Why, thank you, brain!
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Sometimes I’m grateful to my brain. Sometimes I appreciate that it works well and sometimes I’m really grateful for its quirks.
I’m sure we’ve all done this – read something in place of what is there and found our lives the richer for it. There was that substitution of “sweater” for “theater” the other day that really changed the context of a sentence. But here’s the latest one I was pleased with.
Have I mentioned Dave Langford to you? Dave Langford is a friend of mine whom I’ve never met. He’s a long-time fan, has won umpty Hugo awards for fan writing, is one of the funniest human beings on earth and I love him madly. It was Langford who years ago who dubbed my condition/illness “DHAC Syndrome” which stands for “Doctor Hasn’t a Clue”. He is, for me, one of those people who is so damn funny that when I am about to read something he’s written, I tend to start giggling just to get it going. NOT that he can’t write serious stuff. He can, he does, but even then, he has a hard time not letting something through. (He’s good buddies with Pratchett, another one of those giggle boys.)
He’s published Ansible since forever and has written essays, short stories, all sorts of stuff. The other day, I found a collection of his that I didn’t know we owned. It’s UP THROUGH AN EMPTY HOUSE OF STARS: Reviews and Essays 1980-2002 (it has to be serious, note the colon and subtitle.)
It’s here in an introduction to a collection of Fanthorpe’s writing that I added a bit to one of his comments and, dear me, made it even sillier. Hard to do when you’re reading Langford AND he’s discussing Fanthorpe.
Lionel Fanthorpe is um, special. He’s the sort of writer that Pronzini goes nutso over in his books GUN IN CHEEK and SON OF GUN IN CHEEK. That is to say, really bad. Mr. Fanthorpe has kindly accepted the fun fans have with his prose and has allowed himself to be made mockery of and still hangs out with us. In describing RLF’s work, Langford talks about this very thing, how Fanthorpe who churned out books “in perhaps eight or twelve hours” knows we ain’t talking Proust of Nabokov. “Nevertheless,” says Dave, “deadlines were clubbed to death by the mighty Fanthorpe thesaurus, smothered with relentless pudding, stunned by deus ex machina twists,…”
Oh, wait, I’ve just been told that it’s relentless PADDING. Oh darn.
Okay, but um at least “Relentless Pudding” is a good name for a British rock band, is it not?
I’m sure we’ve all done this – read something in place of what is there and found our lives the richer for it. There was that substitution of “sweater” for “theater” the other day that really changed the context of a sentence. But here’s the latest one I was pleased with.
Have I mentioned Dave Langford to you? Dave Langford is a friend of mine whom I’ve never met. He’s a long-time fan, has won umpty Hugo awards for fan writing, is one of the funniest human beings on earth and I love him madly. It was Langford who years ago who dubbed my condition/illness “DHAC Syndrome” which stands for “Doctor Hasn’t a Clue”. He is, for me, one of those people who is so damn funny that when I am about to read something he’s written, I tend to start giggling just to get it going. NOT that he can’t write serious stuff. He can, he does, but even then, he has a hard time not letting something through. (He’s good buddies with Pratchett, another one of those giggle boys.)
He’s published Ansible since forever and has written essays, short stories, all sorts of stuff. The other day, I found a collection of his that I didn’t know we owned. It’s UP THROUGH AN EMPTY HOUSE OF STARS: Reviews and Essays 1980-2002 (it has to be serious, note the colon and subtitle.)
It’s here in an introduction to a collection of Fanthorpe’s writing that I added a bit to one of his comments and, dear me, made it even sillier. Hard to do when you’re reading Langford AND he’s discussing Fanthorpe.
Lionel Fanthorpe is um, special. He’s the sort of writer that Pronzini goes nutso over in his books GUN IN CHEEK and SON OF GUN IN CHEEK. That is to say, really bad. Mr. Fanthorpe has kindly accepted the fun fans have with his prose and has allowed himself to be made mockery of and still hangs out with us. In describing RLF’s work, Langford talks about this very thing, how Fanthorpe who churned out books “in perhaps eight or twelve hours” knows we ain’t talking Proust of Nabokov. “Nevertheless,” says Dave, “deadlines were clubbed to death by the mighty Fanthorpe thesaurus, smothered with relentless pudding, stunned by deus ex machina twists,…”
Oh, wait, I’ve just been told that it’s relentless PADDING. Oh darn.
Okay, but um at least “Relentless Pudding” is a good name for a British rock band, is it not?
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