Tag Archives: Mark Twain

Pixel Scroll 8/16 Waiting for Our Vote to Come In

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When I came home last night my place had no power because a fuse had blown. I waited til this morning to be able to find the fusebox in daylight. Here’s as far as I got with yesterday’s Pixel Scroll, which in Wikipedia parlance is more of a Pixel Stub..

(1) Greg Machlin has finalized the File 770 meetup location at Sasquan.

The Worldcon File770 meetup, Thursday, Aug. 20, at 530 PM, will be at SARANAC PUBLIC HOUSE, 21 West Main Avenue, a very short (2 block) walk from the Convention Center.

They have food, drink, vegan and vegetarian food, and affordable prices:

SO MANY OPPORTUNITIES FOR FUN with that prior sentence, people. DO NOT DISAPPOINT.

They know to expect at least 25, and not to expect us all at once. There’s a bar, so milling is a definite possibility.

Morris Keesan made an interesting discovery:

… and on the Google map, it appears to be next door to the Justice League.

Saranac map CROP

(2) Courtesy of Geekcrafts, socks to wear on your next Trek.

Linda Jo Park, of BeadKnitter Patterns, has created some out-of-this-world socks in honor of Captain Picard from Star Trek. You can find her pattern here.

She also suggests that the pattern could be easily adapted to reference other characters:

There’s no reason why a person couldn’t do them in Captain Kirk gold, Spock blue (you get two choices there), or even Deanna Trois lavender. Or perhaps you’d rather have Gorn green.

(3) Footage of Mark Twain shot by Thomas Edison in 1909, from Mental Floss.

Edison and Twain were close friends. In 1909, Edison visited Twain’s estate in Redding, CT and filmed the famous author. The silent footage is the only known recording of Twain in existence. It first appeared in a 1909 production of Twain’s “The Prince and Pauper,” and it shows Twain wearing his trademark white suit, puffing a cigar. Twain would die one year later.

(4) Sarah A. Hoyt is warming up for Sad Puppies 4 in “It’s All About the Bling”.

When we set out on this, back in the dim days of our first discussions of Sad Puppies (I object, of course.  I have cats) the goal was to make the Hugo worth something again.  Granted, we can’t cater for everyone’s taste.  If you’re a heavy mil-sf guy and the prize goes to hard sci fi it won’t be to your taste.  BUT to cater to the “literary” crowd is to cater to the tiniest fandom in SF.  (I found this out in sincere arguments with agents while looking for one between my third and fourth.  They all wanted me to write literary sf — because I CAN do it — because it would win awards and increase THEIR prestige (and make me slit my wrists in a warm bath if I had to write much more of it.  It was no fun.) But they all candidly informed me that it sold almost nothing and so I should try to get a job teaching or write for literary journals or something.  Why do you think they kept telling us that Ancillary Justice as a “fun space opera” — because no one buys “literary”.  Or yeah, some people do, but not enough to keep you in writer kibble.

Our idea, goofy as it sounds was to get some good books/good names associated with the Hugo, so Hugo would mean a boost in print run again.

[Thanks to Will R., Michael J. Walsh and John King Tarpinian for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of yesterday Will R.]

A Collation of Bradbury Headlines

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4Es Hand 48652_lg CROP(1) Forry Ackerman’s hand went unsold in the Bradbury auction. Well, not his actual hand, a sculpture of it. Presumably nobody realized that’s what it is or there might have been takers.

In a lot titled Ray Bradbury Personally Owned Objects D’Art the description of item (4) is —

very detailed hand sculpture of a man’s hand wearing a large ring, painted in a bronze color finish. Evidence of prior mounting to a base and scattered chips to finish;

John King Tarpinian recognized the “large ring” is Ackerman’s famous Dracula ring – originally worn by John Carradine in Universal’s House of Frankenstein (1944) and House of Dracula (1945), then by Bela Lugosi in Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948).

forrest_ackerman

Ackerman and Bradbury were friends for many decades, so if there was reason to make castings or sculptures of Ackerman’s hand then there might be an equally good reason why Bradbury owned one. Perhaps someday we’ll find out.

(2) Disney will remake Something Wicked This Way Comes, originally produced in 1983 from a script written by Ray Bradbury himself.

The remake will be directed by Seth Grahame-Smith. This will be the first time the author of Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter has directed a movie, though his heart is clearly in the right place —

“I have been so crazy about this book, and it was such a formative title in my life that I actually wrote a piece on NPR about why it is so important for young males to read,” Grahame-Smith said. “It is a classic coming-of-age, father-son story about the transition from childhood to adulthood and how kids can’t wait to be adults and adults romanticize their childhoods. I’m not remaking the movie; I want the haunted atmosphere that makes the book so chilling, and I want to reinstate some of the classic scenes from the book that were missing from the ’83 film.”

(3) The Lake County News-Sun’s editorial writer, a red hot Bradbury fan, grows increasingly grumpy as it appears that the author’s home town of Waukegan is about to snub Bradbury again by declining to name a school in his honor.

The School Board’s current argument against honoring the world-revered author is that he moved away from Waukegan. That’s what often happens. It’s not a punishable offense.

