Tag: reading

The whole and entire purpose for Writing (outside of its own).

First Graf: Goldfinger

IF YOU HAVE NEVER READ the original James Bond stories by Ian Fleming, you don’t know James Bond.

You also don’t know sweeping prose that zips along like a rocket; lush description with a reporter’s eye for detail; fourth-wall breaking double-entendres; high-concept doomsday plans only one man can stop; and some of the best philosophical bon mots in the business. I like Fleming’s Bond for all these reasons, but mostly I like Fleming because he is a writer who inspires me to write — he makes it look easy, unlike some of my other literary heroes.
Continue reading “First Graf: Goldfinger”

How To Make Your Blog Sound Important

1. BEGIN EVERY PARAGRAPH WITH “I.”

2. Repost the same story as other blogs within your target demographic.

3. When commenting in other blogs, slip in the phrase “as I wrote” and flash your URL.

4. Call everyone by their first name whether celebrity, criminal or politician.

5. Make gratuitous jokes equating celebrities, criminals and politicians. Continue reading “How To Make Your Blog Sound Important”

2010 Roundup: Top Posts

IT’S DE RIGUEUR FOR NEWS outlets to wrap up the year with a look at their Big Stories, and we at Metaphorager.Net are no exception despite that we’re only a “news outlet” in the sense of “what’s news to me.” After 10 years of blogging, we only reached our 365th post last week. I could cull my favorites, but that’s a bit too self-serving so here instead is a commented list of this year’s Top Seven Posts by views (as they’re all the stats I could find):

5 Thoughts: Why (and How) We Write 1,636 Views
This was enjoyed and shared by someone with a stumbleupon.com account. I like to imagine it adorning writers’ garrets from here to Montmartre.

About 97 Views
For those who couldn’t help asking, “Who IS this guy?”

ORL Redux: Interview with Robert Anton Wilson 95 Views
Thanks to the wonderful folks at http://rawilsonfans.com, this Most Obscure Interview EVER With Robert Anton Wilson isn’t languishing unread in the bottom of a packing crate.

Links 71 Views
I can’t explain the number here. I sometimes check a site’s links-page if its “About Us” doesn’t tell me enough; maybe others do too. (If that’s the case here, read this instead.) On the other hand, some of these are definitely me checking layout … but not that often.

A Proposal for the Moon of Earth 71 Views
Tied for views with the “Links” page is this immodest proposal to eternalize Stanley Kubrick. I don’t know why it’s not built yet; someone must be on to me. Ooops. Ha ha ha. Is this thing on?

Season’s Regreetings 43 Views
This was also seen and shared through its Facebook page, account, http://www.facebook.com/pages/Same-To-You/178304932195551. (The numbers are essential to the link.) The view count here doesn’t concern me as much as, say, Prosatio Silban or the pithyisms — I’d like to see it spread, credit or not.

Clips 37 Views
News pieces, commentaries and speeches. (Yes, speeches.) Nice to know they hold an interest of some sort — I hope historical.

In related news, the top 10 Google searches turning up a Metaphorager.Net reference are “natural machines” (12), “smallest particle accelerator” (12), “https://metaphorager.net/raw/” (10), “janusz korczak” (6), “metaphorager” (6), “‘jim gjerde’ sputnik” (5), “religious fables” (5), “pithyism” (4), “https://metaphorager.net” (4), and “80s generic foods” (3).
(Also with 3: “linda tomback,” “letter to a dead friend,” “robert anton wilson interview,” “jon stewart slams glenn beck,” “prosatio silban,” “a couple of hamburgers,” and “https://metaphorager.net/frank-frazetta-r” (which full link is actually “https://metaphorager.net/frank-frazetta-rip/.”) Footprints on a digital beach. I like ’em.

December Is Science Fiction And Fantasy History Month

PASS IT ON. (WHY? BECAUSE, as Stewart Sternberg, who got the idea following a Twilight fan’s public ignorance of same, puts it: “(W)e owe it to ourselves to promote quality work and to invite the young into our fold, giving them a perspective and understanding of the traditions and tropes of our literary world … how it has helped us vent our angst, voice our identity, and celebrate our optimism.”

