The SFFaudio Podcast #802 – READALONG: The Seventh by Richard Stark

Jesse, Will Emmons, Terence Blake, and Trent Reynolds talk about The Seventh by Richard Stark

Talked about on today’s show:
sometimes published as The Split, the movie kinda sucks, it should be excellent, not one character actor in it, Jim Brown, Donald Sutherland, Gene Hackman, the girls are fine, they fuckaround with the plot a lot, convincingly convinced, impossible to make Parker a character on film, watched the movie then finished the book, Parker is off the page a lot in those books, entire acts where he’s offscreen, they can’t get inside his head, the old narrator problem, voice over narration, talk to the guy sick in bed, she goes away and gets some tea, do you want lemon or sugar or cream or milk, Parker doesn’t know anything about tea, ignorant of vast swaths of humanity’s interest, pop up menu like The Terminator, he doesn’t operate like a normal human, at the end of the book we see something out of character: he laughs, emotionless or pissed off, he’s not a human, he’s some aspects or parts of human, trying to run people off the road, to test them for his crew?, the character lacks definition, they want to make Parker into a film so bad, it never works, The Sour Lemon Score, Harvey Keitel in City Of Industry (1997), one scene where they’re at a stoplight and cops pull up next to them, this little mechanism, professional and amateur, more than ten years, The Man With The Getaway Face, Ask The Parrot is better, one of the scores, The Black Ice Score, black panthers, The Score, somebody loves every book, no rhyme or reason to it, Slayground, fairly typical of the books, a heist of some kind, trouble dividing the money, thieves fall out, how did you find this book, the beginning, slow, badly prepared, the blurbs, this is amazing in pace, you can’t put it down, not sleep til u finished it, nobody knows what’s happening, the action crystalizes, false tracks, so much description, he has to describe everything, hands, the realist principle, a less good book if you took out the descriptions, a four and a half hour book, unputdownable, the time aspect, Parker thinking, time had been playing tricks like that, an hour took a week or more to be done with, the personality (despite it’s almost absence) underneath the opposition between amateur and pro, different stupidities, the pro vs. the amateur, another type of stupidity, a key, a meta level explaining other detective thrillers, richer in the second half, subtle about his philosophy, makes you want to read the books, super-formulaic, Westlake is writing a formula, he’s being playful, I guess for my seventh book, 1966, feels a little bit earlier, fins on the cars, middle sixties, the secret hidden philosophy or anxieties behind all of Westlake’s fiction, obsessed with insurance, Abe Klinger, a temporary condition that had lasted about twelve years, television was to blame, an insidious monster in living rooms, taxes getting worse every year, barely possible, except for the rotten box, kiddie matinee on Saturday, always a double feature, a nice friendly neighborhood theater, the public library, long suffering voices, in every Westlake Parker book, we get inside other character’s minds, they become sympathetic, reconciling all these modes of being, insurance is worry, it’s a concern, “detective” thriller, this has a mystery in it, failed, he writes crime fiction, closer to suspense than mystery, the light face and the dark face detective, present himself as an agent of change, The Risk Profession, a murder mystery about insurance, successful, the Dortmunder series, high 20s, built up the crew, Kifka, Abe Klinger, had he not been shot, sympathize with him, an amazing choice, wrote this just for money, television or sensationalism came along and ruined everything, very brainful, uses thoughts to create characters, the killer’s problem is he’s an amateur, a non-functioning penis, vituperative girlfriend, bad with his hands, imagery that goes with the sword, it felt good in his hands, letters from prison, criminals get away with it, chance to get away with a crime, Westlake is cerebral, a non-cerebral character, the Reacher series, powered through it, he’s no longer a Terminator, an attempt at acting (was bad), the first season was very solid, had reviewed the book, he’s not Conan, Conan doesn’t have a pension, Conan is not patriotic, our anti-hero is not patriotic, a little bit of Parker’s backstory, a criminal when he was in the army, he doesn’t love his country, he doesn’t think about that at all, a red blooded American, spit on the flag, Westlake is not a super-patriot, surrounded by patriots, Westlake’s real passion, he like community theater, finances his fun with his skill, a furniture maker, put out of business, so now he’s a criminal, Grofield, puts his heisting money into his theatre, in The Score, Parker puts together the heist, show up and look like a manager, the detail work on the other characters, a depth of character, figuring out life philosophy, how to be in the world, what’s the point of crime fiction?, edifying, in this particular instance, the leader, the money was stolen out from under him, abandon this and run away?, an amateur stole from him, with his seventh, Westlake rewarding Parker, a professional pirate, doesn’t have a nation, makes war on all the world, and is vengeful on those who break the covenant, they’re all armed, a homosexual relationship, you got to go to a doctor!, goes vengeful on Parker, acting irrationally, they’re not his friends, they are colleagues, they are comrades, the best Parker on film is Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs, you’re acting like a punk, various psychopathic characters, a very Parker/Stark scene, a war of all of us against the institutions that are betraying us, the cop is probably the smartest character in the book, they’re doppelgangers, family life has made him weak, all that’s crap, the hardness in the eyes, sit for an exam to become a Terminator, need more training, Parker is a stripped down version of a human, there’s no hubcaps, the engine runs great, there’s a crack in the windshield, Parker’s sexual stuff, no sexual need or interest, all he does for three days is fuck, he’s not normal, Sherlock Holmes, A Study In Scarlet, zero interest in astronomy, completely ignores it, he knows about Chinese Tongs and the KKK, that’s kind of Parker too, his definition of what is extraneous is a whole lot more, he has no interesting in that, you’re a fool if you believe it, people call Parker a shark, what he’s not doing, a white sandy bitch named Michelle, completely stripped down, in stripping it down, Moriarty is famous for The Dynamics Of An Asteroid, interested in puppeteering things, he even abandons his face, plastic surgery, his name doesn’t matter, “Call me Joe”, Mr. Brown, Mr. Blue, Mr. Pink, to pull off a big heist, better off with no partners, his human foibles (wanting to have sex with a lady), makes him a bad Terminator, offered to him like a sacrifice to a god, and then he laughs, neat little bow, none of this would have happened, what makes him not a robot, so iconic, so