Archives for September 2010

Julie Dillon, who did the gorgeous cover for issue 2 of Lightspeed, has a brilliant T-shirt design up at Threadless.com: Octopie! Vote for it.

Random egoboo:

My name turned up on this page devoted to the topic “What was the best short story you read in the last ten years?” Royce Wood writes, “‘The Trial of Thomas Jefferson’ by David Barr Kirtley changed the way I think about everything. Literally.”

Also, Facebook has a (new?) function where it creates a page listing everyone who “likes” each topic, so there’s one for David Barr Kirtley. Currently there are a grand total of four people who “like” me. Two are friends of mine (thanks, guys!). Two are strangers, and one of them lives in Indonesia. I was sufficiently curious about what I might have written that got me listed as a favorite author by someone in Indonesia that I sent her a message inquiring about that, but I haven’t heard back.

The first time I ever saw myself listed as a favorite author on a social networking site was back in the days of Myspace when I came across the profile of a teenager named “Goat Vomit” — obviously a young man of discriminating taste. I messaged him, and it turned out all he’d read by me was one story (“They Go Bump”), but I guess that was enough.

I recently tried searching for “short story art” in Google image search and the first things that came up were for my story “Family Tree.” That was quite a surprise.

In other art news, today I came across a piece of digital art I really like: one.man.army by Patricio Betteo. Check it out.

Oh my god, why did nobody tell me about this? I WANT ONE OF THOSE MICE.

So I was in the bookstore the other day, and as I’m browsing through the Fiction & Literature section I hear a guy shout at the top of his lungs, “GET ONE OF THE CLASSICS!” and I’m like, “WTF?” So I peek around the aisle and see a mom sitting with her son, who couldn’t have been more than 14, and she’s saying, “So these both look good, right? Which one do you want?” And the son’s like, “I don’t know. Can we just go?” And the mom’s like, “Well, what do you think of this one?” and the son’s like, “It won’t be good,” and she’s like, “How do you know it won’t be good?” and he’s like, “I don’t know. I just know.” The conversation continued in this vein for a while, punctuated every once in a while by the dad (who was off somewhere else) shouting, “GET ONE OF THE CLASSICS!” I wandered by and glanced at the books the mom was holding. One I couldn’t make out the title, but the other was Catch-22. Now, I like Catch-22 quite a lot, but you’re a total effing idiot if you try to foist that on an unwilling 14-year-old boy to try to get him to read something. I debated for a minute whether I should say anything, something along the lines of, “Hi, I couldn’t help but notice that you’re a total effing idiot. Do you need some help picking out something that a typical 14-year-old boy might actually want to read?” But then I sort of imagined bringing over a copy of Tim Zahn or R. A. Salvatore or something, and having the dad go, “THAT’S NOT ONE OF THE CLASSICS!” and I decided I just didn’t have the energy for it right at that moment. I seriously don’t get what these people can possibly be thinking though. I’ve had this conversation repeatedly: “My 14-year-old son doesn’t read.” Me: “What have you done to try to get him to read?” “Oh, like I bought him a copy of Bleak House, and he read a few pages, but then he went back to playing Halo.” Yeah, no shit, Sherlock.

Looks like we’re getting very close to a relaunch of Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy. Here’s a sneak peak at a banner I’m working on.

So I just finished rereading Gene Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun, and it occurred to me that there are a lot of striking parallels between Severian in Shadow of the Torturer and Jon Snow in George R. R. Martin’s A Game of Thrones.

(By the way, if you’re a fan of Game of Thrones, check out my awesome interview with George R. R. Martin on the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast.)

Jon Snow	Severian
Belongs to fraternal order who dress in black, are much diminished from former days, and who follow ancient rituals whose origin and purpose is forgotten.	Belongs to fraternal order who dress in black, are much diminished from former days, and who follow ancient rituals whose origin and purpose is forgotten.
Must travel north to seek adventure beyond a giant wall, called the Wall.	Must travel north to seek adventure beyond a giant wall, called the Wall.
Is counseled by blind Maester Aemon.	Is counseled by near-blind Master Palaemon.
Doesn’t know who his mother is.	Doesn’t know who his parents are.
Breaks his vows by attempting to desert. The head of his order shows unexpected leniency and gives him a totally badass sword, Longclaw.	Breaks his vows by offering mercy to a prisoner. The head of his order shows unexpected leniency and gives him a totally badass sword, Teminus Est.
?	Becomes ruler of earth and travels into space to face judgment by angelic beings who might restore life to the dying sun.

DO NOT WATCH TIM BURTON’S ALICE IN WONDERLAND. Learn from my mistake. Holy crap, it’s truly ghastly. It’s absolute torture to sit through. Seriously, everyone involved with this travesty is late for a very important date with my fist.

