A Universe Built on Bad Puns

For Tanith! For Verghast! For cold and flu relief!

In the next Gaunt’s Ghosts novel Dan Abnett should have the Ghosts face a Chaos cult called the Histi.

That way they could fight them with anti-Histi-mines!

(Yes, yes, I’ll go drive over my head with a chimera now…)

Pearls of Wisdom

A priest asked the Master, “What is fate?”

No time to write anything myself today, so I thought I’d share one of my favourite passages from Kehlog Albran

A priest asked the Master, “What is fate?”

The Master answered:

It is that which gives a beast of burden its reason for existence.

It is that which men in former times had to bear upon their backs.

It is that which has caused nations to build byways from City to City upon which carts and coaches pass, and alongside which inns have come to be built to stave off Hunger, Thirst and Weariness.

“And that is fate?” said the priest.

“Fate… I thought you said Freight”, responded the Master.

“That’s all right” said the priest, “I wanted to know about Freight too.”

There endeth the lesson. Think on it. Think on it.

Signs You’ve Been Reading Too Much 40k…

No such thing!

1: You find yourself saying “feth” all the time.

2: You read an article about bikie gangs and keep reading “Police Commissioner” as “Police Commissar”

3: You see a bright yellow car and think it must belong to the Imperial Fists.

I’ve read six Gaunt’s Ghosts novels in the last two weeks, and am halfway through a seventh. I’ve done all of the above. Maybe I should take a break…

The Crawling Chaos

The throne of Chaos where the thin flutes pipe mindlessly…

My sleep last night was disturbed by a truly odd array of noises floating in through my bedroom window. To wit…

  • Strange electric guitar warblings, sounding as if Jimmy Hendrix had taken some really bad acid.
  • Tuneless, repetitive piping on a recorder.
  • The sound of something large and metallic being dragged around the carpark.

It was positively Lovecraftian. I expected Nyarlathotep to manifest at any second.

Hearts and Parks, Bows and Crows

Vale

Two great losses this week with the passing of author Ruth Park and musical-oddity extraordinaire Captain Beefheart.

Playing Beatie Bow was on the year nine syllabus when I was at school, so I read and studied the crap out of it. A lot of books suffer when you’re forced to do that to them, but Beatie Bow stood up. I haven’t read it for the better part of twenty years but I still recall vast swathes of it – it’s one of those books that gets into your head and changes it a bit so you’re never quite the same person after reading it.

More recently I obtained a copy of Ruth Park’s Sydney which provides a brilliantly written (if it wasn’t so pretentious I’d even say “sparkling”) history of the city via a series of walking tours. It’s clear that she had an incomparable love and knowledge of Sydney, and the book is going to be the first thing going into my case when I pack for my (Sydney departing) cruise in early 2012.

Captain Beefheart – well, what can you say about Captain Beefheart? A musical genius and provocateur without compare (unless it’s to his buddy Frank Zappa). I’ll let him speak for himself with the 1982 video clip of Ice Cream for Crow – a film so weird that a terrified MTV refused to play it, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York rushed to add it to their permenent collection.

Vale Ruth Park and Don Van Vliet. We’ll miss you both.

Micturition

You know it’s bad when the most authentic version featured Ted Danson…

Saw a preview for Jack Black’s version of Gulliver’s Travels this week. It’s kind of ironic that the only bit that looks authentic to the book is the one bit everyone would assume isn’t in the book.

(If you don’t get what I mean then go out and read it you phillistine!)

On the Lighter Side

Clench!

I always thought it would be amusing to draw a picture of Thomas Covenant jumping wildly up and down in baggy pants with brightly dyed hair, waving glowsticks in the air, while a confused and frighted Lord of Revelstone asks “Lord Covenant, do you rave?!”

C’mon! It’s as least as funny as Clench Racing!

The Language of Gormenghast

The recrudescent malkins of the calid garde-manger

Last week I stopped into the second hand bookstore that’s opened down the road and purchased the copy of Titus Groan that’s been taunting me in the shelf by the window. Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast trilogy is something I’ve meant to read for years so I figured that with a copy of the first book so convenient I might as well get on with it.

The somewhat eccentric bookseller (despite being a new establishment the store is doing a very good job of being rambling, cramped and musty with a slightly gnome-like proprietor – the way all bookshops should be!) reminisced about the first time he read the book while looking for my change. He told me not worry about words I couldn’t understand because I should be able to figure out most of them from context.

As such I was somewhat primed to watch for words I didn’t understand, and have kept a list of them as I go. I’m about halfway through and have hit six of them so far, which I think is pretty good going. The list (and the definitions) are as follow…

Recrudescent – My first reaction to this word was that it could mean almost anything. The actual definition is “breaking out again” or “renewing”.

Calid – I guessed that this means ‘clammy’, it actually means ‘hot’. Which makes sense when you think of the words ‘calorie’ and ‘calorific’ or perhaps the Italian ‘caldo’.

Fumid – I assumed this meant ‘full of fumes’, which in fact it does. Excellent!

Garde-Manger – My sketchy knowledge of French, combined with context, led me to assume that a garde-manger is a pantry. It’s actually a cool and well ventilated area of a kitchen used for the preparation of cold foods – although it seems more commonly used to refer to a chef that works in such an area.

Ichadbod – I am of course familiar with the name Ichabod, but in the book it’s used to describe a semi-ruinous section of the castle. I can’t find a definition online supporting this use, but I presume it’s a reference to the Hebrew meaning “the glory is departed”. Nice one Mr Peake!

Malkin – From context it was clear that this means ‘cat’.

Expect an update to this list when I’ve read some more – assuming I run into any other new words that is.

A Most Significant Anniversery

On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life

It was 150 years ago today Darwin published his book explaining exactly what was going on. If I had time I’d compose an eloquent tribute, but as I don’t, the following quote will have to do…

There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.

Indeed Charles, indeed.

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