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Thursday, July 30, 2009
MY POOR OLD BLOG'S JUST SITTING HERE...
posted 9:48 PM
While I write this book.

Meanwhile, however, try this:

@GreatDismal

I really do find microblogging congenial (not to mention collegial) and most of what I was doing here, before, was exactly that.

Monday, July 20, 2009
DUNCAN JONES' MOON
posted 6:39 PM
My favorite sf on film usually consists of brief luminous moments in what are generally rather low-budget and often actually very bad movies. The outstanding big-budget exceptions of course being Alien and Blade Runner. Duncan Jones' Moon challenges my aesthetic of brilliant pebbles, though, because it's so tightly and consistently excellent. It does everything I want an sf film to do, and none of the things I don't want an sf film to do. How did *that* ever happen?

Friday, July 17, 2009
OUR QUOTIDIAN ALEPH
posted 7:56 AM
"Aleph" as in the Borges story: the spot under the basement stairs from which can simultaneously be seen all things ever.

Simultaneously profoundly amazing and definitively boring:
PingWire

Because you can't step in the same river twice.

Wednesday, July 15, 2009
GOOD THING I'M NOT AN ACADEMIC
posted 4:41 PM
Had planned to sort through all the responses to my Orwell quote query and lay the result out here, but it turns out that I am a working novelist (among other things). So here's what I would tell you if you ran into me on the street and asked me about it: I doubt Orwell wrote it. It may have been cobbled together from a line in his essay on nationalism, and another, quoting Kipling, in his essay on Kipling. Weirdly, the very nearest thing to it is an authentic Churchill quote. As to how it became widely accepted as an Orwell quote, your guess is as good as mine. A great many of the people who most enjoy quoting it, I imagine, would actually be happier with it if it were a Churchill quote.

Sunday, July 12, 2009
QUERY: RE THE AUTHORITARIAN'S FAVORITE ORWELL QUOTE
posted 3:06 PM
"People sleep peacefully in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf."

Often this is given as "Good people..."

I have been unable to source this back to a specific piece of GO's prose. Have encountered the opinion that it is not an actual GO quotation.

Can anyone help? Thanks.