iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

ukjarry.bsky.social @ukjarry.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

...the Road to Hell was the road to Hereford... Bruce Chatwin – On the Black Hill - 1982

ukjarry.bsky.social @ukjarry.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

Last 20 minutes of Bad Apples is basically The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas but everyone in the PTA agrees the kid in the punishment pit is a real shit who deserves it all - which is great bitter comedy

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ukjarry.bsky.social @ukjarry.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

I am now afflicted by the idea of a version of Seven Days to Noon (1950) where Barry Jones threatens London with a stolen nuclear weapon because he just wants to see a Pearl Carr and Teddy Johnson concert

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ukjarry.bsky.social @ukjarry.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

PETER DICKINSON - Murder in the Manor - 1991 lecture after much personal history about realities of Big Houses (costs of running, number of "invisible" servants), economics meets social myth to explain the archetype of the body in the library

When we sit in Plato’s cave and gaze at the shadows on the wall, the ultimate Real Idea of the detective story, that casts all these dim and varied images of itself onto the rock ahead, is of some beastly upstart millionaire slumped at the desk in the library of his country house with a crooked Oriental dagger sticking out of his back.

There was a world once, in unreal, golden England, with houses of Georgian purity or Victorian fancy, standing amid a swooping, tall-treed sward where the deer browsed undisturbed. Ladies and gentlemen of breeding and education inhabited this Eden. (Other inhabitants were needed to keep it going, but they were not seen.) They lived a ritual life, governed by great festivals, grouse shooting on the twelfth of August, partridges and cubbing on the first of September, pheasants and fox-hunting on the first of November, rituals of sacrifice and slaughter. Different rituals of sacrifice between Derby Day and Goodwood, when the London Season was at its height and the virgins — and they really were virgins, most of them — were decked and paraded at nightly balls to be chosen as brides by the tall, young warrior-priests. Warrior-priests because that is what, without knowing it, they were. They kept their hair cut short and their clothes as rigidly prescribed as any uniform. They were educated to an ideal little different from the great warrior castes of the past — the Spartans, the Parthians — to keep their bodies fit, to show no fear or weakness, to ride straight and tell the truth.

And then reality broke in. It was not just that in 1914 these make-believe warriors were called on to fight, and die, though many of them did both. There was economic and social reality as well, which even without the war would have broken that world, because its time was over. It had reached a level of unreality which was no longer sustainable. It did not die at once, of course. When I was a child, there were still quite a lot of people managing to live something like that life, but to them and to the other survivors it was a sort of after-life — and, because they were unable or unwilling to recognize social realities, they blamed the change on the war. They created myths about it, and magics, partly lamenting it and partly attempting to make it live again by special rites and charms. This is why the detective story flourished, had its own Golden Age, between the two World Wars, because its underlying power and purpose was a deep-felt need: to bring that world back to life.

That is why the ideal setting for the mystery novel is the imaginary world of the country house. There, supposed balance and harmony is broken by the act of violence, just as in the real world it had been broken by the war. That is why the ideal murderee is the nouveau riche millionaire, the embodiment of the economic upheavals, contrasted with the dwindling resources that had kept the grand old families going. That is even, perhaps, why the dagger is Oriental, because of the underlying tug of guilt about our colonial empire. (No, that’s a bit far-fetched. Don’t believe that unless you want to.) But the library itself, and, even more, that quite extraordinary figure, the gentleman-amateur detective (a creature as farcically distorted from reality as a Pantaloon or Columbine in the commedia dell’ arte), are very believable symbols.

In almost every country house, there was a room called the Library. Often the books stayed undisturbed on their shelves from spring-cleaning to spring-cleaning — I know it took a five-year cycle to get the library in my brother’s house dusted. What is more, though the actual readers in such houses were often the women, the Library would have been thought of as a largely male preserve, a place for cigar-smoke, and port, and what Kipling described as the most beautiful sound in the world, the deep voices of men laughing together. And around them the books, representing the values of their civilization, the great tomes of sermons, the historians, the poets, at least as far as the romantics, Fielding, Richardson, possibly Scott, but no later novelists. And, above all, the classics — Vergil, Livy, Terence, Ovid, Tacitus, Seneca. Because all these men, however intelligent, however brainless, would have spent most of their school days learning Latin and Greek, subjects almost completely useless but still taught in the same mode right up to my day. Almost all the science I know, almost all the history, certainly all the English literature, is self-taught. The theory was that I could teach myself these relatively peripheral subjects because, there at the center, expert in nothing but capable of anything, stood the supposed product of the educational system, the trained mind. (I was terrible at Latin and worse at Greek, so mine may not be a very good specimen.)

And what is the amateur detective but the literary embodiment of the trained mind?

So you have this mythic world — mythic even in its reality but ten times more so in actual reality. It is doubly intruded upon — first by the upstart millionaire, the new and threatening economy of money unrelated to inherited acres, and then by the blood act in the sanctuary. Blood for blood, only a ritual sacrifice can heal the ever-bleeding wound.

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ukjarry.bsky.social @ukjarry.bsky.social · 12/09/2026

from 1979 Stuart Byron explains to the laity how The Searchers is the "Super-Cult Movie of the New Hollywood": books.google.co.uk/books?id=0tc...

