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writingonjorvik · 4 years ago

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Constructive Criticism Cheat Sheet

Since some folks are struggling:

Constructive criticism is a comment with the aim to improve something without tearing the creator down in the process. It should be:

Critical but not cruel

Pinpoint a specific point relevant to something the creator is asking about

Explains why the individual feels like it should be improved

Expresses how they feel is would look better to them

Be polite!!!

“I like this horse, but I think this muscle looks off. Here’s a reference [provides picture], but adjust it so the leg is a little thicker here.” Constructive Criticism!

Provides feedback, pinpoints their problem, supplies resources as a bonus to back it up.

“This doesn’t look like this horse. The Gen 2 model was better.” Not Constructive Criticism!

While the opinion is valid, there is no explanation of their problem, meaning it is not constructive because the creator has nothing to go on for improvement.

“The last horse looked so much better. I know you can do better.” Not Constructive Criticism!

Improving in creativity is not a linear process. Comparing creations in a recent time frame is not reflective of overall improvement, because we walk back and forth each time we make something. Comparing something you made to something years ago is a better benchmark. This comment sets unfair expectations of constant improvement, which isn’t realistic.

“I made an edited version on my own that you should use instead of what you have.” Not Constructive Criticism!

Everyone has personal preference for sure, but more importantly, everyone works and improves at different rates.You working solo on a project that you’re really proud of is not the same as a team of people working to make something with guidelines from their company as a whole. Comparing how “easy” it is for you to make something to someone else isn’t fair, because everyone grows at different paces and creates at different speeds.

“Why can’t you just change this thing? It’s not like it’s hard.” Not Constructive Criticism!

Again, you can’t judge how difficult something is for someone else. Expecting them to drop everything IMMEDIATELY for something that is subjective like preference in style is not helpful, particularly when the right now is two work days before basically the last active work week and update before holiday vacations start. Asking them to just promotes crunch culture, which is an issue we need to be backing SSE on, not the consumer.

“You’re professionals! This is your job! Why don’t you do better?” Not Constructive Criticism!

Professionals are still human. Experience in technical skill does not void the time it takes to work through the creative process and coordinate with other individuals on your team. These things still take time to work through and again, we’re talking about trying to get an update out right before the holidays.

“Did you even try? This looks terrible. You should just remake it.” Low bar, I know, but have seen this comment floating around, so in case it were not obvious: Not Constructive Criticism!

Does this need a blurb? This one is just mean. This is just an attack. But more specifically, this is not helpful in anyway to the point of not being relevant to the question of “how can this be improved?” Because if someone asks you “how do I make this better?” and you answer “start over” then there is nothing on the project they are actually asking about you are being helpful about.

“You guys are just being greedy and lazy and rushing horses! Just move the release.” Not Constructive Criticism!

If you have to attack someone’s ethics to “provide your point,” you’ve stopped being constructive. Should companies, including SSE, be called out for abusive practices. ALWAYS! But it’s always important to remember that the people making these horses don’t get to set their deadlines. Attacking their work ethics does not equate to being critical of SSE as a company and attacking a company because they don’t back up your opinion does not make them exploitative, particularly an indie company right before the holidays.

Also, bonus ones to fans between fans because someone tried to pull this one on me today:

“You don’t have as much as experience in art as me, so my opinion is more valid.” Not Constructive Criticism!

This is gatekeeping creativity! Should people with more experience in a field be listened to because of their experience? Yes! Experience is important and in STEM fields is often a good indicator of their knowledge, though there are still exceptions. But time put in for art doesn’t work because art is subjective! Just because I’m a published author doesn’t mean I don’t listen to my unpublished writer friends or my fanfiction writer friends. I can still learn from them, even if I have experience in writing they don’t. Their art and their processes are different from mine. We still have things to gain from learning from each other. Time and training does not equal skill in artistic fields, and expectation of university level training equaling experience/mastery in a creative field in particular is incredibly classist as this is not accessible to everyone in the world and traditional schooling is not built for all types of people. Your opinion doesn’t win by default because you’ve taken two years in 3D design and mine is independent study starting a month ago. We all learn at different rates, are better at different things, and ART IS SUBJECTIVE! That means even if I only know how to personally model dice, I can still make reasonable judgements about the amount of time and effort that goes into animating an animated rig. That’s called empathic reasoning. Don’t gatekeep being a creative. Creators competing with each other is why we’re fucked over in the industry in the first place.

#sso #starstable #star stable #star stable online #ssoblr #sso blr

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lets-steal-an-archive · 5 years ago

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Acafandom: Unrefereed Manuscripts (i.e. Theses & Dissertations)

2020

2019

Anderson, Chrisha. 2019. “Women in Online Science Fiction Fandoms: Perceived Impact on Psychological Well-Being.” PhD Dissertation, Advanced Studies in Human Behavior, Capella University.

Barone, Tessa. 2019. “Just Go Find Yourself a Nice Alpha: Gender and Consent in Supernatural Fandom's Alpha/Beta/Omega Universe.” Honors College Thesis, Oregon State University. https://ir.library.oregonstate.edu/concern/honors_college_theses/nk322k653

Takamäki, Topi. 2019. “The Road So Far”: Supernatural as an American Road Narrative. MA Thesis, School of Marketing and Communication, University of Vaasa. https://osuva.uwasa.fi/handle/10024/9567

Trudeau, Cassidy. 2019. "Freedom to Fall: Milton's Christ, Supernatural's Castiel, and the Secularity of Choice." Undergraduate Research Awards, Hollins University. https://digitalcommons.hollins.edu/researchawards/52

2018

Cantrell, Jacquee D. 2018. "From Fan Fiction to Television: Slash Fan Fiction, the Fandom, and Affecting the Source Material." Honors Theses, Eastern Kentucky University. https://encompass.eku.edu/honors_theses/5177

Chiu, W. [招詠琳]. 2018. The gender politics of supernatural : slash fan fictions and the power dynamic in fan/producers relationship. MA Thesis, Department of Literary and Cultural Studies, University of Hong Kong, Pokfulam, Hong Kong SAR. http://hdl.handle.net/10722/265871

Golomb, Liorah. 2018. ‘Let's Go Gank Ourselves a Paris Hilton’ A Textual Analysis of the Dialogue of Supernatural (the First 10 Years). SHAREOK. https://hdl.handle.net/11244/317082

Hatchell, Russ Eugene. 2018. Sci-fi TV in the Great White North : the development of Vancouver as a science fiction media capital. MA Thesis, Radio-Television-Film, University of Texas at Austin. http://hdl.handle.net/2152/72746

Johansson, Emelie. 2018. Up against Good, Evil, Destiny, and God himself. Bachelor Thesis, School of Humanities and Media Studies, Dalarna University. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:du-27069

Koehm, Diana. 2018. "Revision as Resistance: Fanfiction as an Empowering Community for Female and Queer Fans." Honors Scholar Theses, University of Connecticut. https://opencommons.uconn.edu/srhonors_theses/604

2017

Boulware, Taylor. 2017. "Fascination/Frustration: Slash Fandom, Genre, and Queer Uptake." PhD Dissertation, Department of English, University of Washington. http://hdl.handle.net/1773/40073

Edwards, Elizabeth Rose. 2017. Brotherly Love: Remaking Homosociality and Masculinity in Fan Fiction. MA Thesis, Joint Graduate Program in Communication & Culture, York University-Ryerson University. http://hdl.handle.net/10315/33523

Fuchs, Michael. 2016. “Supernatural’s Showrunners, Creative Teams, and Fans: Television Authorship in the Age of Participatory Culture.” Unpublished [accepted for Auteur TV, edited by Ralph Poole and Saskia Fürst. Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2017]. https://web.archive.org/web/20160805175026/http://fuchsmichael.net/index.php/news/47-publication-news/116-supernatural-television-authorship

McKay, Hattie 2017. "Comparing Themes in Supernatural and Left Behind," Relics, Remnants, and Religion: An Undergraduate Journal in Religious Studies: Vol. 2 : Iss. 2 , Article 8. https://soundideas.pugetsound.edu/relics/vol2/iss2/8

2016

Abrahamsson, Beatrice. 2016. "What, so genesis is a lie? Shocker.": en kvalitativ studie om banal religion i TV-serien Supernatural. Bachelor's thesis, Stockholm University. http://www.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:933938/FULLTEXT01.pdf

Klungnes, Kristina Mariell Dulsrud. 2016. "Driver Picks the Music" - Supernatural - A Journey With Music as Fuel. MA Thesis, Department of Musicology, University of Oslo. http://urn.nb.no/URN:NBN:no-54625

Lietz, Michelle. 2016. "Cannibalism in Contact Narratives and the Evolution of the Wendigo." MA Thesis, Department of English Language and Literature, Eastern Michigan University. http://commons.emich.edu/theses/671

Tammentie, Bastian. 2016. "Fandom as an online support group: a case study of CW's Supernatural." Bachelor's thesis, Department of Sociology, University of Jyväskylä. https://jyx.jyu.fi/handle/123456789/62954

Yerima, Adam Kem. 2016. "Saving Innocents: Tracing The Human Monster Hunter’s Hetero-Normative Agenda From The 1970s To Today." PhD Dissertation, Department of English, Wayne State University. http://digitalcommons.wayne.edu/oa_dissertations/1608

2015

Brownfield, Kristi. 2015. “Veni, Vidi, Vids: Transforming Cultural Narratives Through the Art of Audiovisual Storytelling.” PhD Dissertation, Department of Sociology, Southern Illinois University Carbondale.