Science fiction (which I first grokked when I was seven; I didn’t discover fantasy until I was 15) taught me that things were possible outside my 1960s New Jersey existence: that some day, we might have space stations, an international computer network, cleaning robots and two-way TV — not to mention an understanding between races and nationalities that there are more exciting human games than trying to whack each other lifeless. Learning that others shared these secret goshwow dreams has, in some cases, helped me face another day; “being” a science fiction fan feels like membership in a vast underground culture of people who get it. That’s probably common to many in the pre-postpunk and earlier demographics but may not be so now that multimedia SF (film, TV, videogame, webcast) is more dominant than the book-and-zine scene of our youth — before Google and Harry Potter, or cheap access and cultural prevalence, science fiction and its acolytes led a more furtive existence. But the camaraderie’s the same — and likely always will be.

In short: Those who know not the joys of Vance and Bester, Leiber and Brown, Ellison and Sturgeon, Asimov and Clarke, or even bookbound Tolkien are, Arthur-like, unaware of their great heritage; from the first murmurs of Capek and Gernsback to today’s CGI-fueled cyberdreams — and those of us who remember the past are obligated to teach it. Squa tront!)

More: http://house-of-sternberg.blogspot.com/2010/11/science-fiction-and-fantasy-history.html

Ian Fleming’s Wisdom School

FROM THE NOVEL “GOLDFINGER,” PAGE 056 of the Penguin Centenary edition:

Bond sat back. He was prepared to listen to anyone who was master of his subject, any subject.

(This is one of those quotes that keeps coming into my mind when speaking with anybody about anything they know well and love, especially if they know and love it better than I do. Everyone’s an expert on something. Now go learn.)

First Graf: Moby-Dick

SO FAR, IT HAS TAKEN me two years to read Herman Melville’s classic of monomania and cetology, mostly because I don’t want to finish. And so I haven’t, yet.

It’s the language. Melville rolls so many word-clad notions around his tongue, and flips them into and between your ears with such easy fluidity, that it doesn’t matter whether or not he’s digressing (which he does, for most of the book). We fancy moderns with our choice of storytellers and interpretations know how the story goes, or at least how it ends, before we read it. That’s an advantage of sorts over the initial 1851 audience, an advantage which lets us concentrate instead on the journey — since, despite its encyclopedic treatment of whales, the men who hunt them, and the global economy resulting therefrom, we might miss the fact that Moby-Dick isn’t really about whaling at all, at all.

Call me Ishmael. Some years ago – never mind how long precisely – having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world. It is a way I have of driving off the spleen, and regulating the circulation. Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people’s hats off – then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can. This is my substitute for pistol and ball. With a philosophical flourish Cato throws himself upon his sword; I quietly take to the ship. There is nothing surprising in this. If they but knew it, almost all men in their degree, some time or other, cherish very nearly the same feelings towards the ocean with me.

First Graf: Winnie-the-Pooh

“GENTLE FUN FOR ENGLISH TAOISTS” is as good a description as any of A. A. Milne’s two booksful of stories of the Hundred-Acre Wood’s most famous resident. These are not children’s tales any more than “Bullwinkle” or “Le Morte d’Arthur” are children’s tales: unless it’s for the child that reawakens in us when we read these stories. (And yes, S*TO*R*I*E*S: If you only know Pooh through Disney, you don’t know Pooh.) NOTE: That reawakened child may have difficulty getting through the increasingly nostalgic-for-what’s-lost second volume House at Pooh Corner; I personally will never read the last story again without handkerchief or, better, towel. But this excerpt is from the very first story in Winnie the Pooh, titled “Chapter One, In Which We Are Introduced to Winnie-the-Pooh and Some Bees, and the Stories Begin:”

Here is Edward bear, coming downstairs now, bump, bump, bump, on the back of his head, behind Christopher Robin. It is, as far as he knows, the only way of coming downstairs, but sometimes he feels that there really is another way, if only he could stop bumping for a moment and think of it. And then he feels that perhaps there isn’t. Anyhow, here he is at the bottom, and ready to be introduced to you. Winnie-the-Pooh.