compelling, Mel Gibson is not Parker, Lee Marvin is not Parker, how do you do that tea scene?, only in novel form, what’s the point of this?, made the argument, getting into the philosophy of life, the same appeal, what does it mean to have this kind of person, go through the character list, the least fucked up guy is the cop, the least sketched, he makes a great breakthrough and is killed before he can say it, he figures out, Morry, on Will’s deep question, read these things if you want a point from them, what’s the point of having these people in the world, having unplugged people (from the system), born that way, became that way, the partially unplugged, the craft guy, outlet malls, sort of yet another image of Bartleby (the Scrivner), more active, we can’t be Bartleby because it is humiliating, why is it humiliating, Conan is always an active agent in a story he’s thrust into, literally fights a god, Westlake is torturing Parker and entertaining us, this is not just entertainment, about life philosophy, compared to Reacher, Conan is not a patriot, animalistic efficiency, we animals, tricked into patriotism and friendships, allies not friends, judging them on their reliability, a little out of character, determined to go get this guy, they guy doesn’t know who he is, makes him act stupidly, rewarding the reader, more than one dynamic, Butcher’s Moon, Grofield gets kidnapped, logically he shouldn’t be doing it, taking it as a personal insult, a rationalization, tie up a loose end, he doesn’t know what Parker looks like, he doesn’t know his name, middle sized North Eastern town, Parker is married, driving a Toyota Avalon, commonlaw married, as long as he doesn’t bring it home, Westlake in later life, knows who he is, still heisting, how to be in the world, a knife-edge sort of thing, Westlake is a humourist, literally executes a guy, superstitious, Parker picks up the gun and shoots him with it, please help me, making yourself submit, bureaucracies are not good at helping people, superstitious fool with a dick problem who is a murder, why he is mad at Parker, a lot of sex in this book for a book not about sex, Parker thinks he’s just being logical, he’s restoring order in his universe, not logical that an amateur could beat a professional, a personal affront that must be punished, once you’ve unplugged from the system and be a heister, a lucky coincidence, a little off-topic, bring it in, Jesse does a lot of tutoring, a “leadership” class, pretend that they’re teaching them leadership, it makes no sense, automatically a non-leader, how well you behave, write a land acknowledgment, what leaders do, this land was stolen improperly, insert band name here, that was really bad that we stole it from them, land claims and treaties, that’s submitting to a system, if you control your class with a whip, a classroom full of kids with whips, guns and knives, leadership is really weird, everybody has guns and they can all shoot you at any point, not a real thing guys, an assortment of associates, big cave man energy, where do chiefs come from?, people who don’t have a lot of concrete in their sidewalks, characters of ridicule, similarly strange adjacent jobs, medicine man, wise old woman, takes an active role to try to get the money back, wants to get revenge, a professional is a person who gets wins aka the money, wanting things that an amateur would want, when somebody hits you, hitting you with words, violence is a good solution, a tit for tat, escalating, punishing with impunity, stealing from a football game, an ivy league football game, a charity day, they spent all day, one of the most complicated things to do, passed over really quickly, they focus on the wrong things, the logical scaffolding, the most sensational thing, he doesn’t describe that, his book is a paired down thing, it is four tapes, it feels bigger than it is, time going strange, jump backwards in time, the complication, the complication, the conclusion, fascinated by the character, what he’s saying about people and how to be in the world, the guy drives an old car, he can upgrade to an Edsel, gets a pat on the head, when he goes to his boss, his boss never graduated high school, why would that matter, this is something I understand, the cap and gown shit, a place of punishment, i need to go to university, that’s where the fun is, not playing by the rules, working for Klaus Schwab, obey the laws that make sense, nobody listens, what are they gonna do about it?, insurance, financial insecurity, that money not being in your pocket at all times, an aspect of the larger thing, the book that came before it, years salting away money, gigantic nest egg, the end of the previous book, no faith in institutions, the government is corrupt, taking your good pills, everybody in Parkerland, this person is a really great person, you know what his problems are, very wholesome, revenge is unhealthy for you, resentment is a poison that you take to make another person die, you have to take care of yourself, never see him on a roulette table, he’s not 007, he’s the opposite of James Bond, that James Bond book Westlake wrote, hired to write a James Bond movie set in Hong Kong, actors, rights issues, filed the serial numbers off, Tomorrow Never Dies, Westlake is not Ian Fleming, an engineer not a spy, really long, the writing is never bad, they’re all experiments, a formula always works, he was trying to write a Jack Reacher book, a thick thriller you could sell at airports, Dancing Aztecs, cash-ins, decadent, if you just look at the handwork he does with characters, a little bit about Parker’s attitude towards people’s names, Mutt and Jeff, a clumsy haste, that’s comedy writing there, don’t move, Cops And Robbers, lower middle class cops become criminals, a foile a deux, The Outfit, doesn’t feel like a Parker novel at all, The Stepfather, two sequels, about a man’s mind, Block is more straight up, very cerebral, why do people like reading Stephen King books?, children and children’s psychology, grappling with stuff in fiction, largely about how to live in the United States, a college course out of his books, largely about political corruption, civic corruption, openly mocked, the wrong wing of communism, an imperial country, through the course of life, disidentified with Australia, disidentified with English, a rootless cosmopolitan, probably more Australia, Nice, an anti-Proustian experience, unrecognizable, the basic elements, Hyde Park, Sydney, the opera house, the harbour bridge, the sea and the sky, that particular sea and the sky, an American flag, red paint on the sidewalks, chain restaurants, too big, don’t like Justin, nice people everywhere, Turkey, Kentucky, being rooted, Frederick Heimbach, making digs, not committed, what trauma, personality defect or personality superpower, lose faith in institutions, what patriotism is, love the flag as the symbol of that thing, so many different kinds of Christian, soldiers and anti-soldiers, pacifists?, violence, violence at the dinner table, responses to violence and violation, Parker was on to something, refers to the woman, a receptacle, slightly more than that, a liability, annoying, fuck