Collier, Cassandra M. 2015. "The Love That Refuses to Speak its Name: Examining Queerbaiting and Fan-Producer Interactions in Fan Cultures." MA Thesis, Department of Women and Gender Studies, University of Louisville. http://dx.doi.org/10.18297/etd/2204

Genovese, Megan. 2015. "Boys, Girls, and Monsters: Regulation of Normative Gender in Supernatural." Honors thesis, Baylor University. http://hdl.handle.net/2104/9354

Karkanias, Alena. 2015. "And the (Fourth) Wall Came Tumbling Down: The Impact of Renegotiating Fan-Creator Relationships on Supernatural." Summer Research, University of Puget Sound. http://soundideas.pugetsound.edu/summer_research/248

McCurdy, Shellie. 2015. De-Mystifying Fandom: An Ethnography of the World of Supernatural Fangirls. Senior Honors Thesis, Interdisciplinary Studies, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

McGinn, Irene B. 2015. When Becky met Chuck: How the breakdown of the fourth wall is affecting online fandom. MA Thesis, Department of Film and Television Studies, Dublin City University. https://www.academia.edu/3634131/When_Becky_met_Chuck_How_the_breakdown_of_the_fourth_wall_is_affecting_online_fandom

Straw, Amanda L. 2015. “Everybody Hurts: An Autoethnographic Exploration of Hurt/Comfort Fanfiction.” MA Thesis, Department of American Studies, The Pennsylvania State University at Harrisburg. https://web.archive.org/web/20191111044037/https://scholarsphere.psu.edu/downloads/4f4752g316

2014

Holder, Laura L. 2014. "Common Christs: Christ Figures, American Christianity, and Sacrifice on Cult Television." PhD Dissertation, Department of English, University of Louisiana at Lafayette. https://search.proquest.com/openview/705ec356fef9737f7e92061e6876294c/

Karkanias, Alena. 2014. "The Intra- and Inter-Sub-Community Dynamics of Fandom." Summer Research, University of Puget Sound. http://soundideas.pugetsound.edu/summer_research/230

Leddy, Miranda B. 2014. "The women of Supernatural: more than stereotypes." MA Thesis, Department of American Studies, Baylor University. http://hdl.handle.net/2104/9173

Martin, Anna. 2014. Writing the Star: Stardom, Fandom and Real Person Fanfiction. PhD dissertation, Lancaster Institute for the Contemporary Arts, Lancaster University. https://www.academia.edu/25285627/Writing_the_Star_Stardom_Fandom_and_Real_Person_Fanfiction

Vermeer, Alicia Suzanne. 2014. "Searching for God: Portrayals of Religion on Television." MA Thesis, Department of Religious Studies, University of Iowa. http://ir.uiowa.edu/etd/4785

Wickersham, Alexandra. 2014. "Mothers, Martyrs, Damsels, and Demons: Women in Western Horror from Romanticism to the Modern Age." ESSAI: Vol. 12, Article 36. http://dc.cod.edu/essai/vol12/iss1/36

2013

Double, Krystalle. 2013. Female Roles and Fan Fiction in Charmed, Supernatural, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. BA honors thesis, Western Michigan University.

Ireland, Brian. 2013. ""All I saw was evil": Supernatural's Reactionary Road Trip." American Studies Today: 14. http://www.americansc.org.uk/Online/Online_2013/Supernatural.html

Fathallah, Judith. 2013. "Changing Discursive Formations from Supernatural: Fanfic and the Legitimation Paradox." PhD Dissertation, Journalism, Media and Culture, Cardiff University. http://orca.cf.ac.uk/id/eprint/58900

Lander, Katherine. 2013. "That's So Meta: Contemporary Reflexive Television and its Textual Strategies." MA Thesis, Department of Media and Cinema Studies, DePaul University. http://via.library.depaul.edu/cmnt/18

Lausch, Kayti Adaire. 2013. "The Niche Network: Gender, Genre, and the CW Brand." MA Thesis, Department of Radio-Television-Film, University of Texas at Austin. http://hdl.handle.net/2152/22453

Macklem, Lisa. 2013. "We're on This Road Together: The Changing Fan/Producer Relationship in Television as Demonstrated by Supernatural." MA Thesis, Department of Media Studies, University of Western Ontario. http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/etd/1748

2012

Costa, Sarah Moralejo da. 2012. Supernatural na web: produção e reprodução audiovisual em suporte convergente. 2012. 100 f. Dissertação (mestrado) - Universidade Estadual Paulista, Faculdade de Arquitetura, Artes e Comunicação. http://hdl.handle.net/11449/89376

Dubois, François-Ronan. 2012. "Le mythe herculéen dans trois séries américaines: Supernatural, Buffy the Vampire Slayer et The X-Files." e-LLA [revue liée à l'Université de Provence].

2011

Burnell, Aaron. 2011. "Nobody's Darlings: Reading White Trash in Supernatural." MA Thesis, Bowling Green State University. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=bgsu1305054871

Dhalqvist, Ingeborg. 2011. "Competitive Talk and the Three Main Characters of Supernatural." Unpublished manuscript, Mälardalen University. http://www.diva-portal.org/smash/record.jsf?pid=diva2%3A511603&dswid=4389

Geary, Ellen Louise. 2011. “A Critical Analysis of Modern Fan Cultures Attached to Television Texts and the Participatory Nature of Their Activities. With Specific Focus on the Fan Culture of Supernatural.” BA Dissertation, Department of Media Studies, Nottingham Trent University. https://web.archive.org/web/20191111032046/https://picklepegg.livejournal.com/35341.html

Hemmingson, Margaret L. 2011. Sex, Family, and the Home: Portrayals of Gender in the Domestic Sphere in Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Supernatural. BA honors thesis, Elon University.

Richard, Jordan. 2011. "On a Good Day, You Get to Kill a Whore: Narrative Misogyny and Female Audiences in Supernatural." MA Thesis, Department of Sociology, University of Mississippi. https://egrove.olemiss.edu/etd/245

Tovar, Elisabeth. 2011. Supernatural ‘small-town America’ : errance hantée dans les vestiges de l’Amérique industrielle. Métropolitiques. http://metropolitiques.eu/Supernatural-small-town-America.html

2010

Grobisen, Hannah. 2010. “The Winchester Gospel: The 'Supernatural' Fandom as a Religion.” CMC Senior Theses, Intercollegiate Media Studies, Claremont Colleges. https://scholarship.claremont.edu/cmc_theses/2010/

Hampton, Darlene Rose. 2010. "Beyond Resistance: Gender, Performance, and Fannish Practice in Digital Culture." PhD Dissertation, Department of English, University of Oregon. http://hdl.handle.net/1794/11070

Handley, Christine. 2010. "'Playthings in the Margins of Literature': Cultural Critique and Rewriting Ideologies in Supernatural and Star Wars Fanfiction." MA Thesis, Department of English, Dalhousie University. http://hdl.handle.net/10222/13027

2009

Boggs, April. 2009. "No Chick Flick Moments: 'Supernatural' as a Masculine Narrative." MA Thesis, Bowling Green State University. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=bgsu1237564610

Brennan, Joseph Carl Linden. 2009. "I Am Your Worst Fear, I Am Your Best Fantasy: New Approaches to Slash Fiction." Honours Thesis, Department of Media and Communications, University of Sydney. http://hdl.handle.net/2123/5872

Straw, Amanda. 2009. “Squeeing, Flailing, and the “Post-Jared-and-Jensen Glow”: An Ethnography of Creation Entertainment’s March 2009 “Salute to Supernatural” Conventions.” Seminar paper. https://web.archive.org/web/20191111044805/http://www.personal.psu.edu/als595/blogs/amandalynn125/papers/ethnography.pdf

2008

2007

crossposted to: https://justanotheridijiton.dreamwidth.org/34113.html

[previous update]

#acafandom #superwiki #update #meta dumpster

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cryptofeedzposts · 5 years ago

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Final Fantasy VII Remake Demo Game Play Footage Leaked

What appears to be genuine walk through footage of a Final Fantasy VII Remake demo surfaces on YouTube to usher in the New Year. | Credit: LM V2/YouTube

Final Fantasy VII demo footage was uploaded to YouTube.

Corroborates rumors of a demo from late last month.

Videos feature gameplay including a boss fight.

While most were busy celebrating our planet’s latest revolution around the sun with merriment and mirth, an unknown leaker was busy uploading footage of the rumored Final Fantasy VII Remake demo to YouTube.

Final Fantasy VII Remake Demo Footage

Late last month, PlayStation Network data miner site Gamstat picked up on what appeared to be files linked to a PlayStation Store listing for a Final Fantasy VII demo. With art assets and a download file size, this looked like the real deal.

We awake this morning to find that the demo is nothing short of a certainty, barring some extremely unlikely and elaborate ploy courtesy of enterprising trolls.

Source: YouTube

YouTube channel LM V2 uploaded two videos on New Year’s Eve, one dubbed ‘Part 1’ and the other ‘Part 3’, which suggest a further video may pop up before long.

From the footage, it seems the YouTube channel or an unknown third party was able to hack their way into the unpublished PlayStation Store listing and appropriate the game files. The videos appear to show a walk through of the demo, or at least part of it.

Don’t Miss:

The Real Deal

Interestingly, the footage appears to pick up from a video leaked earlier yesterday, showcasing the Final Fantasy VII Remake demo’s title screen and menus alongside the introductory cinematic, which suggests we are dealing with the genuine article.

We see Cloud strutting his stuff and slicing his way through in security officers and guard dogs alongside appearances from Barret, Jessie, Wedge, and Biggs.

The second video shows a boss fight against a Scorpion Sentinel before Cloud and Barret continue on their merry way. We also catch a segment where the player takes control of Barret.

Now comes the waiting game. With the Final Fantasy VII demo on the PlayStation Store servers and in a playable state, it’s only a matter of time before Square Enix announces the demo publicly.

As for when that might be; Final Fantasy VII Remake releases on March 3, 2020, giving us just north of three months for the demo to officially drop.

This article was edited by Gerelyn Terzo.

Last modified: January 1, 2020 14:47 UTC

#Cryptocurrencies #Bitcoin #Ethereum #Litecoin #Ripple #XRP

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ojamesy · 7 years ago

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Full length PDFs of Joycean criticism

1) Morris Beja and Shari Benstock: Coping with Joyce

2) Vincent Cheng: Inauthentic: The Anxiety Over Culture

3) Patrick Hogan: James Joyce, Ulysses and the Poetics of Cognition

Reviewed by Tom De Keyser:

Patrick Colm Hogan is an ambitious writer. Early in Ulysses and the Poetics of Cognition, he promises to explore “the key components of cognition and poetics” in one of the most complex novels of the twentieth century, James Joyce’s Ulysses (Hogan 2014: 5). In six chapters, this book argues that simulation is a constitutive element of cognitive research, and that it is a central means by which authors create stories. The framework of narratology is used to constitute the argument on the basis of the distinction between what is told in a narrative (“story”) and how it is told (“discourse”). Hogan illustrates different aspects of simulation with multiple literary examples taken from various genres. On the story level, the works of Shakespeare and Racine are examined in order to make a connection between character simulation and authors’ cognitive operations. Next to simulating characters, authors use metaphors and models (the way The Odyssey is a model to Ulysses) to guide simulation, which is demonstrated in relation to writings of Brecht and Kafka. On the level of discourse, an author’s creation of plot is clarified by an analysis of Shakespeare’s Hamlet and narration itself is taken up in the surprising Afterword, which simulates a conversation between Hogan and Calvino... According to Hogan, simulation is the central process by which Joyce developed his novel. ...Of course, Hogan admits that things are far more complex, but he contends that authorial simulation in tandem with a simulated readership is crucial to the creation of a convincing story world, a world that only exists in minds. However, simulation still has a close relation to its real-life counterpart.

