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The ten thousand things and the one true only.

by Kip Manley

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Things to keep in mind:
The secret of the shelf.

This poet contains great beauties, a sweet and harmonious versification, easy elocution, a fine imagination: yet does the perusal of his work become so tedious, that one never finishes it from the mere pleasure which it affords: It soon becomes a kind of task reading; and it requires some effort and resolution to carry us to the end of his long performance. This effect, of which every one is conscious, is usually ascribed to the change of manners. But manners have more changed since Homer's age, and yet that poet remains still the favourite of every reader of taste and judgment. Homer copied true natural manners, which, however rough or uncultivated, will always form an agreeable and interesting picture. But the pencil of the English poet was employed in drawing the affectations and conceits and fopperies of chivalry, which appear ridiculous as soon as they lose the recommendation of the mode. The tediousness of continued allegory, and that too seldom striking and ingenuous, has also contributed to render the F--ry Queen peculiarly tiresome; not to mention the too great frequency of its descriptions, and the langour of its stanza. Upon the whole, Spenser maintains his place upon the shelves among our English classics: but he is seldom seen on the table; and there is scarcely any one, if he dares to be ingenuous, but will confess that, notwithstanding all the merit of the poet, he affords an entertainment with which the palate is soon satiated.

David Hume

—posted 561 days ago


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Things to keep in mind:
The secret of time.

My purpose in looking back to that first era of widespread book reading is not, however, to emphasize the abundance of deep reading, or book reading, or leisurely time that we have lost. The more I’ve studied readers of the eighteenth century, the more I’ve doubted that we (by which I mean a historically fairly new “we”—people who can buy books but also must earn money, manage households, walk dogs, bath children) ever really had more time to read. I do not believe that the minutes crowded by messages, HBO series, and childcare today correspond in any direct way to time that we—posters and messengers, scavengers of the internet, wage workers and intellectuals—once spent with books. The readers I represent struggled to make room for the reading of books in lives that they perceived, rightly or wrongly, to be crowded in the same way we perceive ours to be. They worry, like us, about other media forms that seem quicker and shallower and more enticing than books. They sense that round-the-clock entertainment and distraction might render book reading extinct. They dream of a future when books will find a wider and more attentive public. In focusing on book reading rather than on media consumption generally, my first gambit, then, is this: ever since people like us have had access to books, the time we’ve spent with them has been defined as fragile, hard to come by, and good to hope for.

Christina Lupton

—posted 569 days ago


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Things to keep in mind:
The secret of description.

Meditation. Three elementary possibilities for the novelist: he tells a story (Fielding), he describes a story (Flaubert), he thinks a story (Musil). The nineteenth-century novel of description was in harmony with the (positivist, scientific) spirit of the time. To base a novel on a sustained meditation goes against the spirit of the twentieth century, which no longer likes to think at all.

Milan Kundera

—posted 577 days ago


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Things to keep in mind:
The secret of the size of the pond.

Ambition in genre writing is often a perilous thing. The undiscriminating taste of genre readers (actually a highly discriminating taste, but a taste that discriminates only its kind of book from all others, aesthetic quality aside) and the invisibility of genre writing to all other readers are only aspects of the problem. Central is the question of whether the forms and constraints of any of the modern genres—horror, say, or SF, romance, sword-and-sorcery, or the Western—are worth struggling with, worth the effort of transforming. What readership will witness your labours or be able to understand what you have done?

John Crowley

—posted 605 days ago


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Things to keep in mind:
The secret of what keeps it going.

What, after all, kept him writing with any sense of accomplishment if his view of the present state of life was so melancholy, and his faith in words to sustain a better vision so frail? Why did not he cease before he did?

The answer may be partly that for Spenser, in his own particular form of exile in Ireland, writing had become somehow synonymous with living. The long poem, instinct with a better time, peopled with the glistening creations of his imagination, sustained him despite the profound disappointments and frustrations of creating and living. To stop one would have meant stopping the other. That the attraction of ceasing was strong is attested by the temptation to give in that assails his epic protagonists; that he saw no final reconciliation of the images in his head and what he saw around him, or even what he could write, is evident from his own words and from the fact that all ideal moments of vision vanish and all the lovely ladies and brave knights meet only to part with promises of future bliss.

A. Bartlett Giamatti

—posted 615 days ago


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Two bananas and a New York Times.

Forty’s coming slowly, sadly. —I suppose I was due for a bit of a break after last year’s epic run? But not too much, no, no. The next three novelettes have to go off like clockwork, plotwise, at least: maybe that’s why the words have suddenly gone chary.

So here, have a cover reveal; the image that will eventually grace this dilatory no. 40, “ – dirty white noise – ”.

