Pixel Scroll 1/1 Let Scrolled Acquaintance Be Forgot…

rhinowaiting(1) HORNING IN. Another rhino run starring Jim Mowatt — “New Year Parkrun Rhino Running at Temple Newsam House”

We set off past the glorious Elizabethan mansion and out through the formal gardens. Down the long hill, left at the motorway and curl back along the edge of the woods until we are once again struggling up the hill toward the house. Twice around we go and the second time we are curved around the hill a little until we burst out into the finish funnel. I queue to be scanned behind the girl in the orange tee shirt. I’d finished before her at Woodhouse Moor but she was really pleased to finish in front of me here at Temple Newsam. “I couldn’t be beaten by a rhino twice in one day” she said.

 

(2) CARRIE FISHER. James H. Burns writes: “Considering that I was never particularly a fan of Carrie Fisher as an actress, I am finding myself becoming quite a fan of her mind!” Burns had just read “Carrie Fisher shuts down the ageist haters as only Carrie Fisher can” on Salon.

She soon followed up with a more direct command, saying, “Please stop debating about whether OR not aged well. unfortunately it hurts all 3 of my feelings. My BODY hasn’t aged as well as I have. Blow us.” It’s been favorited over 35 thousand times — and still going.

(3) FIRST AMENDMENT. Has he been listening to Fisher, too? George Lucas definitely spoke freely on the Charlie Rose show broadcast on December 25:

At one point he said that filmmakers in the Soviet Union had more freedom than their counterparts in Hollywood, who, he maintained, “have to adhere to a very narrow line of commercialism.”

Mr. Lucas appeared particularly unhappy with the direction the “Star Wars” franchise has taken since he sold the rights to it, along with Lucasfilm, his company, to Disney for $4 billion. He compared the sale to a breakup and a divorce.

“These are my kids. All the Star Wars films,” he said. “I love them, I created them, I’m very intimately involved in them.”

He added, trailing off with a laugh: “And I sold them to the white slavers that take these things and. …”

(4) BABYLON 5.1. Blastr’s headline runs a little ahead of the facts – “Straczynski bringing sci-fi classic Babylon 5 back to life with movie reboot in 2016” – in that he hasn’t finished a script and he doesn’t have a commitment from a studio to produce the movie.

Thanks to some shrewd negotiating, Straczynski actually owns the film rights to the franchise — so he isn’t beholden to getting a particular studio to sign on. But he is apparently hoping Warner Bros. (the studio that produced the original series) might be interested once the script is complete. You know, assuming it’s good.

If Warner Bros. doesn’t bite, Straczynski apparently aims to finance the film through his own Studio JMS, though that might be a tall order to bankroll an $80-100 million sci-fi epic. But considering the franchise’s name cachet with genre fans — not to mention the fact that studios are mining just about any brand they can get their hands on these days — you’d think someone would be interested in co-producing.

(5) MARSHAL BURNS. Ken Burns the documentarian was this year’s Rose Parade Grand Marshal, prompting an exchange between John King Tarpinian and Phil Nichols:

[Tarpinian] The documentarian is this year’s Rose Parade grand marshal.  They keep taking about his “moving” stills as having been groundbreaking, calling it Ken Burns effect. Now his documentaries are very well done and quite enjoyable however when I saw the first one this moving-still effect reminded me of Icarus Montgolfier Wright.  I’m thinking Ray Bradbury and George Clayton Johnson’s contribution to this effect was a bit earlier.

[Nichols] Good point, jkt! In fact, the technique had been used prior to ICARUS, most famously in a Canadian documentary called CITY OF GOLD (1957). In the UK, it has only recently become known as the Ken Burns effect. We have our own Ken (Ken Morse) who did similar work for the BBC for decades. We used to call it “movement in stills”, until the American influence became irresistible.

(6) STAR WARS SPOILERS. Beware spoilers in Alex Ross’ fine discussion of “Listening to Star Wars” at The New Yorker.

