![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
There's at least one item I'm going to in the festival then. Tickets on sale Monday.
Tags:
A month or so back Tescos introduced a tough love policy where you either had to join the single queue at the so-called Express Tills (claustrophobic, hot as behind the chicken oven, cramped, impossible to pack, get lost behind other customers) or at the Self-Service Tills (never work, encourages you to steal, steals your points, does people out of a job). If you have a trolley you can you use a Proper Till, but I hear stories of people being refused service because they had two items in their trolleys.
I note the disappearance of the suggestion box, and the increasing unhappiness of the staff. They produced a sign claiming "1283 more customers served in two minutes last week", but I didn't see any stop watch.
Now things are to change - let's hope for the better. If not for the grammatical.
I note the disappearance of the suggestion box, and the increasing unhappiness of the staff. They produced a sign claiming "1283 more customers served in two minutes last week", but I didn't see any stop watch.
Now things are to change - let's hope for the better. If not for the grammatical.
Tags:
XXXV: Thomas M. Disch, On Wings of Song (1979)
It must say something that my earliest reading of sf included both E.E. Doc Smith and Thomas M. Disch, and that I was reading the New Wave before I had a real sense of what the Old Wave was. My guess is I read Disch's spoof interview in New Worlds 10 with R.G. Allbard, author of Rash fairly early on, certainly before knowing who Ballard was. When venturing into the adult library during a similar period I discovered Ballard and Dick, and then (having been turned onto Vonnegut) Jack Trevor Storey and John Sladek - specifically The Müaut;ller-Föaut;kket Effect. Somewhere along that line of reading I must have connected back to Disch.
This would have been prior to the Minnesota Sequence - there were the various disaster novels, several collections of short stories and I even found some of the poetry. Whilst Disch was clearly a master ironist, his fiction seemed relentlessly downbeat, without the sense of psychic fulfilment that the ending of, say, The Drowned World had. Aliens invade and human fight back - unsuccessfully. A hero is imprisoned for a crime he did not commit, and is killed. There is no up escalator.
Whilst I bought my copy of On Wings of Song 18 October 1991 from Murder One (presumably on the way to the PKD event) I must have read it earlier than that, probably in hard back. As a mark of rememberance and as part of an on-going project I've alluded to before, it was time for a ( re-read )
For those of you who have already read the novel, or who are unafraid of spoilers, I've written about it in different terms at Solar Flares, a space I've set up for my exploration of 1970s sf.
It must say something that my earliest reading of sf included both E.E. Doc Smith and Thomas M. Disch, and that I was reading the New Wave before I had a real sense of what the Old Wave was. My guess is I read Disch's spoof interview in New Worlds 10 with R.G. Allbard, author of Rash fairly early on, certainly before knowing who Ballard was. When venturing into the adult library during a similar period I discovered Ballard and Dick, and then (having been turned onto Vonnegut) Jack Trevor Storey and John Sladek - specifically The Müaut;ller-Föaut;kket Effect. Somewhere along that line of reading I must have connected back to Disch.
This would have been prior to the Minnesota Sequence - there were the various disaster novels, several collections of short stories and I even found some of the poetry. Whilst Disch was clearly a master ironist, his fiction seemed relentlessly downbeat, without the sense of psychic fulfilment that the ending of, say, The Drowned World had. Aliens invade and human fight back - unsuccessfully. A hero is imprisoned for a crime he did not commit, and is killed. There is no up escalator.
Whilst I bought my copy of On Wings of Song 18 October 1991 from Murder One (presumably on the way to the PKD event) I must have read it earlier than that, probably in hard back. As a mark of rememberance and as part of an on-going project I've alluded to before, it was time for a ( re-read )
For those of you who have already read the novel, or who are unafraid of spoilers, I've written about it in different terms at Solar Flares, a space I've set up for my exploration of 1970s sf.
( LXXXV: The Red Shoes (Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, 1948) )
Totals: 85 (Cinema: 32; DVD: 48; TV: 5)
Totals: 85 (Cinema: 32; DVD: 48; TV: 5)
Tags:
.