Monthly Archives: November 2010
david constantine
Delighted that David Constantine has won the 2010 BBC National Short Story Award. His stories aren’t just thoughtful & beautiful, they find the existential strength in human fragility. They’re honest. They regard the reader steadily, with an emotional candour which … Continue reading
Comments Off
Filed under books & reviews, writing
tramps over travel writers
Because, “mad or chill/obsessed with angels/or machines,/the final wish/is love”. It’s freezing cold in here & upstairs one of F’s students is playing Three Blind Mice on the keyboard over & over. I’m making lists of authors, carefully grouped. Ginsberg, … Continue reading
Comments Off
Filed under uncategorizable
pearlant: the failure-of-memory palace
A swimming pool full of code. A vocabulary of interestingly combinable algorithms. A failure-of-memory palace bricolaged together around writers I remember from being very young. The usual combination of playground and fever-hospital. Bad dreams crawl over everything like the images … Continue reading
Comments Off
Filed under pearlant notebook
the guests at the ambiente hotel
A reader from Leicestershire asks, Why are guests seen so rarely at the hotel ? Reader, there are plenty of guests, but you only see them when you first arrive! The rest of the time they are stored in humane … Continue reading
Comments Off
Filed under the Theory Cadre at the Ambiente Hotel
per ardua
I enjoyed Roz Kaveny’s excellently funny piece on how sf ratchets up the audience’s boredom by pandering to it; how that creates a tightening feedback cycle of loss; & how, in a kind of compensatory gesture, a hundred years of … Continue reading
Comments Off
Filed under science fiction
ghost story
1. Pinkish and surrounded by brand new wire netting, the surface of the tennis court is already sinking into the mud, so that the drainage channels around it, which are still to be filled in, look more like the remains … Continue reading
driven to distraction
You can just hear Dave’s people ringing the Palace, can’t you, “What we really need now is the biggest, most tribal, most simple-minded psychodrama to take their minds off it all & get them pulling together. ‘Terrorism’ won’t be enough … Continue reading
Comments Off
Filed under outright politics
blasted
We make fiction for the same reason as we make buildings: security. Rigid notions of causality in fiction have developed as shelter from a fear of the unstructuredness of actual events. Few societies have been more afraid than ours of … Continue reading
Comments Off
Filed under writing
a key event in room 121
Incidences of telekinesis disturb the hotel at night, rearranging small objects, papers, items of clothing. A pair of shoes moves an inch to the left. A cupboard door is rattled so quietly that no one wakes. Bunches of keys, placed … Continue reading
Comments Off
Filed under the Theory Cadre at the Ambiente Hotel