her while he’s sick, comedy, helping you, keepin you warm, that person seems more well adjusted than Parker, able to hold down a job, their backstory, sex him up, a dry run for Claire, healthy marriage, don’t bring the corpses into the garage, coffee will be ready in 10 minutes, says when he’s done, seen this relationship before, you have your hobbies she has hers, the sex while sick, she never caught, the other woman in the story, the madam who talks to much, always wants to have chats, Hazel?, Madge!, a retired hooker, a cathouse runner, showing up at Madge’s place, that’s not Parker, lovingly, friends or something?, she gets one of the sixths, the beat up spot, Book 1, Chapter 4, less than a hundred bills to his name, outside of Scranton, our president, strange conversation, fun, a Kifkaesque conversation, in her 60s now, when age retired her, too talkative, too nervous, rented mostly by the hour, stay and talk, Parker not being able, I’ll go there, I’ll fix the drinks, everyday was old home week, her gossiping, she never shut it with insiders, beautiful prop work, 4 cassettes, 4 hours 22 minutes, a weird life philosophy going on, we all gotta deal in the world, shut up, maybe, is this how to behave?, self-contained, not completely, people who can’t sit alone in a room with a book, where ethyl was sitting at the desk, mentally retarded, Bob Negly, the second Parker book, best Parker book?, The Score, the sandwich in between two classics, an old communist back in the day, he’s dumb now, a doctor who does facial reconstructions, he doesn’t think real good, the retarded girl, why did he do that, he’s really good with character work, he’s just so strange, it’s not representation, exactly, flawed characters keep people in their lives out of duty, duty, explaining why Parker goes after Grofield, when somebody does something wrong, make things even, rather than revenge, very subtle, nemesis, fate or The Cold Equations, everything is logical and that’s the way things are, correct the anomaly without emotion, a nemesis who takes a personal interest, the god, infringements of the cosmic order, that was wrong, wrong as in it was a mistake, acting improperly, violating the tao, a big part of it, something you don’t appreciate, a violation, rectification, correction, an nemetic, various way of being taciturn, a defect, useful, she doesn’t blab about what she learns, they don’t talk back, a scene where Madge blabs for an hour and a half, sits there and lets her talk, chatter away, Parker doesn’t watch TV, Lawrence Block’s characters read , hangs out on the beach, does job, he needs to know the psychology of people, he sums them up, studies and analyzes and sums up, “Parker didn’t”, often not diding things, that opening is so nice, it went with a dry cracking sound, Parker raised his foot, the door popped open like it was surprised, his plans were loused up now, Parker didn’t want drinks, no to Negly, a joke about vengeance, it wasn’t cash Negly wanted, the amateur first, find out how the situation now stood, “handy”, Parker uses people for his own good, as pieces on a chessboard, manipulating himself, drink cigarettes and eat beer, always in opposition, more of the same, he’s not on the property ladder, playing his own game, what makes you an amateur is you don’t get the money, convincing, why Jesse likes Parker so much, why Jesse likes Conan so much, Solomon Kane is insane, funny that you mention that, the Del Rey collection, wish there had been a lot more, doesn’t write a lot of novels, all about Satan, there’s only his mind thinking there is Satan, morally insane, he think he’s serving god, slays visions, whatever is happening you’re delusional, he never reconciled some of the contradictions, Staff of Solomon, buddy buddy with the witchdoctor, derives his power from Satan, the right hand of vengeance, more vengeance than nemesis, another big gap, better than Conan stories, we did pretty good, the Harlan Ellison tweet, the land of fear, throw out you fucking copy of Finnegan’s Wake, very Harlan Ellison, even when his novel doesn’t gel, heights and insights, not a character guy, he’s good at that, that’s really good, he’s really on to something, let’s rob a rock concert, let’s rob a casino, variations on a theme, the weirdness of how to be in the world, the books exist for the fallout, the heist is never the focus, when the stuff hits the fan, what he likes to explore with these, he was a cop in the airforce, white caps [“snow tops”], Dortmund, a German beer, puts everything he’s experiencing and puts it in his stories, The Green Eagle Score, an unproduced screenplay for that, owned by a major studio, lucky that they didn’t make it, Parker has a brother, no, Parker doesn’t have family, Ransom, Black Ice, Green Eagle, Sour Lemon, Rare Coin, the most violent, torture stuff, mostly offscreen, they didn’t pay for the rights when they made City Of Industry, attempts to try to capture Westlake, there’s problems with it, how many Westlake films were produced, one of the most adapted guys ever, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Brothers Keepers, post show scheduling, a Ray Cummings, Cat-Woman by Ray Cummings, 13 pages, Selina’s Big Score, it is better not to picture Parker, watching the movie adaptations, the best Parker on screen was Robert Duvall, he’s nothing like Parker, The Outfit, the philosophy doesn’t translate, a really good read, Stark, all on purpose, a webcomic called Gravedigger, Point Blank, where to find it now, track everything, real comics, Lee Marvin on the cover, a lady lying on a floor topless, a dude wrapped up in ropes, a trapper’s shack in Yukon, the mad gods laughed at my helpless plight, a murdering ravening beast, shudder pulp, cringe pulp, weird menace, later 1930s early 1940s, a lot of torture, weird cults, Mike Vendetti started getting into it, finally found my genre, sloppily written stories, racism, sex and torture, with deep philosophical reflection on modes of maleness, men want to save women, meet cute, hooded cultists, you go into cave, branding with swastikas, to make them nude, working theory, designed to make men have romantic adventures on how to make girlfriends, not a great prose stylist, the other options on Ray Cummings, Space Liner X-37, renegade Venusian, manacled hands, Mark Nelson, mixing it up with something good, not a good reputation amongst us, Cirsova, bad Alex?, that Alex, one is better than the other?, morally?, you want to pair up?, something that we’ll know it will be good, next open slot, time to research, something thematically related, rising intonation, Terence is powerful like that, Call Me Joe, in the science fiction industry, a collection of planetary adventures, Dragon Queen Of Jupiter, all read by the same narrator, trying to play it cutesy, In The Orbit Of Saturn by R.F. Starzl, Stupendous Spectacles Of The Solar System In Space, Prize Ship [by Philip K. Dick], 1931, the dreaded solar scourge, spend to much time on Mars you go mad, “space madness”, David H. Keller, awful and long, detective tryyna figure out why this chinese religion is so popular, dresses up as a Chinese, underneath the altar, a drug