In other news, I’ve started reruns: posting the early stuff on the sorts of webserial portals where the kids hang out these days, Royal Road and Reddit and Scribblehub, to start. Think of it like cheap paperback editions on spinner racks in drugstores, and I do not mean for any of that to be taken as the slightest bit derogatory. There’s honor in the stooping. —One can’t help but feel the slightest bit out of place, though: I’d been discombobulated enough by urban fantasy’s slip into paranormal romance; now the shelves are littered with things like isekai and litRPGs and ratfic and “hard magic” systems, and I’m just dizzy. Still. One has to put oneself out there.

A final bit of teasing: there may well be some new edition news forthcoming. I’ve been running some numbers. We’ll see.

But that’s all about handling what’s already been written! I need to get back to what comes next. Happy spring once more, y’all.

—posted 745 days ago


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(Originally posted on the Patreon.)

Things to keep in mind:
The secret of magical realism.

The first recorded use of the term can be found in the work of the German philosopher and poet Novalis, who, in 1798, wrote of two hypothetical kinds of prophets: a magischer Idealist, and a magischer Realist. The discussion—one about idealism and realism—is beyond the scope of this piece, so suffice it to say that the term is then put to sleep for more than a century, until another German, Franz Roh, summoned it in 1925, when discussing a specific vein in German painting of the late 1910s to early 1920s. It is in his book Nach-Expressionismus: Magischer Realismus: Probleme Der Neuesten Europäischen Malerei that magical realism resurfaces, now deployed to explain a distinct return to realism in post-Expressionistic painting. “Magical,” according to Anne Hegerfeldt, is how Roh understands this return—one mediated by “a sense of mystery and unreality.”

Interestingly, the term reappears a year later in Italy, in the work of Massimo Bontempelli, an Italian poet and future secretary of the Fascist Writers’ Union. Whether Bontempelli—who was more interested in fabricating new European “myths” after the hard reset of World War I than with German Idealism or painting—was aware of the work of Novalis and Roh is a matter of debate. But that Bontempelli is looking for “an explanation of mystery and daily life as a miraculous adventure,” in the words of Maryam Asayeh and Mehmet Arargüҫ, and the fact that he was a wordsmith (a fascist poet, that most sado-masochistic of combinations), puts his understanding of the term closer to ours.

Fernando Sdrigotti

—posted 846 days ago


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Things to keep in mind:
The secret of the impossible.

“Imagination to power,” as the French students said. “Be practical, do the impossible,” because if you don’t do the impossible, as I’ve cried out over and over again, we’re going to wind up with the unthinkable—and that will be the destruction of the planet itself. So to do the impossible is the most rational and practical thing we can do. And that impossible is both in our own conviction and in our shared conviction with our brothers and sisters, to begin to try to create, or work toward a very distinct notion of what constitutes a finally truly liberated as well as ecological society. A utopian notion, not a futuristic notion.

Murray Bookchin

—posted 854 days ago


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Things to keep in mind:
The secret of the ancillary.

He was the born confidant, the shadowy friend, the evasive supporter. What you assert he does not deny. In a sense he acts out feminine attributes in relationships, he yields, he consoles, he sustains. He is the felt in the bedroom slipper, the storm strips on the wintry windows, the wool lining back of piano keys, the interlining in conversations, the shock absorber on the springs of cars, the lightning conductor. He is the invisible man. When he worked at the press with us, and Gonzalo’s anarchism, erratic hours, cause us so much anguish and extra work, he was the receptive ear, the devoted helper. In his diary he asserted his physical hungers and fulfillments. But I have yet to know this enigmatic friend.

Anaïs Nin

—posted 862 days ago


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Hexagonagall.

Oh, hey, I kinda lost the conceit on the last one, didn’t I. Shoulda been something like Heptanomicon, instead of an ansible quote.

Anyway. —The kid’s now had a thirteenth birthday, which has me feeling the passage of time in all kinds of ways; the first draft of no. 39 proceeds apace, on track to finish on time, if not necessarily under budget (there’s already one scene that went on for over 1,800 words because it took me a while to figure out what it was trying to do, so that’s gonna need to be completely restaged on the rewrite, and no, it’s not the one with the adraxone monologue). —But it’s nothing we can’t handle.

Click here, then, for the cover reveal (or here, for the underlying image): the VERN, Chilli’s unofficial headquarters on Southeast Belmont, as fine a Tower as he’s ever likely to fall from. —The real name of the joint is Hanigan’s Tavern, but it’s been called the Vern by just about everybody ever since the night somebody parked a tall truck a little too close. Or, at least, that used to be the real name: couple of years ago a couple of entrepreneurs added this dive to their portfolio of reclaimed watering holes, remaking the interior with tchotchkes salvaged from other dead bars, redoing the menu and the liquor shelf, and renaming the new joint officially as the Vern, which seems to miss several important points all at once.

In the meanwhile, my coffee cup’s (once more) almost empty, which means the cat asleep on my lap is about to be rudely awakened (again), and I’ve yet to hit today’s word count. Happy November, y’all.

—posted 864 days ago


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(Originally posted on the Patreon.)