Galaxies // Barry N. Malzberg [Thoughts & Spoilers]

ANTI-OEDIPUS PRESS: Galaxies

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Author: Barry N. Malzberg

Setting: his living room

Plot: Malzberg can’t be bothered writing a novel so writes the notes for one

Subplot: Malzberg can’t stand whichever sci-fi writers he’s criticizing [Heinlein?], but sees them at conventions sometimes so doesn’t want to use their names

Sub-subplot: A ship falls into a black ‘galaxy’, where narrative descriptions are endless

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Notes:

The cover is good, the plot description is good, the 4 and 5 star reviews on Goodreads make good points, but the 2 star reviews are closer to how I feel about this.

Basically, the novel is a series of short chapters that function as notes on a future novel as well as Malzberg’s feelings on the state of 70’s sci-fi. Straight away this brings up two problems. 70’s sci-fi is era specific and, although some of the points remain valid [e.g. writing filler to bump up the word count, hard sci-fi writers hiding their lack of writing ability behind hard science], the era itself is long gone.

The second problem: if you’re going to write notes for a novel, you have to a] make sure the concept of that novel is interesting and complex, and b] keep your novel length down. Even at 180 odd pages, Galaxies is exhausting.

In fact, I haven’t finished the book yet.

Don’t know if I will either.

I’m on page 68, I think, and Malzberg is currently writing out potential dialogue between Lena, the main character, and another character who isn’t on the ship, it’s a flashback, a potential flashback, and I don’t really know either of these characters, I don’t care about them, and if this is the case then you better at least make the dialogue interesting.

It isn’t. Continue reading →

Star Trek TNG: The Drumhead [Redux] Part 2

The Drumhead (episode) | Memory Alpha | Fandom

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Part 1 is here

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Worf smacks the table in frustration, making the betazoid jump and the Observation Lounge shudder.

‘This is impossible…’

‘We shall look again.’

‘All of the crew have been with us for over a year, I know most of them, there’s no way they could be Romulan spies.’

‘What about this guy?’

The betazoid points at a picture of Alexander.

‘That’s my son.’

‘Official records say he’s currently living on Earth, in a city called Minsk.’

‘He’s on vacation.’

‘Okay. What about this woman?’

‘That’s Guinan.’

‘It says here she has poorly-defined magical abilities…’

‘She runs Ten Forward. Sometimes.’ Worf shakes his head. ‘Her schedule is strange.’

‘Has she ever been to Romulus?’

‘No. But she has been to Ted Danson.’

‘Noted.’

Worf folds his arms. ‘This is still pointless. All we have is vague supposition and guesswork.’

Pages: 1 2

You can drop ‘dou ka’ no one cares

MISKATONIC LONDON UNVEILS FALL 2015 LINEUP! : The Miskatonic ...

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Koto wa + ka dou ka

Lurking in the abattoir

Once a week

Don’t smile, Nerys

Chief corrected himself 5 times to reach your view on leftism

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1 word novel

push gently

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Auntie-gone

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Greys can’t write about magic

from Metroid alone

cannot

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for hate’s sake

check out girly Héviz fun camp

winter thin coat factory

stroke complex

nice guard nice gun nice silt nice dust neat bit of Hungarian hiding well but

Vince Merry Man McMahon

I’ll finish this shit on Planet J

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Forced by Polarity

To think about

Mercilessly cutting down the old Continue reading →

Star Trek TNG: The Drumhead [Redux] Part 1

The Drumhead (1991)

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Black.

No nearby stars.

No planets or moons or nebulae.

We zoom in closer, picking out a speck of dirty white dust drifting through the void, at the mercy of whichever unimaginably smug higher beings are lurking nearby.

Closer, closer, closer still…ah, it’s not dust, it’s a ship.

The Enterprise.

The blackness lightens a shade or two, and we’re inside the vessel.

A Klingon that isn’t Worf sits in the sharp spotlight of a room with no decoration. Opposite him, sitting behind the only desk are two people: a lanky, part-time sleaze with a black beard and a female betazoid in a lilac leotard.

Behind them, shadows creeps along the edges of the walls.

‘I don’t know anything about that,’ says the Klingon, keeping his ridges hyphen-straight.

‘Is that so?’ asks Riker. ‘Then maybe you can explain why you were in Engineering last night, asking questions, lurking…’

‘I wasn’t.’

‘There’s no point denying it, J’dann, you were seen.’

