Moorcock’s Miscellany fan dialog with Mike about his interest in, appreciation of, and personal dealings with Zelazny. My acquaintance R. Wang drops by. MM is too savvy to talk in depth about Z, but makes nice and points out that he was Zelazny’s publishing editor back in the day. Oh, I want to read a less-guarded take. Corwin is either Elric as an aspect of the Eternal Champion or something closer – there can be no accident regarding the characters’ colors.

A poster in the thread notes that Hawkwind cut two songs nearly certainly based on Zelazny stories.

A moment’s reflection on MM’s avowed openness to shared characters, in particular and specific the character of Jerry Cornelius, tells me all I really need to know. Whether or not Zelazny consciously borrowed the “Cor” phoneme for Corwin is fundamentally not germane. Corwin and company clearly are an aspect of MM’s groundwork, and when I think I see a glint of his stuff shining through, given Zelazny’s amply documented love of allusion, I. can think of no reason to to accept the insight.

A long critical analysis of Zelazny’s Amber.

I think the last time I read these books, which I love and have reread on many occasions, was in the 1990s. I recall taking a crack at them sometime more recently but not making headway, back when I was experiencing internet-inflected difficulty with extended readerly concentration, maybe a decade ago.

I’m a more critically-engaged reader now than I was certainly when I first read the books, and I think probably than I was when I last read them – I’ve certainly read more widely and also worked professionally as a writer. So I’m more sensitive to technical aspects of material I read, and likely also to allusive content.

I’m more aware of how Zelazny is using and creatively reshaping the raw material he’s playing with in the books. He’s juxtaposing different genre traditions and then incorporating amusing grace notes such as characters meeting a “cadaverously thin” writer named Roger or experiencing a shift in perception explicitly described and named as cubist. Again and again a minor set piece is presented as a tableau in a scene where one of the the Rider-Waite tarot cards is unquestionably described (The Hermit, as Dworkin leads Corwin up the tunnel from his cell; The Hanged Man, as Corwin and Ganelon interrogate a young deserter in Benedict’s Avalon).

Anyway, the texts are far richer than I understood initally, consuming them simply as fast-paced and accessible adventure fantasy, in ignorance of both many of Zelazny’s witty allusions and the ways in which reading deepens when one questions the work and treats the author and his characters as untrustworthy. In short, it’s better than I knew and I am finding the reread deeply satisfying. It’s also delightful to recognize how clearly the series influenced Zelazny’s friend George R. R. Martin’s own epic series of internecine aristocratic struggle.

Chip Delany reviews Star Wars, 1977. Page scans.

“The main good guy is the dissatisfied young farmer, Luke Skywalker, played by an engagingly naive Mark Hamill. Etymologists take note: the relation between Lucas and Luke is obvious. But more too that the name George comes from the greek word georgos: farmer,i.e., “earth man” or “earth walker.” George Lucas/Luke Skywalker, dig? The film is a blatant and self-conscious autobiographic wish fulfilment on the part of its ingenious director.”

1985 Zelazny-authorized interactive fiction game Nine Princes in Amber.

Moved a bunch of banker’s boxes of old files, like, college notes and junk, but found these in the process.

They were given to me either just before or just after I moved to Seattle by Bloomington, Indiana artist (and the sculptor of these pieces) David Ebbinghouse. David proposed an exchange whereby I would bend my then-considerable powers of art writing upon his career, and he would give me these.

Alas, life in the west eroded the bonds of former lives and the essay was never writ. I certainly still feel I should write it, but there’s a lifetime more art made by David today than what he’d made by 1990.

Noticed today that someone prowled my car sometime between Friday and Tuesday. They just took the change in the coin pocket, which had been building up for years. They were polite enough to close the doors. No idea when this happened. A bit irritating, as the car is parked in the rear of our house and the shitbag had to come around back to do this, indicating a likelihood of door-opening attempts directed at the houses as well.

I had been considering heading down to the Mariners game tonight but had also decided to enact such under a new drive plan. Instead of heading down between 3:30 and 4, which guarantees no traffic issues on most days where the games start at 7:10, I had thought to try driving down sometime shortly after 6p.

Instead, I see that both the radio and Gmaps shows southbound 99 and I-5 to be at a total standstill due to wreck on 99 and a building fire just south of that which has completely closed southbound 99. Watching gmaps turn all the surface streets downtown red told me everything I needed to know. Last year there were a couple of times that this happened early enough in the day that I was caught in the storm. One of those times I was in my car for nearly four hours and it eventually died about two miles from the stadium.

I suppose I should keep track of the frequency of these events. Once a year is too much; we seem to be having them every three months.

UPDATE

what got on instet. sawright

Nine miles in on my not-quite fifteen this week and I am finally feeling physically tired from the exercise at the end of the day, which, I suppose is good news. My objective is to get up to twenty-five mile weeks. That should be sometime around May with a strict 10% growth plan. I wonder how long the four and five mile days will feel tiring.

Still no hint of exercise endorphins; I still feel full of rage as my body adjusts to the energy demands, like as a side effect of the adrenaline, I guess. By now I’m used to it and can recognize it for what it is, an emotional reaction created by the physical experience of excercise. It still blows.

The last couple years I ran, I immediately dropped several pounds and then kept dropping them, at a slightly slower pace, and my blood pressure dropped immediately as well. This year, my BP readings have barely budged and my weight has also stuck around.

Last week, at the doctor’s, my BP readings were where I had expected them to be by now. So my thought was perhaps my monitor was messed up. So I bought another. It reads the same as the one I have been using. I still need to pay better attention to the reqs for accuracy, I think, since I always have consumed significant coffee by the time I take a reading. The matching readings on two different pieces of gear is of concern, though, as is the static weight.

The characters in the Amber books use their trumps as a sort of transdimensional teleporter-equipped cell phone. They even refer to the routine communications carried out with them as “calls.”

Dreamt of a housewide blackout that led me to rewire the breaker box, breaking it in the process.

of course, it’s a bowdlerized 9th that defeats the ironic distancing