Williams’s wider influence on musical culture can’t be quantified, but it’s surely vast. The brilliant young composer Andrew Norman took up writing music after watching “Star Wars” on video, as William Robin notes in a Times profile. The conductor David Robertson, a disciple of Pierre Boulez and an unabashed Williams fan, told me that some current London Symphony players first became interested in their instruments after encountering “Star Wars.” Robertson, who regularly stages all-Williams concerts with the St. Louis Symphony, observed that professional musicians enjoy playing the scores because they are full of the kinds of intricacies and motivic connections that enliven the classic repertory. “He’s a man singularly fluent in the language of music,” Robertson said. “He’s very unassuming, very humble, but when he talks about music he can be the most interesting professor you’ve ever heard. He’s a deep listener, and that explains his ability to respond to film so acutely.”

(7) 40% PUPPY CONTENT. Brandon Kempner at Chaos Horizon takes his first cut at predicting the 2016 Best Novel Hugo. Pups get 2 spots out of the top 5.

The difficulty in predicting the 2016 Hugo lies in how little information we have: how big will the Rabid Puppies vote be? How will the Sad Puppies 4 operate? How much will the rest of the Hugo vote increase? Will other Hugo voters change their voting habits to stop a Puppy sweep? Will specific authors turn down endorsements and/or nominations?

(8) RETURN TO SENDER. Kate Paulk, in “Offer? What Offer?” at Sad Puppies 4, dismisses Steve Davidson’s reconciliation post for failing to treat with “the management.”

I’ve heard through the Internet (all right, Facebook) that someone who fancies himself a big shot in the field has “offered” to stop claiming Sad Puppies 4 is all things evil in return for a few “reasonable concessions” on our part.

Since the person in question hasn’t bothered to make this offer to me, Sarah Hoyt, or Amanda Green, Sad Puppy supporters can reasonably assume that the so-called offer is not actually genuine.

(9) KNOW JOHN, NO PEACE. John C. Wright deconstructed George R.R. Martin’s reconciliation post in “Peace on Mars, Good Will Toward Puppies” .

…Mr. Martin wills the ends without willing the means. He wishes for a cessation of enmity but does not identify who caused it and why, nor does he offer any apology or concession. Perhaps he is merely wishing for the status quo ante. Perhaps he regards his role in the matter as an entirely innocent one.

Be that as it may, honor demands a courteous response to a courteous overture….

The second group is a parasite on the first. Its sole purpose rests on expropriating the glory and reputation the award in times past painfully and honestly earned in the public esteem, and expending this stored capital profligately on unworthy objects to give them an outward momentary appearance of worth.

For example, the parasites seek to elevate REDSHIRTS to the stature of DUNE by an outward show of praise without the book being as praiseworthy. However, according to the inevitable rules governing such counterfeits, as soon as the public opinion grows aware of the inflation and adjusts its estimates accordingly, the parasites fail, and the original host fails with them.

In this case, failure means the Hugo Award no longer represents to anyone an honest judgment of worth. The boast ‘Hugo Award Winning!’ becomes a leper’s bell rather than a badge of honor, and any undeceived science fiction readers flee it. REDSHIRTS is not elevated to the stature of DUNE, but DUNE sinks.

Perhaps Mr. Martin can see a means whereby the host and the parasite that forever seeks to destroy the host can coexist in peace. I, for one, cannot….

(10) AN INTERVIEW WITH URASIS DRAGON. But once Wright had a look at Steve Davidson’s reaction to Martin, he discovered a new comradely admiration for GRRM, as expressed in “Constant Discord from Imaginary Dragons”.

Good grief. Observe that by kicking up this smokescreen of false reconciliation, Mr. Davidson actually makes it more difficult for any parties wishing for true reconciliation (I believe George RR Martin is one such) to accomplish the task…..

For the sake of any undecided readers toying with the notion that the puppykickers have some sort of valid argument or same vestigial desire for peace, allow me to address Mr. Davidson’s four points in order.

Point One: Please note that in the same column he says ” Anyone can become a member and all members enjoy the same rights and privileges as any other member.”