When the board considered renaming Whittier School, the same argument against Bradbury was offered although it did not stop a previous board from naming a middle school after Jack Benny, another hometown product who left.

But Bradbury so truly loved growing up in Waukegan that reflections of his youth and the town he revered reverberate through his books. People everywhere in the world know about Waukegan because they know Bradbury….

For the record, Samuel Langhorne Clemens moved away from Hannibal, Mo., when he was 17. But Hannibal never had any trouble finding suitable ways to honor him. Townsfolk named a school for him. They knew being Mark Twain’s hometown was their honor, even more than his.

(4) Something else Mark Twain and Ray Bradbury have in common is they both have books on Edina, MN’s 7th and 8th Grade Reading List – The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Fahrenheit 451 – though the blogger who pointed this out feels theirs are the only two works on the current list that deliver the same challenge and literary value as the books on Minnesota’s 7th and 8th Grade Reading List in 1908.

Tailor Twain

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John King Tarpinian assures me that on this day in 1871 Mark Twain received a patent for suspenders.

I wonder if those were the famous suspenders of disbelief so necessary to fiction writers?

Here’s more detail about the patent from Time:

One of the first U.S. patents for suspenders was issued in 1871 to Samuel Clemens (better known as Mark Twain) for “Adjustable and Detachable Straps for Garments,” that attached to everything from underpants to women’s corsets and were designed as an alternative to suspenders, which Clemens reportedly found uncomfortable. Metal clasps were invented in 1894 so that suspenders could be clipped on rather than buttoned, meaning that pants no longer had to come with buttons sewn in the waist, as they commonly did at the time.

Bradbury’s Nefertiti-Tut Express Screenplay

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Ray Bradbury never got around to completing the screenplay based on his poem “The Nefertiti-Tut Express.” The project languished for years. He tried to recruit his friend Harlan Ellison to add dialog and direction, but Harlan was just as busy.

What is this tale? As Bradbury regaled a Caltech audience in 1976:

I have a friend, Chuck Jones, the cartoonist, who calls me all the time with revelations he finds in dictionaries and all kinds of reference books he is reading. He called me on the phone and said, “Ray,” and I said, “What?” He said, “Did you know?” I said, “No, tell me.” He said, “Did you know that when they were building the Trans-Egyptian Railroad across Africa 100 years ago and they ran out of fuel, they would stop the locomotive, run into the nearest graveyard, steal mummies out of the tombs, bring them back, shove them into the firebox of the locomotive, and use them as fuel to go across Egypt late at night?!” I said, “That’s great!” I threw down the phone, ran to my typewriter, and wrote a poem called “The Nefertiti-Tut Express”! Well, there’s a metaphor of survival, isn’t it? If a mummy works, you burn it. And all the Egyptian gods and goddesses haunt you across the desert forever after that.

Decades later, there is the promise of a finished edition, The Nefertiti-Tut Express: A Story in Screenplay, ”fleshed-out and reanimated through the artistic vision of Gary Gianni” and forthcoming from The RAS Press.

The story has that mythic quality of feeling so obviously true – Yes, of course that would have happened! – I never thought to question it.

Imagine my surprise when I discovered that Mark Twain (who may have been a little sharper than the rest of us despite never having written a blog) was openly skeptical about the legend, which is repeated in The Innocents Abroad —

I shall not speak of the railway, for it is like any other railway—I shall only say that the fuel they use for the locomotive is composed of mummies three thousand years old, purchased by the ton or by the graveyard for that purpose, and that sometimes one hears the profane engineer call out pettishly, “D—n these plebeians, they don’t burn worth a cent—pass out a King;”—[Stated to me for a fact. I only tell it as I got it. I am willing to believe it. I can believe any thing.]—

So whatever they had before urban legends were invented – whoppers, tall tales, fables? — it was one of those.

[Thanks to John King Tarpinian for the story.]

Hertz on Collectingsf.com

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John Hertz’ contribution to Collectingsf.com in June is a review of Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889):

Six years before Wells’ Time Machine (1895) this story, operated by time travel but barely exploring it, is placed in the theater of Aristocracy and the Common Man, like The Prince and the Pauper (1882), Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc (1896), and perhaps Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884)…

Snapshots XX

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Ten developments of interest to fans:

(1) Hear, hear! SFFaudio asks an excellent question: Where are are the Charles Stross audiobooks?

Seriously, the guy is super talented. There have only been three commercially released Charlie Stross audiobooks (all from Infinivox). The were terrific, but they’re not enough.

If Saturn’s Children and Halting State were available as audiobooks they’d shoot up to the top of my listening stack.

(2) The Los Angeles Times says a new Mark Twain collection is on the way, with no love for Jane Austen:

“Who Is Mark Twain?” is due to hit shelves next month. It’s the first collection of Mark Twain’s unpublished short works and will include both fiction and nonfiction. In one essay, he wonders if Jane Austen’s intent is to “make the reader detest her people up to the middle of the book and like them in the rest of the chapters?”