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ukjarry.bsky.social @ukjarry.bsky.social · 31/08/2026

As I can't find a copy of this already on Bluesky to like:

tumblr post - bucketofcrows

so what you want to do is go to Settings > Twinks > Manage My Twinks, then right click on That Twink and set the Obliterated setting to true

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ukjarry.bsky.social @ukjarry.bsky.social · 08/08/2026

Sadly I note reports of the death of John Crowley (1942 - 2026), the writer of Engine Summer, Little Big, and the Aegypt quartet. A luminous and erudite writer on love and memory. 25 years ago I compiled lists of his career, works, reviews, documentaries, interviews: web.archive.org/web/20030628...

CROWLEY ON WRITING
"One of the reasons you write fiction is because you can create your own world. You need that constant sense of possibility. If you don't feel that sense of possibility on your own life, don't even feel a craving for that kind of possibility and change, it makes it difficult to write. SF and fantasy share a dissatisfaction with how things are arranged. In the past it might have been more like a religious impulse than a scientific impulse. It's what you might call a holy dissatisfaction with the fact that wishes can't come true, that you can't make things better, you can't have what you want - not in the sense of material things, but something that can satisfy you ultimately. Whatever literary fiat you make you still want something different." - CNB

One of the jobs I set myself is to make it convincing that realistic and ordinary people are inhabiting fictional worlds where the miraculous and the unreal and the bizarre and the awful don't happen--then project them into a world where such things can happen." - RG

"One of the things I tend to write about is the solving of mysteries, or of mysterious things coming to be and people trying to understand them." - RG

"The mysteries that have intrigued me are those moments when the world exfoliates in some sudden, surprising way." - TMD

"One of the values of magic, the humanist-magical option, is to say that man is really here to learn, to understand everything, and to gain powers from nature because God has provided nature to give powers to man." - RG

"I'm not really interested in solving problems. I don't really have answers. My wife says 'There's all this funny uncertainty in your writing. Not only the characters are always asking questions, the narrator is always asking questions, ending sentences with question marks.' Maybe because it's really a literary endeavour, to make people excited and affect them emotionally and put them in a circumstance, in an ongoing narrative. It's a philosophical proposition, but you can only support it as fiction. People wouldn't read philosophical romances if they didn't have some other kind of quality. I just wanted to write fictions where I could make the rules and have what I wanted and also get them published. I had to think of some way to cast these things in terms shared by readers. I think they're good, very challenging limitations. SF is a shared universe of rhetoric. I have been peripheral to it. I like rhetorical devices, to see what can be done with them, especially how you can, without changing their assumptions, make them come out more affectingly so they touch people in new ways." - CNB

"A lot of people are very irritated by [a] kind of self-reference, and I am too. You're engaged on a primary level with the events. Everything else is extra. If you don't engage on a primary level, if the primary level is a level of self-reference than it's repellent. I think that there is a movement in literature that is, maybe call it post-post-modernism, but maybe it's just post-modernism which is a sense that there is a duty to entertain, that fiction is stories, that there is a certain fascination (so you might call it magic realism, or something like that), a certain fascination that literature has to have in order to do anything. Way early on I figured out that maybe the distinction was that modern literature contains symbols, whereas this kind of literature that I'm talking about is symbolic, doesn't contain symbols, but is a symbol. It is itself a quest or a journey or one…

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ukjarry.bsky.social @ukjarry.bsky.social · 08/08/2026

I like to think that barely comprehensible as this is now, when I look at it in the future it will have matured into the finest impenetrable gibberish: "3th"? Really? "Immaculate"? Like PauI Eddington? Few would call me "warm blooded" 100? When somewhere there's a textbook denigrating my cadences

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ukjarry.bsky.social @ukjarry.bsky.social · 24/07/2026

Peter Barnes Barnes' People II (1984) "Insanity is the first sign of the zodiac" "On account of stupidity this world will be closed till further notice"

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ukjarry.bsky.social @ukjarry.bsky.social · 19/07/2026

Two decades-long mysteries solved at last! Illustrators I used to see in the colour supplements in the early 80s: Janet Woolley Mordillo

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ukjarry.bsky.social @ukjarry.bsky.social · 16/07/2026

Fresh from the pages of Punch, May 1955, it's Capsulysses ! Ronald Searle imagines how a schock film adaptation of The Odyssey might look. scans from the great ronaldsearle.blogspot.com (no alt-text - images too detailed, and half my keyboard is dying)

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ukjarry.bsky.social @ukjarry.bsky.social · 07/07/2026

Ancient Gaul's Eye View Of Britain - From Our Own Correspondent, Paris The Times 19 Oct, 1966 explaining the recent popularity of Asterix includes these comments from René Goscinny

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ukjarry.bsky.social @ukjarry.bsky.social · 03/06/2026

I couldn't figure why S. Clay Wilson work seemed so familiar 15 years ago, but today's tributes to John Blanche fantasy and sf gaming illustrations from White Dwarf, Sorcery! Warhammer when I was 9-13 are obviously what I was trying to recall for form, detail, colour, violence

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ukjarry.bsky.social @ukjarry.bsky.social · 02/06/2026

Erich Sokol - American Natives - 1960 (3)

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ukjarry.bsky.social @ukjarry.bsky.social · 02/06/2026

Erich Sokol - American Natives - 1960 (2)

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ukjarry.bsky.social @ukjarry.bsky.social · 02/06/2026

