It’s not just Tolkien – there’s a move afoot to make author G.K. Chesterton a Catholic saint, too. The Word on Fire Blog questioned the president of the American Chesterton Society about his prospects: “Saint G.K. Chesterton? An Interview with Dale Ahlquist”.
BRANDON: I know many people are excited about the possibility of G.K. Chesterton being named saint one day. Why do you think he’s a saint? And can you give us an update on his cause?
DALE: First the update: the Bishop of Northampton, England, Peter Doyle, appointed a priest, Fr. John Udris, to be the investigator for Chesterton’s potential. Father Udris is completing his report to the Bishop within the next month, and the Bishop is expected to approach the Congregation for Saints in Rome to officially open the Cause for Beatification. If that happens, Chesterton would be declared a Servant of God, and a postulator would be appointed. And the real work begins, with a thorough examination of Chesterton’s holiness and his cultus. The cultus is us, those who are devoted to him. And that is the answer to the first question. I think he’s a saint because there is a universal cultus devoted to him, finding in him a model Christian, especially a model of lay spirituality, and a friend and companion. That’s what the Communion of the Saints is all about.
Chesterton is already remembered liturgically on June 13 by the Episcopal Church, with a provisional feast day as adopted at the 2009 General Convention.
His influential essays and nonfiction are the foundations of his case for sainthood, though some of his views have led to charges of antisemitism.
Among fans, Chesterton is known for fiction like The Man Who Was Thursday. Neil Gaiman has stated that he grew up reading Chesterton, whose The Napoleon of Notting Hill was an important influence on Gaiman’s Neverwhere, which used a quote from it as an epigraph. Gaiman also based the character Gilbert, from the comic book The Sandman, on Chesterton.
By Dann Todd: Brian Keene intends to double last year’s success.
In January 2017, The Horror Show with Brian Keene podcast held a 24 hour telethon to raise money for the Scares That Care. Scares That Care is a 501C(3) charity that helps children with cancer, women with breast cancer, and burn victims. The telethon coincided with their 100th podcast episode.
The Horror Show podcast started out with the objective of raising $10,000 for Scares That Care in 24 hours. They exceeded that goal…barely.
The Horror Show podcast announced that they would be repeating their telethon effort on behalf of Scares That Care in 2018. The details of this year’s telethon were announced on a recent Horror Show episode. This year’s fundraising goal is $20,000.
The telethon will take place beginning at noon (EST) on May 11, 2018, and ending at noon (EST) on May 12, 2018. As with last year’s telethon, the show will be livestreamed via YouTube. It will be free to listen to all of the telethon related mayhem.
For those wanting to attend in person, the telethon will take place at the Courtyard Marriot located at 2799 Concord Road, York PA 17402. Seating is limited to 80 people. Tickets to attend the telethon in person will cost $25 and can be purchased via Ticket Leap.
From the news release:
(All proceeds raised from ticket sales will go directly to the $20,000 goal). Your ticket guarantees you 24-hour admission to the telethon — come and go (and sleep) as you please. Please note that by purchasing a ticket and attending, you are granting The Horror Show with Brian Keene permission to broadcast your voice and/or likeness live on the air.
By Dann Todd: After a year-long sabbatical motivated by personal health concerns, mystery/thriller author Paul J. Hale is back with episode 10a of The Disney Story Origins Podcast.
In this most recent episode, Paul focuses on Disney’s The Black Cauldron movie. As has been the case with his past podcast episodes, Paul presents a thoroughly researched comparison between the source material and Disney’s movie. His purpose is not to criticize the choices of Disney filmmakers. Instead, his focus is on illustrating the differences between the source material and the movie. His analysis ends up having the movie illuminate the source material and the source material illuminate the movie. As is his habit, Paul includes a complete bibliography at the page for this podcast that formed the basis of his research.
One interesting sidelight on the movie is that Jeffrey Katzenberg, then a new studio chairman with Disney, feared that the original version of the movie was headed for a PG-13 rating from the MPAA. That concern was after the movie’s director and editor had already removed material to avoid a suspected R rating. Mr. Katzenberg then attempted to personally undertake the process of editing the movie to remove the offending material.
The source material for The Black Cauldron was Lloyd Alexander’s series The Chronicles of Prydain. The movie uses material from books 1 and 2 of the series; The Book of Three and The Black Cauldron.
Lloyd Alexander won the Newbery Medal for the fifth and final installment of the Prydain series, The High King, in 1969. He received the World Fantasy Award – Lifetime Achievement in 2003.
Join Altadena Library for this special look into the life of science-fiction author and Altadenan Octavia E. Butler!
