Category Archives: Essays

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Earlier Work [pt.2]

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THE FRANTIC AND EXHAUSTING LIFE OF A PARLIAMENTARY MEDIA ADVISER colinposter

Jacobs, Colin (7 August 2014; Crikey.com.au)

I bundle out of the train in short-pants and find a phone box to call Colin. I’ve started explaining where to meet me when Colin screams and I hear the receiver clatter against the tabletop.

When he comes back on a few minutes later, Colin explains that from his kitchen window, he saw his car start to roll back down the slope out of his garage. He ran out of his house and slapsticked along beside it trying to get the key into the lock as it picked up speed, rolled down the slope and through the neighbour’s fence in front of an audience of staring children. Continue reading

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Ruminations On The S And F in SFF

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What is the dividing line between literary fiction and the fantastical? Is there a line? Is there also a distinction between fantasy and science fiction? Are these even meaningful questions?

In thinking about this and discussing it in the past, I’ve tended to prefer the terms used by Moorcock and Le Guin in their literary essays, ‘realist’ and ‘imaginative’ fiction if a dividing line must be drawn. Realist fiction tends to favour close simulation of ‘realistic’ human experience, and is most highly characterised (I think) in modern fiction by stream of consciousness narratives about ordinary things. Imaginative fiction tends to lean towards an exploration of the possibilities of human experience, and both fantasy and science fiction tend to be more imaginative than realist in bent. Continue reading

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Lynx

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ADVERTISING CAMPAIGN FOR LYNX DEODORANTlynx

At some point we seem to have accepted that, as peasants, if a bank or other large company imposes on us a penalty fee, for instance for paying a bill slower than they’d like, that as long as the company does it following the company’s own rules, we should find it fair for them to charge it. The historian of the future must see us as sufferers of Stockholm syndrome – as forlorn hostages who’ve somehow come to feel they owe something to their captors.

Have we forgotten how we got here? While you and Daisy ran hand-in-hand in the garden, ecstatic in the rain, they set about to laying claim to all the best flowerbeds and fencing them off. Now they charge you for the flowers and have convinced Daisy’s mother that if you don’t send seven a week, you don’t respect her. The Shamshiel they’ve posted at the gate doesn’t even have a flaming sword, just a valium of meaningless apologies. Continue reading

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Floorplan

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FLOORPLANcricoidhall

This shows a floorplan for a ring-shaped hall with buttresses.

To support the vaults, I imagine the columns stretched into crescents along the concentric axis. I think it might please the eye if the linear distance between each crescent’s tips equalled a third of the length of the curve between its centre and the centre of whichever of the two neighbouring crescents around from it clockwise or counterclockwise stands the farthest away. Continue reading

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The Phenomonon Of The Filler Book

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We’ve lately had a couple ‘filler’ releases by authors of great big series where the fans are eagerly biting their fingernails and waiting for the next instalment. Patrick Rothfuss’s The Slow Regard of Silent Things is a spoiler-free story about Auri – the slightly otherworldly and rootless waif of the university. George R.R. Martin’s The World of Ice and Fire is a massive and detailed world-book actually cut down from 300,000 words of ‘sidebars’ he wrote on the history of his world for the project. It is apparently full of weird and wonderful bits of information and a lot of tributes to a look of people. The Muppets are hidden in the book, as is Mervyn Peake if you look hard enough. Also, you won’t find out anything about what happened at Summerhall… the conceit of The World of Ice and Fire is that the book has been written by a historian from fragmentary notes of an earlier historian and a conveniently careless ink spill has blotted out the particular piece of history relating to those events. Continue reading

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Reply to Johnstone’s “50 Proverbs”

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Give a man a fish and he’ll eat for a day. You’ll have him out of your hair until he comes by tomorrow for his next fish.

Teaching him to fish will feel like teaching a walrus to roller-skate. As soon as you break out the fishing rod he’ll look at you like you come from the seventeenth century – like you tried to tell him he could knap his own spearheads with a hammerstone and pair of reindeer antlers. He hasn’t got time to screw about with bait and fishing rods and sinkers. He just wants a fish.

Even if you get him to try it, he’ll just pretend to pay attention and spend most of the time fantasising about the woman in apartment twelve.

Give the man a fish.

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Will A Computer AI Write A Creative Story?

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On the weekend I attended one of the regular Trampoline events in Melbourne. The event is an ‘un-conference’, where no talks, discussions or workshops are planned, but instead the attendees get up and offer to talk about this topic, or lead a conversation on that topic and the day’s content is filled in on a big board. If the idea sounds intriguing, it is, and the event works much better than I’d have ever guessed with a lot of really fascinating discussion and thoughts tumbling out of the day.

In one of the last sessions of the day, one presenter played the short film Humans Need Not Apply by CGP Grey.

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It’s a Sair Fecht

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OUTLANDER

Diana Gabaldon (Delacorte Books, 1991) ISBN: 0385302304

***WARNING: the following review contains SPOILERS and discussion of sexual violence, torture, and sexual identity.***

When I first heard of Outlander, a time-traveller’s love story set against the Jacobite uprising in 18th century Scotland and written by an American, I cringed.  This is admittedly because I am a recovering literary snob.  I’m aware it a massive generalisation, but I am cautious of books written about Britain by Americans.  I have been put off by the Midsomer Murders series, which according to my mother (I haven’t done any research) is written by an American and features all of the most cringeworthy, twee stereotypes of Middle England you can think of.   As a descendant of highland Scots* myself, I feared Diana Gabaldon might have given the 18th century highlands a similar treatment.  Reading her inspiration and reasons for commencing the novel did not help my confidence.  In my imagination the series was a horrific combination of corset-ripper Mills & Boone and Lord Tennyson’s The Highwayman.

Nonetheless, when recommended the television series based on the books by a person whose opinion on such things I trust, I decided to give it a chance.  I’m glad I did.  The series is great.  It even managed to cast actual Scottish people for the most part, which is a sadly rare feat.  They even mostly use the Inverness accent and speak actual, real Gaelic.  Very exciting stuff for someone who has become used to Hollywood’s tendency to both confuse Irish and Scottish accents, and hire people who can’t pull of either accent well.

Then the show went on mid-season hiatus until April.  April.  It left me on a cliff-hanger until April.

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50 Proverbs

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The following is a short list of 50 English proverbs culled from several online sources. I simply took those that sparked an interest, or that those that I’ve never heard in quite this phrasing, or those that caused a moment of thoughtful agreement. I’ve mostly excluded sayings from Shakespeare as he does make up a surprising volume of English language wordage. Continue reading

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