Day: March 3, 2010

Live from New York

Today was about as close to yesterday as it could get without being a weird repeating loop in the space-time continuum. I spent it mostly reading through a revised chapter on a counseling book we have in development, and also reading through a few of the stories that keep coming for Kaleidotrope ever I since opened the zine back up to submissions in January. It occurs to me, with just the tiniest hint of accompanying panic, that the next issue has to be out next month, in April, and I should probably get some layout work done as soon as possible. I think it’s going to be a really good issue, but I need to bring it all together before that happens. And, because I’m just a little crazy, I’m still thinking about doing three issues this year, the third one coming sometime in July.

This evening, I watched the very first episode of Saturday Night Live (then NBC’s Saturday Night), since I recently purchased — on the cheap, although those prices don’t seem to be offered anymore — the first two seasons on DVD. I’d seen a lot of it, in retrospectives and the like, but I’d never seen the episode in its entirety. It was…interesting, occasionally even amusing. Andy Kaufman’s Mighty Mouse routine is still kind of inspired. But it was more of a weird relic from a time before the show really got a handle of what it would morph into. (Although, after 35 years on the air, it’s safe to say the show has morphed more than a few times.) Intriguing, if only because that first episode is so over-stuffed — George Carlin, two guest comedians, two musical guests (with two songs apiece), the Muppets, and the expected sketch comedy — but not hysterically funny.

And now, if you don’t mind, it’s time for bed.

Wednesday various

  • I don’t know, there has to be a better way to reform our failing public schools than by firing all the teachers. [via]

  • Is it just me or is having Abe Lincoln say, “I’ve been a slave to vampires for thirty years” sort of in questionable taste? It feels like maybe it’s just me. Still, this is pretty neat as far as book trailers go.

  • I admit it, I got a kick out of Hark! A Vagrant’s Canadian Stereotype Comics.

  • Yes, and this font joke. [via]

  • And finally, I meant to post about this when BBC Audiobooks America did their whole audio book by Twitter thing with Neil Gaiman, way back in October, but I just never got around to it. You can read the whole story here (or you can listen to the audio version here), but even I haven’t done that, and I contributed a line to the darn thing. They’ve apparently since done at least one other such story, with author Meg Cabot, but I’m much more interested in the experiment here than the results. It was fun to participate the day-of, but like Salon’s Laura Miller, I’ve yet to be convinced that the results are particularly readable to outside eyes.

    Raymond Chandler once offered this piece of advice to his fellow writers: “When in doubt, have a man with a gun come into the room.” Yet even the excitement of an armed intruder wears thin by the time you’ve got 30 of them milling around for no apparent reason….At some point, every tale needs to stop expanding so it can begin to contract into a coherent whole. People often ask great storytellers, “Where do you get your ideas?” but the real question is “How do you make sense of your ideas?” [Samuel R.] Delany believed that good writers read so much that they “internalize” certain “literary models” and thereby acquire an instinctual feel for a story’s proper shape. As they build on that evocative first image or scene, while they are still venturing further out into the unknown, an unconscious part of their creative intelligence is figuring out how to knit it all back together again. Writers who never develop that instinct tend to keep dragging new gunmen into the room until the story stalls out, which is why a decent ending is so much harder to write than an enticing beginning. The ability to pull it off is one thing that separates the Neil Gaimans of this world from the rest of us saps.

    Which may just be another way of saying too man cooks — especially untrained cooks — spoil the broth.