Erich Sokol - American Natives - 1960 (1)

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ukjarry.bsky.social @ukjarry.bsky.social · 21/05/2026

Ronald Searle covers for original hardback and Penguin paperbacks of Angus Wilson

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ukjarry.bsky.social @ukjarry.bsky.social · 21/05/2026

70 years too late some incidental humour relating to reviews of Anglo-Saxon Attitudes by Angus Wilson (1956), missing from Margaret Drabble's breeze block of a Wilson biography. The emotional literateur Elvira Portway in the book is based on Sonia Orwell. (1)

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ukjarry.bsky.social @ukjarry.bsky.social · 22/04/2026

Much of Before She Met Me ( Julian Barnes 1983 ) is very funny Here an overly-precise attention to semantics and the changing of social attitudes in which this characer feels slightly left behind captures an era between David Nobbs and Amis:

He also hadn't masturbated, he realized, since the days when people thought about it as 'masturbation': that cool, frowning medico-biblical word. There'd been other words around, no doubt, but 'masturbation' was what it always felt like. Masturbation, fornication, defecation: serious words from his childhood, representing activities to be pondered before being indulged in. Nowadays it was all wanking and fucking and shitting, and no one thought twice about any of them. Well, he used shitting himself; a bit, privately. Jack, of course, talked about wanking quite casually, and fucking as well. Graham was still a little tentative about both usages. ' Wanking ', after all, was such a quiet, domestic, guiltless sort of word: it made it sound like a home craft.

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ukjarry.bsky.social @ukjarry.bsky.social · 22/04/2026

The last 10-15 years of conservative writing has delivered some terrible straining prose, habits of style now institutionalised in Grokipedia. A drive-by shooting of an explanation from Ruth Rendell in "A Demon in My View":

The circumlocutions, the polysyllabic words were pathetic. They breathed a tense need for the preservation of an immaculate ego, they smelt of paranoia, fear of retribution, a desire to be thought well of by all men, even strangers. But men like that, he thought, cannot be reassured, their deep-seated belief in their own worthlessness is too great and too long-established…for self-confidence ever to be implanted in them.

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ukjarry.bsky.social @ukjarry.bsky.social · 05/04/2026

Stumbling across Celia Dale's earliest story, "The Scream" in "The Bystander" August 25, 1937, the issue also has this glorious photo of Alastair Sim in the play "The Gusher"

Alastair Sim smiles at the camera, a pipe in one hand and the other holding a headhunter's long pole topped by a decorated skull

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ukjarry.bsky.social @ukjarry.bsky.social · 18/03/2026

#hhgg Was Marvin the Paranoid Android in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy gay? Would he have been happier out of the closet? Well, not quite… But Douglas Adams did say Marvin was inspired by comedy writer Andrew Marshall’s worst sullen behaviour and in a 2 Oct 1983 NME interview:

Or was, as Adams explains: “Andrew has now left his wife, suddenly decided he’s gay and is now living with a man in Milton Keynes and has cheered up a lot. It’s curious.”

So how does he feel about being immortalised as a robot? “He tells me he’s very annoyed about it but he makes sure that everybody else knows it’s him.”

screenshot of Andrew Marshall, wearing a trim leather jacket over a white t-shirt, and a trim moustache. The screenshot is from "Film 86" and not "Out on Tuesday"

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ukjarry.bsky.social @ukjarry.bsky.social · 15/03/2026

This from Charles Beaumont's "The Heavies - A retrospective appreciation of filmdom's black-hearted bad guys" (Playboy, Feb 1965) perfectly encapsulates the villainous western stereotypes in BLAZING SADDLES

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ukjarry.bsky.social @ukjarry.bsky.social · 05/03/2026

John Sladek – Bugs – 1990 Hoorah for logical semantic equivalences. Multiple times the AI computer intelligence in this novel argues “ Orwell was right “ explaining:

War is peace. I have looked it up in my own approved thesaurus. War means combat. To combat is to grapple. Grapple means grasp, and a grasp of English is a command of English. A command is an authorization. Authorization is consent. Consent is agreement. Agreement is harmony. Harmony is peace.

Freedom is slavery. Because freedom means leeway, and leeway means play. To play is to venture, but a venture is a pursuit. One’s pursuit is one’s work. Work is labour, and labour is slavery.

Truth is a lie. I looked it up in the thesaurus. A truth is a fact, a fact is a thing, a thing may be an event, an event is a stunt, a stunt is a trick, a trick is a lie.

Love is hate. Because love is concern, concern means care, but care is apprehension, apprehension is horror, horror is aversion, and aversion is hate.