HBO has posted a short featurette about their upcoming Game of Thrones adaptation, in which we can see some of the actors in costume for the first time. Here’s Arya Stark, Tyrion Lannister, and Daenerys Targaryen:

This weekend I attended a really fascinating lecture titled Speaking of Paradoxes which was presented by philosophy professor Graham Priest and hosted by the New York City Skeptics. Priest began by positing the following scenario: “Suppose you have professor Smith, and he’s completely at odds with Professor Brown down the hall. Smith tells all his students not to listen to anything that Brown says, and to emphasize the point he writes on his blackboard ‘Everything written on the blackboard in Room 33 is false!’ But Professor Smith has made a mistake. Actually he’s the one lecturing in Room 33.” So is the statement “Everything written on the board in Room 33 is false” a true or false statement? If it’s true then it’s false in which case it’s true in which case it’s false, etc. This is a classic conundrum called the Liar Paradox which has bedeviled philosophers for thousands of years.

The foundations of logic in Western philosophy were laid by Aristotle, who argued that all propositions must logically be either true or false. If a statement isn’t true then it must be false and if it isn’t false then it must be true. For a statement to be both true and false is a contradiction, and contradictions are impossible in formal logic, therefore if a line of reasoning leads to a contradiction, there must be something wrong with the line of reasoning. But in all the years that philosophers have been arguing about the Liar Paradox, no one’s ever come up with a problem in the line of reasoning, so maybe, Priest argues, what we have to do is question Aristotle’s Law of Non-Contradiction itself. This is apparently a somewhat heretical notion. But despite its long pedigree, Priest argues that Aristotle’s defense of the law is actually pretty flimsy, resting as it does on the presumption that if a statement such as “A and not A” is true, then it follows that anything is true. Priest argues that this is nonsensical.

Instead of dividing all statements into “true” and “false,” he proposes a grid consisting of “true,” “false,” “true and false,” and “neither true nor false.” Apparently some ancient Buddhists played around with this idea for a few centuries before ultimately abandoning it — regrettably, in Priest’s view. No matter how hard you shove, Liar Paradox arguments such as “this statement is false” just aren’t going to fit into either the “true” or “false” categories, but “true and false” seems like a pretty good fit for it (or maybe “neither true nor false”).

He also discussed a number of other classic paradoxes, such as: Are there fewer even numbers than there are numbers total? Common sense would seem to say yes — that there are half as many even numbers as numbers total — but then, aren’t there an infinite number of even numbers and an infinite number of numbers total, and doesn’t infinity = infinity? There’s also Zeno’s Paradox — Before you can get to point A, don’t you first have to pass through a point halfway between where you’re standing and point A? And before you can get halfway to the halfway mark, don’t you first have to pass through a point halfway there? And before that don’t you have to pass through a point halfway there? And isn’t it possible to keep iterating this process infinitely, and so how is it possible to move at all, if there’s an infinitely expanding set of tasks you must accomplish before you can get anywhere? These ones Priest indicated have been settled.

One that hasn’t been settled apparently is this: It seems sensible to say that one nanosecond in a person’s maturation process can never make such a dramatic difference that it would be sensible to call that person a “child” at one instant and then an “adult” one nanosecond later. So take a small child and fast forward time one nanosecond and ask, “Is this person still a child?” Yes, according to the principle established above — one nanosecond just can’t make that much difference. The problem is, you can keep repeating that process and by that same seemingly firm logic the “child” will never become an “adult,” even if the compounded nanoseconds add up to seventy years.

Really cool, thought-provoking stuff. Anyway, these lectures are all recorded and are eventually made available online, if anyone’s interested.

So since I’ll be appearing next month as a putative zombie expert, I figured I should actually sit down and watch some of the zombie movies that have come out in the last few years:

Quarantine: This one is fantastic. It’s the American remake of a Spanish film called REC (which I haven’t seen). It’s basically Cloverfield in a zombie-infested apartment building. As with Cloverfield, you sort of have to suspend disbelief a bit when the camera always happens to be present and pointed in the right direction whenever anything important to the plot goes down — this sometimes makes the movie feel more like an amusement park ride than cinema verite. It’s an intense movie though, and is notable for its unusually long and well-done setup in which we really get to know and identify with the principal characters. This one’s a must-see for zombie fans.

Planet Terror: The title led me to expect something more science fictional, but this is a pretty standard self-spoofing horror movie, a la Feast. It’s maniacally tasteless, melodramatic, and silly. It has a scattering of Quentin Tarantino-esque flourishes that raise it marginally above the norm, and Rose McGowan’s machinegun leg is kind of cool. It’s okay for what it is, I guess, but you’re not missing anything if you skip it.

Dead Snow: This is a Norweigan zombie movie (with subtitles) about med students on a ski vacation who inadvertently awaken a horde of Nazi zombies left over from World War II. The Norweigan setting and characters were kind of interesting, and the most effective part of the movie is the story about the German occupation. When the zombies actually attack, the movie gets pretty stupid. It tries for a Shaun of the Dead-style humor/horror combo, but I thought the humor fell pretty flat and merely sucked away whatever tension the movie might have succeeded in creating. Silly, over-the-top gross-out stuff doesn’t do much for me, and that’s really all this movie has to offer. The final act increasingly comes to feel like some kids out in the woods fooling around with a camera, and the Nazi zombies don’t act any different from non-Nazi zombies, which renders the whole conceit sort of beside the point. I think this movie might have been interesting if it had dealt — even in passing — with some of the themes raised by the dark history of German occupation, but really its only ambition is to find new ways to use intestines for slapstick comedy.