I was recently able to pick up two rare Jack Vance first editions, one of them one of his most difficulty hardbacks, the other a recent chapbook not even my hardcore Jack Vance collecting friends had heard of.
Not in any standard online reference sources. I found it via a Google image search for “Jack Vance chapbooks”. I can’t help thinking that this is going to drive some Jack Vance completists absolutely bonkers.
Another bit for St. Patrick’s Day: The late, great John Belushi on “The Luck of the Irish”:
Belushi’s frothing editorials were always among the highlights of the original Saturday Night Live cast. I wish they’d put all of them on a single DVD, maybe paired with the Samurai skits, or else the Ackroyd/Curtain Point/Counterpoint bits.
(Video updated as of 6 PM, March 17, 2014)
(That video is dead as well, here’s a non-embeddable version.)
Just as a blind squirrel occasionally finds an acorn, so to does College Humor occasionally produce something that’s actually funny. “The Nightmare Before St. Patrick’s Day” is one of those time.
What is it with Shoegaze bands and surreal Communist-era Eastern European films? First No Joy used the Czech film Daisies. Now here’s Mirage in the Water’s “Chimera Panorama,” whose video features clips from the 1973 Polish film The Hour-Glass Sanatorium, which looks extremely weird and interesting.
And it being the Internet, the entirety of The Hour-Glass Sanatorium is available online as well:
The video is in black and white, but the film is in fairly glorious color.
Since this is the anniversary of H. P. Lovecraft’s death in 1937, here’s a short, well-done, Lovecraft/Cthulhu Mythos themed cgi short film called “Ryleh”. Enjoy!
Because I wasn’t really in a position to post them to Twitter when Argentine Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio was named Pope Francis:
On the non-snarky side, here’s a video of Pope Francis making his first appearance:
Austin’s own The Asteroid Shop presents “Destroyer,” a video full of stop-motion plastic dinosaur goodness.
I may have to catch one of their live shows one of these days…
Lots of health-related news for the science fiction community, so I thought I would roll it up into a single post here.
The good news: Jay Lake is currently free of detectable tumors. As Jay notes, this is quite different than being cured, but beats the alternative. Indeed, his optimism is so guarded as to be indistinguishable from pessimism. “No one knows what will work for me, and none of the choices are all that likely to pay off anyway.” He’s still waiting for the full results of the DNA scan.
The bad news: SF writer, editor, and publisher and pioneering rock critic Paul Williams is in a hospice. Williams is suffering from early onset dementia brought about as a side effect of his 1995 bicycle accident. There’s a donation page to help his family. Williams was also executor for the Philip K. Dick estate for a number of years, but that’s now handled by the Philip K. Dick Trust. I think I may have met Williams, very briefly, at the 2006 Anaheim Worldcon, but I’m not sure.
And now a few Steven Utley memorials:
Background
In The Wizard of Oz (the movie), protagonist Dorothy wakes up at the end and finds out her entire trip to Oz was just a dream.
In Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle, Merricat, the first-person protagonist, believes she can work a sort of sympathetic magic through wards and charms to keep the world at bay. When these charms are breached by an interloper, the outside world (and disaster) come crashing in. Also, one character believes Merricat is a ghost and never interacts with her, and by the end of the novel, several characters in the village she and her sister Constance live in have come to believe they are a witches.
Problem
Is either of these novels a fantasy, neither, or both? Explain your answer.
This will make up 10% of your grade.