Category: ARTS

2008
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ARTS

Thank the Stars for Writers Block!

Yes, it has now been 22 years since I last finished writing a novel. A short career that began during a delirious summer (amid a gaggle of noisy ducks and cases of Liebfraumilch) and lasted until confronted with rewriting my third novel for the fourth time for yet another agent who just wanted a bitter laugh, no doubt. Six years altogether, during which I earned less than enough to buy a cup of coffee every week, and yet demanded from myself the discipline of a fakir and the liver of Charles Bukowski. So you can imagine it is with no small irony or sense of unbounding freedom and joy that I can look back over the last 22 years and thank all the Bodhisattavas in the Western Lands that I have not got the itch to write another novel during the entire time!

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ARTS

Steele Savage, all those faces

Who was this artist, Steele Savage? His full name was Henry Steele Savage. Born in 1898, in Central Lake, Michigan, he went on to have an outstanding career as an illustrator. His range of work incl

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ARTS

Who Gives a Hoot von Zitzewitz?

The interesting cover on Arthur Sellings The Uncensored Man attracted my eye in a San Francisco bookshop on Polk Street several years ago. It featured a sort of typical 1960s collage of a man’s face

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ARTS

Itll be a cakewalk...

Five years after the invasion of Iraq, with hundreds of thousands dead, I can’t help but think of the original assessment by the brilliant Bush-Cheney team, that the operation would be a cakewalk. Af

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ARTS

Listen to Wally Wood and Stop Noodling!

Muchos kudos to Joel Johnson, who not only saved from obscurity the original paste-up of Wally Wood’s 22 Panels that Always Work, but scanned it and made it available for the Universe. Way to be, Joe

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ARTS

Comics on the Mainland

Interesting article on BBC about an exhibition of Mainland Chinese comics. The curator of the show is Paul Gravett, probably London’s most famous comics aficionado, and author of Manga: 60 Years of J

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ARTS

Zombies Devour the Lawless Elite: Boskone 2008

This year at Boskone, there were some interesting panels, great painting demos by Bob Eggleton and Omar Rayyan, and a nice gallery of paintings from Boskones past and present alongside works by the Artist GOH, Dean Morrissey. Anthropology, SF, and Chad Oliver The first panel I attended was on the works of Chad Oliver, the great anthropologist / SF author from Texas. Amy Thomson, whose work on the encounters between humans and aliens (and between robot girl and humans) remarked that, in fact, she was not influenced by Oliver before writing the Color of Distance and Through Alien Eyes, and only came to appreciate the anthropological aspects of Oliver’s science fiction in retrospect. George Zebrowski told of his long working relationship with Chad Oliver. When he worked with Crown Books as editor for their Classics of Modern Science Fiction series in the mid-1980s, Zebrowski was asked what the first ten volumes should be, and he told them that the three of those ten should include Chad Oliver’s novels: Shores of Another Sea, Shadows of the Sun, and Unearthly Neighbors. Three out of ten? By the same author! Was Zebrowski out of his mind? But, in fact, Crown ended up supporting the suggestion and those novels did appear as the 3rd, 8th, and 9th volumes in the series.