The Invisible Library

Each of them is 101 words long. You can do very cool stuff with brevity. Just ask Jorge Luis Borges.

British science fiction writer Sir Arthur C Clarke has died in Sri Lanka at the age of 90.

If you’re wondering what this whole WGA writer’s strike thing is all about, but only have enough time to go one place to get the low down, you could do worse than stopping by John Roger’s place over at Kung Fu Monkey. If you have the time though, also drop by Ken Levine’s and Jane Espenson ’s sites.

As dedicated fans of good writing and good TV and film, we owe it to the WGA to support them any way we can. If you live in LA or New York, swing by the picket lines and give them a honk of support. Bring them water or Pizza or just say thank you. Send a letter or e-mail to the studios or your local paper, or write it up on your blog.

Writers deserve to be paid for their work. That’’s what the strike is all about.

Norman Spinrad, author of the classic proto-cyberpunk novel, Bug Jack Barron has a new book but you can only read the first third of it online. Apparently, no publisher wants to get behind Osama The Gun. The author explains that he fears it’s for political reasons and having read the first twenty pages or so, I can definitely see how that conclusion could be reached. it’s a great read though. Have a looksee. If enough people read part of it, maybe we can use these tired Internets for good and get this book the publication it deserves.

Via Warren Ellis.

So, Ray Bradbury now says that his famous anti-censorship novel, Fahrenheit 451 isn’t actually about censorship, but how TV rots your brains and pop-culture is the torch lit under literature’s legacy. Or some such nonsense.

Fahrenheit 451, published in 1953, is now supposed to be about the evils of Television, a device not widely available until the mid nineteen fifties? Man, he really was ahead of the curve, wasn’t he? So how’s that Martian colony coming along?
As I said over at Making light, The man’s 87 years old. If he has any hills left to go over, their little ones at best, maybe speed bumps.

A novel, like a child, becomes it’s own entity once it leaves your desk and enters the world, bound and printed for everyone to read and decide what it means for themselves. What he wanted it to mean while he was writing it fifty years ago is different then what it meant when he finished it, which is different from what it means now. He had a say in the first instance, an opinion in the second but the third instance is completely out of his hands.

It’s our book now, Mr. Bradbury. Thanks for writing it but we’ll take it form here.

Kurt Vonnegut, 1922-2007:

“He was the kind of writer who made people - young people, especially - want to write,” added Jonathan Safran Foer, the 30-year-old author of “Everything is Illuminated.” “He wrote the kinds of books you pass around.”

For countless teenagers, reading Vonnegut was as much an entry into adult life as your first beer. The world became funnier, more dangerous, more exciting. If you were looking to send up authority, question life’s meaning or face the worst and keep your sense of humor, Vonnegut was your teacher.

I know that there have been countless generations that grew up and led meaningful lives before Kurt Vonnegut’s writing was around but they all must have realized that there was some hole, some vital missing piece to the human experience that they could not fill. It took Kurt Vonnegut to fill that hole. Those of us who have grown up in a world with his books at hand are better people for it. He was a teacher and a hero, not because he did great things but because he taught us all that it was heroic enough simply to get up in the morning and keep on living, despite all the reasons in the world not to. His message was a simple one: be kind to one another as often as you can, not because you’ll be rewarded for it but because it makes the world a better place and a lot more interesting. He may be gone but his words remain, to fill the hole left behind.

Jean Baudrillard, 1930-2007:

PARIS: Jean Baudrillard, a French philosopher and social theorist known for his provocative commentaries on consumerism, excess and what he said was the disappearance of reality, died Tuesday, his publishing house said. He was 77.

[…] Baudrillard, a sociologist by training, is perhaps best known for his concepts of “hyperreality” and “simulation.”

[…] The Sept. 11 attacks, in contrast, were the hyper-real event par excellence — a fusion of history, symbolism and dark fantasy, “the mother of all events.”

