It's official
Wednesday, January 27, 2010



"Dungeons & Dragons could 'foster an inmate’s obsession with escaping from the real-life correctional environment, fostering hostility, violence and escape behavior,' prison officials said in court."

Dungeons & Dragons Prison Ban Upheld NYTimes.com

posted by Greg Purcell @ 1:35 PM, ,


Hey, neat!
Sunday, January 24, 2010

posted by Greg Purcell @ 4:34 PM, ,


Soldiering through
Saturday, January 23, 2010

I've given myself a deadline of Tuesday to finish a story.

This deadline business never goes well for me. The story keeps unraveling and I find myself rapidly stuffing the cotton back into the seams and stapling the seams shut. Why can't I just sit down and write a neat, clean ten-pager? It seems like a lack of good judgment, ultimately.

posted by Greg Purcell @ 9:38 AM, ,


Punch Kick Pause Punch
Sunday, January 17, 2010

To play this game in front of any human being over the age of 12-- indeed, just to play it in front of yourself-- is to develop a sense that something has gone horribly wrong with your recreation. This choice of leisure bespeaks some profound defect in your makeup. That niggling thought that shadows much of our play...is amplified to the point of palpable shame by Bayonetta's relentless barrage of steaming tawdry nonsense.


So begins Iroquois Pliskin's recent post about Bayonetta, which ends:

You cannot pass up this game for its visual and thematic inanity. The libretto for your average operatic masterpiece is some genuinely nonsense, and this does nothing to obscure the beauty of the music that is its rationale. As Frank Lantz astutely noted, games are more music than cinema. Let the music take your mind.


Unbridled admiration combined with mouth-watering disgust of just this sort seems to pretty much sum up what people have been writing about this game. As for me, I am truly enjoying the smooth, unapologetic, and nearly-mechanical videogaminess of this title. Its self-awarness is of itself as a Video Game, and not as a Video Game attempting to be something else.

posted by Greg Purcell @ 4:50 PM, ,


Canada Dry
Wednesday, January 13, 2010



1
It's the layering of gimmicks--rhyme schemes and repetition and metric jingles--that lend poetry its natural opacity. In fact, the whole history of free verse has been an attempt to replicate that opacity without the appearance of gimmicks at all. The Oulipo had a word for a text wherein the constraint is to produce a text which reads as if written under a restriction, without any restriction being imposed at all--"Canada Dry" (derived from a series of advertisements in the 60's that promoted ginger ale as a "kicky" alternative to real alcohol). In other words, the supposed difficulty of poetry is not a poem-to-poem problem, but a universal one. Assuming that, it's also not worth arguing. It's fortunate for the crossword puzzle industry that what they produced was never mistaken for soulcraft--they are neither expected to fill in the puzzles nor make them unsolvable.

There are poets who, in an effort to bypass the difficulty of poetry, write little synopses of the novels they would have written if they weren't so lazy. They aren't difficult, it's true, but they're also boring, too boring even to understand things like games and puzzles, boring even in translation, and are not worth talking about. It's the people engaged in the 30-year cult of difficulty (70 years, if you count The New Criticism) you have to try to talk down from this stuff. They're the ones getting too old to continue the pretense, who created our very difficult world in a situation of unparalleled ease, who are still squatting on a big chunk of poetic real estate, and we younger writers should know better than to allow them to fuck with our dignity, and especially with our fun. No other generation has folded so readily before their elders as we have before ours. They will die soon, and what will we have? Nothing of our own. Not an art, nor a legitimate politics: nothing. Just this meaningless word called difficulty.

2
After hosting a reading of self-identified "literary" science fiction writers this Thursday--a very talented group, and one of the more exciting and fun readings we've had--I was chatting with one of the founders of The Interstitial Arts Foundation. She was singing the praises of an annual science fiction convention outside of Boston called Readercon. She hit upon all the things that make it exciting to me: "it's science fiction writing, but it's the rare convention without the distractions. It's by and for writers." At first, I was excited by the focus of it. But something deeper hit me about it. I'm tired of the "focus" of poets. Because it's all focus, all the time. What luxury, I was thinking, to be in actual danger of being distracted by one's peers. I dream of being so distracted by another poet, instead of watching him or her pretend, in drudgery and recitation, to have honed their specific ideology of language to a killing point.

As we discussed the merits of Readercon, I was thinking the analog to poetry would be if we were in a situation in which there were regularly these fantastic Rhythm and Rhyme conferences featuring birdwatchers, video game developers, graphic designers, musicians and hopscotch athletes --conventions available from month to month in states all over the country, held together by the specifically unserious love of its participants-- and that at least one of them had the rare benefit of featuring only poets. This does not exist of course, because poetry shares with factories and offices and government bureaus everywhere an obsession with perfecting singular processes and the neat-freak abhorrence of the non-ideological.

Where else can you find such clarifying unprofessionalism as in science fiction?

posted by Greg Purcell @ 3:56 PM, ,


Moon!
Sunday, January 10, 2010

I don't know if it'd make much sense to make an annual list of top science fiction movies. Frankly, not enough of them get made to compete, but this year was different.









If you missed Moon you owe it to yourself to rent it when it comes out on DVD next week. It's not that the story's so great--the twist at the end is the story, and while it's fun it's also sort of cheap. The really great thing about it is twofold. First, you've got Sam Rockwell pretty much holding down the fort solo, and to his credit, he's fascinating to watch throughout. That's he's really the only actor in the movie illustrates the point that what's merely intellectual in a high-concept Louis Malle movie becomes actual, philosophical dreamwork in a spacesuit (that is to say, when the director has already asked you to suspend your disbelief at the door). Secondly, it's obvious that Duncan Jones likes the moon. I'll bet money that he liked the moon since he was a kid. I bet he's spent time daydreaming of the peculiar motion of men in fluffy spacesuits moving and bouncing around against the moon's desert, and that clear, clean shine the horizonline makes when unobstructed by atmospheric blur. I'm thinking he did not so much intend to make a movie but to do something with the moon. A movie was just the way to do it, the way Willis O'Brien made a beautiful animated monkey climbing the Empire State Building and asked himself: what can I do with this?

Runners up: District 9, of course, and I hate to say it but I sort of liked Avatar. Of course, I loved last year's Star Trek, but it does not bear repeated home viewings, as I discovered recently. How does Kirk not get arrested for bald Machiavellian intrigue, anyway?

posted by Greg Purcell @ 4:30 PM, ,


Speaking of Adam Roberts...
Sunday, January 3, 2010

Speaking of Adam Roberts, he has an interesting recent post on Science Fiction and Poetics:

Hazard Adams, The Offense of Poetry [Punkadiddle]

posted by Greg Purcell @ 9:02 AM, ,