front, he can do wrong, religion is the opium of the people, warping himself, all of the Taine stories, somebody has to do the job, for the collective, liking your tweets because I like your tweets, might even quote tweets, we can have a beef, whistle at tweets, The Gun by Philip K. Dick, a trigger warning, a content warning, Tommy Patrick Ryan, bad idea, unsuccessfully modeled my mind, land acknowledgment, don’t fall for it, don’t like hypocrisy, an Indian community, Indians who take advantage of their status to self-aggrandize, not better people, it’s okay if a woman bombs us, fighting a straw man, am I?, no!, taking advantage, how big a problem, Inuit and the Metis, just above a million one hundred thousands, as a percentage, cultural genocide, actual genocide, less Indian wars, we have to be careful, for what reason?, Paul getting in trouble or not getting in trouble (at the hands of western administrators), it was western liberals, Camestros Felapton?, liberals collaborating with or submitting to communists, just did it, hilarious, back to the Hugos, hott goss, if Paul had won Fan Writer, we shouldn’t have a convention in China because of the Uyghur genocide, if you stretch the definition, vs. actual genocide in Gaza, because they’re cowards, they don’t beleive the video of their eyes, they’d rather believe the government lies, tagging in that word is calling it a cultural holocaust, murder and culture destruction, deliberate and widespread attempt to steal kids and their language, Jesse concentration camp, particularly egregious, the previous convention was in Canada, nobody was all up in arms about dead children in Canada, anti-China hate, Nixon is a lot more reasonable, Nancy Pelosi trying to start WWIII with China, The Mad Planet by Murray Leinster, Demons Of Cthulhu, a concession to will, Starman Jones, a concession to Jesse, The Stone Dragon by R. Murray Gilchrist, sweaty looking guy with a nice mustache, Temple Bar, The Yellow Book, The Crimson Weaver, a great Edge, the Valley of the Willowbreaks, sleeping side by side, fresh gathered heather, wallless bridge, The Domain of the Crimson , a beldame, ossier, enter not the domain of the crimson weaver, behold I was beautiful once, discovered the foulness of her bosom, she is mad, that sounds good, Eldritch Archives, The Werewolf’s Daughter by H. Warner Munn, Farmer friends, you should, Time Is The Simplest Thing by Clifford D. Simak, the beginning premise blew Terence’s mind, Exiles To Glory by Jerry Pournelle, a right wing guy, he’s wrong, because welfare slums, a senior engineering student at UCLA, murderous “youth gang”, kills an inner city resident and has to run, you don’t kill juvies in this town, on the run and all of earth there was no place to hide, 144 pages, 5-6 hours, YA, a response to Heinlein, interested in right-wingers, tarred by people who claim to be left wingers, unacceptable and wrong and hypocritical, patriotic communism, very internationalist, the neighbourhood and the biome, Kentucky is an area in addition to a state, used to be a statehouse, the long view on nations, too soon to tell, Zhou Enlai on the French Revolution, the Chinese Revolution, Mao’s right hand man, educated by a rich Chinese man, studied in France, how do you feel about funding this young man, the just so story, being funded by a rich man, signed up, solved, What Mad Universe by Fredric Brown, how did we get Scott on there?, The Fearless Benjamin Lay by Marcus Rediker, vegetarian dwarf, vegetarianism is a mistake, maybe too soon to tell, Hitler and Benjamin Lay, probably both liked dogs but not to eat, Hitler had two eyes, you like architecture, hey you live in Europe, the stupidest argument, the guy pops out of a hole in a well, and yet you live in a society, as a response on twitter, so stupid, latent patriotic tendencies, an episode of American history, Evan is fiercely patriotic, it is a vice, Evan loves vices, he wants to earn enough money and be a prepper?, Wisconsin, he has failed to Terence properly, Mad Max novelization, might be a problem, motorcycle and biker gangs, one of the finest films, Mad Max II, an extravaganza of awesome, the dog dying, baby schmaybe, the grandma with the shotgun, Cundilini with his hand missing, likes Shakespeare with motorcycle gangs, 1981, rust on the details, Thunderdome is not as good, almost a comedy, fun things, more accessible to children, Tina Turner, the blue lagoon, great character, be the queen of capitalism, that weird airplane, native Australian project, air taxi/crop-duster, who isn’t in to planes?, cars are pretty good too, transformers, they can hide, they’re in disguise, secret identity, secretly millions of years old, I can transform, Dragon Queen Of Jupiter, fascinated by the world of Mad Max, Audiobooks For The Damned, funny names and numbers, all pirate, doing it out of love vs. commercial purposes, Commercialism: The Curse Of Art by Lovecraft’s wife, I must fund him, I must save him, I can save her, she’s like that with Lovecraft, none of us can be saved in the end, recorded in his car, AFTB #68, the account exists in a limbo state, the cancellers, really trolly, I like this person because they like copyright, fuck off, you can’t get me, ignore it, their collection of dung beetle photographs, probably awesome, very interested in the passions of the people, Midwestern Marx, Liger, patriotic communist, who is Destiny?, Twitch, in conversation with other people, Steven Kenneth Bonnell II, it is not genocide if it is during a war, don’t tell him, Omaha, Nebraska, superwhite, most Cubans in the united states, dispossessed, Evan says “I like Vaush”, he likes him, streamers or youtubers, American youtuber, the Hugo kerfuffle, used to have one of those ear gages things, about audiobooks, passionately doing, voting for Biden to help your portfolio, Scott Miller, he’s not an analyzer, 2022 output, Imagination, Planet Stories, episode zero, recording the unrecorded, noble, a perfectionist, make it as good as possible, good at voices, got pretty good taste, I’m in love with you, sir, one everyday, Herland by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, far enough out, one question about Queen Of Air And Darkness, orienting question, some blood quantum Cherokee, just as mentioned, the woman is like let them keep their ways, put them on a reservation, interesting of course, what that’s about, what’s the significance of that if any?, Dercum Audio, Thompson, or Tetty?, for the sake of Will, the name of the author in the files, free audiobooks, Tom Tetty, the last glow of the last sunset, left in the ‘if you your cassette is not working’, collecting stamps, media archaeology, how much tech has changed, Books On Tape, amalgamated and amalgamated, now Audible owns everything, whole scandal going on, Findaway voices scandal, go back to the basics: audiobooks for the damned, an Amber series fan fiction, John Betancourt, costs money, disgusting, how to do a lot of copyright, actively trying to make money at a basically impossible task, megapacks, legal dispute over the word “megapack”, trying to make a living, sad for Paul, he’s playing a rigged game, you know you’re getting