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ukjarry.bsky.social @ukjarry.bsky.social · 25/02/2026

Theodore Sturgeon 26 February 1918 – 8 May 1985 Over 15 years ago I wrote (and wrote and wrote – approx. 30,000 words) on Sturgeon’s life, struggles, marriages, novels, stories, reviews, scripts, teaching, criticism, ghost-writing, writer’s block and so much else. Some excerpts:

Photograph of Theodore Sturgeon, probaby from the 1970s

Theodore Sturgeon’s pre-eminence in the first half of his career bred the widespread assumption that he would be the break-through artist, the one writer sure to cross over into the mainstream, forcing audiences to realise the worth of science fiction. Sturgeon was one of the giants of the Golden Age of Science Fiction. He was regarded with awe by his sf contemporaries, Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, and Ray Bradbury. In his earliest works in sf magazines he was notable for sprezzatura and a refreshingly askew approach to his stories. In his prime, Sturgeon brought artistry and emotion to sf. He introduced love and sex and challenged his audience’s assumptions. Sturgeon was passionate about artistic challenges but cognisant of the demands of the genre. The sf critic James Blish wrote that Sturgeon ‘has made himself the finest conscious artist science fiction has ever had’. This was during the decades when science fiction and its writers were unregarded, unrecognised, and barely profitable, consigned to disreputable, lurid magazines. His friend William Tenn noted that Sturgeon ‘aspire[d] to starve for art in the pulps’.

Sturgeon’s hopes, themes, and interests found natural expression through the accessories of fantasy and science fiction. But he could never write a typical genre set piece, and so each story was a new struggle with form, character, narrative, and resolution. Each story required him to find a new mechanism through which the characters, and therefore Sturgeon as the writer, confront their emotions and responses to the world. Each story had to become a solution found in the pressures and necessitous spontaneity of short story writing. Even at the very beginning of his career, his personal notes and letters to friends, family, and editors reveal the perpetual pattern of his intense, almost self-destructive working methods. He despairs that when he isn’t about to miss a deadline then he’s already late and so is reduced to frantic all-night sessions at the typewriter. Yet it is then that he can wring out lengthy works of great quality and insight, long short stories in a couple of hours, novels in barely a month. But still he finds he can never produce on demand in a regular manner, shamed by all his mechanisms for delay, avoidance, and distraction, with inevitable knocks to his faith and confidence in himself a writer, and the resultant guilt about unmet responsibilities.

Sturgeon ‘lived on crisis, and if he wasn’t in a crisis, he’d create one for himself. His life was completely disorganised, so it was impossible for him to do his best work consistently’ was the assessment of his friend Alfred Bester. Sturgeon was a man of practical talents who couldn’t direct them, and so his skills acted as more of a hindrance. Being easily distracted by his ability and ingenuity in solving the little problems life threw at him was a consolation and distraction from his inability to face up to larger tasks. An eccentric way of apprehending the world channelled into a personal delight in carpentry, engineering, and radioelectronics is little compensation for an inability to handle money, live up to the responsibilities of his contracts, or the long-term commitments of a family. ‘I’m not a writer,’ he told Judith Merril, with whom he had an affair in early 1947. ‘A writer is someone who has to write ... The only reason I want to write is because it’s the only way I can justify all the other things.’

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ukjarry.bsky.social @ukjarry.bsky.social · 16/02/2026

Bradley Denton - Buddy Holly is alive and well on Ganymede - 1991 A Charles Portis-influenced odyssey less gonzo sf than deeply-rooted chronicle of Boomer coming of age and aging. An appealing colloquial humorous tone (ala Howard Waldrop). The intro to a great fundamentalists bust-up over rock/pop:

Vacation Bible School.
Every Protestant church in the Midwest runs one of these. Some last only a few weeks, and some last the whole damn summer, but all have several things in common: A lack of air-conditioning. "Bible Heroes" coloring books. "This Little Light of Mine," an inspirational song written for three-year-olds but forced on persons up to the age of ten. The Children of Israel's Escape from Egypt. Blue-haired teachers with fat arms and cheek rouge the color of red M&Ms. The walls of Jericho. King David. Construction paper. The baby Jesus. Elmer's glue. The adolescent Jesus. Crayola crayons. The adult Jesus. Rounded-tip scissors. The crucified Jesus. Severe discipline for the unruly. The dead Jesus. Warm Kool-Aid and stale cookies. The resurrected Jesus. Bible-quiz contests ("What is Jael best known for?"). The ascended Jesus. Why the Devil (aka Satan) is bad and how to avoid him. Jesus, Jesus, Jesus.

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ukjarry.bsky.social @ukjarry.bsky.social · 16/02/2026

Gene Wolfe - Castleview - 1990 Some prose that is more John Crowley than most of this novel, which is more interesting and exciting for its novel pacing and structure, offering experiences for which are there precious few "why"s proffered

She was watching the black, wooded hillside past; it seemed to her that the road they drove was an intruder in the same way that the blade of a saw would have been an intruder, vulgarly revealing the secret, almost silent life of the trees. You were supposed to see things in dark woods like this: bears, wolves, or witches. For the first time it occurred to her that people talked about such things to end the awful stillness, the age-old quiet of wood and stone. A wolf or a witch would be one heck of a relief, she thought.

They kissed, and it was not (as Mercedes had always heard it was supposed to be) before she knew what was happening. She knew perfectly well what was happening — that a whole world, new and strange, terrible yet wonderful, was unfolding for her. She understood, when their lips touched, exactly why Snow White and Sleeping Beauty had been awakened by a kiss, knew what those old grandmothers of eight hundred years ago had been trying to tell her, and knew that they had told her, their coded message coming clearly across the years, and that those dear old grandmothers — the bent crones at the firesides — had triumphed, their words not lost with the crackling of the sticks in their fires.