The second half of Ulysses and the Poetics of Cognition therefore presents an argument in favour of a connection between Joyce’s novel and reality. According to Hogan, simulation of the fictional events and actions on 16 June 1904 constitutes Joyce’s way to provide the reader with a convincing representation of reality. He aims to reexamine the notion of realism in relation to Ulysses. Hogan notes that his argument goes against the interpretation offered by an important commentator in narratology and reader response theory: Wolfgang Iser. In 1989, Iser wrote an influential essay called “Ulysses and the reader”. He argued that Ulysses establishes a radical break with nineteenth-century fiction, as it resists a traditional interpretation, namely that art should represent reality. Ulysses simply “puts an end to representation” and, as a consequence, to “expectations” of tradition (Iser 1989: 133). Every expectation proposed in the novel is later on inexorably shattered, leaving the reader in a wasteland of unfulfilled expectations. Iser thus presents an interpretation of Ulysses that considers it as radically “making it new” and embodying the spirit of the age, namely attempting to bring order to chaos, but failing in the attempt... While Iser writes that Ulysses does away with this notion, Hogan contradicts him with his interpretation of simulation. According to Hogan, Ulysses provides the reader with a particular representation of reality, though it does not intend to mirror or transcribe reality. Above all, Joyce’s novel does not give a truthful image of reality, but instead wishes to cultivate the reader’s “understanding” of it (Hogan 2014: 116). This is what Hogan calls “communicative realism” (2014: 116). Furthermore, Ulysses establishes a critique on norms imposed by society and thereby opposes specific, misleading ideas about reality...the book refuses to accept traditional – what Hogan calls “external” – expectations, motivations, and norms. In order to provide a convincing interpretation of Joycean realism, Hogan takes this idea further. He correctly observes that Ulysses offers a critique not only of external norms, but also of newly-established, internal norms.

4) Ulysses with Declan Kiberd’s Introduction

Quotes from the intro: “The sincere nationalist asks writers to hold a miror up to Cathleen Ní Houlihan’s face; authentic liberationist wistfully observes that the cracked looking-glass, which is all he has been left by the coloniser, renders not a single but a multiple self.’ (p.lxxviii; also Inventing Ireland, 1995, p.298.) [Cont.]

“The difference between these two versions of Irish Renaissance might best be explained by invoking Lionel Trilling’s brilliant distinction between sincerity and authenticity. Sincerity, a congruence between avowal and feeling, can be achieved when there is no problem of form: in it based on the Romantic ideal of truth to the self and it presupposes a definite indentity [sic] which it becomes the task of a lifetime to be true to. Authenticity is a more excruciatingly modern demand, which begins with the admission that there is a problem of form, and that this makes a congruence between avowal and feeling difficult: it recognises that the issue is not truth to the self but the finding of the many selves that one might wish to be true to. It makes the liberating concession that a person, or a nation, has a plurality of identities, constantly remaking themselves as a result of perpetual renewals. Joyce’s constant struggles with the question of form […] places him squarely in this tradition.” (p.lxxvii.)

“[…] Ulysses is an endlessly open book of utopian epiphanies. It holds a mirror up to the colonial capital that was Dublin, 16 June 1904, but it also offers redemptive glimpses of a future world which might be made over in terms of those utopian moments.’ (p.lxxx; end)

Harry Levin: James Joyce: A Critical Introduction

Because Harry Levin’s view is large, as opposed to the many necessary exegeses and close textual studies, he leads the reader easily into the delights to be found in Joyce, from the comparatively simple prose of Dubliners, through Ulysses and into the complexities of Finnegans Wake. The insight and brilliance of this "critical introduction," first published by New Directions in 1941, make it as rewarding for the expert as the student. For this revised edition, Mr. Levin, who is Irving Babbitt Professor of Comparative Literature at Harvard, has made revisions and added a new preface and a long "postscript" which he calls "Revising Joyce." He examines the works that have come to light in the last few years and some of the important later biographical writings about Joyce.

5) John McCourt: James Joyce In Context

This collection of original, cohesive and concise essays charts the vital contextual backgrounds to Joyce's life and writing. The volume begins with a chronology of Joyce's publishing history, an analysis of his various biographies and a study of his many published and unpublished letters. It goes on to examine how his works were received in the main twentieth-century critical and theoretical schools. Most importantly, it places Joyce within multiple Irish, British and European contexts, providing a lively sense of the varied and changing world in which he lived, which formed him, and from which he wrote. The essays collectively show how Joyce was rooted in his times, how he is both a product and a critic of his multiple contexts, and how important he remains to the world of literature, criticism and culture.

6) Laurent Milesi: James Joyce and the Difference of Language

Cambridge Press book release:

James Joyce and the Difference of Language offers an alternative look at Joyce's writing by placing his language at the intersection of various critical perspectives: linguistics, philosophy, feminism, psychoanalysis, postcolonialism and intertextuality. Combining close textual analysis and theoretically informed readings, an international team of leading scholars explores how Joyce's experiments with language repeatedly challenge our ways of reading. Topics covered include reading Joyce through translations; the role of Dante's literary linguistics in Finnegans Wake; and the place of gender in Joyce's modernism. Two further essays illustrate aspects of Joyce's cultural politics in Ulysses and the ethics of desire in Finnegans Wake. Informed by debates in Joyce scholarship, literary studies and critical theory, and addressing the full range of his writing, this volume comprehensively examines the critical diversity of Joyce's linguistic practices. It is essential reading for all scholars of Joyce and modernism.

7) Daniel R. Schwarz: Reading Joyce’s Ulysses

Reissued to commemorate the 100th anniversary of Bloomsday, Reading Joyce's 'Ulysses' includes a new preface taking account of scholarly and critical development since its original publication. It shows how the now important issues of post-colonialism, feminism, Irish Studies and urban culture are addressed within the text, as well as a discussion of how the book can be used by both beginners and seasoned readers. Schwarz not only presents a powerful and original reading of Joyce's great epic novel, but discusses it in terms of a dialogue between recent and more traditional theory. Focusing on what he calls the odyssean reader, Schwarz demonstrates how the experience of reading Ulysses involves responding both to traditional plot and character, and to the novel's stylistic experiments.

Schwarz's sensible, conservative reading of Ulysses emphasizes that "Joyce always returns from his fascination with stylistic innovation to focus on his characters." Though his approach is traditional, Schwarz does justice throughout to the novel's radical ambiguity and to contemporary critical theory. Chapters on how Joyce's fiction "signifies," Joyce's concept of the hero, and the role of the reader are followed by a substantial episode-by-episode reader's guide. The Iliad , Wilde, Yeats, Dante, Milton, Tennyson, Swift, and Blake figure prominently, and Schwarz argues strikingly for the central importance of the "Scylla and Charybdis" chapter. Though not a radical departure from earlier readings, this is a thoughtful interpretation that serious students of Ulysses will welcome. Keith Cushman, English Dept., Univ. of North Carolina, Greensboro

8) Katie Wales: The Language of James Joyce

This book presents an analysis for students of the language and style of Joyce's major prose works in the light of current work in language studies, stylistics and literary theory. Each chapter addresses a particular aspect of the style of a prose work or text, rhetoric (Dubliners, and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man), speech and thought presentation and word-play (Ulysses) and sound-play (Finnegans Wake).

---Amazon blurb

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oscopelabs · 8 years ago

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From Script to Screen: The Strange Alchemy of ‘Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans’ by Soheil Rezayazdi

The word “iguana” doesn’t appear in the shooting script of Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans. And why should it? Written by veteran TV writer William Finkelstein, the script unfolds with the cause-and-effect logic of a tight police procedural. Prior to penning Bad Lieutenant, Finkelstein wrote more than 50 episodes of L.A. Law, created and wrote on Brooklyn South, and contributed to such cop show staples as Law & Order and NYPD Blue. The man knows how to write a coherent crime drama. He’s devoted his career to the genre, mastering its plot points and character arcs for network television.

So why, in Bad Lieutenant, does a routine scene of police surveillance devolve into a full minute of shaky close-ups of iguanas? Why do scenes end with mystifying non-sequiturs like “Shoot him again...his soul is still dancing”? Why does its protagonist enter a bar shouting, “Sup! Sup! Sup, motherfucker!” for no reason? And why does he aim a gun at an old lady’s head and seethe “Maybe you should drop dead, you selfish cunt!” long after a director should have shouted “cut”?

William Finkelstein wrote none of that. His script originated in the early 2000s as a New York-set TV pilot. Over time, he reworked the material—first into a feature, then into a New Orleans noir. He finished revisions on the script in 2008 as the film was in production. The final script, which he sent me prior to our recent meet-up at an Italian bakery in the West Village, bears the signature of a police procedural master craftsman. Over espressos and lemon ices, I implored Finkelstein to discuss the brazen changes made to his script by the erratic tag team of Nicolas Cage and director Werner Herzog.

Our discussion, along with a close look at the unpublished shooting script, reveals how many of Bad Lieutenant’s most singularly strange moments were born.

“I always wanted to pull back to the procedural nature [of the script],” Finkelstein said, “and Werner basically didn’t give a shit about any of that.”

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Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans is a true curiosity. Neither a remake nor a sequel to Abel Ferrara’s 1992 Bad Lieutenant, the film attempts to turn that film’s premise��a cop with a severe drug problem—into a franchise. Finkelstein likened the connection between his film and Ferrara’s to the Bond series. “From Russia with Love is not a sequel to Dr. No,” he said. “It’s a different movie with different bad guys and settings, but there’s a character in the midst of it—who’s played by different people over the years—who has certain traits that make James Bond James Bond.”

And so the refined Bond martini, shaken not stirred, becomes the bump of coke before work, the hit of crack with your local dealer, the shot of heroin to end the night. Take your pick. Both bad lieutenants love it all. Not surprisingly, there’s no word yet on a third installment to a film franchise whose trademarks include hardcore drug use, gambling debts, and sexual bribery.

The 2009 film is a gleeful exercise in provoking head scratches, raised eyebrows, dropped jaws. Where to start? That a Nic Cage cop drama is the biggest budgeted film of Werner Herzog’s career? Or how about its supporting cast, a grab bag of the formerly famous (Val Kilmer, Fairuza Balk, Xzibit) that gives the film its straight-to-video flavor? Or maybe we focus on the title, Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans, a name as indecisive and unwieldy as the film itself?

Above all, though, we have the enchanting interplay between three distinct voices: Herzog, Cage, and Finkelstein. The three operate as something of a jazz trio— Finkelstein keeps time while Herzog and Cage solo over his material. Each player takes turns taking control of what’s on screen. Cage brings the Tourettic outbursts of a repressed superstar unchained. Herzog injects the film with lyrical (and often very goofy) interludes. And Finkelstein gives contrast to his partners’ more self-indulgent noodling. Together, the three don’t exactly harmonize; their agendas clash on the screen, birthing moments of wondrous strangeness. You either dig the contrapuntal pleasures, or you hear nothing but noise.