scammed, worse and more corrupt, this book sucks, why is it getting a Hugo award, They’d Rather Be Right, Mark Clifton, co authored book, why are you playing, school’s business is not education, obey orders, learn propaganda, babysit you, not the prevailing sentiment, so mean to his students, otherwise you are subject to them, how would you know?, the etymology, solved with drills, shampoo is a scam, why is shampoo a scam?, of course, I’m normal, it smells nice, soap does not have the same effect, axe body spray, bad for them, that they have to use up, that don’t help them, we’re taught it, what did people do before toothpaste?, we just buy the shit they tell us to, a history of shampoo, since ancient times, long hair, a daily indulgence, putting yourself in the upperclass, something people do, learning to play piano, they feel like they need to, it’s all unconscious, what shampoo do you use?, if you’re a girl, get away with having no hair, punish girls in France for having babies with nazis, nazi babies, her hair!, proportional to the crime, a truth and reconciliation process, just solved it with a haircut, as much as a woman values your hair, you can’t have books for six years, a horrible punishment, you’d have to talk to people, what books have you read recently? they have to struggle, some school assignment, can’t we be friends?, people are talking about a book you should read, so rare, do French people read at all?, they read more than Americans, probably dying a cultural affectation, a sociological study of who reads non-fiction cultural books, it is good to learn stuff, some books are not meant to be read, anything written by Barack Obama, briefing books for their activists, Hillary Clinton, report on what’s in there, they don’t know what they’re saying to their ghost writers, a lot of shit for school, get to read Othello, Shakespeare is so fuckin awesome, the sexy one, The Taming Of The Shrew, way in, new theory just dropped, Iago’s the badguy, undermine Othello and his marriage, Iago’s gay for Othello, pretty good theory, I hate the moor, you act like you’re obsessed with him, interpretations, reaching for Desdemona, Iago reaches for Othello, a cool interpretation, a cool tragedy, this last information, shampoo your hair, eating and sleeping, ammonium laurel suphate, rub the glycol all around, people won’t object to your hair anymore, eat more yeast, some problems with flatulence, we’ll book it next time, relationship with shampoo, how often?, how many ablutions per day, once a month?, more than once a week, struggle to say more than that, another product, try never to use it, long hair, big, afro like, get a bidet, bidets are my new religion, buy a second one, very useful, saves money, cleanly, saves time, very Heinleinian, the fresher, oh no!, used to being clean, not covered in paper shit, mandatory, standard, a propaganda campaign, if you learn nothing else: bidets are the way, blog posts, setting up a blog is annoying, manage account names, to give Musk money, longform reads, tweet threads, an opportunity cost, twitter is a reading diary, searchable, shareable, David H. Keller 2023 tweets, a popular magazine, Popular Publications, topics Will could explore, freeform, follow your passion, engaging with audio, get more fiction into you, sitting sucks, not wasting time and money, post there, if you got offline, the internet has been ruined, google doesn’t listen blogs anymore, they don’t exist anymore, defunded, duckduckgo started caving to the baddies, go to the websites, what’s a better search engine?, the dot com, blog search, so focused on extracting money it doesn’t do its service anymore, the guy in the store today, he thought he was a good institution, a part of the community, enjoying the things he provided to the community, mom and pop restaurants still exist in small towns, what happened?, it’s all wrecked, it’s tough, store restaurant gas station, cute and nice, minimal population, cheap land, people with time and interest in being able to subsidize a small gas station restaurant, this doesn’t seem so foreign, a familiar Kentucky thing, Culver’s, ice cream custard?, a thick ice cream, best frozen custard, Dairy Queen Blizzard, Concrete mixer, mix in your rocks, have you ever had a jelly baby?, Doctor Who candy, a dalek, penny candy for kids, shaped like little babies, better flavours, blackcurrant, delicious and subtle, blackberries are free, nobody grows blackberries on purpose, her microclimate is very dry, not a lot of extra water for blackberries, a post a week, the pace, what Will’s doing with his life right now, sequester, a tablet, dreams, no shampoo, eating black currants, look at the list of ingredients and then look them up, Harry’s mens products, accused of enjoying the smell of things to much, overdosed on perfumes, laundry detergent with no scent, unscented detergent, unscented cat litter, you should smell like nothing, stone scented deodorant, antiperspirants, toothpaste, toothpicks, Nelson Mandela’s autobiography, boarding school, ashes, doesn’t sound delicious, enjoying the flavour of toothpaste, there’s no movements like this, veganism is the new religion, anti-scent religion, how sensitive people are to autism, not just stuff injected into your body, covered in rashes, a sensitive organ, the whole purpose is to make fucking money, all products produced under capitalism, how these things go, love LibriVox, recording audiobooks in their basements, a prison project for prisoners to record audiobooks, a serial killer recorded some V.C. Andrews, very interesting, prison book programs, you could study and it is not mandatory, a privilege, turn them all into lawyers, a student today, push a lot of science fiction and fantasy, the excuse is vocab, vocabulary through poems, god forbid, essays, so fucking awful, book introductions, little editorial prefaces, Robert Silverberg’s Worlds Of Wonder, what he thinks are awesome stories, Alfred Bester, C.L. Moore, so good, paid him money, The Monsters by Robert Sheckley, sent to Scott, Scanners Live In Vain, Colony, Light Of Other Days, Day Million, Who Am I Which Are You, The Triumph Of Honest Bellamy, Don’t Forget To Kill Your Wife, Fuzzy Puzzle Odyssey, Six Plots For The Price Of One, I Trusted The Rug Completely, A Boy, A Girl, A Lovestory, 164, respect yes, wobbly publishers, fine feelings, a demi-god, 1953, Philadelphia, Columbia, professional writers, verges are uncomfortable places, immense lobby, Harlan Ellison, a little stir in the lobby, a slender graceful man, that’s Ted Sturgeon, James Blish, Willy Ley, recently skipped an essay by him, grinny broadly, buoyant, envy, admiration, hope, on every contents page, Untouched By Human Hands, with very close attention, role models, his instant rise to fame, tremendously prolific, tabulated by author, 24 stories, only Philip K. Dick had more with 28, he made it all look so easy, just grace, agility, ingenuity, Henry Kuttner, out of the simplest materials, cleverness, delicacy of touch, trading jokes with my fellow celebrities, no story worth reading ever was easy to write, products of anguished revision, keep up a the job day in and out, a lot fore people