This, then, was why she had wept in childhood, although she had not known it. Then there had been only the unfocused sense of loss – the unplumbed knowledge that in the end the world would take away everything, even the worst things, so that at the end, when she had nothing left, she would miss them; and surely it would take all the good things, all the best things, the good things first of all. That her most beautiful dresses would turn ugly, hideous and foolish, merely by hanging in the closet; and that all the people, all the most beautiful people, the ones she loved best, would fall to rags.

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ukjarry.bsky.social @ukjarry.bsky.social · 09/02/2026

Odd fact hidden in Ricard Lupoff letter in SF Eye #5 1985 TV Movie "Scandal Sheet" with Burt Lancaster is kind of a parallel evolution of "Trust Me on This" by Donald Westlake. Westlake wrote a script in 1982, parted ways with the producers, but apparently the movie still hews close to his story.

A bound script "Scandal Sheet" by Donald E. Westlake, dated December 16 Deceber 1982

Photo from tv movie "Scandal Sheet". Lauren Hutton (as Meg North) and Robert Urich (as Ben Rowan) - counerparts to the novel's Sara Joslyn and Jack Ingersoll

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ukjarry.bsky.social @ukjarry.bsky.social · 02/02/2026

Thomas M. Disch February 2, 1940 - July 4, 2008 For years one of my favourite living authors: novels, stories, poetry, reviews, childrens books. Digging up his works across UK & US magazines was an education in itself SCHROEDINGER'S CAKE was where I wrote about him web.archive.org/web/20110510...

web.archive.org

Thomas M. Disch Website - Novelist, Poet, Critic

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ukjarry.bsky.social @ukjarry.bsky.social · 25/01/2026

In a 1970 SFWA Forum Harlan Ellison reveals Robert Sheckley's agent removed a story from Again, Dangerous Visions to sell to a better market. Possible dates, venues, and "dangerousness" suggest to me the story was: Can You Feel Anything When I Do This? - Playboy Aug 69

Now on Sheckley. Sheckley, it was beautiful. I’ve got a stack of correspondence, I swear to
you, with all sorts of horrendous things. They took the story away after they had already sold it
to me, after it was already in my possession. After I already owned it, they sold it some place
else. We had a whole fight about it. They returned the money. It was incredible. Sheckley had to
write three more stories. Three more stories, before he wrote one that I liked to put in the book.
Right? And now we've got a contract that looks like you wouldn't believe it. So I will never
again buy from Don Congdon. Any of his clients are, just forget it, I don't even want to speak to
them. I wouldn't care if he had the greatest writer in the world.

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ukjarry.bsky.social @ukjarry.bsky.social · 18/01/2026

Paula Gosling – Monkey Puzzle – 1985 Sprightly university-set murder novel, combines both police procedural and the late surprising character reveals of an Agatha Christie. Hoped for more meta-commentary of one character’s lectures on crime fiction - and much less of book's prevailing homophobia.

In addition to studying the crime novel as literature and as entertainment, I also propose to investigate its structure and to compare methods not only of the detectives, but of the writers themselves. We'll examine their individual ways of achieving their aim – which is to keep the reader mystified until approximately five pages from the end. That is the so-called 'ideal contract.’ between writer and reader – the former fairly supplies the clues, and the latter agrees to suspend disbelief while trying to solve the puzzle. The reader does not want to solve the crime ten pages from the beginning, he wants to be mystified and dazzled – that is the entertainment he has paid for. But he wold like the opportunity to try.

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ukjarry.bsky.social @ukjarry.bsky.social · 06/01/2026

Marty Supreme 80s synth-pop helps makes 50s Marty equiv of 80s young crazily ambitious adult protags ala Michael J Fox, Tom Cruise, etc. Everybody Wants to Rule the World was one of poss songs I thought would end on. Yazoo Oh Yeah should've played as he had sex with Gwyneth Paltrow in Central Park

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ukjarry.bsky.social @ukjarry.bsky.social · 30/12/2025

J. G. Ballard! thou shouldst be living at this hour! And the raving raging racist, paranoid, hysterically thanatophobic billionaire Benedict Howards and his "Foundation for Human Immortality" in Norman Spinrad's "Bug Jack Barron" (1967-68) does seem a lot more on the mark nowadays unfortunately

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ukjarry.bsky.social @ukjarry.bsky.social · 23/12/2025

Read this year approx 117 booka. Much of it Americana bought long ago as I try to clear my shelves

Sherwood Anderson – Winesburg, Ohio
Alan Kapelner – Lonely Boy Blues
Robert M. Coates – The Bitter Season
Bernard Malamud – The Natural
William Gaddis – The Recognitions
Alan Harrington – Revelations of Dr Modesto
Peter De Vries – Blood of the Lamb / Mackerel Plaza
Pynchon - V
Warren Miller – Looking for the General
Sol Yurick - Fertig
Robert Stone – A Hall of Mirrors
Sue Kaufman – Diary of a Mad Housewife
Saul Bellow – Mr Sammler’s Planet
Paula Fox – Desperate Characters
Anne Roiphe – Up the Sandbox
Gore Vidal - Burr
Felice Picano – Eyes
Richard Yates –Easter Parade
John Irving – World According to Garp
Laurie Colwin – Happy All the Time
Bobbie Ann Mason – Shiloh (ss)
Kate Wilhelm – Oh, Susannah!
Valerie Martin – Consolations of Nature (ss)
Anne Tyler - Breathing Lessons
Alison Lurie –Women & Ghosts (ss)
Michael Chabon – Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
Halle Butler – The New Me