His views on the attacks sparked controversy. While terrorists had committed the atrocity, he wrote, “It is we who have wanted it. . . . Terrorism is immoral, and it responds to a globalization that is itself immoral.”

Although many Americans were puzzled by his views, Baudrillard was a tireless enthusiast for the United States — though he once called it “the only remaining primitive society.”

“Santa Barbara is a paradise; Disneyland is a paradise; the U.S. is a paradise,” he wrote. “Paradise is just paradise. Mournful, monotonous, and superficial though it may be, it is paradise. There is no other.”

Sunday’s Episode of BSG wasn’t nearly as bad as I had expected and even had a surprise or two that tied it into the main plot. No surprise that it was written by Jane Espenson, of Buffy/Angel credit. I was poking around on Television Without Pity and discovered that the writer of the episode that I hated,”The Woman King” also wrote the one where Saint Helo decides to kill the Infected Cylons in a fit of righteous indignation, thus preventing them being used as biological weapons. The guy seems to think BSG is the Helo show. I wonder if he’s ever sat down and watched any of the previous seasons? It would probably help his future scripts a little to know what show he’s writing for, rather then continuing to turn in episodes form the Universe Next Door, where BSG is just another Star Trek rip off, staring a cardboard cutout wearing Helo’s uniform. As to why Ronald Moore thought that episode was worth shooting rather than just burying is beyond me (which isn’t entirely true. I understand shooting budgets and you have an allotment of episodes that have to delivered by date X and you can’t do an instant rewrite and necessarily get something better. Even Ron Moore admits that the previous two episodes were Black Market week). Listening to the podcast, I get the notion that they had intended for there to be a sub-plot involving the Sagittarans but that it got dropped and added and drooped and added until it eventually backed into the script ass first, which is just clumsy. And I can see what they were shooting for with “Day In The Life,” but it didn’t come off well. which is fine. They can’t all be winners.

Meanwhile, Jane Espenson knows how to float a subplot and make it work. Chief got to play Cesar Chavez, we learned something interesting about Baltar (that may or may not be true– see, ambiguity works!) and it segways into the pending trial and overall thrust of the greater story, about people in horrible situations doing the best and worst they can for reasons that are not always ethical but are always human. Chief got to be a hero, but only after having his family threatened and he never once came off like a petulant super brat like Helo did two episodes back. That’s how to write a show!

Reason Magazine has a nice obituary for Robert Anton Wilson:

Given his enormous influence on pop culture, from Lost to Laura Croft, you might have expected Wilson’s death to get more attention in the mainstream press. But while there were a few more notices in the newspapers — a detailed story in the London Telegraph, a short UPI dispatch that was basically cribbed from the Times — none I’ve seen has suggested that his work had an impact beyond the fans of the fringe, and only John Clute’s account in The Independent displayed any appreciation of Wilson’s oeuvre. Instead, the best tributes to the writer have appeared in the medium that most resembled the beautiful cacophony of his books: the Internet. On LiveJournals, e-mail lists, and blog comment threads, Wilson received the praise he was due.

He was honored on the bigger sites too. At The Huffington Post Paul Krassner, who started publishing Wilson’s articles in The Realist back in 1959, quoted one of my favorite things that Wilson wrote in the last year of his life: a haiku sent to his email list a day after he announced what looked like his pending death.

Well what do you know?
Another day has passed
and I’m still not not.

There were respectful memorials in places you’d expect, such as bOING bOING and 10 Zen Monkeys, and in places you wouldn’t expect, such as Wonkette. Even the conservative forum Free Republic got in on the act, with a thread that included the remarkable statement, “The modern right was greatly influenced by Wilson.” While you’re digesting that, I’ll note that elsewhere on the same site another reader greeted the news with the phrase “one less leftist nut.”

Link via Boing Boing.

Robert Anton Wilson, January 18, 1932 - January 11, 2007.

I wish I had met him, and had a chance to tell him how much his writing has been a major influence on my own, and my life in general. He will be missed.