today, vunderjar, Seventh Victim, scant 4000 words, turning the familiar upside down, wondrous, the dissonance that gives rise to the plot, the tone will be light, it was undoubtedly the newest thing, compact, uncluttered, efficient, a substance resembling fire, an astonishing hook, they slithered down the mountainside together, a murder mystery?, a science fiction story, socially desirable for men to kill their wives, he will need only 4000 words to do the job, the aliens are puzzled by the intentions, suspense, holding his reader’s interest, the ritual slaughter of wives, most of us, too simple, but what? what!, a calm serious manner, are they moral?, this from a man who has just killed his wife, among the other debaters, hideous aliens, morality is very important, the visitors are so repellent, put them out of their misery, lean sparse style, to the surplus female pen, 2 more pages, the important thing to find out, if it has become apparent yet, the moral beings, we’re back with Gulliver in the land of the Houyhnhnm, the misanthropic Swift, fable, plausibility was not an issue, cunning brains and useful hands, doodle up, a lot of people need to learn this, his world of wifekillers, some convincing rationale, pure exposition, married females lay eggs every day, simply a fact of biology there, the problem of surplus women, polygamy, too intricate, a great nunnery far away, the gentlest possible solution, the grotesque solution, serial polygamy, otherwise excluded, casual unthinking sexism, allowed to reach maturity, married sisters, the next group of wives, meanwhile, the leisure to spend their time in philosophical debate, annoyingly deficient in logic, Heinlein would like this, a splendidly logical system, overenthusiastic slaughter, equilibrium, past mating age, mortal combat, we who subscribe, modern India today, wife-murder, governed by high moral imperative, telling untruths, a host of other evil customs, destroy our way of life, decent and righteous customs, so elegantly constructed, parable so deftly, craftsmanship, light entertainment, inspiring esteem and envy, already a master of his craft, that’s how to write an essay, just crank him out, undertaken a program to do so, secret hidden stuff, seeing it and making it explicitly, making you see stuff, vocab words at least, you need to understand what they’re for and what the teacher wants, if they judge you on your dancing, a better hobby than writing an exercise, group dance, usually about half an hour, a movie review, movies are better than TV shows, reviews Star Trek episodes, some good Next Generation, take notes, The Twilight Zone, you don’t know what you’re getting each time, generally science fiction, a fantasy, a satire, social commentary, quite difficult to watch anthologies back to back to back, find the original stories, look at them in that light, very focused right now, easily distract, tutoring, coffee, Connor, No-Man’s Land by John Buchan, fairy cave men, exciting plans, a chapter in The Way The Future Was by Frederick Pohl, the admirable Pohl, teenage dalliance with communism, Amazing Stories novel, The Space Merchants, a rush job, Kornbluth has sharp teeth, a moderating influence?, sleeping in the stairwells, making us laugh, Search The Sky by Cyril M. Kornbluth and Frederik Pohl, The Advent On Channel 12 by C.M. Kornbluth, cheap server, servers in North Korea, servers on a satellite, what the fuck is this?, he’s really smart and he doesn’t play dumb, Ambrose Bierce, tricky, start with the famous one, also a French one, An Occurrence At Owl Creek Bridge, Ambrose Bierce is like Mark Twain’s evil brother, he’s still alive!, 1914 to cover the Mexican Revolution, may have got got, see you in cyberspace.

The Split by Richard Stark

Posted by Jesse Willis

The SFFaudio Podcast #779 – READALONG: The Colorado Kid by Stephen King

Jesse, Evan Lampe, Cora Buhlert, and Terence Blake talk about The Colorado Kid by Stephen King

Talked about on today’s show:
Terence without a story, no story here, short novel from Hard Case Crime, pretty slight, the narrator, this fake Maine accent, a little hard to understand things here and there, you get used to it, the name of the owner of the restaurant, some of the beginning, Jack Ruby vs. Jack Moody, JFK is in here, a theme, a throughline between the stealing of the money and the keeping of the article, it’s our story, it’s not for the people from away, including the US government, everybody does it, not nationalistic, localistic, a political point, what these islanders are like, such places, lonely and weird, late 1990s, drive up from Boston to the Canadian border, Acadia national park, a rental car, an ice cream parlour, a cinema, and a gas station, we don’t like strangers here, local teenagers were hanging out, staring at us, talking German, the two strange women, priceless looks, an old A-Team episode, when you read Stephen King, exaggerates this aspect of it, condensed, a love letter to Maine, Pet Semetary, Derry, know the town’s secrets, talking to each other and playing cards, in the Lovecraftian sense, you gotta remember it, the illustrated version came out in 2019, the disc break, when it first came out, a really big deal, used to sell Hard Case Crime, no. 13, the biggest living author up to that point, when Stephen King hit, drew attention, Cora retweeted an article, a paid advertisement, affiliate links, Holly, whatever that means, in terms of sales, Charles Ardai, Joyland, Crichton ones, crossover appeal, Later, a thematic sequel to The Body, on a publicity tour, host of a TV show, NPR, hardboiled, noir, crime encrusted filthy books, Ardai bent the rules, an introduction to the 2019 publication, The Birth And Rebirth Of The Colorado Kid by Charles Ardai, revive pulp fiction, gorgeous dames in torn negligee, grab you by the throat, someone lay bleeding in the gutter, about the same as a movie ticket, bookstore, drugstore, a quixotic plan, half a century earlier, there was drinking involved, David Dodge, Day Keene, Wade Miller, maybe there’s a well known writer out there, write us a blurb, gone on record, John D. MacDonald, Lawrence Block, Richard Stark, the great Donald E. Westlake, I understand completely, I tried to sound cool, it would contain a mystery, a boxing story, a western, it presents a hard case, the mystery of the unanswerable, the classical mystery tradition, Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon, Flitcraft, vanished like a fist when you open your hand, if that’s not a noir story…, a pretty weirdest book, an experiment, a thought experiment, a philosophical parable, metafiction, trynna make some points, teased, this is a fantasy book, continue their legacy, if she doesn’t go on to the New York Times, I’d like this to be true, small towns have newspapers, county paper, the Tri-Cities, the last issue of the last newspaper went online, its owned by a corporation, required by law ads, not doing news anymore, before the internet killed off these smaller newspapers, The Province (newspaper), The Vancouver Sun, a corporation asking for donations, this is a fantasy world, he has a fantasy setup about how things will work, there’s no