Walter van Tilburg Clark – The Ox-Bow Incident / 40s ss
A.B. Guthrie – The Big It (ss)
Charles Neider – The Authentic Death of Hendry Jones
Theodore Sturgeon – The Rare Breed

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ukjarry.bsky.social @ukjarry.bsky.social · 05/12/2025

A selfish, cynical TV executive haunted by three ghosts at Christmas Eve? Scrooged from 1988, script - Michael O'Donoghue? Nope! It’s The Return of A Christmas Carol (Esquire, Dec 1961), script - Harvey Kurtzman, art - David Levine The original massive 1960s’s Esquire pages are truly impressive

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ukjarry.bsky.social @ukjarry.bsky.social · 05/12/2025

By the great, lamented cartoonist Richard Sala, this is his fabulous round-up (anatomy, even?) of !!! PSYCHO SANTA MOVIES !!! Sala’s original comments on how much harder it was to compile this kind of piece back in 2003: hereliesrichardsala.blogspot.com/2009/12/slig...

Header: a skeleton in a Santa costume clutches a butcher’s knife, in panel bordered by holly and candy canes
“Knock back some eggnog and curl up in front of a warm TV screen - Here is your guide to PSYCHO SANTA MOVIES”
1st panel “And all through the house – a segment of 1972’s Tales from The Crypt, this is the daddy of all psycho-Santa-on-the-loose pix, adapted from the classic EC comic book and remade by HBO in 1989. – Eeeek!” (1972). A young girl happily says “Look who’s here, Mommy!”, pointing at a looming wild-eyed maniac in an ill-fitting Santa costume wielding a large ax.
2nd panel: “Black Christmas (1974) – No killer Santa Claus this time, but it’s the best phone-calls-from-a-psycho-hiding-inside-the-house-urban-legend film ever made. Don’t watch it alone!” A black-haired young woman in a yellow jumper holds a white telephone from which a voice says “Billy! What have you done with the baby?!!” and she replies “Who’s there?” A Christmas tree is in the background.

3rd panel: “Christmas Evil (1980) – This psycho Saint Nick is a sad schlubby loser traumatized by seeing Mommy doing Santa Claus! Watch out for that toy soldier! Ouch!” A real, but crazed-looking Santa extends a hand clasping a toy soldier which holds a long thin spike aimed at the horrified, comically bulging eye of his victim.
4th panel: “To All A Goodnight (1980) – You better watch out for Santa in this every-cliché-in-the-book slasher film, as he depletes a sex-hungry sorority with ax, knife, cross-bow, rock and propeller!” A raging Santa Claus looms out of the panel, wielding a crowbar and saying “I know where you’ve been sleeping, slut!”
5th panel: "Don't Open Till Christmas" (1984) – In a shocking twist, this time it’s Santas who are being slaughtered by a holiday hating maniac! Ho ho-oh!” A Santa Claus cowers before a towering monstrous-looking man wielding a knife over him.
6th panel: “Silent Night, Deadly Night (1984) – This is the one that upset all the parent groups, so of course it’s the one that everyone has seen. Remember? It’s the one with the blonde impaled on reindeer antlers!” An alarmed blonde woman is held aloft by Santa Claus on the panel’s left. On the panel’s right is a wall on which is a large stuffed reindeer head with prominent antlers poking toward the woman’s back.
7th panel: Silent Night, Deadly Night 5 (1989 – really 1991) – The beloved children’s classic PINOCCHIO is ‘reimagined’ as a twisted fever dream having something to do with toy-maker ‘Joe Petto’ (get it?) and his ‘so’, a murderous, sex-crazed, life-size doll. Scariest of all, the toy-maker is played by (gulp!) Mickey Rooney!” A round-faced caricature of Mickey Rooney in a Santa Claus costume with the beard pulled low to reveal his face says to the reader, “Hey, a job is a job! Merry Christmas, folks!”

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ukjarry.bsky.social @ukjarry.bsky.social · 23/11/2025

A nice anatomy of a centuries-old literary habit: D. Keith Mano National Review JUNE 9, 1972 from a review of The German Lesson by Siegfried Lenz, translated by Ernst Kaiser and Eithne Wilkins

The digressive method has its venerable ancestry: Jacques le Fataliste out of Tristram Shandy. In The German Lesson we have predictable devices, “How shall I describe his hat?” “I must stop here and set the scene.” It puts a MAN WORKING sign over the author’s head. These phony associations are a substitute for the business of metaphor making. And the reader, with noticeable condescension, is made to participate in, to be present at, the artist’s great moment of creation.

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ukjarry.bsky.social @ukjarry.bsky.social · 13/11/2025

What happens if you think of Avram Davidson, less as sf writer, and instead as a contemporary of Saul Bellow, Delmore Schwartz , Isaac Rosenfeld, Philip Roth, and Wallace Markfield: Avram Davidson: Jew d’Esprit efanzines.com/SFC/SFC122L....

What Davidson’s readership delights in and celebrates is this rare instance of the style of the Jewish American Writer applied to the Roald Dahl/John Collier-type short story. At its Davidson-ian mostest his style exemplifies the brilliant, flickering style of Jewish American Writer-dom, animated action-paintings of the psyche. This self-attentive style is often employed by the Jewish American Writer on quasi-autobiographical materials, whereas Davidson is rarely so explicitly personal, instead employing it as the means of elliptically arranging the elements of his stories… Davidson’s particular method where readers trace his apparently multitudinous and inconsequential threads to the revelation that they constitute a singular perfect knot.