So, when we Sad Puppies did exactly this, Mr. Davidson uses this as an example of us “scamming the system” and advises us, as a condition of reconciliation, that we stop.

Logically, since we cannot cease to do what was never done to begin with, the condition cannot be met. As if one offered peace to a confirmed bachelor on the condition he stop beating his wife.

And Mr. Davidson also uses this to contradict our (accurate) accusation that a small group of inside elite writers and editors over the last fifteen years has been manipulating and dominating the awards secretively, that is, scamming the system.

(11) AMAZING NEGOTIATIONS. Meanwhile, Fandom’s self-appointed Ambassador Plenipotentiary Steve Davidson is experimenting with a unilateral cease-fire, which he calls a “Self-Inflicted Puppy Moratorium”.

I’ve finally whittled my suggestions down to two:  1.  leave the current SPIV recommendation list as a pure recommendation list.  (It’s almost not a slate – all that needs doing is to drop the associated political rhetoric and the curation down to a “final list” and it will BE a recommendation list) and 2. disassociate SP from RP in a publicly demonstrable way.

I’ll note in passing that BOTH of these suggestions are things that the Sad Puppies are claiming to want to do – or to have already done.  It would, therefore, seem to be an easy set of requests to comply with.

As quid pro quo, I offered the following:  I would consult and participate in their recommendation list(s) (participate in order to ‘prove’ that I was doing so); I would give serious consideration to any proposal(s) they might make at WSFS business meetings (they’ve called for a Hugo for tie-ins, among other things);  I will honor their votes and nominations as being valid participation in the Hugos (in other words, won’t assume it’s all politics and market grab on their part); will continue to keep Amazing as an open source (that it has always been – the ONLY people I’ve ever received a “never coming here again” are those who complain the site is biased against them, which, if they stuck around instead of running for the hills….)

AND – I promised a unilateral moratorium on puppy-related posts for two weeks (starting yesterday) while I awaited their response.

(12) NEW YEAR’S FIREWORKS DISPLAY. Scott Lynch, who for reasons explained in the post felt unable to do so immediately after Sasquan, rang in the New Year with a defense of Patrick Nielsen Hayden against John C. Wright’s characterizations.

…This was especially frustrating in the wake of the 2015 World Science Fiction Convention, after which the ponderously self-important blowhard John C. Wright publicly accused veteran editor and lifelong fan Patrick Nielsen Hayden of both assaulting Wright’s wife and masterminding the long-term “corruption” of the Hugo Awards, to which the SF/F field largely replied: “Meh.” Now, some of that is certainly due to Wright’s tireless self-marginalization and frothing bigotry, but regardless, I think Patrick deserved better of his friends and colleagues. He deserved to have someone stand up and state plainly what he could not– that John C. Wright talks a big game about truth and courage, but that he is demonstrably full of shit.

I wanted to be that person. I prepared a lengthy post to that effect. And then anxiety did its usual crushing, grinding thing, and days became weeks, which became months. It is now the new year, Hugo chat has started up in earnest, and Wright is once again plying his mealy-mouthed combination of false civility and vicious nonsense on the subject. I have decided to weigh in with a reminder that the narrative Wright wants to push is an absolute full-blown fabrication….

(13) YEAR IN REVIEW. Like on that game show, Lou Antonelli delivers the answer in the form of a question: ”2015? The Year in Review?” at This Way to Texas.

And then, what I would have thought would be be a great thing, being nominated for the Hugo award twice, turned out to be the worst thing that ever happened in my life. But it helped me realize that, in the end, I really only write for myself and friends, and in literature – as in other things in life – trying to please other people is the fast track to misery.

[Thanks to Stephen Burridge, Morris Keesan, Nila Thompson, John King Tarpinian, Zenu, and Bruce Arthurs for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Matthew Johnson.]

Update 01/02/2016: Corrected item (8) after readers pointed out Paulk was commenting about Steve Davidson’s reconciliation post, not George R.R. Martin’s.

328 thoughts on “Pixel Scroll 1/1 Let Scrolled Acquaintance Be Forgot…

  1. @Bruce Baugh:

    We shall not cease from Hugo seeking
    And the end of all our nominating
    Will be to arrive where we started
    And No Award the place for the first time.