This piece focuses on the film’s noisiest moments: those flashes of improvisation and left-field obsession smuggled into Bad Lieutenant. I select four scenes where the film erupts into delicious chaos. These are the scenes where a genre picture, penned by an industry veteran, morphs into a kind of madness no screenwriter could dream up.

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“You’re the fucking reason this country’s going down the drain!”

A police officer investigates a homicide while battling his own demons. Bad Lieutenant, for all its digressions, hinges on a fairly straightforward premise. As the film’s tagline cutely puts it, the only criminal Lt. Terence McDonagh can’t catch…is himself. Our protagonist stumbles around New Orleans, getting into all kinds of trouble, as he gathers evidence against the likely perp, a local drug dealer named Big Fate (Xzibit). McDonagh has shades of the great stoner detectives—The Dude, Doc Sportello, Altman’s Philip Marlowe—only he doesn’t shy away from conflict; he seeks it out like a commuter with low blood sugar.

His biggest meltdown arrives in a luxury nursing home. McDonagh’s there to interrogate Binnie, a nursing home assistant, on the whereabouts of her grandson. In the script, he badgers Binnie and a patient in her care, an elderly woman in a wheelchair. Binnie refuses to talk—until McDonagh cuts off the patient’s oxygen supply. Aghast, Binnie gives up her grandson’s location. McDonagh reattaches the oxygen tubes, having extracted the information he needs to move the plot forward, and leaves. End scene.

This two-page exchange runs a sadistic three minutes in Bad Lieutenant. The unscripted touches start right away: Cage hides behind the old lady’s bedroom door as she enters, surreally shaving with an electric razor. He attacks this material with the whisper-or-scream volatility of his famed freakouts. Dialogue-wise, he sticks to Finkelstein’s words for the first two minutes, drawing out lines like “Children...were executed” for maximum menace. From there, he transforms the moment into macabre humor. Cage introduces a gun into the scene, shoving it up against Binnie’s temple as he fumes, “Where the fuck is he?” Once he gets his answer, Cage extends the scene with a virtuoso verbal assault on the old lady. “Maybe you should drop dead you selfish cunt!” he erupts after a few seconds of silence.

It’s too much to print here in full. You can find it in any Nic Cage supercut worth your time.

“You’re the fucking reason this country’s going down the drain!” he screams to close the scene, a head-spinning non-sequitur from a character who’s never expressed concern for the state of the nation.

For Finkelstein, the scene was way too much.

“When I first saw it I thought, ‘Wow, we can’t do this,’” he said. “‘This is terrible. It’s so extreme. It takes us out of the scene.”

Finkelstein wrote the sequence as an homage to the 1947 noir Kiss of Death, in which Richard Widmark shoves a woman in a wheelchair down a flight of stairs. He saw an early cut of the film and dined that night at Herzog’s house. He decided, rather than suggest a dozen small edits, he would focus on two or three big asks. This scene was one of them. Cage’s assault serves no real purpose. It’s just a full minute of over-the-top Cage rage. I’d imagine most writers would question the inclusion of such a tone-shattering addition to their script. Herzog overruled him.

“I saw it again at the premiere, and I’m sitting there in the theater and I just loved it,” Finkelstein said. “I thought it was funny as hell. The extreme nature of the annunciation is what sold it. I think I was a little conservative, a little cautious.”

“I was so happy that nobody listened to me in the end,” he said.

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“What’re these fucking iguanas doing on my coffee table?”

Little can prepare first-time viewers of Bad Lieutenant for the iguana interlude. In perhaps Herzog’s most ostentatious addition to the script, he stretches less than a page of script action here into two minutes of on-screen delirium. It’s the film’s most infamous scene, a narrative and aesthetic sideswipe of the highest order.

On the page, the moment unfolds without much incident. McDonagh arrives in an apartment being used to surveil a drug dealer. He has a routine exchange with two officers about the suspect’s whereabouts. McDonagh and Stevie (Val Kilmer) disagree about whether to call the SWAT team. Soon, all five cops leave to apprehend the suspect. No outbursts, no obscenities, no iguanas.

In the film, Herzog opens this sequence with a shot of Cage snorting heroin in a bathroom stall. This bit appears elsewhere in the script; Herzog moves it here, we can presume, to prime us for the psychedelic journey to come.

Cage enters the surveillance site with an un-holstered gun comically bulging out of his pants. Finkelstein was on set the day Cage decided to wear his gun like this throughout the film. Initially, he felt compelled to protest.

“There’s times when an actor wants something like this, and you got to say no,” Finkelstein said. Having worked on cop dramas for decades, he took pride in getting these details right.

“Cops don’t carry their guns like that,” he said. “But as extravagant as this was as a gesture, Nic understood something about this character. He was playing this guy bigger than I’d imagined, but in fact he was right and I was too cautious.”

Heroin in his veins, gun in his groin, Cage storms into the scene and spots two iguanas matter-of-factly lounging on a coffee table. He stutters in extreme agitation, turning script lines like “Let ’em stay there” to “Naw! No...just no SWAT, let ’em stay there.” He then drifts into a fugue state with the invisible iguanas. Amid a story of cops and criminals, Herzog asks us to stare at garish close-ups of the animals for 60-some seconds. Louisiana native Johnny Adams wails on the soundtrack. To make the narrative rupture even more pronounced, he films the ordeal in ugly, consumer-grade digital video.

I’m not so concerned with what this all means. Animals and nature have long fascinated Herzog, from the “fiendish stupidity” of chickens to the “obscene, explicit malice” of the jungle. Animals permeate Bad Lieutenant—fish, iguanas, gators—and almost all of them were introduced by Herzog. As a viewer, a part of me wants to rationalize these moments. Perhaps Hurricane Katrina’s floodwaters brought the wilderness into the city, turning New Orleans into a literal asphalt jungle? Or maybe it’s more intuitive: “There is nothing more wondrous,” Herzog has said, “than seeing Nicolas Cage and a lizard together in one shot.”

Finkelstein gave his blessing for the iguana hallucination, despite its total disruption of the story. The scene came at the expense of an action sequence Finkelstein had written. In the shooting screenplay, Cage’s character has a coke-fueled fight with some strangers at a gas station. Herzog refused to shoot the scene to ensure his iguanas made the final cut. Finkelstein tried to sell him on the merits of the rest stop melee, and lost.

“Herzog said ‘I think we’re going to go long, and then [the producers] are going to make me lose my iguanas—and if they make me lose my iguanas I feel like I can’t be a filmmaker anymore,’” Finkelstein recalled. “And I thought ‘Whoa, this cat is serious. He’s not fucking around.’ I just had so much respect for him as an artist. I didn’t give a good goddamn if he shot the scene or not once he said that. That beats anything.”

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“To the break of daaaawn, baby!”

Bad Lieutenant’s script detours tend to arrive at the start or end of a given scene. Consider the above examples: Herzog and Cage hit the scenes’ narrative beats, and then they start riffing. As Finkelstein put it, the two “always knew what had to happen in the scene.” Once they hit those notes, they had carte blanche to treat the script like mere bullet points to a freeform lecture of their choosing.

“Nicolas knew that sometimes after a scene was shot I would not shut down the camera if I sensed there was more to it,” Herzog wrote in 2009. “I simply would not call ‘cut’ and leave him exposed and suspended under the pressure of the moment.”

The film’s catchphrase grew from this loose set dynamic. Toward the end of Bad Lieutenant, Cage’s character cons Big Fate to both gather evidence against him and score some of his drugs. In the script, McDonagh, Big Fate, and his men share a moment together after a successful drug deal. McDonagh demands his cut of the money and a cut of the drugs. He pulls a gun on Big Fate and wins the exchange, closing the scene with an unambiguous threat to a car full of drug dealers: “I’ll kill all of you.”

Cage doesn’t end the scene there. To begin, he colors the exchange with spastic ad libs like “Sup!” to get the men’s attention. The actors stray from the particulars of the screenplay, but they convey all the key information to move the story forward. Then the scene trails off into loopy nonsense. Cage waves his gun around like a toy and, sensing radio silence, mutters—and then roars—“I’ll kill all of you...to the break of dawn. To the break of daaaaawn, baby!”

You can see the smirk sneak onto Cage’s face just before he opens his mouth. Clearly pleased with himself, he delivers the line with the Elvis-like drawl he used in Wild at Heart. All four actors erupt in laughter, and suddenly it’s as though we’re watching a closing credits gag reel. Cage swings the mood from sinister to silly; Herzog, the enabler, lets him get away with it.

“This was pure Nic,” Finkelstein said. “That was one of my favorite moments because he can’t help but get this smile on his face when he says it. He’s so enthused.”

I smiled, myself, upon hearing this. As a viewer, I’d long wondered if Finkelstein found moments like this offensive. Here’s Cage, after all, undercutting his words, cracking up fellow actors for kicks. It could be interpreted as mockery. For Finkelstein, though, Cage’s untethered rambles “all seemed to work of a piece.” Finkelstein had years of experience making on-set changes to other writers’ scripts as a TV showrunner. His words, he told me, need not be “cherished” by an actor struck with inspiration.

“The story felt like it could incorporate all that,” he said. “There was a basis for it because this guy was fucked up all the time.”

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“Shoot him again...his soul is still dancing.”

The script revisions get downright operatic by the film’s climactic shootout. Over an eternal five and a half minutes, Cage and Herzog here transform the script’s most violent moment into a surreal and comic medley of their wildest impulses.

They make far too many edits to detail them all. In Finkelstein’s text, the scene begins as a meeting between Big Fate, his henchmen, and McDonagh. Spirits high, McDonagh smokes crack with the men to test out their new product. He proposes that, in lieu of his cash payment, he gets a cut of the dope. The men agree, and McDonagh spoons his share into a baggie. He then invites Big Fate to take a hit from his “lucky crack pipe.” McDonagh, we later learn, will plant the pipe at a crime scene to seal his case against Big Fate.

A trio of thuggish debt collectors arrives at Big Fate’s home to shake down McDonagh for the money he owes them. McDonagh suggests they take his dope as payment; the head gangster, Dave, threatens to take all of the dope, Big Fate’s included. A tense moment follows. The debt collectors reach for the dope on the table; Big Fate and his men shoot all three of them. “Clean this shit up,” Big Fate says to close the scene.

Cage and Herzog’s gonzo take on this material is at once faithful and ludicrous. The scene begins, as in the script, with the characters in a celebratory mood. The four men smoke as Xzibit orders his men to “light the Caucasian’s rock”—the first of many ad libs smuggled into the scene. For Cage, the drugs are a green light to go berserk. He proposes a business idea and explodes into a pipe-bursting laugh few on this earth could imitate. From there, the floodgates open. Cage runs through a nonsense story about a football player who sprouts antlers. We’ve all been there: loaded, desperate to tell a story with no point. Wild-eyed and blissed-out, he ends the unscripted monologue with another abrasive laugh. Pure Cage, uncaged.