The writer Avram Davidson, wearing a beard and yarmulke, stares down at a bagel, while attending a 1962 science fiction convention.

photo from the Jay Kay Klein collection

In a centennial mood I noted that 1923 gave the world both Norman Mailer and Avram Davidson. Assorted articles declaring the defining contribution Fanny Mailer’s little Norman had made to Jewish American literature invited a corresponding thought that Avram Davidson, the most rabbinical-looking author ever to wander a science fiction convention floor dispensing bagels, gets NO credit as a Jewish American Writer.

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ukjarry.bsky.social @ukjarry.bsky.social · 12/11/2025

Given these are excerpts from a mere magazine column I could easily, happily believe it's some extended scene-setting from Saul Bellow, “Mr Sammler’s Planet” or “Humboldt’s Gift” maybe. D. Keith Mano NATIONAL REVIEW November 24, 1972

I have been in Hell; it’s a place where old men exercise. God, the bodies... Gross flesh meringues, invertebrate. You can memorize death from them. The belly fig-leafs over the groin; dewlaps serve as a saggy bib; varicose vein garters wrap the shin. Muscles no bigger than portions of ice cream at a Chinese restaurant. One strong push-up and terror bugs wide the eyes. Is it now? Is this the cardiac infarction? (Infarction—wonderful word. Let me die of an infarction. Satire to the end.) Stalls in the bathroom wait, confessional boxes perhaps. Not merely a metaphor, this. I have seen men worship before them, “Oh, Lord, please give me success this time. Protect me from the shark nip of my kidney stones.” They can hardly walk, but they’re in shape, in . . . shape, in-shape, three-four.

It’s an old club: twenty stories plus above Manhattan. I belong; that is, I’m a member. You see, all my life I’ve wanted lats. Frankie Ritello on 181st Street had great latissimus dorsi muscles: we kids would pay him a dime to show us. They seemed wonderful things, a cobra’s sinewy hood, the vestigial wings of man. And, crucified now on the special lat-making device, I watch the old men come in. Impressive leathery faces, garnished below with wide-tie mod clothes, like John the Baptist’s head on his charger. Maitre d’ hailing heads; heads whose nods are influential.

But that’s all they are — heads . . . the rest is hollow, amorphous cloth, like Kukla and Ollie, hand puppets. They stand in front of sunlamps hopefully: but their skins have glossed mirror scales and flash the tanning rays back. They make sauna sweat; they make steam-room sweat. Belt machines strop them, throwing stone and stone after stone into the flabby pools of their stomachs. The masseurs work, Rodinesque, in clod handfuls of flesh. And then the workouts are over. It enfeebles them to get dressed again. Putting on socks is an isometric exercise. I have seen one seventy-year-old man stand helpless, blindfolded, arms up — mugged by his own undershirt — until the shoeshine boy helped him yank it down.

Mr. Zinsser waves distractedly, Sisyphus pushing his own body uphill, uphill…What makes Sammy jog? Health fear first. Then the payments, man, the payments.

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ukjarry.bsky.social @ukjarry.bsky.social · 02/11/2025

Did you get a notice in the press for staring a new job? Here's a report on Avram Davidson as the first kosher fish-liver inspector, in "The Jewish Post" 21 November 1952

Kosher Vitamins
A job classification guaranteed not to be found in the U. S. Bureau of Commerce listings, since it is the first in U. S. Jewish history, finds Avram A. Davidson, young Orthodox scribe of Yonkers, N. Y., as the first mashgiah (supervisor of kashrut) for vitamins being manufactured in Ossining, N. Y., for kosher margarine. Davidson was assigned to the task at Collett-Week-Nibecker, Inc., which is manufacturing the vitamins for Miami Margarine Company, Cincinnati, under supervision of the Kashrut department of the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations. Davidson is responsible for making sure that the vitamins come only from kosher fish

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ukjarry.bsky.social @ukjarry.bsky.social · 11/10/2025

Walter Van Tilburg Clark - "Why Don’t You Look Where You’re Going?" (Accent, Summer 1941)

WHITE AS a sainted leviathan, but too huge for even God to have imagined it, the liner played eastward easily. It swam at a much greater speed than appeared, for it was alone in open ocean, and there were only the waves to pass. Everyone on board was comfortable, even satisfied. The sea was a light summer one, still blue, although the sun was far gone toward the mountain range of fog on the horizon astern. Its swelling, and the rippling of the swells, could not give the slightest motion to the vessel, whose long hulk glanced through it as through warm and even air. The sense of well-being in the passengers was made firm by the knowledge that their fate was some- body else’s responsibility for the next three days. ‘There was nothing an ordinary mortal could do about a ship like this; it was as far out of his realm as the mechanics of heaven. He could talk about it, as he might about one of the farther galaxies, in order to experience the almost extinct pleasure of awe, but he could not do anything about it, and what was even more comfortable, he could not be expected to do anything about it. Even the crew shared this un-Olympian calm, for the liner was a self-sufficient creature who, once put upon her course, pursued it independently, with gently rhythmic joy. The wheel took care of itself, the fuel sped upon quick wires, the warm and supple steel joints rose and fell, self-oiled to perfect limberness. More like a white Utopian city than any the earth will ever bear, she parted the subservient waters and proceeded.