    This was great BTW.

  2. @Nigel

    And the cock crowed a third time. And then a fourth. And a fifth. Eventually the cock gave up, went home, gargled hot honey and lemon and wrapped his neck in a scarf. ‘Does this guy know anyone?’ he clucked, and went to bed.

    May I humbly present you one late edition internet for your efforts?

  3. Pingback: Bookstores, the industry and shooting yourself in the foot. | Rants, Raves and Diatribes

  4. snowcrash on January 3, 2016 at 5:39 pm said:

    The JCW trackback (archive link) above is crazy awesome. Not only does he not know who Scott Lynch is (srsly, does the man not know *anyone*? Or how to use Google?),

    See what I mean about the Pups not keeping up with current work in the genre?

    but there is this passage which, truly is a work of beauty and an utter, utter lack of any self-awareness:

    “In other words, he deliberately scammed and cheated the system, and he personally robbed me personally of my due, thanks to his dishonestly cast vote…”

    1. George R. R. Martin’s vote doesn’t decide the Hugos, as George would be the first to tell you.

    2. JCW believes that by any honest estimate, his work should win the Hugo. He made that clear in Smeagol Nielson Hayden (“None of this was done on merit,” “I am, in all modesty, a skilled author, one of the finest writing today”), and blatantly obvious in The Stormbunnies and Crybullies (“he personally robbed me personally of my due”). Even the other Puppy slate writers are missing from his schema. JCW’s nomination is the only one that matters, and therefore his failure to be awarded the Hugo can only be the result of force or fraud.

    (Which is absurd. If his work was so obviously superior, there would have been no need for Puppy slates in the first place.)

    What I find interesting is the way JCW’s erased the readers/fans/Hugo voters. His losses to No Award must be PNH’s fault, or GRRM’s fault, or whomever he chooses to blame next. It can’t be the the result of the normal SF audience reading his work and deciding that it was passably amusing, but not Hugo-worthy.

    As Mike Glyer has observed, the Pups tend to talk about the Hugo controversies as though pros were the only significant participants. Maybe they’re all trying not to think about the readers.

  5. My mother, who cheerfully admits that she isn’t a particularly discerning reader (and wasn’t a Hugo voter either, but she did read the works because, um, I asked her to, and come to think of it I should probably apologise to her), thought that JCW’s stories were dire. So they weren’t even obviously superior enough to please my mother. (She has read The Goblin Emperor five times now, though, so I’m not an entirely horrible daughter.)

  6. Oh, dear, Meredith. I wouldn’t have done that to my mother. Goblin Emperor, yes; That’s also why when she accidentally bought it for me again for Christmas this year, upon realizing her mistake, she just kept it. (She returned Ann Leckie; I intend to lend her the trilogy to indicate that was a little bit of a mistake, but she is buying fewer books to keep and reading more from the library or my copies anyhow, so not a major one.)

    I’m am not JCW’s anti-fan. I admit I partly voted on the Hugos without reading the slated works – I hit the point of “I’m running out of time, at this reading rate I won’t even finish the Three Body Problem, so the stuff being reported as dreck is being triaged to last, and JCW in particular to dead last.” (I did read his Desolation of Smaug takedown. I agreed on much of it, and was impressed at how little of it was direct insults to all females, but thought it needed to be half as long to be really killer. I should say, I tend to write long and desperately need an editor, so if I think you’ve gone on a bit…)

    This is why I did read the fan writer nominees, but haven’t touched on JCW’s fiction. Unless you count a few of his blog entries , and his comments here.

    And yet… I still look at “I made my mother read this” and shiver….

  7. @Lenora Rosa

    In my defence, I hadn’t read them yet and I didn’t know what I was getting her in for at the time. The open mind I was trying to keep about the results of slating didn’t survive contact with the enemy – or her contact for that matter. I did feel rather badly about it, especially after I discovered that she was still stubbornly trying to finish The Dark Between the Stars long after I’d given up on it.