Xzibit and his men worry Cage might die from the crack intake. Here, the actors use snippets of Finkelstein’s dialogue about other drug users dying and apply it to Cage, given how feral he’s decided to play the scene. “Easy, easy, easy...cuz I’m not Eazy-E!” Cage retorts, another improv line that makes Xzibit laugh.

From there, the scene plays out as written for two minutes. Finkelstein, a native New Yorker with an agreeably gruff voice, plays Dave, the lead debt collector. The confrontation between him, Xzibit, and Cage ends in a shootout set to “Lost John,” the same song Herzog used for the dancing chicken sequence in Stroszek.

Cage then passes the freak flag to Herzog. Instead of “clean this shit up,” Herzog has Cage implore the gangsters to shoot Finkelstein again because “his soul is still dancing.” Cage erupts into his asthmatic laugh as Herzog pans to reveal a breakdancer dressed like Finkelstein spinning near his dead body. Cage stares ahead, transfixed by the breakdancing soul. An iguana saunters through the room, an emblem of his hallucination. A shootout has devolved into a freakout.

None of this, of course, was scripted. It’s all too perfect: A screenwriter gets his work butchered, and then he gets killed on camera. Finkelstein called these edits “happy bastardizations.”

“Some of that big shootout was improvised, yeah,” he said. “That thing about the gazelle sprouting antlers, Cage made that up. The breakdancing was Werner. Absolutely Werner.”

Finkelstein compared Bad Lieutenant to other gangster films freed from the shackles of genre, from Breathless to the crime dramas of Jean-Pierre Melville. He also likened it to Cop Rock, a short-lived ABC show he co-created. A true curio, the 1990 show operated as part cop drama, part musical. It was a fascinating, supremely awkward marriage. “Audiences were not happily startled,” as Finkelstein put it. Though he didn’t write it that way, Bad Lieutenant became a similar experiment in police procedural storytelling.

“There’s a tradition of being able to take the form and blow it up and make a movie that’s more lyrical and not realistic,” he said. “I think that’s what we all wound up doing.”

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Who captains this ship? The answer changes from scene to scene, shot to shot, line to line. A big-name actor, an art-house iconoclast, and a veteran TV writer each take turns steering. Finkelstein guides much of the first act; his instincts as a successful writer/producer orient viewers into this world. Herzog takes the film on its strangest journeys, refashioning this material into an exploration of what he calls “the bliss of evil.” And Cage grabs the mic like a drunk wedding guest, holding viewers hostage to his artful, overlong eruptions. Each contributor has his marquee moments. Like a stoner pizza topped with cream cheese, bacon, and Nutella, it shouldn’t work—but it does.

Bad Lieutenant reveals cinema for what it is: a messily collaborative medium. Every film is the work of many voices. What makes the film wonderful is that, despite their strong and distinct personalities, Cage, Herzog, and Finkelstein’s voices don’t compete; they complement. They produce a sound neither could create on his own.

Finkelstein stressed this point throughout our talks. His impulses did, at times, conflict with the liberties taken to his work. He returned several times to Cage’s unhinged attack in the nursing home. Finkelstein’s voice, calibrated over decades on television, couldn’t make sense of such excess. Of course he came around. Had he been in charge that day, though, he “almost assuredly would have pulled back,” he told me. “That Nic didn’t is a testament to one of the joys of a collaborative process.”

The word “alchemy” feels appropriate for a film this volatile. To watch Bad Lieutenant is to witness a bizarre and unlikely combination of elements collide on a screen. We’ve seen these elements before, in isolation: Cage’s tantrums, Herzog’s lyricism, Finkelstein’s cop drama chops. Together, they produce something new, unclassifiable—a drug you’ve never taken before. As with all great cult films, my recommendation comes with a warning: Be careful. It’ll mess with your head.

#werner herzog #nic cage #nicolas cage #william finkelstein #bad lieutenant #bad lieutenant: port of call new orleans #xzibit #val kilmer #abel ferrara #nypd blue #law & order #iguana

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hermanwatts · 4 years ago

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Sensor Sweep: Savage Sword, Tanith Lee, Fritz Leiber, Greyhawk

Tolkien (Scifi Scribe): If you want to create a high fantasy game that is in the same vein as Tolkien and checks off all those “woke” boxes you so desperately want to check off, you can easily do so without using any of the characters or places in his classic work. It isn’t that hard to do. I did it. Its called Minya’s Legacy. The game never got produced but I created the entire story and bible for it. I’ve been considering making it into a full-blown novel down the line.

Comic Books (Tentaculii): The third volume of the sumptuous Savage Sword of Conan reprints is now shipping in the USA, including a 160-page Conan the Buccaneer adaptation that is effectively a graphic novel. No sign of the book on the UK Amazon, though. Volume 4 is now announced there for November 2020, adding another 900+ pages of reprints.

Game/ RPG (Kairos): Like a lot of people, I’ve been on a nostalgia trip lately. The accelerating societal collapse seems to be the catalyst for this phenomenon, so it makes sense that much of today’s nostalgia revolves around the High 90s–when most entertainment media sang their swan songs prior to hitting cultural ground zero. For me, a defining component of the High 90s experience will always be sixteen-bit JRPGs.

Forthcoming (DMR Books): Fortunately for Lee’s fans, Immanion Press is doing an excellent job keeping her memory alive and her work available. In recent years they’ve released a number of collections of Lee’s stories, including many that were previously uncollected, having only appeared once in magazines. They even unearthed a few previously unpublished tales, so even the most devoted of Tanith Lee’s fans will find something they never read before. A partial list of Tanith Lee collections published by Immanion Press.

Harry Potter (DVS Press): It’s a curious case – Millenials, particularly in the “literary” and “writing” (I use those terms as ironically as possible) community are constantly referencing Harry Potter, particularly when it comes to some of the basic parts of the moral play, such as Lord Voldemort, who represents whatever current-year evil they happen to be personally obsessed with (usually just orange man bad). Why? Why so much obsession with a children’s book series, to the point where people put their Hogwarts house in their twitter bio? Yes, you are so Gryffindor, Miss Keyboard Warrior!

Appendix N (Jeffro’s Space Gaming Blog): Just as important is the fact that the campaign setting we developed together is a heterogeneous mess that works far, far better in practice than I think anyone would would want to believe. We have a Melnibonéan ruling over Lankmar… with a Clark Ashton Smith story next door and bits of a Margaret St. Clair novel in the dungeons below. To the north we have the lost city of Opar courtesy of Edgar Rice Burroughs and another dungeon concept taken wholesale from H. Rider Haggard and A. Merritt.

Fantasy (Davy Crockett’s Almanac): I first came across the adventures of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser sometime in the early ’70s, when in the throes of Howardmania. There were five volumes available back then, four story collections and one novel, and they were all good. So I finally decided to take another trip through the first book in the chronological series. And whaddaya know? Unlike the sword and sorcery works of Michael Moorcook, which now seem much less than they were, these stories are more.

Interview (NC Register): “No science fiction writer is imaginative enough to have pictured this combination of hysteria, incompetence, malice and affluence.” So says award-winning science fiction writer John C. Wright, down the line from his home in Virginia. In this time of pandemic, Wright was speaking to the Register June 20, just as the lockdown began to ease across the Western world. The obvious question to ask a writer of speculative fiction is how recent events — which for many have been surreal and at times reminiscent of a premise for a sci-fi novel — compare to his own imaginings of future realities.

New Pulp (Pulp.Net): Professor I.V. “Ivy” Frost was a scientist who solved crimes, billed as an “American Sherlock Holmes.” An eccentric character, he wasn’t afraid to get his hands dirty solving a crime. He was no armchair detective, and used his scientific knowledge in solving crime. His assistant, Jean Moray, also broke the mold. Miss Moray was no dumb blonde secretary or damsel in distress. A sexy blonde with a genius IQ who packed a .25 derringer, she was the perfect counterpart to her boss.

RPG (Boggswood): The esteemed Paleologos has put up a couple very interesting posts on The Gnome Cache, an early Greyhawk story written by Gary Gygax and serialized in The Dragon magazine. Have a LOOK. Paleologos pointed out that the installments in issues 6 and 7 feature Blackmoor and reading his posts have prompted me to take a closer look at this portion of the tale.

Fiction (Paperback Warrior): t’s no secret that Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer series was an empire. It’s like the KISS of crime-fiction and by the late 1940s Spillane and Hammer boosted the genre to lofty commercial heights. Detective fiction was real cool…again. But, a decade before, a guy named Davis Dresser had done the same. Dresser’s Mike Shayne character was a media phenomenon. Beginning with the character’s debut in 1939’s Dividend on Death, Dresser, using the pseudonym Brett Halliday, penned fifty novels through 1958.

Art (Animation Treasures): JOHN CONRAD BERKEY,1932 – 2008, was an american artist known for his space- and science fiction-themed works. some of berkey’s best-known work includes much of the original poster art for the STAR WARS trilogy and the poster for the 1976 remake of KING KONG, berkey produced a large body of space fantasy artwork, creating utopian scenes of bubble-shaped, yacht-like spaceships. his distinctive painterly style has been evaluated as “at once realistic, yet impressionistic and abstract”, and his space craft designs as being “distinctly elegant, yet clearly technological and unmistakably BERKIAN, more inspired by luxury yachts and manta rays than NASA”. he has been described as “one of the giants in the history of science fiction art”.

Westerns (Mens Pulp Mags): There are also some notable new printed and digital guides to Western books, TV shows and movies. Among those, in addition to the HOT LEAD fanzines, is the 52 WEEKS * 52 WESTERNS series co-edited by Paul Bishop, and the extremely well-researched and entertaining “The Six-Gun Justice” podcast hosted by Paul and his fellow novelist and Western maven Richard Prosch.

Science Fiction (Future War Stories): When they came from the red planet to take what is ours, they came in war machines that walked on legs of three and vaporized with rays of heat. In the founding work of military science fiction, War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells, the tradition of alien invaders was established along with the use of robotic war machines used in future war fiction. One of the many features that made these alien war machines was their form of locomotion: three legs. In this installment of Our Enemies, FWS will be exploring and explaining one of the oldest types of enemies of mankind: the Tripod!

RPG (Misha Burnett): Venger Satanis is a Tabletop Role Playing Game Designer and a prolific blogger on the subject of RPGs. He publishes his work through on the DriveThruRPG platform as Kort’thalis Publishing. His work falls under the general descriptor of OSR or Old School Renaissance–the RPG equivalent of PulpRev. He has an irreverent, often scandalous style.

