But not for long! In June, the United States Postal Service will get its Southern Gothic on when it releases its beautiful Flannery O’Connor stamp.
Monthly Archives: May 2015
I Don’t Need An Editor!
Said the copywriter who wrote this for the Beverly Hills Hotel home page:
“Many of our bungalows have interesting histories as well: Elizabeth Taylor honeymooned with six of her eight husbands, Marilyn Monroe and Marlene Dietrich, among others, enjoyed them as well.”
Unclear pronoun reference, improper punctuation, confusing repetition — it’s almost everything you could ask for in bad writing.
Quote of the Day
“As a literary form, then, the uncanny tale can be a means for expressing truths enchantingly. Many are drawn to this literary genre as it affirms what most of us know, and that is the truth that our senses are not capable of apprehending all that was, is, or will be. While the ‘scientists’ or ‘materialists’ will not acknowledge it, ‘nature’ is something more than mere fleshly sensation, and that something may lie above human nature, and something below it—why, the divine and the diabolical rise up again in serious literature.” Russell Kirk on ghost stories
Quote of the day
“Bill, play full value. Make four beats be a really full four beats. Don’t rush to the end of the bar.” Jerry Garcia to Grateful Dead drummer Bill Kreutzmann
Not Bulwer-Lytton
No, this isn’t from the infamous but beloved Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest:
“As my FBI forensic psychologist husband put it last night while I was cooking dinner in our historic Cambridge home that was built by a well-know transcendentalist, ‘You’re being tricked, Kay.'” — Patricia Cornwell, Red Mist, p. 5.
Reading that sentence makes my head hurt. As much as I admire Patricia Cornwell, she and her editor let that turkey slip through the cracks. Yes, even the great ones flub it sometimes.
Quote of the Day
“Just because there’s a dragon in the book doesn’t mean the story isn’t based on reality.” – Jeff VanderMeer
Contagious Magic
While researching Appalachian Folk Magic for my latest wip, I read Sir James Frazer’s The Golden Bough. In his chapter “The Principles of Magic,” I encountered this:
“If we analyze the principles of thought on which magic is based, they will probably be found to resolve themselves into two: first, that like produces like, or that an effect resembles its cause; and, second, that things which have once been in contact with each other continue to act on each other at a distance after the physical contact has been severed.” (p. 12)
Frazer refers to this principle, which he calls “Contagious Magic,” in his discussion of spells around the world that involve the use of hair or nail clippings to exert control over the owner. Even things that were once close, and not necessarily part of the body, can be used because a bond still exists. For example, in Mecklenburg, Germany, practitioners of folk magic believed a coffin nail driven into a footprint would make the person who made the print go lame.
Frazer, with his usual scholarly contempt, dismisses such thinking while painstakingly documenting other examples of it.
But now we have quantum mechanics, which says to folks like Frazer, “Not so fast.” From the Encyclopedia of Science:
“Identical twins, it’s said, can sometimes sense when one of the pair is in danger, even if they’re oceans apart. Tales of telepathy abound. Scientists cast a skeptical eye over such claims, largely because it isn’t clear how these weird connections could possibly work. Yet they’ve had to come to terms with something that’s no less strange in the world of physics: an instantaneous link between particles that remains strong, secure, and undiluted no matter how far apart the particles may be – even if they’re on opposite sides of the universe.”
Erwin Schrödinger, in a letter to Albert Einstein, called this phenomenon “entanglement”:
“When two systems … enter into temporary physical interaction … and when after a time of mutual influence the systems separate again, then they can no longer be described in the same way as before, viz. by endowing each of them with a representative of its own. I would not call that one but rather the characteristic trait of quantum mechanics, the one that enforces its entire departure from classical lines of thought. By the interaction the two representatives [the quantum states] have become entangled.”
Einstein dismissed Schrödinger’s ideas as “spooky action at a distance.” (And isn’t that what magic is all about?) But it’s for real. Today, IT researchers are studying how to create super computers that can exchange data instantaneously through entangled components despite being separated by thousands of miles.
Spooky, indeed.
Best Fiction and Writing Blogs
The best fiction and writing blog posts from around the ‘net, all guaranteed to make you a literary cult figure. Compiled by lovecraft
Alice Osborn – How the Right Kind of Criticism Makes You Grow
Rick Lai – The Foundations of “The King In Yellow” and “The Necronomicon”
Steven Ramirez Writers, Start Building Your Brand Early!
The Book Blogger – The New Fatherland?
A.D. Martin – 10 Tips For Better Writing!
Fergus McCartan – Interview with Age of Iron author Angus Watson
Purpleanais – The Night Owl and Tolkien
Nurse Kelly – Be The Peace
Once Upon A Time – Living in Fairy Tales