Walmart here, wherever Mooselick is now, King Soopers, things have changed, corporate control, corporate extraction, the earlier setting in the 80s, he’s almost a regional writer, he’s been to California, what percentage are outside of Maine?, he’s not a city guy either, Deer Isle, Maine, other island stories, Dolores Claibourne, a zombie apocalypse, strangers experience, the island on the show called Wings [Nantucket], you’re gonna make it Stephie, passing the torch, making a story out of nothing, the story is there’s no story here, to make it a story, story construction, a central mystery, one of the two interchangeable, more than a single gunner, that’s Stephen King for you, can’t even separate them from each other or King, the girl is pretty well done, a fantasy, she’s from Away, write about hayrides, we’re gonna last years, a little fastforward, the really old one, skip to 2023, she sold the paper to a corporation has kids and lives in Ohio, is Jesse being too cynical here?, school is in, not supposed to be solvable by the reader, Jean Paul Sartre’s Nausea, waves don’t form a story, a thing without a story, an event without a story, a philosophical education, resistant to paradigms you bring to bear, even if you fail all the time, all the stories published in the newspaper are lies, a beginning a middle and an end, the meta-level, an inversion of values, the insular mentality, closed minds, they don’t like strangers, big city people, Heidegger used to say, even if he was a Nazi, in closer contact with Being, the real people in touch with what life is, inculcating existential philosophy, independently constructed a theory of story, the school of problems, is this deliberate?, what Evan said, what makes a book memorable, this story about story, mysterious lights, a story about how stories are told, real life events are turned into a story (or not), the other cases, weird lights, UFOs, church picnic poisoning, dead boat, a likely story, some kind of weird crime that was never solved, an unsolved murder, 22 years, Picnic At Hanging Rock (1975), the art in the book, the last image of the story, Stephie looking out of the view, there needs to be a sexy lady, a newspaper folded over the rail, Vinceteague, Chincoteague, wild horses, the story goes, a Spanish shipwreck, annual capture of the herd, sold to rich people, Cora’s experience, intruding on their local haunts, a defensive look, you’re a tourist, curiosity, you’ve just walked into their living room, boxes full of board games, a community center, we can’t blame them for the weird feelings, take your money and monetize, a generous tip, need two old guys who know the score, like they see it go round like it’s in a dryer, he’s gonna give em a book, bringing a book to our lowly new publication, Lawrence Block is a really great writer, nobody cares, everybody knows the name, everybody can act like him, that’s the fantasy, supporting local causes all over Maine, patriotism on a local level, Walter Gibson, he didn’t move away, he’s made it a virtue too, this is how one ought to be, 31,000 people, a Lovecraft idea, you can write from anywhere, I don’t fit in New York, August Derleth, those regional things your writing about Wisconsin, Clark Ashton Smith, Robert E. Howard, Cross Plains, [City Of The Singing Flame], set on a hike, it’s for you, you’re local now, that’s the story, why didn’t they give him a story, they just take his money, right Evan?, I guess, it’s a response to the idea that stories must progress to a point, to critics, why is that there?, why is IT 1,000 pages long, meditating on that, letting the story breathe and be what it is, that’s the change, bring everyone to the parlour, why they kept it secret, Nero Wolfe isn’t going to show up, Jesse’s week theory: it was suicide, why would he do it in Maine?, the geographical solution, people running away, the physical limit of the border of the country, maybe his wallet was stolen, just like the food out of his hand, insure you choke to death and have a brain hemorrhage, old guy detectives, the money gets to the right hands, Stephen King likes moms, trying to help moms out, a less important gender for child raising, like an old gay couple, help out as best they can, published in all the papers in Colorado, desperate old men all over the United States, Hancock Lumber, a pay paper?, free weekly, no longer, two on Sunday, newspapers called out, New York Times, Boston Globe, Bangor Daily News, if done in realtime, restaurant to the seaside newspaper department, giant printing machine, go get a muffin, a pee, some coke, pee break, retro flashback to the future, he died six months later, obituary for the really old guy, 1915-2005?, she’s still there, smelling the seaweed and the fish, front page obituary, small town newspapers, editorial content, usually on the front page, local journalists running around, small arts events, festivals, local sport, shooting competition, report about Hugo winners, desperate for content, dine out on your story, a young woman, a man in his forties, the Russian coin, the red herring, a Russian sleeper agent, The Americans, told to come to Maine, a commercial flight, a very good theory, why do you carry evidence you’re a Russian around?, 10 ruble coins, a plot point or not, a sleeper agent from an alternate earth, he’s from another dimension, supernatural elements, he can’t help it, why not?, the lights, the author said it was extraterrestrials, Rendezvous With Rama sequels, Mary Celeste, the Doctor Who version: The Horror At Fang Rock, aliens landed in the ocean, Telefon (1977), the Soviet Union objected to the movie, the premise is that there’s been a purge going on in Soviet Russia, hardliners, trying to start WWIII, a detente, a Robert Frost poem, fugue state, suicide mission, Charles Bronson is a KGB agent with a perfect memory, when they die, this guy died in 1922, these are fake people, the birth certificate of a dead kid, the suicide theory, how to fit all the pieces together, the gun in the hand pointing at the head, assassinated, a calling card, maybe he found it on the beach, perfectly constructed, because it’s a fiction story, some newspaper stories are completely fiction anyway, without having the tweet thread, a bad idea of what actually happened, Sherlock Holmes, getting the quotes wrong, a well constructed meta-story, characterization is immaculate, backstories of various people, the widow eating her meal and looking great, this island and its people, a mystery that can’t be solved, no obvious solution, the church picnic, The Shining, Stephen King’s explanation, telepathic powers, ghosts come to life, the story is terrific, his way of solving, psychic powers, so good at telling the story, a problem of madness, a psychic command to go to Maine, much more elaborate, a central character who ends up dead, goes to quite a length to justify a death to alleviate a problem, drinking himself, fucking around with his boss, hurting his kid, trying to do right, go live with the magical blackman in Florida, Murder She Wrote, Jessica Fletcher, Cabot Cove at Universal Studios, giving school, the coziness of the town, the judge, another graduate