooded hillside past; it seemed to her that the road they drove was an intruder in the same way that the blade of a saw would have been an intruder, vulgarly revealing the secret, almost silent life of the trees. You were supposed to see things in dark woods like this: bears, wolves, or witches. For the first time it occurred to her that people talked about such things to end the awful stillness, the age-old quiet of wood and stone. A wolf or a witch would be one heck of a relief, she thought.They kissed, and it was not (as Mercedes had always heard it was supposed to be) before she knew what was happening. She knew perfectly well what was happening — that a whole world, new and strange, terrible yet wonderful, was unfolding for her. She understood, when their lips touched, exactly why Snow White and Sleeping Beauty had been awakened by a kiss, knew what those old grandmothers of eight hundred years ago had been trying to tell her, and knew that they had told her, their coded message coming clearly across the years, and that those dear old grandmothers — the bent crones at the firesides — had triumphed, their words not lost with the crackling of the sticks in their fires.This, then, was why she had wept in childhood, although she had not known it. Then there had been only the unfocused sense of loss – the unplumbed knowledge that in the end the world would take away everything, even the worst things, so that at the end, when she had nothing left, she would miss them; and surely it would take all the good things, all the best things, the good things first of all. That her most beautiful dresses would turn ugly, hideous and foolish, merely by hanging in the closet; and that all the people, all the most beautiful people, the ones she loved best, would fall to rags.
@ukjarry.bsky.social · 6mo ago

Odd fact hidden in Ricard Lupoff letter in SF Eye #5 1985 TV Movie "Scandal Sheet" with Burt Lancaster is kind of a parallel evolution of "Trust Me on This" by Donald Westlake. Westlake wrote a script in 1982, parted ways with the producers, but apparently the movie still hews close to his story.

A bound script "Scandal Sheet" by Donald E. Westlake, dated December 16 Deceber 1982Photo from tv movie "Scandal Sheet". Lauren Hutton (as Meg North) and Robert Urich (as Ben Rowan) - counerparts to the novel's Sara Joslyn and Jack Ingersoll
@ukjarry.bsky.social · 6mo ago

In a 1970 SFWA Forum Harlan Ellison reveals Robert Sheckley's agent removed a story from Again, Dangerous Visions to sell to a better market. Possible dates, venues, and "dangerousness" suggest to me the story was: Can You Feel Anything When I Do This? - Playboy Aug 69

Now on Sheckley. Sheckley, it was beautiful. I’ve got a stack of correspondence, I swear to you, with all sorts of horrendous things. They took the story away after they had already sold it to me, after it was already in my possession. After I already owned it, they sold it some place else. We had a whole fight about it. They returned the money. It was incredible. Sheckley had to write three more stories. Three more stories, before he wrote one that I liked to put in the book. Right? And now we've got a contract that looks like you wouldn't believe it. So I will never again buy from Don Congdon. Any of his clients are, just forget it, I don't even want to speak to them. I wouldn't care if he had the greatest writer in the world.
@ukjarry.bsky.social · 7mo ago

Paula Gosling – Monkey Puzzle – 1985 Sprightly university-set murder novel, combines both police procedural and the late surprising character reveals of an Agatha Christie. Hoped for more meta-commentary of one character’s lectures on crime fiction - and much less of book's prevailing homophobia.

In addition to studying the crime novel as literature and as entertainment, I also propose to investigate its structure and to compare methods not only of the detectives, but of the writers themselves. We'll examine their individual ways of achieving their aim – which is to keep the reader mystified until approximately five pages from the end. That is the so-called 'ideal contract.’ between writer and reader – the former fairly supplies the clues, and the latter agrees to suspend disbelief while trying to solve the puzzle. The reader does not want to solve the crime ten pages from the beginning, he wants to be mystified and dazzled – that is the entertainment he has paid for. But he wold like the opportunity to try.
@ukjarry.bsky.social · 7mo ago

Marty Supreme 80s synth-pop helps makes 50s Marty equiv of 80s young crazily ambitious adult protags ala Michael J Fox, Tom Cruise, etc. Everybody Wants to Rule the World was one of poss songs I thought would end on. Yazoo Oh Yeah should've played as he had sex with Gwyneth Paltrow in Central Park

@ukjarry.bsky.social · 7mo ago

J. G. Ballard! thou shouldst be living at this hour! And the raving raging racist, paranoid, hysterically thanatophobic billionaire Benedict Howards and his "Foundation for Human Immortality" in Norman Spinrad's "Bug Jack Barron" (1967-68) does seem a lot more on the mark nowadays unfortunately

Yashar Ali 🐘@yasharali.bsky.social · 7mo ago

I am begging everyone on here to read this new post by Bryan Johnson — the super rich tech guy who is now doing the “never die” protocol. I need to talk about it with you all.

Bryan Johnson • 0... @bryan_johnson It's been 19 days and 20 hrs since | last felt Kate's warm embrace. She landed 47 minutes ago. The 24 hours of travel no doubt has her rushing to shower. She needs to cleanse herself of a dirtied world incompatible with her sensibilities. The wash doubles as a ritual, preparatory for entrance into the symbolic world we've constructed. The time apart has been costly. My body's electrical signaling betrays the separation. Without her touch, my vagus nerve's 100,000 myelinated fibers have dropped their high frequency spectral power, squawking distress. An intelligent system broadcasting diminished wave forms, hoping to be heard. There are other signals of distress. My white blood cells have shifted their gene expression, upregulating pro-inflammatory genes IL-6 and TNF-alpha and downregulating my antiviral genes. A pro-aging biochemical signature of a system suffering hardship. My environment is a pristine anti-aging laboratory. Air, water, food and light are meticulously measured. Toxins are filtered. Purification systems run autonomously. Biomarkers tracked. Nutrition is calibrated. Yet outside my control is the affection of another. The 68 trillion cells that constitute Bryan Johnson run non-negotiable code. They demand tenderness, and not of a whimsical type, but deep, all-encompassing love that must be earned and carefully maintained. Otherwise they protest in self-termination. She's now only 13 miles away and I can viscerally feel her essence. The transmission pulses in high fidelity. As if there were a fiber optic cable streaming our connection at light speed through the multiplexed cylinders of glass. The time apart created latency, buffering the connection, depriving us of the luminescence and dimming into noise.
@ukjarry.bsky.social · 8mo ago

A selfish, cynical TV executive haunted by three ghosts at Christmas Eve? Scrooged from 1988, script - Michael O'Donoghue? Nope! It’s The Return of A Christmas Carol (Esquire, Dec 1961), script - Harvey Kurtzman, art - David Levine The original massive 1960s’s Esquire pages are truly impressive

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@ukjarry.bsky.social · 9mo ago

A nice anatomy of a centuries-old literary habit: D. Keith Mano National Review JUNE 9, 1972 from a review of The German Lesson by Siegfried Lenz, translated by Ernst Kaiser and Eithne Wilkins

The digressive method has its venerable ancestry: Jacques le Fataliste out of Tristram Shandy. In The German Lesson we have predictable devices, “How shall I describe his hat?” “I must stop here and set the scene.” It puts a MAN WORKING sign over the author’s head. These phony associations are a substitute for the business of metaphor making. And the reader, with noticeable condescension, is made to participate in, to be present at, the artist’s great moment of creation.