First Graf: VALIS

IN FEBRUARY AND MARCH OF 1974, science-fiction author Philip K. Dick had a series of experiences which might have been psychosis, hallucination or divine grace. Phil often tended toward the last explanation, at least in print, and based a handful of novels (and more than a million pages of exegesis) on trying to figure out what happened to him. VALIS is one such novel; its thesis (in part): through an ancient satellite named VALIS (for Vast Active Living Intelligence System), a rock and roll musical, and a little girl, God or something like It is trying to comfort us all — most especially the broken ones. There’s much more to it, but this — and the fact that Phil once lived around the corner from where I live now — is what makes VALIS this week’s First Graf pick.

Horselover Fat’s nervous breakdown began the day he got the phone call from Gloria asking if he had any Nembutals. He asked her why she wanted them and she said that she intended to kill herself. She was calling everyone she knew. By now, she had fifty of them, but she needed thirty or forty more, to be on the safe side.

First (Two) Graf(s): The Universe Next Door

THE TITLED BOOK IS PART of a trilogy, and it’s hard to say it’s the “first” part since Robert Anton Wilson wrote Schrodinger’s Cat such that the reader can open any of its constituents (The Universe Next Door, The Trick Top Hat and The Homing Pigeons) at any point and begin reading (as Charles Fort said, “One measures a circle beginning anywhere”). The text, in chapters of two- to four-page pastiches, follows (in part) a couple dozen compassionately well-drawn “everymen,” and the cumulative effect is three or four unique and intertwined storylines that play hob with the reader’s perceptions of reality and deliver a crash course in James Joyce, Wilhelm Reich, black-market economics, quantum physics, Jungian psychology, little-L libertarianism, Western mysticism, some fairly hot weird-science and a lot of sharply empathetic humor: “The story herein is set in a variety of parallel universes in which most of the politicians are thieves and most of the theologians are maniacs. These universes have nothing in common with our own world, of course. Of course.”

from The Universe Next Door

The majority of Terrans were six-legged. They had territorial squabbles and politics and wars and a caste system. They also had sufficient intelligence to survive on that barren boondocks planet for several billions of years.

We are not concerned here with the majority of Terrans. We are concerned with a tiny minority — the domesticated primates who built cities and wrote symphonies and invented things like tic-tac-toe and integral calculus. At the time of our story, these primates regarded themselves as the Terrans. The six-legged majority and other life-forms on that planet hardly entered into their thinking at all, most of the time.

First Graf: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead

Fig. 1
THIS MOST ELEGANT OF STOPPARD plays is, I think, best viewed live — the 1990 film, for all its polish, loses something as it’s translating. Live it should be: for “live” is what it’s about, and specifically but not exclusively: Does life make a sound without someone else to hear it? Or is it a series of borderless scenes with no walk-off? These are the questions pondered by two minor characters from Hamlet as they wait for something to happen. No one knows the answers, but one thing is certain: the curtain will, inexorably, fall.

For me, R&C’r’D will always be the stuff of all-night wordbinges laughing with friends into the post-adolescent dawn; the perfect accessory to a 1970’s high-school backpack stuffed with On The Road, Tao Teh Ching and the latest issue of Heavy Metal.

ACT ONE

Two ELIZABETHANS in a place without any visual character.

They are well dressed — hats, cloaks, sticks and all.

Each of them has a large leather moneybag.

GUILDENSTERN’s bag is nearly empty.

ROSENCRANTZ’s bag is nearly full.

The reason being: they are betting on the toss of a coin, in the following manner: GUILDENSTERN (hereafter “GUIL”) takes a coin out of his bag, spins it, letting it fall. ROSENKRANTZ (hereafter “ROS”) studies it, announces it as “heads” (as it happens) and puts it into his own bag. Then they repeat the process. They have apparently been doing this for some time.

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