Westerns (Paperback Warrior): Before he became a popular author of quirky crime fiction bestsellers, Elmore Leonard (1925-2013) was a working author of gritty, well-crafted westerns. He started with short works in the western pulp magazines and transitioned seamlessly to paperbacks in the 1950s. Last Stand at Saber River was released by Dell in 1959, and the subsequent British edition was re-titled Stand on the Saber. Somewhere along the way, the novel was also released in hardcover as Lawless River. Over 60 years later, the book is still in print as a paperback, ebook and audiobook.

Sensor Sweep: Savage Sword, Tanith Lee, Fritz Leiber, Greyhawk published first on https://sixchexus.weebly.com/

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maxwellyjordan · 5 years ago

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A “view” from the courtroom: Return to sender

We’re well into June now, and the court enters the morning with 27 outstanding merits cases. It’s beginning to look like a busy final few weeks of the term.

An item in a recent edition of the court’s internal newsletter, Oyez! Oyez!, got me thinking about one of the mind games I played during slower moments of oral arguments this term. The item said “POSTED: applications are being accepted for a cabinetmaker/woodworker in the marshal’s office.”

Justice Sotomayor, “. . . takes awhile, right?” (Art Lien)

It’s a reminder that the court has its own woodshop, as it were, presumably to serve the never-ending need for custom furniture of various forms. The notice also makes one wonder whether relevant employees in the building — from the woodworkers to the administrative officers to the justices themselves — have paid any attention to the debate swirling about “court packing,” or expanding the size of the court.

With proposals floated by various advocacy groups and presidential candidates to add as few as two and as many as six justices to the court, there would be some significant practical considerations if any of those proposals became law, however unlikely that is.

Even the addition of two new justices would likely set the court’s woodworkers to work expanding the existing bench on each end. That would push the workspaces of Marshal Pamela Talkin and her assistant, on the right side (looking at the bench), and Clerk Scott Harris and his assistant, on the left, farther to the extreme edges of the available space in the courtroom.

If some of the more radical proposals were enacted, then we would be talking about some serious work in the woodshop. Expanding the court to 15 members would probably require a whole new bench. One possibility is a new, longer version of the current curved bench. Another would involve two rows of benches in the style of some congressional committee rooms. Since there is plenty of room looking up toward the ceiling of the courtroom, perhaps planners should consider a variation of the old “Hollywood Squares” set, with five justices per row stacked in three rows.

The courtroom considerations say nothing of where to put additional chambers. Mark Joseph Stern of Slate floated the idea of a WeWork court, with the most junior justices using offsite workspace until they gain enough seniority to move to traditional chambers.

At 10 a.m., eight of the nine justices serving in the current court — the size authorized by an 1869 act of Congress — take the bench. Justice Stephen Breyer is away on travel, though his voice has been heard in today’s order’s list, with a statement respecting the denial of certiorari in al-Alwi v. Trump, a challenge to the long-term detention of a citizen of Yemen at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

Chief Justice John Roberts announces that Justice Brett Kavanaugh has the opinion for the court in Quarles v. United States, which concerns whether for purposes of a violent felony requiring a longer sentence under the Armed Career Criminal Act, a defendant can form the requisite intent to commit burglary any time after entering a building or structure unlawfully.

Kavanaugh explains that this case revolves around “remaining-in burglary,” such as when a person enters a store lawfully but stays after closing and then intentionally steals something.

Justice Kavanaugh with opinion in Quarles v. U.S. (Art Lien)

He explains that the court is rejecting the claims of the petitioner, a Michigan man named Jamar Alonzo Quarles, that remaining-in burglary occurs only when the defendant has the intent to commit a crime at the exact moment he or she first unlawfully remains in a building.

The court sides with the government’s view that remaining-in burglary occurs when the defendant forms the intent to commit a crime at any time while unlawfully present.

“Burglary is dangerous because it creates the possibility of a violent confrontation between the offender and an occupant,” Kavanaugh says from the bench as he delivers a crisp summary of his opinion. For remaining-in burglary, “the possibility of a violent confrontation does not depend on the exact moment when the burglar forms the intent to commit a crime while unlawfully present in a building.”

The opinion is unanimous, with Justice Clarence Thomas filing a concurring opinion.

This case was argued in the unusually busy argument sitting of April. It was one of two, in fact, argued on April 24, the last day for arguments. The other case from that day, Taggart v. Lorenzen, was already decided as well, in a June 2 opinion by Breyer.

Next up is Justice Sonia Sotomayor with the opinion in Return Mail Inc. v. United States Postal Service, stemming from the postal service’s efforts to invalidate a patent for a machine that scans and processes barcodes containing address information, which speeds up the handling of undeliverable mail.

Justice Sotomayor with opinion in Return Mail Inc. v. USPS (Art Lien)

The Feb. 19 argument in this case marked the return of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg to the bench after her treatment for lung cancer and a recuperation that required her to be absent for the January argument sitting.

The case presents the question of whether the federal government is a “person” who may petition to institute review proceedings in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office under a 2011 federal statute, the Leahy-Smith America Invents Act.

Sotomayor summarizes the case, including the three arguments offered on behalf of the postal service that would displace the presumption that a statutory reference to a “person” does not include the government.

“None delivers,” she says of those arguments. It takes a moment for her postal wordplay, which is also in her written opinion, to reach the mental inbox of those in the crowded courtroom, but people begin to chuckle when it does.

“Takes a while, right?” Sotomayor says of the delayed reaction, and she gets a heartier laugh with that.

The ruling below for the government is marked “Return to Sender,” or reversed and remanded. Sotomayor, it turns out, is part of an unusual lineup, joining with the court’s more conservative members in this outcome, while Breyer has written the dissent, joined by Ginsburg and Justice Elena Kagan.

Although the postal service has been declared a non-person, today’s decision cannot detract from the federal agency’s heartwarming role in the landmark case of State of New York v. Kris Kringle (unpublished bench opinion, December 24, 1947), in which the state trial judge took judicial notice of the federal Post Office Department’s (arguably ad hoc) declaration that Mr. Kringle was the one and only Santa Claus. (See “Miracle on 34th Street,” but only the 1947 original in black and white, not the colorized version of that film or the 1994 remake.)

Thomas has the final opinion of the day, in Parker Drilling Management Services Ltd. v. Newton, involving an attempt by a worker on an oil rig off the California coast to be compensated for time on “standby,” a period as long as 12 hours per day when he cannot leave the rig.

Justice Thomas with opinion in Parker Drilling v. Newton (Art Lien)

Writing for the court, Thomas says that the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit was wrong to hold that California’s wage-and-hour laws, which the worker contends would require that he be paid for standby time, apply. When federal law addresses the relevant issue, state law is not adopted as surrogate federal law on the Outer Continental Shelf, Thomas says.

This spells an end to the worker’s California minimum-wage claims, though Thomas explains that the worker’s other claims were not analyzed by the 9th Circuit, so its decision is vacated and remanded. The opinion is unanimous, and it marks the completion of another case from the April argument sitting.

As the session comes to a close, Talkin announces that we will have to wait until next Monday for delivery of some of the term’s 24 remaining packages.

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itsworn · 6 years ago

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Backstage Past: Streamliners, Customs, Race Cars, and Hollywood Stars Made 1959 Memorable

If you could see the hundreds of rejected 1959 images currently covering our cutting-room floor (digital version), you’d be shocked and awed; shocked by the volume and awed by the variety. You’d be forgiven for wondering aloud why 34 others made it to print instead. Heck, who wouldn’t?

No two humans granted access to the massive film collection compiled by late publisher Robert E. Petersen could be expected to make identical choices. Going in, we’d advise an aspiring editor to bury any and all biases about racing types and organizations, vehicle makes and models, heroes and villains, other personalities, aftermarket companies, engine designs, magazines and their staffers. He or she would be reminded that many mature HOT ROD Deluxe readers made firsthand automotive memories during 1959 (though not your correspondent, who turned 10 that October, nor editor Hardin, who turned 2 that August).

While the objective of this series is to share never-before-seen scenes alongside the mugs of the lucky Petersen photographers and writers who worked behind the scenes during one calendar year, what three-dozen such photos would most appeal to most of you (thus encouraging nice reader mail and subscription renewals)? How many artists and entertainers should steal space from steel subjects? Rods or customs? Open-wheeled versus full-fendered? Shouldn’t some space be made for significant shops and shows? Don’t forget the drag bikes and dream cars. How about this killer action from Indy, Daytona, Bonneville, Sebring, and Pomona? Or a tortuous road test of Detroit’s hottest 1959 iron?

Petersen’s in-house photo lab processed more than 3,000 rolls of black-and-white film between January 4 and December 31. Most rolls contained 12 exposures (though the compact, versatile 35mm format’s 24- and 36-frame rolls appear more frequently as the racing season progresses). Of these 50,000-odd individual images, your editor has room for 34, no more. He’s also got a deadline with an inflexible Midwestern printer whose giant presses will roll right on time, ready or not, little HOT ROD Deluxe. You’d better get busy.

That’s just the fun part. The hard part is research—not the unreliable kind done online, either. You can’t beat 60-year-old paper and ink, particularly the monthlies published by Petersen. All too often, though, a person, place, or thing that shows up on old film in the archive never did show up in a magazine, forcing modern-day editors to reject interesting images for want of caption material, rather than commit publishing’s mortal sin of omission. Another, more common cause for rejection is prior publication. In most of the latter cases, at least one scanned outtake can be found to surprise and amaze even those readers who have seemingly memorized every photo in every issue since 1948 (e.g., invaluable HRD contributor Greg Sharp).

Indeed, unpublished outtakes buried in the archive vastly outnumber the photos printed in Petersen periodicals and other, so-called “special interest publications” (yearbooks, pictorials, how-to compilations, and so on.). Film was relatively inexpensive; printing and binding and storing and mailing never have been. Then, as now, the number of editorial pages in print magazines is largely determined by projected combined revenue from subscriptions, newsstand sales, and advertising. Because so many of you good people support this one, we’re getting space in 2019 to tell a 1959 story. These 34 frames will hopefully be as enjoyable to view as they were painful to pick.

Lost in the aftermath of a certain blue streamliner’s 363.670-mph American record was mechanic Athol Graham’s one-way 344.761 on the bitter-cold 29th of November, making a former Mormon missionary the fourth-fastest driver in history. The Allison-powered Spirit of Salt Lake didn’t need a push car; Graham simply spun its onboard electric starter and drove away on a surface that hadn’t been touched since Mickey Thompson persuaded the Utah Highway Department to smooth the course with a grader two months previous. Graham’s pit crew consisted of wife Zeldine and teenaged mechanic Otto Anzjon, who are possibly the two people shown witnessing a late-afternoon return run. They didn’t have much company; published aerial photos from tire-provider Firestone’s plane reveal the least-occupied lakebed we’ve ever seen for such an attempt. Most of the witnesses appear to be volunteers with the Salt Lake Timing Association who set up Chrondeks. HOT ROD sent staffer Ray Brock, who shot these photos, and author Griff Borgeson. After testing his new Firestones at 277.499 mph in the morning, Graham described the ride in the Feb. 1960 HRM as “Smooth as the way to heaven.” Those words would prove eerily prophetic a year later, when the 36-year-old father of four young children went into a skid and flipped at 300-plus.

