Slate has an interesting article on Gary Gygax and D&D.
I’m not sure I would be as harsh as this guy, but he does do a good job of sorting out the flaws and virtues of so-called role-playing games. I grew up playing D&D, and I do remember the experience as a sort of ongoing struggle against a stupefying rule system. (more…)
6 comments March 12th, 2008
Lately I’ve been having the weirdest dreams about presidential candidates.
Last week I had a dream that my girlfriend and I were on the road with Obama. His whole campaign was a kind of freaky cult, with candles and ceremonies and white hooded robes–the works. The funny thing was, Obama himself wasn’t involved in the cult; he was just hanging around like a normal dude, very cool and personable, rather amused by the whole thing. We chatted with him a bit over cans of soda, then the cult members took us out to this dock and told us that if we wanted to be a part of their movement, we each had to swallow, whole and alive, some sort of sea creature. Mine was a big fleshy sole type thing, about the size of a baby blanket, flexible and slimy. I didn’t manage to swallow it.
Last night I dreamed I was on the road with McCain. We were sitting on a subway platform and he was telling me in a grandfatherly way why war is a good thing. In the dream, I agreed with him wholeheartedly (note: I’ve been reading Robert Kaplan). I felt a sort of mentee-mentor affection toward him. Suddenly his speech slurred into nonsense and he clapped a hand to his chest and fell to the ground. He was having a heart-attack! I watched him dispassionately, thinking, “That’s it for the Republicans in this election.”
His mouth dilated into a gray rictus packed with glittering dental fillings, and he gasped out, “I can’t die … I have to fight … for America!” I gazed into his piercing blue eyes (does McCain have blue eyes? I don’t even know) and chanted “Fight! Fight! Fight!” His wife handed him a bottle of pills and he pounded one after another into his mouth and munched them fiercely. At last he shot to his feet, virile and strong, puffing out his chest like the man from Brussels in the that Men at Work video, ready to resume the struggle. But I couldn’t help thinking that I would never vote for a commander in chief whom I had seen writhing in the grime on a subway platform.
These are real, bona-fide dreams, only slightly normalized. I’m scared to think what my Hillary dream will be like. I don’t even want to go to sleep.
4 comments February 19th, 2008
This blog has obviously slipped into an e-coma, but one of my friends asked recently if I could at least post an update once in a while saying what I’m doing in my life.
Here you go.
(more…)
Add comment February 14th, 2008
I work at a college library. Sometimes I put in orders for books. Sometimes these orders are based on professors’ requests.
The other day, a professor put in a request for a book that costs over 1100 dollars. That’s right. Over one thousand dollars. For a book.
Now I’m going to rhetorically ask the obvious question. What book costs over one thousand dollars? And no–I know what you’re thinking–this is not a rare illuminated manuscript from Monasterio de El Escorial or some like item. To all appearances it’s an ordinary, rather dull academic book, with a title like “Critical Concepts in the Study of Urban Culture” or something along those lines.
Here at the library, we’re all scratching our heads. Naturally, we didn’t order the book. I almost wish we had, so I could find out what the big deal is.
5 comments August 29th, 2007
So here I am, gearing up to send another flurry of query letters and synopses and sample chapters and whatever else out to the agents America–the agents of America, of course, being pretty much the same thing as “the agents of New York City,” since just about all of them seem to be here, and those that aren’t are (naturally) in California, embodying the publishing world’s backdoor romance with the film industry.
But yeah, I’m going through the ritual again, trying to compress a novel into the sort of nugget of sensational description that’s likely to catch someone’s eye. And I wonder, as always when I sit down to this activity–why agents? (more…)
2 comments August 27th, 2007