MemeMachineGo!

At Denvention, I attended a John Kessel reading of “Pride & Prometheus”. It’s just what it sounds like: the brilliantly obvious-in-hindsight fanfic mash-up of Pride & Prejudice (1813) and Frankenstein (1818). Mary and Kitty Bennet meet Victor Frankenstein and his friend Henry Clerval at a ball.

Afterwards, Kessel explained just how neatly it fits. Frankenstein says:

We had arrived in England at the beginning of October, and it was now February. We accordingly determined to commence our journey towards the north at the expiration of another month. In this expedition we did not intend to follow the great road to Edinburgh, but to visit Windsor, Oxford, Matlock, and the Cumberland lakes, resolving to arrive at the completion of this tour about the end of July.

Matlock is a town in the county of Derbyshire, where Pemberley, Darcy’s estate, is. Lizzy and Darcy chatted about it when Lizzy visited Pemberley with her aunt and uncle.

He then asked her to walk into the house — but she declared herself not tired, and they stood together on the lawn. At such a time, much might have been said, and silence was very awkward. She wanted to talk, but there seemed an embargo on every subject. At last she recollected that she had been travelling, and they talked of Matlock and Dove Dale with great perseverance.

It’s in his new collection The Baum Plan for Financial Independence and Other Stories, which is available as a free download. I bought the trade paperback at the con, and regret only that I hadn’t known that the hardcover has this hilarious double-sided dustjacket allowing you to convert it into a financial book.

The current war in Ossetia may be an unpleasant reality for the people actually dying in it, but it’s the war of Gary Brecher’s dreams.

This is the war that I used to see in the paintings commissioned by Defense contractors in Aviation Week and AFJ: a war between two conventional armies, both using air forces and armored columns, in pine-forested terrain. That was what those pictures showed every time, with a highlighted closeup of the weapon they were selling homing in on a Warsaw Pact convoy coming through a German pine forest. Of course, a real NATO/Warsaw Pact war would never, ever have happened that way. It would have gone nuclear in an hour or less, which both sides knew, which is why it never happened. So all that beautiful weaponry was kind of a farce, if it was only going to be used in the Fulda Gap. But damn, God is good, because here it all is, in the same kind of terrain, all your favorite old images: Russian-made tanks burning, a Soviet-model fighter-bomber falling from the sky in pieces, troops in Russian camo fighting other troops, also in Russian camo, in a skirmish by some dilapidated country shack.

Now here’s a specialized blog: The Ampersand.

=v= It seems the Democratic Party is fixin’ to have the greenest national convention in history. (The first thing this brings to mind is the prospect of the Green Party having the most democratic national convention in history, but that’s a side-issue.) Naturally, I had to wonder whether all this greenness will extend to transportation, and was thrilled to see this announcement in June:

Denver Host Committee President Elbra Wedgeworth and Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper unveiled plans for a bike-sharing program called Freewheelin, part of Denver’s efforts to support healthy living and environmental sustainability during the Democratic National Convention.

Freewheelin, which for some reason lacks a trailing apostrophe, will provide 1000 bikes for conventioneers to get around on. Not too shabby. In 2004, fixing and providing community bikes for RNC attendees was an all-volunteer effort.

One problem, though. Citing “security concerns,” bikes won’t be allowed anywhere near the DNC. Not even at the hybrid-only parking lot. I guess it’s just impossible to separate terra-ists and bicycles. or something.

Speaking of John Kessel, a fun throw-away line in his first novel, Good News from Outer Space was:

Dadaist punks had broken into his car and installed an expensive stereo.

Meanwhile, in Rockridge (a neighborhood in north Oakland):

Is it a twisted Rockridge Robin Hood, a bizarre new brand of treasure hunt, or slightly meshuga malfeasance? One resident reported to her neighborhood-group on August 11 that whoever had rifled through her husband’s car the night before “took some $1.50 in loose parking change, and they made an exchange — they took his flashlight, and they left a different flashlight. The flashlight they left is smaller, but is waterproof, so we may even be ahead on the swap.” A neighbor responds that her car too was rifled through, and oddly enough “they took a small flashlight from the glove compartment and left us a bigger, maybe better, one. They also left us a very nice 7-disc CD set: How to Listen to and Understand Great Music, 3rd Edition. We certainly have a lot more we could learn about classical music, and the course looks interesting.”

For the record, I wouldn’t mind finding the odd Teaching Company course in my car.