(3) Coming soon: a new Card trilogy:

Simon Pulse senior editor Anica Rissi has acquired world English rights to the first three books in a new fantasy series by Orson Scott Card written specifically for a YA audience; Barbara Bova of the Barbara Bova Literary Agency made the sale.

(4) Do you study Google Analytics’ map of the hits on your blog? The other day File 770 got a hit from Gabarone, Botswana, the locale of the #1 Ladies Detective Agency. Spammers beware! Precious Ramotswe reads my blog.

(5) The Virginia legislature has declared June 27, 2009 to be Will F. Jenkins Day. Steven H. Silver is soliciting reminiscences about Murray Leinster/Will F. Jenkins, or pieces talking about how he/his writing has influenced writers and fans, for a memory book that will be presented to Jenkins’ family. Written pieces or photos of Jenkins/Leinster for inclusion should be sent to Steven at [email protected] no later than May 31.

(6) Alexis Gilliland’s website is up and running. Lee Gilliland announces, “We are slowly adding cartoons (we have an estimated 12,000 to 15,000 total to post) and we also now have a forum.” It’s quite nicely designed.

(7) The fastest growing category in the iTunes App Store is: books. O’Reilly Radar explains:

Granted releasing an e-book for the iPhone is a lot easier than writing a gaming application using the iPhone SDK. Roughly 6 out 10 of the Books on the app store sell for 99 cents or less, and 1 in 20 are free.

(8) Laurraine Tutihasi’s Feline Mewsings #35 can now be downloaded at http://homepage.mac.com/laurraine/Felinemewsings/index.html.

(9) Have you already heard about the Dalek found in an English pond?

I got the shock of my life when a Dalek head bobbed up right in front of me. It must have been down there for some time because it was covered in mould and water weed, and had quite a bit of damage. One of the dome lights was smashed, but the eye-stalk was intact and the head and neck stayed in one piece as I carefully lifted it out.

(10) Guy Gavriel Kay’s piece for the Toronto Globe and Mail tries to make sense of readers’ intrusive demands on writers who blog:

These days, writers invite personal involvement and intensity from their readers. In direct proportion to the way in which they share their personalities (or for- consumption personalities), their everyday lives, their football teams and word counts, their partners and children and cats, it encourages in readers a sense of personal connection and access, and thus an entitlement to comment, complain, recommend cat food, feel betrayed, shriek invective, issue demands: ‘George, lose weight, dammit!'”

[Thanks to Francis Hamit, Andrew Porter, Steven Silver, David Klaus and John Mansfield for the links included in this story.]

1000 Novels Everyone Must Read: SF

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On the installment plan, The Guardian is running its choices for the list of 1000 novels everyone must read. It’s just posted the science fiction titles from the list and the introduction, mentioning some of the right names, makes it all sound very promising:

From the margins of an almost invisible literature has sprung the intact reality of the 20th century.” Ballard’s visions of “inner space”, Orwell, Huxley and Atwood’s totalitarian nightmares, Kafka’s uneasy bureaucracies, Gibson’s cutting-edge cool – all are examples of a literature at the forefront of the collective imagination.

The three parts of the list and some sidebar articles add up to 149 books, according to SF Signal, which encourages people to copy and annotate the books on the list they’ve read.

Here are the links to The Guardian:

Science Fiction/Fantasy Part I
Science Fiction/Fantasy Part II
Science Fiction/Fantasy Part III

I wish I liked the results more because they’ve made some idiocyncratic choices I entirely approve. Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur’s Court would certainly be on my list, but I don’t know how many other fans would call it must-read sf. They also named Walter M. Miller Jr.’s A Canticle for Leibowitz, an overlooked classic that’s well-known to actifans but not by so many others. And it never would have occurred to me to tag Antoine de Sainte-Exupéry’s The Little Prince but I like the choice.

Unfortunately, too many of the selections ring false for me. The right authors represented by their lesser works. No Bradbury at all. And a bunch of books that came out in the past 30 years which didn’t seem very significant then or now.

[Thanks to Andrew Porter for the link.]

Where Real Writers Work

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The desk and chair Charles Dickens used while writing Great Expectations sold for £433,250 at auction in early June. It is the original of the desk shown in Filde’s drawing known as “The Empty Chair” and upon it were written Dickens’ last works.

When I looked at “The Empty Chair” I immediately wondered: How did Dickens ever get any work done in such a neat room? Impossible. Someone must have cleaned it up before they let the artist in. I don’t know any writer who could even begin to work in such a sanitized environment.

Certainly Dickens’ contemporary Mark Twain didn’t. Go to the interactive map of Mark Twain’s House. Click on the Third Floor “Billiard Room” to see where Samuel Clemens did Mark Twain’s work. Even now that it’s a museum, the curators haven’t forgotten to spread around some clutter to simulate the great man at work. (While you’re there, click on the First Floor “Entrance Hall” and look at the three-story spiral staircase. Legend holds that whoever seeks to be a writer should touch the staircase’s mahogany railing. Now wipe the fingerprint off of your monitor.)

Thanks to Google, it’s easy to find lots of photos of science fiction writers’ offices to illustrate the same point. A collection of links appears after the jump.

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