  8. My reading discussion group gave up on The Dark Between the Stars. And that has never happened before, in some twenty years of discussions. It was all the fault of the Eight Deadly Words….

  9. Meredith, apologize to your mother immediately! If she doesn’t cut you out of the will, she’s a saint.

    @AnnaFdD: You succeeded. It’s amazing how much better you are in your second (third? fourth? FIFTH?) language than he is in his first and only.

    You guys, maybe there’s something actually physically wrong with JCW. He keeps claiming not to know who people are, people whom he’s actually met/corresponded with/been in publications with. So if we take him at his word (which he insists upon), that must mean he’s forgotten them!
    Is he having memory problems? Does he need a checkup and some ginkgo biloba or phytonutrients or something?
    Maybe he’s just never been good with names? That’s pretty common (esp. in men) and we’d understand his poor memory if he told us that.
    Jagi could make him a list, she seems like a supportive helpmeet.

  10. Lurkertype: He keeps claiming not to know who people are, people whom he’s actually met/corresponded with/been in publications with.

    Welllllll…..having just turned 60 last November and having noted the past year or so a decrease in an already lousy ability to remember names/faces, I know how that can go. OTOH, if he didn’t insist on making huge sweeping claims of *never having heard of X insigificant worm who dares to criticize him* (how I read some of his rhetoric in a few cases), it wouldn’t be so tempting to poke him with the facts (which clearly, like reality, have a liberal bias).

  11. Since I was hit by a truck back in 2012 and closing in on 50 I’m having more problems with names. I’ve found one seems smarter if one doesn’t go around claiming to “never heard of” in case ones memory is wrong and/or the person turns out to be famous.

    When one sticks ones foot in ones mouth using a condescending tone one should prepare for the consequences of being wrong/looking ignorant which may include much mocking.

  12. Meredith:

    I’m sure your mother is a fine reader, one of the most discerning reading today.

  13. You guys, maybe there’s something actually physically wrong with JCW. He keeps claiming not to know who people are, people whom he’s actually met/corresponded with/been in publications with. So if we take him at his word (which he insists upon), that must mean he’s forgotten them!

    He did have a massive heart attack some years back.

  14. Anna Feruglio Dal Dan: He did have a massive heart attack some years back.

    On the other hand, there are a significant number of Filers who deal with chronic mild-to-severe physical and mental illnesses — and generally I see all of them bending over backwards to ensure that they maintain a mindfulness about how this may affect what they say and do, and adjust what they say and do accordingly.

    At this point, JCW has been called on his false claims on numerous occasions. So if it’s a question of impaired memory, then he is well aware that this is an issue for him, and he should be compensating for it by doing things like, I dunno, a 5-second-Google before making absolutist claims which turn out to be false.

    If it’s not a question of impaired memory, well, then, he’s just a liar. Quelle suprise.

  15. JJ on January 5, 2016 at 1:29 am said:
    Anna Feruglio Dal Dan: He did have a massive heart attack some years back.

    On the other hand, there are a significant number of Filers who deal with chronic mild-to-severe physical and mental illnesses — and generally I see all of them bending over backwards to ensure that they maintain a mindfulness about how this may affect what they say and do, and adjust what they say and do accordingly.

    Yeah. but not everybody has the energy, the capacity, the insight and just the brain function to be aware of one’s own limitations.

  16. I’m frequently unsure whether Wright is a troll out for kicks or there is something actually, physically amiss with him. I mean, does he truly believe that he’s not a bigot, or does he just know that claim gets a reaction? The bigots I know are self-aware enough to at least silently identify themselves as bigots. They rationalize it, or they embrace it, but they aren’t in complete denial. Similarly, consistently denying you have no knowledge of things you’ve literally written essays about could be the act of someone who just doesn’t care about anything other than getting a rise out of people, or someone with a tenuous grasp on reality.

    I wish I knew, because I honestly wouldn’t want laugh at someone who is in dire mental straits, yet his awfulness makes him so deserving of mockery. Even his oddly stilted writing style could go both ways. Has anyone met the man? Is it possible to tell?

