It could be a bit more vivid, more colourful word choices, but that’s a lovely scene setter.

OTOH, by the time I knew its origin I’d seen it used as the opening of countless novels by Snoopy in Peanuts cartoons, so I’d absorbed the idea that it’s a cliche.

I’m currently reading Sir Nigel by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. I half expected it to be turgid and painful in a very Edwardian way, even as pop fiction, but it’s vividly written with good characterization and setting description. I’m zipping right through. Best free reading I’ve ever done on Project Gutenberg.

I once tried on serious literature of that era in response to a girl’s promptings [she was an English major]. Henry James. Good lord was that torture.

Every sentence need not be Hemingway, but Jesus that James was a gasbag.

Modernity is not so different. One can read Mickey Spillane and see some more effective use of words to convey things than in all sorts of same-era blatherings about some middle-aged writer’s waning libido.

https://web.archive.org/web/20191029161518/https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/s/schopenhauer/arthur/essays/chapter1.html

Harry Jones, I feel just the same. Nearly everything on the web insults my intelligence. Certain recommendations algorithms — YouTube, in particular — have gotten so bad that they’ve crossed from “pathetic” into “electric-shock” territory. I really mean that. And it isn’t just the censorship or the transparent boosting of MSM on any topic even vaguely political. All recommendations everywhere are much worse than I remember.

Take the above essay for example. I originally thought that it was by Schopenhauer. I made several queries on three search engines and scrolled through several pages. Top to bottom, it was nothing but commercial services and empty SEO “content”, revealed proof that money is the root of all evil.

The number nerds in Silicon Valley are optimizing for engagement. In doing so, numbers are leading them around by the nose. But numbers can only suggest to us what is, not was ought to be.

The blind-numbers approach may have worked when the average Internet user had an IQ of 120. This is no longer the case, but there’s no reason that I shouldn’t be able to pretend that it is. I demand control over my recommendations. I want to tweak the settings. I mean to twist the “sophistication” dial to 150 and flip the political and clickbait circuit breakers to the “off” position.

Unfortunately, this will never happen, because these companies are monopolies that owe their monopoly position to government regulation such as the DMCA and other laws that protect them from competition and make software a ludicrously profitable industry.

Imagine a world in which scrappy and nimble upstart companies could provide adversarially interoperable products, source code wasn’t a secret weapon, public and private de facto wiretaps weren’t a mundane fact of everyday life, and non-profit Wikipedia wasn’t the only useful website on a search results page 9 times out of 10.

I dare say we’ve had quite enough of the private profiteering and rapacious centralizing hegemony of Internet Capitalism, thank you very much.

It’s high time to return to the open protocols, decentralized networks, and privacy-respecting Internet Communism of yore.

“Antisemitism” is a silly concept, and I mean that sincerely.

If you’re interested, I can probably hook you up with one of the most “connect-the-dots”-est websites of all the websites.

On the positive side self-publishing has never been easier, and authors have alternative means of supporting themselves through platforms as Patreon or Kickstarter. Although I’m also very happy to let others do the hard work of finding the nuggets .

Interesting link between pulp fiction and the comic books that I wasn’t aware of…

https://majormalcolmwheelernicholson.com/

I’d never heard of this gentleman before today, while skimming through Cracked.

https://www.cracked.com/article_27015_the-weird-porny-origin-story-dc-comics.html

Bunch of “connect-the-dots” stuff, there. Organized crime, Superman, and a bunch of other things I did not know about.

Worth looking at, if only for an understanding of where a lot of modern pulp culture comes from, and its shady underpinnings.

And, for our resident anti-Semites, there are even a few Jews getting screwed over by gentiles, so there is something for everyone!

Still, I think his technique is at least as worth studying as that of Mickey Spillane.

It’s entirely possible that everything we ascribe to Shakespeare is actually at least partially the work of the entire theater company, which makes sense of how a rustic from the country managed to come up with all the erudite and sophisticated stuff that’s in those plays.

We really do not know who authored that stuff, because we have nothing direct from Shakespeare’s hand. There’s no definite truth, one way or another, to be quite honest.

And, to the point I meant to make, starting out–Shakespeare was hardly seen as the “Immortal Bard” at the time he was writing–There were others, long-forgotten, who his contemporaries would have named first, when asked for the finest playwright of the time.

One generation’s mediocrity is the next ones poet laureate–Look at Melville, and the history of Moby Dick. Then, examine exactly where we place one of the most well-known authors of his time, Bulwer-Lytton. Today, Bulwer-Lytton is the punch line to a joke, and the namesake of a contest for bad writing. Back in his time, he was a respected and popular author.

Time’s verdict ain’t always what you think it will be.

I recommend the http://www.castaliahouse.com/ blog for their discussion of classic pulp.

Lately I’ve been undertaking a close reading of classic pulp to figure out how it works. I plan to put my thoughts up on my blog. So far I’ve just got Conan.

What I simply don’t get is the magazines you see at the supermarket checkouts and in doctor’s offices. They’re utter drivel, in a way that pulp is not.

On the Web, nearly all clickbait insults my intelligence. Why exactly am I supposed to want to click that? But a whole lot of people out there click it.