Dispatches since 2005
The journal
Announcements, new editions, travel, diving, cooking and the working life of a novelist — 3,180 entries, all of them here in full.
March 6, 2019 · 258 words
‘Tis the Season
It’s award season, so it’s become customary for authors to announce which of their works are eligible for Hugos and whatever. (When I started, anyone who tried this would have been ridiculed until they’d be embarrassed to show themselves sober at the Hugo Loser’s Party, but now it’s just a part of business.) Be that [&
Read entry →March 5, 2019 · 56 words
All Beaded Up and No Place to Go
Happy Mardi Gras,Y’all! I put on my beads and went to town today, but I couldn’t find a second line anywhere, so I had a cup of mediocre gumbo at a supposed Louisiana restaurant and went home. At least this video has over two and a half hours of music appropriate to the season. Enjoy!
Read entry →February 28, 2019 · 947 words
Megalo-Happenings
I’ve always felt there was a place for megalomania in art. (Go big or go home, right?) And recently one of the most megalomaniacal works in history premiered in Paris. Eleven years in the making, financed by a pro-Putin oligarch, over a dozen feature films plus 700 hours of ancillary material, and shot in an […]
Read entry →February 26, 2019 · 360 words
Throwing Flame
Today I had a flamewar. The good kind, the kind fought with actual flamethrowers. Well, flamethrower, singular. I was the only person who had a flamethrower, which is another reason why it was the good kind of flamewar. Every winter we have to go out and burn out last year’s crop of weeds, which has […]
Read entry →February 22, 2019 · 253 words
Tasting
So the other night we held a scotch tasting with our friend Sue Lampson. (Fortunately her nondrinker husband Alan was available to drive her home.) The bottles I contributed are shown above, ranging from sweet/sherry/vanilla on the left to smoky and peaty on the right. Sue brought her own box of goodies, and so we [&he
Read entry →February 21, 2019 · 63 words
When I Wrote It
Some days I’m glancing at my Amazon sales numbers and can’t avoid reading the reviews. There was one review of This Is Not a Game and the whole Dagmar series that said they were excellent books, but warned the reader that they weren’t in any way science fiction. To which I can only respond: They were science […]
Read entry →February 19, 2019 · 239 words
Boxes
More boxes of books have arrived. They’re coming faster than I can give them away! Be that as it may, this photo should tell you that the revised edition of The Praxis is finally in print! (It’s been available as an ebook for some time.) It’s the “Author’s Definitive Edition.” It says so right there on […]
Read entry →February 16, 2019 · 92 words
Black Beret
Motored up to Santa Fe last night to see the (seemingly) immortal Richard Thompson, OBE, and his current four-person trio. I donned a black beret in tribute. Pardon the amateur quality of the video (not by me), but it has the virtue of showcasing Thompson’s phenomenal guitar skills in a song that is a tribute […
Read entry →February 12, 2019 · 232 words
Abandoned Carcass
Shoshana Zuboff takes aim at surveillance capitalism. . . . the digitization of everything was giving technology firms immense social power. From the modest beachheads inside our browsers, they conquered, Blitzkrieg-style, our homes, cars, toasters, and even mattresses. Toothbrushes, sneakers, vacuum cleaners: our form
Read entry →February 8, 2019 · 82 words
Sympathique
I’ve been trying to work hard and mostly failing, so I might as well listen to Pink Martini and surrender to the mood. The chorus is a riff off the French composer Poulenc, and translates as follows: I don’t want to work I don’t want to lunch All I want is to forget And I […]
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