  17. @tmv: It’s very often not an “either/or” – you can start trolling because you feel down a lot and want distraction, and then it can provide both a temporary rush of relief and end up feeding underlying problems, including that damnable sense of being uniquely clear-headed in a world full of soft-heads. I’ve been there myself, and am here as I am now thanks mostly to friends who could see through it and encourage, guide, and sometimes goad me to treatment.

  18. tmv on January 5, 2016 at 2:38 pm said:
    I’m frequently unsure whether Wright is a troll out for kicks or there is something actually, physically amiss with him. I mean, does he truly believe that he’s not a bigot, or does he just know that claim gets a reaction? The bigots I know are self-aware enough to at least silently identify themselves as bigots. They rationalize it, or they embrace it, but they aren’t in complete denial. Similarly, consistently denying you have no knowledge of things you’ve literally written essays about could be the act of someone who just doesn’t care about anything other than getting a rise out of people, or someone with a tenuous grasp on reality.

    I wish I knew, because I honestly wouldn’t want laugh at someone who is in dire mental straits, yet his awfulness makes him so deserving of mockery. Even his oddly stilted writing style could go both ways. Has anyone met the man? Is it possible to tell?

    The more I read him, the more I have the gut feeling he is not a well man. In Italian there is a largely untranslatable saying that literally goes “Are you there or are you making it?” which means loosely “Are you really this stupid or are you pissing with me?” I am increasingly convinced that JCW is making it. He’s still annoying as hell but I feel a pity for him that I don’t feel for Tank Marmot, just to pick an example at random.

  19. @Anna Feruglio Dal Dan: Yeah, I’m getting the same queasily sorry feeling for him. What @Bruce Baugh says makes a lot of sense, too.

    Happily, at least Beale’s just a twit and I can feel perfectly happy making fun of him.

  20. On the 23 NA voters putting MZW second: I’m pretty sure that I remember MZW announcing that he was voting No Award in all categories. (Googles) Ah, yes:

    I have just voted NO AWARD across the board for the Hugo awards, including the category in which I am a finalist.

    This was my choice. I am not telling my fans not to vote for me. If you feel my work is worthy, by all means vote for it. Just understand that if I win, it will be subject to the same scathing derision I give to any and all social and political issues. It deserves no less.

    The Sacred Cow Slaughterhouse: No Award

    So some of his fans might have decided to do the same, and put his work second.

  21. After being reminded that John C. Wright was one of the essayists in “Star Wars on Trial” I pulled out my copy to reread it.

    This book (which is uneven but kind of fun) was published in 2006. It is a series of essays, each from a set of two different authors, arguing for and against “charges” made about the film franchise.

    I’ll be honest. If Wright’s essay here were all I knew of the man I would be shocked at his recent behavior.

    His essay, “May the Midichlorians Be with You” is on the prosecution side of “Charge 2: While Claiming Mythic Significance, Star Wars Portrays No Admirable Religious or Ethical Beliefs”.

    It’s charming, coherent, informed, wry, and amusing. Wright picks apart the ethical contradictions and mythical shortcomings of the movies with clear eyes and no small amount of wit.

    The fatherless birth of Anakin was one of the clumsiest bits of Star Wars lore ever. There are other myths where, for example, Juno gives virgin birth to Vulcan, but only one religion in the modern occidental countries in the world where the Virgin Mother makes an appearance. The child she bears is not the Evil Magic Ninja Boy.

    But once again, the fact that Anakin was conceived of the Holy Midichlorian, and Born of the Blessed Virgin Shmi, has no plot point and tells us nothing about the religion of the Force. It is here for atmosphere, to make Anakin seem to be Big Stuff.

    Reading this bit in isolation, I just noticed it can sound a little like the snark Wright has evinced recently. But the essay as a whole does not give an unpleasant impression. It’s clear and well argued and genuinely funny.

    Something has clearly changed.

  22. @Peace

    Thanks for pulling that out, I was wondering about that essay. I think that in JCW we might be seeing that failure mode of erudite is obnoxious.

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