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ukjarry.bsky.social @ukjarry.bsky.social · 22/09/2025

Terry Bisson – Talking Man - 1986 Off-page for much of story the titular silent demi-urge is “one of those deals where a tall man was called Shorty or a fat man, Slim” First half replicates the world of Bobbie Ann Mason’s new South, bookended by an Alan Garner–esq Brisingamen/Elidor mythos

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ukjarry.bsky.social @ukjarry.bsky.social · 21/09/2025

Kate Wilhelm - April Fool’s Day Forever - Orbit 7, 1970 In which a conspiracy of stagnant immortality is counteracted by an upsurge of the collective unconscious expressed by artistic works like this sculpture:

He knew, his hand knew, what she meant. Order over something wild and unordered, ungraspable. Something unpredictable. Something that began to emerge, that overcame the order with disorder, distorting the lines. The feeling was not visual. His hand seemed to feel the subliminally skewed order. Rain. Snow. Wind. The imperfections became greater, a deliberate deterioration of order, exposing the inexplicable, almost fearful inside. A nightmare quality now, changing, always changing, faster now. Grosser changes. A peak too thin to support itself, falling sideways, striking another lesser peak, cracking off the needle end of it. Lying at the base, weathering into sand, running away in a stream of red-yellow water, leaving a clean basalt base. Deeper channels being cut into the thing, halving it, dividing it into smaller and smaller bits, each isolated from the rest, each yielding to the elements, faster, faster. A glimpse of something hard and smooth, a gleam of the same red and yellow, but firm, not giving, not yielding. A section exposed, the quartzite, polished and gleaming. Larger segments of it now, a corner, squared, perfect, sharp. Even more unknowable than the shifting sandstone, untouched by the erosion.
But it would go, too. Eventually. Slowly, imperceptibly it would give. And ultimately there would be only the basalt, until in some distant future it would be gone too.

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ukjarry.bsky.social @ukjarry.bsky.social · 21/09/2025

Kate Wilhelm - The Fusion Bomb - Orbit 10, 1972

He walked on the beach and seemed to feel the earth stirring beneath his feet. Bits of the earth flowing down the river, into the bay, material to be used by the sea as it constructed the islands grain by grain, shaping them patiently, lovingly as the very face of the earth was changed, subsiding here, growing there, swelling and ebbing. Eternal cycles of life and death….He left her and walked through the darkness of the shadows cast by the oak trees and the pines, around the ruins that rose abruptly, smelling the night-blooming cereus, and the sea, and the constant odor of decay that was present wherever there were tropical plants. The scents mingled, the drive toward life stronger than death, blossoms in decay, greenery erupting from the black.

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ukjarry.bsky.social @ukjarry.bsky.social · 21/09/2025

I'll never remember this otherwise. Raymond Burr imitating Jackie Gleason, and accidentally foreshadowing John Cleese's silly walk and the worst of Freddie Garrity www.youtube.com/watch?v=8S4h...

youtube.com

Raymond Burr silly walk entrance on Jack Benny Show 1961

YouTube video by Scott Hettrick

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ukjarry.bsky.social @ukjarry.bsky.social · 20/09/2025

Kate Wilhelm - THE PLASTIC ABYSS - 1971 Gary, not believing a word until he uttered it aloud, then believing it to be gospel. We say what we want to hear, not what others want to hear, and when it pleases us, we call it truth

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ukjarry.bsky.social @ukjarry.bsky.social · 18/09/2025

Kate Wilhelm "Somerset Dreams", Orbit #5, ed. Damon Knight, 1969

Ahead of me on the dark stairs the rustlings hurry along; they pause outside my parents’ room, scurry down the hallway and precede me into my room, where, when I turn on the light, there is nothing to see. I know it is the settling of floorboards untrodden for eleven months, and rushing air, and imagination. Memories that have become tangible? I don’t believe that, but it has a strangely comforting sound, and I like the idea of memories lingering in the house, assuming a life of their own, reliving the past.

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ukjarry.bsky.social @ukjarry.bsky.social · 15/09/2025

Amanda Cross - Death in a Tenured Position, 1981 "Men are always writing books about murdering women — it's one of their favorite fantasies: revenge for having their prerogatives usurped: sexual prerogatives, political prerogatives, social prerogatives "

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ukjarry.bsky.social @ukjarry.bsky.social · 06/09/2025

Horace McCoy in a 1951 interview with Ward Moore mentions he originates from *those* McCoys of "Hatfields and..." fame:

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ukjarry.bsky.social @ukjarry.bsky.social · 20/07/2025

Bobbie Ann Mason - Love Life (1984) As a retired, slightly drunken teacher enjoys watching MTV, her thoughts on zombies as the horror of aging watching Michael Jackson’s Thriller:

The ghouls are so old and ugly. That’s how kids see us, Opal thinks. She loves this story. She even loves the credits: “Scary Music by Elmer Bernstein.” This is a story with a meaning. It suggests all the feelings of terror and horror that must be hidden inside young people. And inside, deep down, there really are monsters. An old person waits, a nearly dead body that can still dance.

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