ABOUT THE PRESENTER:
Presenter Natalie Russell is the Assistant Curator of Literary Collections at The Huntington Library, and curator of the recent exhibit “Octavia E. Butler: Telling My Stories.” She has been at the Huntington for over 11 years. She holds a Bachelor of Arts in Cinema-Television Production from the University of Southern California and a Masters of Library and Information Science from San Jose State University. She is a native Californian, and a member of the Pasadena Tournament of Roses.
25 COPIES OF “KINDRED” AVAILABLE BEFORE THE EVENT!
The Friends of Altadena Library have generously donated 25 copies of Octavia Butler’s powerful novel “Kindred” for patrons to borrow prior to the event. Stop by the Main Library or Bob Lucas Branch Library after 1/10/2018 to pick up your FREE copy — we encourage participants to return the book before the presentation so that others have a chance to read the book as well!
Patreon’s Jack Conte has walked back the controversial new fee structure that was scheduled to go into effect later this month, with the implied promise the company will find a solution to its problems that doesn’t hurt creators.
We’ve heard you loud and clear. We’re not going to rollout the changes to our payments system that we announced last week. We still have to fix the problems that those changes addressed, but we’re going to fix them in a different way, and we’re going to work with you to come up with the specifics, as we should have done the first time around. Many of you lost patrons, and you lost income. No apology will make up for that, but nevertheless, I’m sorry. It is our core belief that you should own the relationships with your fans. These are your businesses, and they are your fans.
I’ve spent hours and hours on the phone with creators, and so has the Patreon team. Your feedback has been crystal clear:
The new payments system disproportionately impacted $1 – $2 patrons. We have to build a better system for them.
Aggregation is highly-valued, and we underestimated that.
Fundamentally, creators should own the business decisions with their fans, not Patreon. We overstepped our bounds and injected ourselves into that relationship, against our core belief as a business.
We recognize that we need to be better at involving you more deeply and earlier in these kinds of decisions and product changes….
Although Patreon folded on their proposed fee changes, the damage to creators’ income has already been done. One author offered this analogy to describe the moral effect of today’s announcement:
I'm not happy about Patreon's announcement about not shafting and devaluing the people it supposedly cared about in the same way I'm not happy if my secretly-a-junkie babysitter apologizes for leaving the kid in a hot car to make a quick score but did return a non-dead toddler
Webcomic artist Zack Morrison voiced what must be a lingering concern for many creators:
The whole affair was a big reminder that companies like Patreon can blow up what we're building in a day, that they're a shaky foundation. As someone who really values working for themself, it's frustrating to feel so exposed to the impact of their whims.
Here are some reactions tweeted by people in the sff field:
Kameron Hurley
Let this also be a lesson: a well-written apology really can work miracles. I'm glad @patreon took the time to get that apology right. A LOT of goodwill hinged on that. I'm very satisfied with this apology and ready to move forward.
For my fellow creators though: note that Patreon still apparently has a problem that needs addressing. Don't assume everything's going to be fine, okay?
Now that @patreon has rolled back the new billing policy, I will maintain all my pledges. My offer to help creators move and/or set up secondary streams of income still stands. https://t.co/M5K69UnPZ3
Apologies and policy reversals are good, but @Patreon needs to send an email to all patrons saying, "Here are the accounts you stopped supporting when we changed our policy. Please consider supporting them again."
Looks like @Patreon are walking back their changes. https://t.co/8RNaykRf6D That’s good. But we’re still out like $700 from where we were before. If you want to help get us back to where we were, please consider subscribing directly at https://t.co/0Q8Hn93g1Y
If you want to fall in love with a reader, go where the readers go. The late Ray Bradbury met his future wife, Marguerite McClure, at Fowler’s Bookstore in Los Angeles when he was 22 years old.
It was not love at first sight. McClure, who was clerking at the store, accused Bradbury of shoplifting. “He carried a briefcase and wore a trench coat on a clear day, so I was immediately suspicious,” she remembered later. “I expected him to slam his briefcase down on a pile of books and make off with a few. Instead, he told me he was a writer and invited me to have a cup of coffee with him.”
(2) PROFESSIONAL OPINION. The Center for Ray Bradbury Studies documents that Ray Bradbury was asked to review the Star Wars: Empire Strikes Back script before it went into production.
At a glance, Bradbury can seem excessively cheery, his fiction bursting with a simple positive bombast that stretches, at times, into naiveté and clichés about good and evil, gender roles, religion, and science. When I recently reread Something Wicked This Way Comes, I was struck by how, in one breath, Bradbury could go from perspicacious, precise imagery to ham-fisted, trite moralizing. And the great chronicler of Martians himself sometimes emphasized this saccharine self-portrait. “I believe we’ll be immortal, seed the stars and live forever in the flesh of children,” he declared in 1975 with the death-defying assurance of a transhumanist. His “job as a writer,” he continued, was “to show man his basic goodness… I reject the doomsayers!” Yet there is more than a little dusk beneath this sprightly veneer.
