Monthly Archives: June 2013
PRESSING ON
Gotta keep pushing — play this in your car sometime, it will improve your gas mileage . . .
PULP MASTER
I order a lot of books online and I’m always happy when they arrive, but rarely do I anticipate the delivery of one of them as keenly as I anticipated the delivery of this one.
Henry Kuttner was a fascinating figure. He wrote hundreds of novellas, novelettes and short stories for pulp magazines between 1936 and 1958, the year of his untimely death at the age of 42. Many of his works were written in collaboration with his wife C. L. Moore (seen with Kuttner above) — their friends said it was impossible to tell who contributed what to any particular tale.
He was an admirer of H. P. Lovecraft, and wrote a number of stories set within Lovecraft’s cthulhu mythos, He wrote in a wide variety of other forms, too — conventional horror, sword and sorcery, space opera, detective thriller. He had to be prolific, to write fast, in order to make a living at pulp fiction, which saved him from the sins of literary preciosity — his tales are punchy and lean, great fun to read. The horror tales are often extremely disturbing to read as well — he had a genuinely creepy and ghoulish imagination.
He was a mentor to or great influence upon many writers who are better known today than he is — Ray Bradbury and Richard Matheson among them.
The collection of his early tales pictured above, containing mostly horror fiction, published by the Haffner Press in a handsome edition with a sewn binding, is every bit as thrilling as I anticipated it would be.
THE DEBT WE OWE
Or as Abraham Lincoln once put it:
The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battle-field, and patriot grave, to every living heart and hearthstone, all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.
We can’t let this republic die, murdered by a tyrant. We just can’t.
Illustration by N. C. Wyeth.
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THE DAYS OF ’49
One of my favorite Dylan recordings, and much on my mind when writing Missouri Green, a Gold Rush tale, which has a couple of references to the song . . .
A CARTOON POSTER FOR TODAY
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SHE LOVES YOU
. . . and you know that can’t be bad.
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GIRLS
New York City, 1890s. The one on the left is clearly wearing a hand-me-down dress.
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THE GREAT MAN SPEAKS
A BOOK COVER FOR TODAY
THE DUKE OF EARL
It really doesn’t make sense anymore to refer to Barack Obama as the “President” of the United States of America. He has long since abandoned the duties and responsibilities of that office as outlined in the Constitution, instead assuming powers which that document was specifically designed to outlaw. He needs a new title — but what should it be? The Duke of Earl would work for me, conveying both the pretension and the absurdity of the role he is trying to play. As he walks through this world, nothing can stop him — because he’s the Duke of Earl. Or is that being unfair to a great and wonderfully witty rock and roll song?
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DEFENSELESS
Now that the Supreme Court has struck down the Defense of Marriage Act, what stands between me, an unprotected straight man, and gay marriage?
I guess I will just have to go ahead and marry a man, since my last line of defense against the inevitability of this has been swept away.
BIG STATE, LITTLE DICKS
The gentleman of the Texas State Legislature didn’t treat this little lady very well, did they? Indeed they behaved towards her like craven eunuchs.
Oh, men of Texas, you who once fought the merciless Comanche, tamed a wilderness and treated women with gallantry — your strain grows weaker.
A WESTERN ILLUSTRATION FOR TODAY
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RECIPROCITY
It appears that Edward Snowden may not be in Russia, but if he is Putin should respond to America’s arrogant and self-righteous demands for extradition by proposing the following — if Obama will ensure that James Clapper is prosecuted for lying to Congress, Russia will return Snowden to America so he can be prosecuted for exposing Clapper’s lies. That seems fair doesn’t it?