Contrary to suppositions put forth in the previous installment of this series (Nov. 2018), Mickey Thompson’s 294-mph car made at least this one public appearance (in far-off San Mateo) after its record-setting 1958 season, adorned in a quickie coat of new paint (notice oversprayed rear slick). The Harman-Collins lettering led to further Car Craft research confirming that it was, in fact, Cliff Collins—not Ed Iskenderian, as erroneously reported—who produced steel-billet camshafts for the dual Chryslers. For the Aug. 1959 issue, Mickey confided to Don Francisco that one of those bumpsticks had to be pried out of the forward engine after two connecting rods came apart during an unsuccessful return run. “The thing that fouled us up was time,” M/T explained. “When we saw we were beginning to run short of time, we got frantic, and when you get frantic at Bonneville, you dump more nitro into the fuel tank. That’s just what we did.” He planned to bring six Pontiac engines, developed with Mr. Isky’s grinds and personal assistance, this time, back to Utah with a new car, boldly promising to “break the World’s Land Speed Record. I’m as sure of this as I am that Bonneville salt is white.”

Bob D’Olivo shot countless concerts and doesn’t remember Johnny Mathis’s gig at the Cocoanut Grove, L.A.’s first and biggest nightclub (originally named the Zinnia Grill in 1921). The 1,000-seat venue was part of the 24-acre Ambassador Hotel complex, which closed in 1989.

Tom Nelson (left) and Nick Nicolosi demonstrate the ideal weight distribution of Dragmaster’s 1,100-pound prototype. “Featherweight frame design works so well, duplicates will be marketed,” gushed HOT ROD. NHRA didn’t hurt sales by awarding a special Safest Constructed Car trophy to builders Jim Nelson (an old pal of Wally Parks from their dry-lakes days) and Dode Martin at September’s gas-only NHRA Nationals at Detroit, where the Chevy-powered rail set overall low e.t. of 9.12. Later, a small ad in the back of the Mar. 1960 HRM assuring that the 96-inch chassis “Will not be obsolete by rule changes” referred to NHRA’s new minimum-wheelbase requirement, which happened to be the same 96 inches, thereby rendering illegal hundreds of early Chassis Research dragsters, modified roadsters, and competition coupes and sedans produced since 1956 by NHRA critic Scotty Fenn. (See Apr. and Nov. 1959, Jan. 1960 HRM.)

In July’s HRM, technical editor Ray Brock revealed a new business arrangement enabling C-T Automotive to deliver hard-chromed stroker cranks for just $16 more than its standard welded versions ($172 versus $156). In this outtake to a similar lead shot, photographer D’Olivo posed Brock with the 12-foot-long, 2,000-pound arms that Chrome Crankshaft Co. prepared for diesel-electric locomotives.

What evolved into the National Roadster Show was conceived as an all-encompassing exposition of antique and sports cars. After the few invited hot rods stole that 1949 event, Oakland promoter Al Slonaker wisely changed the name and focus. For this 11th edition, painter-pinstriper Jerry Anolik returned with the homebuilt Thunderbird (foreground) that was voted 1957’s People’s Choice as a mild custom. Driving home to San Francisco from that trophy presentation, the T-bird was sideswiped into a guardrail. Rather than repair the extensive damage, Anolik took the opportunity to create a radical custom. (See July 1959 Car Craft.)

Jerry Anolik bought the ’55 T-bird brand-new upon his discharge from the Army. No babied show car, it was driven daily, towed Anolik’s ski boat to mountain lakes, and turned 12.50s and 113 mph at the drags. It even ran Bonneville during a cross-country road trip, shocking veteran lakes racers with a record-bettering 161-mph pass that qualified for a record attempt—which proved disastrous. After gasoline leaked from one of the four Strombergs onto an exposed plug-wire clip and ignited, Anolik quickly killed the ignition, but both fuel pumps continued blasting fuel onto the hot engine, melting the heavily leaded front end. The remains sat hidden in his home garage for the next half-century, finally resurfacing—still scarred from fire, but complete with the blown 364ci Cadillac pictured—at the 60th Sacramento Autorama in 2009. Anolik later sold the Moon Rocket to collector Joe Hickenbottom and saw the famous custom fully restored before passing away last year. (See May 1959 MT, July 1959 CC, June and Oct. 1959 ML, and July 2010 HRD.)

Oakland promoters Al and Mary Slonaker were interviewed by Editor Dick Day for his Feb. 1960 Car Craft column and show coverage.

Pontiac chief Bunkie Knudsen uniquely capitalized on automakers’ infamous AMA ban of racing involvement to remake his stodgy GM division into a high-performance brand by discreetly arranging for hot V8s to power race cars ranging from NASCAR, USAC, and NHRA stockers to Mickey Thompson’s Challenger I and even the Kurtis Indy roadster that tested high-speed Firestone rubber at the newly opened Daytona International Speedway. A Hilborn-injected, 370ci, rpm-limited Ray Nichels Pontiac powered Jim Rathmann past 190 mph in the straights, with a best 2.5-mile-lap average of 172.8. Few action photos exist from the top-secret session (which further involved Paul Goldsmith in a pair of Grand National stock cars). Bob D’Olivo cleverly composed this one to include a Pontiac support vehicle.

Inspired by the one-piece Shadoff streamliner’s fiberglass body, Ed Roth rocked the custom-car world by reinterpreting the Model T in moldable silica cloth and resin. Introduced as the Excaliber (an unintentional misspelling of King Arthur’s mythical sword), the revolutionary roadster was renamed Outlaw after Roth realized that some showgoers were unaware of the literary reference and/or proper pronunciation.

The off-road champion and fence-jumping stuntman immortalized on a big Triumph in 1963’s The Great Escape looks sheepish posing for Rod & Custom editor Lynn Wineland’s Aug. 1959 article about a vehicle type so new that nobody knew what to name it. R&C went with “go-kart cycles” here. We found other 1959 references to “kart bikes” and “miniature cycles” (but no mention of “minibikes”). Bud Ekins gamely tooled around his San Fernando Valley dealership for a low-speed action shot that ran in the story.

Norm Grabowski landed a speaking part in the campy movie Girls Town. His T tub is the coolest car involved in a Los Angeles River showdown between hot rodders and sporty-car types, but here’s what Petersen photographer Pat Brollier brought back from the set instead. Mamie Van Doren’s costars included 17-year-old Paul Anka (driving the Dodge) and a bunch of 30ish actors pretending to be slang-slinging teenagers. The cult classic is easily found on YouTube, as is a short spoof of highlights done decades later for the TV series Mystery Science Theater 3000.

If you know any of the Petersen ad guys pictured, we’d love to learn what actress-singer Joi Lansing was doing at the annual L.A. sales meeting hosted by boss Robert E. Petersen (kneeling, far left). Yes, she played Shirley Swanson in the 1955-1959 series The Bob Cummings Show/Love That Bob and was Lester Flatt’s wife in The Beverly Hillbillies. Lansing also appeared in many movies, including Orson Welles’s Touch of Evil, during a career cut short by breast cancer at 43, in 1972.

Custom-airbrushed “weirdo” or “monster” shirts were high fashion for 1959 hot rodders. Editor Dick Day devoted his Aug. 1959 Car Craft editorial and a major inside feature to the fad. Artists Pete Millar (shown), Ed Roth, and Dean Jeffries each painted an example for the article.

The camera (left) bears NBC’s logo, and the star-studded panel and “Ballad” signage surely indicate a music-themed production, but our search for any such TV series or special went nowhere. (Help, mature readers?) Along with the best-selling singers visible here, a fifth panelist, Dick Clark, was seated to the right of Connie Francis in other frames.

Sure, Dean Moon’s dual-purpose drag-and-lakes Devin was plenty cool, but it’s the background vehicle that put this shot over the top in final eliminations. Online research into the Oscar Mayer empire revealed this to be one of five ’52-model Wienermobiles adapted to Dodge chassis by Ohio coachbuilder Gerstenslagger. Upon their replacement by a new, streamlined fleet in 1958, this one was presumably put out to pasture in Santa Fe Springs, California. Like us, the kid pedaling past must’ve wondered why it sat behind Moon Equipment Co. As for the race car, Rod & Custom’s subsequent Mar. 1960 cover story credits the frame to Moon’s in-house-fabricator, Harley Klentz, and describes a Potvin-supercharged ’57 Chevy engine bored to 291 cubes. At the time of publication, the 2,000-pounder had hit 170 mph at Bonneville and El Mirage, and made 12-second, 125-mph passes in Modified Sports classes. Eric Rickman got the shot.

Fifty-nine years after little Danny Thompson (foreground) watched his daddy shake down Challenger I at Rogers Dry Lake this August, the kid was destined (at age 69) to average a record 448.757 mph in this car’s successor, the half-century-old Challenger 2. His proud mom, Judy, was also in attendance on both historic occasions.

Bob Petersen’s first two fulltime photographers were themselves rarely photographed at the same event, let alone in a single frame. As Mickey Thompson buckled in for his checkout pass in the Mojave desert, Bob Greene, HRM’s managing editor, captured both Eric Rickman (right), hired in 1950, and Bob D’Olivo (left), a staffer since 1952. (See their photos in the July 2016 HRD.)

Here’s one that didn’t show up in any magazines. Direct from the salt flats, D’Olivo drove the Borgward to Detroit for the NHRA Nationals then home to Los Angeles, a 5,000-mile extended road trip that required a lift near the end.

Scrounging junkyards and horse-trading parts reportedly held Ed Roth’s cash investment in the game-changing Excaliber/Outlaw to under $1,000 (equivalent to $8,500 today), including a fully chromed ’50 Cad built by Fritz Voigt, Mickey Thompson’s in-house genius. A two-piece aluminum T-top seen in construction photos blew off while the car was being trailered between shows and was abandoned, literally. Roth would pull an unknown number of reproduction main-body sections from his mold, but a stiff $230 retail tag resulted in few takers and fewer finished clones. The original debuted in late summer at a Disneyland show and remained a major attraction even after Ed sold it. No price is mentioned in a Mar. 1960 HOT ROD Mart photo ad, but the car reportedly fetched more than $3,000 from the second of multiple owners. In 2018, the T was among the Roth creations brought together for the Amelia Island Concours and presently resides in the Petersen Automotive Museum’s underground vault. (See Jan. 1960 CC cover story.)