‘He’s lying.’

Riker glances at Troi then back at the Klingon. ‘We didn’t say it was a ‘he’.’

‘What?’

‘We did not say you were seen by a man,’ repeats Troi.

‘Aghh, most of the crew here are men…lobotomised, puny men who never speak, but men nonetheless.’

‘Okay. How about this?’ says Riker. ‘You were overheard in Ten Forward saying, and I quote, ‘you, Vulcan, wouldn’t it be glorious if someone broke some cables in Engineering and made this junk fly to Romulus…get captured by Romulans…put all you humans in the same cell, naked, and make you fist each other while the-…’ Continue reading →

Bloomberg 1942-2845

Image result for mike bloomberg eating ice cream

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IF IT’S 95, KILL IT

IF IT’S 85, KILL IT

IF IT’S 75, KILL IT

IF IT’S 65, 65’S A GOOD AGE, KILL IT

IF IT’S KEN LOACH-ESQUE, KILL IT

KILL HATE EDIT FLAY

VOTE ME

 MIKE

 

THIS ISN’T THE KIND OF ENERGY WE NEED

YOU PEASANT CUNT

VOTE MIKE

 

YOU SAY IT’S BAD, I SAY PRAGMATIC, DEFINITELY WOULD’VE DONE THE SAME IN LA, DETROIT, SPIKE LEE’S HOUSE, THAT’S WHERE THE COPS WERE, THAT’S WHERE THEY WERE, ALL OF THEM, WHAT CAN YOU DO, THAT’S WHERE THEY HAPPENED TO BE, THAT’S WHERE THEY WERE

I WENT TO TANZANIA ONCE Continue reading →

Lisa & The Devil [1973] // Mario Bava [Thoughts and spoilers]

Image result for lisa and the devil

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Director: Mario Bava

Starring: Telly Savalas, Elke Sommer, Alessio Orano

Plot: a young tourist finds out how quiet some areas of Spanish towns can be before ending up at an anachronistic villa where Bava feeds her LSD and says don’t think, just go with it.

Subplot: Telly Savalas tries to quit smoking by sucking lollipops

Thoughts:

I watched this film online, bookended by two guys saying how tricky the plot was to follow. Perhaps because of this prior warning, it wasn’t. I understood what happened in the film. I just didn’t always understand the background details. Or which country Lisa was supposed to be from.

Ja, I’m not sure what exactly the director was trying to say [that past sins will come back to haunt your reincarnated soul?] or how many times the main story had played out already. Let’s go through it:

The plot establishes early on that she’s wandered into a drama from a century earlier, but there is also the implication that the first murder of Carlos had happened previously to that as the original version of the main character was a skeleton on a bed. And some of the characters talk about both Lisa and Carlos coming back, suggesting that the story has happened once before. And Carlos is, at one point, alive and dead at the same time.

Is that accurate?

But then the location doesn’t make much sense as, near the start of the film, Carlos appears on the steps of the town and dies after being pushed down to the bottom [by her]. The rest of the time he’s at the villa. Was the stairs murder a real event or just an hallucination?

And is Telly Savalas actually the devil? Continue reading →

Portuguese Mountain of Pain e…

Image result for portuguese ate mais e obrigado pelos peixes

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I’m finally done with ‘A espada da gruta’ and the Lemony Snicket book set at the carnival and now it’s time to level up. And I don’t mean going somewhere and asking new people the same few questions I asked the last people I met and the ones before that and…

The Lemony Snicket book was tough.

It took a few weeks and a lot of dictionary work but I got through it, and now it’s time for three other books at the same time.

Ate mais e obrigado pelos peixes [So long and thanks for all the fish]

Matadouro Cinco [Slaughterhouse Five]

Another Lemony Snicket book, the one at the school

I started with ‘Ate mais’ but struggled a bit as the writing is a lot more complicated than I remember the English version being. I should’ve known. There’s so much slang and random weirdness and huge run-on sentences in the story that reading it in Portuguese is borderline impossible.

The only saving grace is the fact that English and Portuguese have a lot of crossover vocab – without those I’d be lost. If I were reading the Chinese translation of this book, I’d be deep in Children of Tama territory, much worse.

As I was plodding through ‘Ate mais’, the Vonnegut book arrived in the post, a book I also believed, based on my reading of it 10 years before, to be quite prosaic in terms of writing style.

Wrong. Continue reading →