APB-SAL is a blog about education, science, science education, fiction, science fiction, literature, literary stories, poetry, and anything else that strikes the blogger's fancy. NOTE: This blog interrogates art. It rarely make moral proclamations. For that attend the church or politician of your choice. This blog concerns aesthetics, not propaganda. Consider this as interviews with books where the interviewer presents interviewees, so you get what you need to do your own thinking.
"2 Great Books for the price of one written by West Point Graduate and former Green Beret Bob Mayer."Scott Nicholson
The book world has a new phony debate. On the good side, at least we're not arguing about Franzen anymoreHow Iowa Flattened Literature By Eric Bennett
With CIA help, writers were enlisted to battle both Communism and eggheaded abstraction. The damage to writing lingers.The Iowa Writer's Workshop was instrumental in the Bay of Pigs fiasco, not to mention they helped Nixon negotiate with China. Flannery O'Connor's sent emissary peacocks to Russia, which later led to the fall of the Berlin wall. Below is Kurt Vonnegut's attempt to take down Nikita Khrushchev (Bennett's article is interesting or I'd not post it):
--Lou Anders on Elizabeth Bear on SF, from Writers Workshop of Science Fiction & Fantasy, edited by Michael Knost"Elizabeth Bear proclaimed that [science fiction] was the literature of testing ideas to the breaking point."
Trust the manifesto, not the description. We originally intended it to be projected into the far future as well as solar system developments (although a few only wanted it on Earth--you can't get everyone to agree on everything). Future technologies were acceptable as long as it adhered to today's science. Moreover, it was after Clarion that we discussed this, spurred by my idea for the need of experimental SF, and Julian Todd's idea that we don't explore oceans much in SF.
We edited an issue of Interzone and Geoff did his own anthology as well, When It Changed. It's critique was that it was too science-y science fiction, but that sounds pretty cool to a science major/teacher.The blog is largely inactive these days. I had to stop posting when I started teaching, learning on the job. It appears I'd done about 80% of the posts up until that time. Since then, they averaged a post a month. We also had an explanatory website (now Chinese) that got sucked into the internet's black hole of oblivion. I may have access to rough drafts of the original posts if I dig around. UPDATE: Found some old posts from our original group, but Yahoo is a pain in the butt. Maybe I'll access them later when Yahoo irons this out. Leave a note if interested to remind me.
The Complete Cosmicomics by Italo Calvino
Now Dig This
The Unspeakable Writings of Terry Southern, 1950-1995
Terry Southern
Josh Alan Friedman, Nile Southern, Editors
Open Road
William Burroughs: Now here's something that goes straight in the wastebasket--"Non-narcotic." I don't want nything non-narcotic on these premises!
Terry Southern: Listen, they can say "non-narcotic" but they may have some really weird definition of narcotic, like something out of Dracula...The best here, for my tastes, are the New Journalism pieces. "Fiasco Reverie" travels to Guatemala on a part party trip, part military chess game preparing for the Bay of Pigs. "Grooving in Chi" talks about escaping the Chicago police with Allen Ginsburg, William Burroughs, and Abbie Hoffman during the 1968 riot while the Democratic Convention was carrying on.
"In that second I was deathly afraid of her, and that in itself was enough to get me interested."