Major Petersen Publishing Co. (PPC) advertisers were treated to a deep-sea outing in September, accompanied by at least one ringer: lifelong fisherman Tom Medley, the former cartoonist and editorial staffer working “the dark side” as HRM’s ad manager.

Sorry, your guess is as good as ours! The odd image of what looks like an animal cage was found amongst six rolls exposed by staffer Al Paloczy at Disneyland’s September custom-car show

“Mechanical troubles” sabotaged the dual-engined Kartliner’s Bonneville debut, but what it lacked in displacement (7 ci!), power (12.4 hp), and performance (65 mph) was more than made up for by the massive publicity it generated. Wheelbase was a scant 50 inches for the 193-pound, 29.5-inch-tall prototype built by Rod Schapel (right) and Bill Orndorff of the Rocket Kart engine shop. Copies of their swoopy body would soon be advertised for $250 (about $2,100 now), plus $58 for a canopy. (See Dec. 1959 HRM, Jan. 1960 CC, and Jan. 1960 R&C.)

Berlin was a divided city in 1959, and boss Bob Petersen came no closer to the Communist side during a tour of West German automakers. He was accompanied by Motor Life editor Don Werner, a future competitor who cofounded Argus Publishers (Popular Hot Rodding and so on) with another PPC defector, circulation specialist Gordon Behn.

Do you suppose the boys at Advance Mufflers minded an interruption by British model and actress June Wilkinson? Pat Brollier burned through four rolls of silly setups during a visit presumably arranged by PPC’s advertising team.

Late photographer Colin Creitz left us a rare peek inside Chassis Research Co., the originator of mail-order drag cars. We recognized founder Scotty Fenn (left). A search for his helper’s identity ultimately led to an email address for former employee Roger Wolfard. “The fellow in the picture is me,” came the surprising response. “I worked for Scotty from 1959 to 1964. From there, I wound up at Mickey Thompson’s and got involved with his racing programs.” Perhaps best remembered for the blown-fuel Jeep that was among the few independent Funny Cars competitive with Mercury’s revolutionary ’66 Comet floppers—and, consequently, partly responsible for NHRA’s subsequent ban of topless bodies—Wolfard still wonders what became of his crowd-pleasing, 392-powered Secret Weapon. (If anybuddy knows, kindly email editor Hardin, and we’ll pass the info along.)

Dapper D’Olivo designed and managed a busy photographic department charged with filling the pages of an ever-growing roster of Petersen publications. Starting in 1955, Bob also assumed the task of organizing the massive film archive that makes an historical series like this one possible. At 91, he remains the incomparable authority on the approximately 8.5 million individual frames accumulated before digital photography superseded negatives and transparencies.

Beatniks and their drinking girlfriends were evidently too racy for editorial director Wally Parks and/or his editors, all of whom passed on coverage of a “beatnik party” hosted by Ed Roth. Everyone else captured on two rolls is unfamiliar to us, though Bob D’Olivo recognized a couple of short-haired Petersen ad guys, ironically, who’d traded their usual suits and ties for costumes of freshly torn shirts and shorts.

Notice how close unprotected spectators and photographers were to Jack Chrisman (far lane) and Eddie Hill as the A/Dragster finalists hit top speed at Inyokern (California) Airport’s inaugural Texas versus California championships. Wally Parks wisely kept his distance while shooting the close trophy dash. (See Feb. 1960 HRM.)

The unidentified crewman who wandered into this shot seems to be reacting to whatever curse was hurled down from Eric Rickman’s ladder perch. The unfortunate intrusion was probably responsible for an otherwise wonderful composition’s omission from HRM’s Feb. 1960 Inyokern coverage. Dig the contrast between bitchin’ 1934 Fords, both classified as B/Altereds: the chopped Hart’s Automotive entry versus George “Boltloose” Bolthoff’s full-fendered, wire-wheeled beauty.

Last but not least, from the Hell Hath No Fury Dept. comes Bob Petersen’s Mercedes 300R. His actress girlfriend left his hillside house in a huff one December night, yanked the car out of gear, and released the emergency brake. The fence and shrubbery belonging to his downstream neighbor prevented the car from flopping into that guy’s home. Needless to say, this is one new-car durability test you never saw in Motor Trend or Motor Life. Bob D’Olivo related the story, adding that the car was eventually repaired and traded to a local import dealer.

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trishbsblog · 7 years ago

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Can you tell those who don't know you a little bit about yourself. I’m the author of eight – soon to be nine – novels, six of which have been Sunday Times Bestsellers. To date, I’ve sold one million copies of my books around the world and my novels have been translated into eleven languages. How would you describe your new book, Christmas in St Ives? Christmas in St Ives is my very first Christmas e-novella and it’s a prequel, too! It features characters that appear in my ninth novel, Somewhere Beyond the Sea next year. It was so much fun to write and is set, like the novel, in my favourite place on earth – St Ives in Cornwall. It’s fun, festive, romantic and I hope like a little Cornish mini-break in a book! When you are not writing what do you do? I’m mum to my three year old daughter, Flo, so when she isn’t at nursery she’s my main employer! I’m also a singer-songwriter and a session singer, so occasionally I have performing or recording jobs, although not so much since having Flo. Apart from books, what films or TV shows do you like? So many! I love Gilmore Girls (the original series, not the awful remake Netflix made last year), Dear White People, Glow, Broadchurch, Shetland and Vera on TV and I’m more than a little obsessed with George Clarke’s Amazing Spaces, too. For films my all-time favourites are You’ve Got Mail, While You Were Sleeping, The Philadelphia Story and Before We Go. How do you choose your covers, must be difficult, they are all wonderful? Which one is your favourite and why? I don’t always get a say in my covers, but I’ve been very lucky with the designers my publishers have found. The cover for Christmas in St Ives is gorgeous and I’ve just seen the cover for Somewhere Beyond the Sea, which is one of my favourite covers yet. Have you ever had any one not believe you can do it? Lots! The very first person I told I was writing a book (when I was 18) told me it was a childish thing to do and it knocked my confidence so much that I didn’t try and write again for ten years. And even when my first book, Fairytale of New York, was discovered on an online site for unpublished writers and I was offered a book deal, I still had people telling me it probably wouldn’t happen. What matters is that you believe in yourself first and keep believing no matter what. It helps that my lovely husband Bob is my biggest cheerleader and I have a great group of friends who believe in me. I think selling a million books kind of proves the naysayers wrong, so that’s what I focus on when I have doubts about my writing! What is your writing process? It varies from book to book. I used to start writing at the beginning of the story with only a vague idea of where I wanted it to go (so much more fun, but not good when you’re a mum and your time is short!). Since having Flo, I’ve had to be more disciplined with my time, so I work out a plan before I start writing. I handwrite the plan because for it sticks in my head better when I’ve seen it written down. Then I write the first draft, check it and send it to my publisher. There are then several edits, so it’s a steady process and good that I know I can change things and refine the story as we go along. Which of your books is your favourite? I love them all in different ways. Some remind me of where I was in my life when I wrote them: It Started With a Kiss was when Bob surprised me with a Christmas Day marriage proposal; When I Fall in Love was the year we got married, so I was planning it while editing that book; Take a Look at Me Now was our honeymoon; and I wrote and edited I’ll Take New York while I was expecting Flo. I’ll always love my first book, Fairytale of New York, because it was my first and I wrote it largely in secret over seven years. And I adore Searching for a Silver Lining and A Parcel for Anna Browne because they were both stories that had been bubbling in my mind for years, so I was so proud to see them finished. And I have to say I absolutely love Christmas in St Ives because it was a ball to write and, I think, is the most perfect Christmas story I could have written. What got you in to writing, did you always want to do it? I fell in love with books as a little kid when I was taken to our local tiny library in Kingswinford. I asked my mum when I was five if our library would put my book on the shelves one day and I think that’s where it began. I’ve always loved writing and always done it, but being able to write and publish books for a living is the biggest dream come true. I feel very lucky! If you were to do it again, writing each book, what would you do different? I would probably apologise less and stick to my guns more! Having said that, I believe each book I’ve written is a stage on my never-ending writing apprenticeship, so I’m not sure I’d change anything because it’s all part of the journey. The only way you really learn how to write a novel is to actually write one and I learn so much with each new book I write. I always want my next book to be the best I’ve ever written so far and keep growing as an author. Who is your writing inspiration? I am inspired by writers who are brave and keep going, who refuse to be boxed or defeated by whatever life throws at them. My writing heroes include Sarah Addison Allen, Neil Gaiman, Sir Terry Pratchett, Simon Toyne, Rowan Coleman, Julie Cohen, CL Taylor, Tamsyn Murray, Kate Harrison, Cathy Bramley, Rachael Lucas, Kat Black and Genevieve Cogman, to name but a few. What is your favourite book or books? I love Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen, Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman, The Sugar Queen by Sarah Addison Allen, Cranford by Elizabeth Gaskell and more recently I’ve adored Where Love Lies by Julie Cohen, The Summer of Impossible Things by Rowan Coleman and Crooked Kingdom by Leigh Bardugo. Who gets to read your work first? To be honest only I read it in full before my publisher, although I have a couple of close friends who are writers whose advice I treasure. I’ll very often bounce ideas off them as I’m writing but I don’t ask them to read it before I start the editing process with my editor. My husband Bob helps with ideas if I get stuck, but it tends to be advice I seek as I’m writing rather than sending it out to beta readers etc. If you weren’t a writer what would you be doing? I’d love to be able to do music full-time or be an actor. How long does it take you to write a book? The first draft can take anything from six weeks to two months. Having said that, I wrote both the first drafts of Christmas in St Ives and Somewhere Beyond the Sea in just over eight weeks. I wouldn’t recommend writing two stories in eight weeks, though! My quickest was the first draft of Take a Look at Me Now, which I wrote in four-and-a-half weeks – but I didn’t have a bouncy Flo back then, so that explains why it was so fast! What do you do if you feel your book is going down the lines of another book you have read and how do you correct it? I don’t read books in my genre while I’m writing a first draft, mainly because I’m scared of either bringing elements subconsciously into what I’m writing or, scarier still, discovering someone else has already had my brilliant idea! I write from my gut feeling and I think that hopefully stops me being too similar to anyone else’s work. If I did find I’d named a character the same as someone else I would change it but thankfully that’s only happened once when I was writing. I’m inspired by film references more than books, though, so my next novel, Somewhere Beyond the Sea, is a You’ve Got Mail-type story of two people who fall in love before they meet. It’s not You’ve Got Mail, obviously, but I loved the idea of your heart deciding who to love before your head works it out. It’s an idea you can see in Pride and Prejudice, Jane Eyre, Great Expectations, etc, so I think ideas can be passed down from generation to generation for authors to put their own spin on.

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