Curtis: When it happens it usually turns out that there is no one available to fight for peace. Peace does not have any constituencies and its adherents are mostly professing religious types with no skin in the game.
Phileas Frogg: So let me get this straight, if I have an expansive vocabulary THAT is the nominal representation of my intelligence, but the piece of paper with my intelligence abstracted into numerical form is somehow the REAL form of my intelligence? And athletically…dunki ng on you in a game of 1 v 1 in a complete blowout is merely representational, but if I have great health markers from my doctors office, then I’m the superior athlete? This nerd thinks showing is telling, and telling is...
Michael van der Riet: Way back when we used to call this “status symbols.” In the drawing office for example only the senior had a high chair and the other draughtsmen had to stand. Like many other animals, humans have always competed for position in the social hierarchy. Publishing your tax return sounds like a rather bloodless way of getting one up on the rest. And there’s a practical objection. A guy can’t walk up to a strange girl at a bar and say,”Here’s my tax...
McChuck: The person proposing this has never met actual people, has he?
TRX: Van Vogt’s imagination far outstripped his writing ability, which is why so many of his stories started off with a bang, then trailed off into mediocrity. The fix-up thing became very annoying when I went through a van Vogt phase, as I kept finding previously read short stories (or pieces of them) in later novels. And later editions of the same book might get revised without any mention on the cover or copyright page, leading to some head-scratching as a re-read fails to match the original....
Jim: Gaikokumaniakku: “I have half-a-dozen friends who would make time for this even though their schedules are packed.” I’m with you, six million percent.
Jim: McChuck: “And he never even imagined the folly of overly educating women.” You cut to the quick like a dagger to the heart. https://i.ibb.co/Cwy07jx /goodevening.jpg
Isegoria: A.E. van Vogt coined the term fix-up: He followed a strategy of introducing a new twist or complication every 800 words — a method SF author and critic James Blish called recomplication, and which Damon Knight derided as the “Kitchen Sink Technique.” This approach is both exhilarating and frustrating, and has contributed to the sharply polarized critical response to van Vogt. In the words of Brian W. Aldiss, he was a “genuinely inspired madman.” Philip K. Dick, who...
Isegoria: PKD is an odd character and not necessarily one I’d expect to value the language of clear thinking.
Isegoria: I’m afraid I sensed exactly where Dan’s anecdote was headed, when he said that Uncle Alfred sent them a copy of every book. Sigh.
Phileas Frogg: “…NO ONE in the family ever read any of his novels.” The true pain of those who write is the realization that, “No prophet is accepted in his hometown.”
Bruce: In Dream Makers Charles Platt said Van Vogt’s stories were ‘utterances’ , not just stories.
Dan Kurt: By chance I met a woman and her pre-teenage son circa early 80s whose name was Vogt. She was divorced and used her maiden name. I mentioned that a favorite author mine was A.E. van Vogt. She replied that that was her uncle Alfred, and she said that he sent their family a copy of every novel he published. I asked her if she enjoyed any of them and she said that NO ONE in the family ever read any of his novels. Another point about A.E. van Vogt is that he was dyslexic and writing was an ordeal...
Gaikokumaniakku: Around 1990 I was reading biographies and gossip about Phil K. Dick. PKD once said (perhaps very seriously, perhaps insincerely) that A. E. van Vogt had done more to create the field of sci-fi than anyone else. From the moment I read that endorsement, I sought out van Vogt’s work assiduously.
Gaikokumaniakku: “There is no living composer as great as Bach. Nevertheless, the present looks much better than the past if you compare the fifth-best to the fifth-best.” I doubt this. “Who even wants to listen to the fifth-best Baroque composer?” I have half-a-dozen friends who would make time for this even though their schedules are packed. “But the fifth-best punk rock band (say, the Dead Kennedys) is excellent.” I don’t think the Dead Kennedys were really a punk rock band so much as a...
McChuck: Phileas Frogg, the past few decades have proven that Richelieu was right on this point. And he never even imagined the folly of overly educating women.
T. Beholder: The “dysfunctional culture” is downstream of great many things. It’s a symptom. Still, they are not apathetic. And at least tend to see a patronage scheme for what it is, rather than being stumped by childish kayfabe. “…until 2017” Indeed. That’s when things began to turn around. https://web.archive.org/ web/20170313151218/econo mictimes.indiatimes.com/ news/politics-and-nation /uttar-pradesh-rejects-p olitics-of-appeasement-s ays-yogi-adityanath/a...
W. Geibel: Have you ever encountered a meth addict who hasn’t slept for five days? The “sadistic rage” that was the Japanese army had unlimited supply. Seeing demons, talking to God, hearing the voices , twitching , unspeakable sadistic violence, all in the package.
Phileas Frogg: Because a knowledge of letters is entirely indispensable to a country, it is certain that they should not be indiscriminately taught to everyone. A body which had eyes all over it would be monstrous, and in like fashion so would a state if all its subjects were learned; one would find little obedience and an excess of pride and presumption. The commerce of letters would drive out that of goods, from which the wealth of the state is derived. It would ruin agriculture, the true nourishment...
