Sunnydale High circa 1997: Mac or PC?
Tuesday, October 20, 2009




All of your questions answered here:
http://www.currybet.net/cbet_blog/2008/02/buffy_internet_guide.php

posted by Greg Purcell @ 9:09 AM, ,


Report from Albany
Sunday, October 11, 2009





They call this The Egg. It stands in the center of a pedestrian mall, half moon cityscape, half Tativille.





Colie Collen, gracious host, and Jessica Fjeld, featured at the Yes! Reading the night of my arrival.





The talented Jono Tosch.





With the great Paul Park at Albacon. A high point.





I would not say this man was harassing people with his dragon puppet at Albacon. I would say he was the only person in costume at an otherwise fairly grey event and was, by necessity, overcompensating for his fellow Albanians's lack of enthusiasm with an application of felt.





Natalie Knight and Anne Eyre, my hosts: they lived with a beautiful sightless dog named Vinnie I regret not capturing in a picture.





With Adam Golaski and Josh Potter, at the reading. We read in front of a highly original painting featuring a lurid warrior with a slashed nose. Before, him the One Ring was presented by Lady Gaga, represented as a pixie.

posted by Greg Purcell @ 9:16 PM, ,


Albacon!
Thursday, October 8, 2009

I'm going to Albacon this weekend. I'm pretty excited. It's my first science fiction convention. I'll bring my camera.

The line for wedgies begins to the right.

And please pass the following along to any Albanians you know...

The Yes, Reading! Presents
A Sci-Fi Mini Marathon!

Date: Saturday, October 10, 2009
Time: 4:00pm - 5:30pm
Location: UAG Gallery
Street: 247 Lark Street

Josh Potter writes music criticism for Metroland, Relix Magazine, and State of Mind Music, while amassing ideas in a notebook, which he tells himself will one day magically turn into short stories and novels. The few that have done so are available in Pindeldyboz, Thieves Jargon, Elimae, the Taj Mahal Review, and the American Drivel Review. He recently learned, however, that his most enduring literary legacy is for a poem he wrote on the wall of a composting toilet that mocks the poet Mary Oliver.

G. Carl Purcell is a science fiction writer from from Kalamazoo, MI. His writing has appeared in Open City, The 2nd Hand, and on his website, The Supercollider (http://www.noslander.com/supercollider.html). He is a founding member of SF writer’s collective The SIMPLGOS Six. As Greg Purcell, he publishes poetry and curates a reading series out of St. Mark’s Bookshop in New York.

Adam Golaski is the editor of New Genre, a journal dedicated to publishing literary and experimental horror and science fiction. He is the author of Worse Than Myself, a collection of strange stories, and of the upcoming–from Rose Metal Press–Color Plates. He’s co-editor at the poetry press Flim Forum. Adam’s poetry, fiction, and non-fiction will or has appeared in journals and anthologies such as Torpedo, The Lifted Brow, Moonlit, word/for word, McSweeney’s, Strange Tales II & III (from Tartarus Press), Zombies: Encounters with the Hungry Dead, Cinnabar’s Gnosis, and LVNG.

posted by Greg Purcell @ 8:46 AM, ,


Re: Escapism
Tuesday, October 6, 2009

Kind of a het-up article over at i09 hits on interesting points but fails to point out the obvious: people escape in communities. The opiate of the masses is actually that cult of the selfish, doomed individual creator--the one we may someday but probably won't become--who is able to escape the bounds of community and indulge himself in great thoughts and statutory rape.


Escapism Is The Highest Form Of Art

posted by Greg Purcell @ 8:16 AM, ,


LeGuin, Hard SF, The 1960's, Literature
Monday, October 5, 2009



Having recently finished LeGuin's The Dispossesed, alongside her story "The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas," I'm left thinking about the legacy of the 1960's in science fiction. Like much that went on in the sixties, contemporary practice has only fitfully digested it.

The feeling creeps up on me that what I'm reading in LeGuin is literary parable, especially in the story. I don't put that in opposition to science fiction, except to say that it rarely comes up in SF anymore.

Political systems are not often debated these days: they are condemned. Even when debate is tolerated, the open conclusion of the parable is not.

The libertarian twist that runs through SF these days is an offshoot of the triumph of Hard SF attitudes. It is a certain way of confusing the politics of pragmatism with the utilitarian emphasis of the hacker/gearhead. It's interesting to note that in some reprints LeGuin's leading subtitle for the piece was "Variations on a Theme from William James."

With all due respect to LeGuin, I don't think I like parable, either. I'm not even sure on my best days I like literature, or fine intelligences, either. Perhaps I'll take one or the other but not both at the same time. Looking at a recent e-mail exchange with a member of our group, I find this:

Part of the beauty of SF is that it has sometimes been a refuge from the concerns of serious literature. The idea of colonizing SF with mainstream aesthetic concerns (and at this point, Borges, Calvino, Ballard all belong to the mainstream) is something that has been hashed out for a couple decades, now. One of the answers was Gibson: there's a reason why he didn't write like Borges or Calvino, though he was read in them. The previous generation had already done that. His answer was to go deeper into science fiction, to embrace new geekery and to go to darker corners of techspeak and SF neologism. This is an attitude I empathize with, though I'm not sure I'd want to follow him there...I sense a fumbling among the SF community for the
next thing, whether it be Steampunk or the New Weird or Mundane SF. They all seem to be in agreement, though: if SF all became sort of Virginia Wolffish, there's no longer be much interest in keeping the shop open. There would no longer be a refuge to pull from. Opening up SF to Fine Literature is like opening up the City Zoo to the City. All the strange animals would be dead within a week, and the residents of
the City would no longer be able to go see the zebras.


Ack, but I've got to go to work. More on this later.

posted by Greg Purcell @ 10:52 AM, ,