The visions of the future in some of his best-known texts, while sanguine, are quietly bloody in another sense. Ambrose Bierce—who appears as a character in The Illustrated Man—described pessimism in his delightfully perverse Devil’s Dictionary as a natural response to “the disheartening prevalence of the optimist with his scarecrow hope and his unsightly smile”; Bradbury was a rosy smiler, like the charming scarecrow in Howl’s Moving Castle, but no mere romantic idealist. Instead, he was a darker optimist, an optimist of the evening. We all have, need to have, a piece of night in us. Bradbury’s pictures of his era and his prophecies for the 21st century were as hopeful as they were quietly horrifying, and, unexpectedly, they helped me find a language for loss.
As a writer, Bradbury is known and respected for his poetic language, honed over a career that spanned seven decades. But in 1981, Bradbury’s flowery prose describing cosmic phenomena failed to impress [National Air and Space Museum] exhibit developers, whose remarks about the script were incorporated into the files that Romanowski uncovered.
“Many of the phrases are crude and devoid of meaning. Some of it flows nicely, then suddenly it changes and becomes awkward,” a reviewer noted.
Other comments proposed that Bradbury’s words did not accurately represent the science of the Big Bang and the formation of stars and planets, Romanowski reported. One reviewer scoffed at Bradbury’s line about “suns that must birth themselves,” saying that his description “reeks with misunderstanding,” while another pointed to the phrase “life cooking itself,” identifying it as “a poor way of describing/summarizing evolution,” according to Romanowski.
Donovan will play Commissioner Nyari, a leader in the ministry. McQueen plays Gustav, a member of the resistance, and Kung plays Chairman Mao, a member of the resistance. In addition to Jordan, they join previously announced Michael Shannon as Beatty, Sofia Boutella as Clarisse and Lilly Singh as Raven.
Praise for journalist Rich Smith’s article on The Stranger, “Meet John Smelcer, Native American Literature’s ‘Living Con Job’”: a profile of a fiction writer who starting claiming a strong Alaskan Native identity as early as 1994 and then appears to have run with a twenty-five-year string of inflated credentials and biographical details so elaborate that the resulting tale itself should be up for an award.
Jamoche posted the link in comments with this clarification:
[About] the Bradbury quote- the Jezebel article missed the line above it, so they report it as being for the new book; it’s actually for the writer’s 2013 book:
Praise for Lone Wolves:
“A beautiful and moving story of courage and love.”—Ray Bradbury
[Thanks to John King Tarpinian, Chip Hitchcock, Andrew Porter, and Jamoche for these stories.]
Charlottesville: Attention-seeking fans attracted to media hotspots don’t always get the kind of reaction they want. Bleeding Cool News, in “The Supergirl Cosplayer Who Went To Charlottesville – Guess Whose Side She Was On”, reports that celebrity cosplayer Alisa Norris (aka Alisa Kiss) marched with her partner and other white supremacists last weekend. She was not there in costume, but drew attention to her participation by complaining on Facebook about how the media had portrayed them.
Once the negative reaction set in she denied being in the march, however, Bleeding Cool has video showing her walking hand-in-hand with her partner while he shouts anti-Semitic slogans.
Even the webmaster of her “adult entertainment” site is outraged and has taken it down in protest. The website, AlisaKiss.com, now only displays a message denouncing Alisa Kiss for promoting racism.
Phoenix: Cosplayers on the other side of the culture war are being called to protest Donald Trump’s appearance in Phoenix on August 22. The organizer of a counter event, Cosplayers Rally Against Hate, urges fans “to help drown out the hate groups that will make an appearance by showing up to the rally in cosplay.”
Notes:
1) We are not an official organization, but a rag-tag diverse group of creatives and costumers.
2) We plan to be as safe as possible. I encourage folks to plan exit strategies, and we will be following the main protest groups for updates and recommending staging/protesting areas.
3) Keep your messaging positive – dont react to hate. Also, PLEASE do not wear military-themed cosplay. Wear “safe” looking cosplays, and comfortable cosplays in case of the weather. Signs encouraged (some examples on the page).
Authors and well-wishers raising money for the victims of the Grenfell Tower fire are augmenting a bid by a teacher to name a character in His Dark Materials author Philip Pullman’s new book after one of his former pupils, who lost her life.
Nur Huda, 16, died in the fire along with her parents Abdul Aziz and Fouzia, and her siblings Yasin, 21, and Mehdi, 8.
The teacher’s £1500 bid has been augmented by others’ donations, both small and large (one for £5000).
Many in the publishing industry are joining the Authors for Grenfell Tower online auction, offering items to help raise money for British Red Cross’s relief fund for Grenfell Tower residents and neighbors.