student, a CSI guy, local time colour, CSI being a good show, grounding it in the period of time, peak of its popularity, so many spinoffs, it’s realistic, super unrealistic, weird tiny clue, the reality is Mark Furman plants the glove at OJ’s house, the theory of the case, fuck it he’s guilty, told not to look in the bag, the underlying theme: it’s okay to cheat, that’s just a Stephen King move, desperately wants to be Stephen King, a descent attempt, one aspect, kids, boyscouts, body horror, The Troop, Dreamcatcher, a central ideology, lensing all his writing through, this is what I believe, the NPR series: This I Believe, Heinlein’s, we all cheat a little bit, it’s good to like our locals, the definitive Terence thing, when you’re an old many running a newspaper in Nice, fuck off and sell your paper, a smaller town, an island off the coast of Spain, Glory Road, nude island off the coast of France, nude island, the whole island is news, Île du Levant, naturist resort, gonna have to get into nudism, inside on an offset typewriter, wear big hats, prove that you’re not wearing a wire, East German nudism, lingering nudism, Wreck Beach, sunbathing garden, close to exhausting this very slim book, 3.5 hours, padded out reprint, 2005 afterword not in the audiobook, a real case of a woman in Maine who died and was never identified, unsolved and unsolvable, the phenomenon, people hate mysteries, the reason the police are there to solve crime, a collective will, find somebody to blame, who the victim is, teenage drug dealers, not a story, cold cases, years after, calls after all these years, crimes no one really cares about, some kind of theory, one of the big fictions, it’s the drug cartel, they’re so horrible, court cases, drug dealers are so bloody stupid, they’re amateurs, that’s not their business, unsolved without a story, two boys [Sebastian Burns and Atif Rafay], murder, awaiting extradition, France off the coast, upper peninsula of Michigan, the Point Roberts anomaly, [turns out Jesse is conflating two cases from the same period, the Sebastian Burns Atif Rafay case and Frederick Gilliland (who was tricked into Point Roberts), Jack The Ripper, still trying to solve, supernatural solutions, time travel, space alien from Star Trek, 150 year old, the Zodiac Killer, annoying people, the police were not fully corrupted, lazy bastards, pressuring people into confessing, Homicide: Life On The Streets, a bunch of people to kidnap the governor of Michigan, money, retarded, lonely, not reporting on stuff, unsolved cases in Germany, equivalent of a state governor, Switzerland, a famous hotel where other people have died, a famous press photograph, late 1980s, dressed in the bathtub, someone important, Mossad, the Iranians, a shitty terrible person, the official verdict was suicide, Seth Rich murder, no story here, perpetrator unknown, no one would do that, Salvador Dali would have killed himself like that, constantly screaming, this is of course locked, July 10, 2016, 4:20 am, a victim of attempted robbery, with lots of citations, leaked DNC emails in 2016, hacking the email accounts, quotation marks around that, Hillary Clinton had broken the rules, Donna Brazile, thumb drive, how fast can u download?, no good evidence, it’s always Russia, Mossad is pretty fucking active, if you talk about Seth Rich on youtube, we’re nit going to have this be a story, shot in the back, some political reason, die on a beach, the thing that’s being addressed here, making a connection between or fear of random seeming deaths and how being unsettled by death is, The Body, the point of that story, hit by a train, dead crow on the sidewalk, who did this?!, it only matters when it’s people, maybe it died of old age, I don’t need a story to make me feel better about it, hit by a car, our response to the fear of death, what he’s going for, the the dead kid on the beach is Stephen King, he’s 42, hit by a van, 1999, mentioned at the end of the audiobook, a little biography, making a story out of the story, now I feel satisfied, satisfied there was no explanation, not knowing the others, always broken up, bathroom or muffin, we can’t experience it as a framed story, jump back in time, circle back to the table, a TV show, Haven, an FBI agent, relationships, she has a relationship in this book, somewhere in Ohio, leaning up against a garbage can, a little essay by Brian Aldiss, what sticks in your memory from science fiction stories, inspire you later, the example of a mad robot on the Moon firing into the void, not a powerful enough image, he’s a blank slate, emotion, empathy, whatever, before they knew the story from the widow, in 20 years, a vague impression, sounds familiar, short, bought the book at an airport, these old guys, a young woman, sitting on the beach looking out at sea, the new cover has that, looking at the corpse, a girl with the tape recorder, Glen Orbik, nothing to do with the book, really, Holly, simply written, for the Hollywood Reporter, a familiar King protagonist, September 9, 2023, Stephen Colbert, latest book, quickly shot to number one, 2014’s Mr. Mercedes, If It Bleeds, Finders Keepers, $30, just $19 right now, on audiobook, narrated by King, The Gunslinger, online for free!, lit window, silhouetted windows, by today’s standards, an improvement over that, in the 1990s, 80s are great, Scribener’s reissuing, The Institute, Rolling Stone, I like her so much, go on with, what she was up to, supposed to be a walk on character, stole my heart, the supernatural realm, dealing with covid, covid-denier mom, eventually succumbing to the disease, wear a mask, get your vaccination that doesn’t work, mom, a time capsule, devour, emdash, all the familiar trappings, covid books, I’m not going to read that, unimaginably deprived, the book’s description, summon all her formidable, professors, the shopping section, to bookmark it, crime fiction roundup, I’m reading a Stephen King now, of course he’s up to this, very well written, King likes Gibney, 15 hours, Evan is looking forward to it, Fairy Tale was illustrated throughout, Gabriel Ba, yeah, yelling at Evan, how can you stand this shitlib?!, build up a whole narrative, fully embrace how awesome, as a thinker, his essays, his fiction writing, not extraordinary, Lester Del Rey hits the buttons, build a robot lady in their basement, what happens if humans uplift dogs and monkeys, character constructor, limited ideas, stepping on his dick, the lone gunman theory, he’s a good boy, he has to, the sex scenes for Cora, Vaush is gonna misinterpret, free publicity by denouncing it, why does Cora read The Guardian so much?, triggered, the news is so fuckin shitty, translate them, nothing Jesse needs to know about, a few episodes, didn’t need to think about it at all, license Stephen King something, like Foundation, getting sued by King, how many ongoing TV series, Castle Rock, the good one, not the quality, the sheer number, Netflix tv shows and Netflix movies never have sex scenes, foreign language, an American company, Jessica Jones had sex scenes, boobs?, Oppenheimer, HBO, Cinemax, in the 1990s, slightly less than pornography, sex in them just to have sex in it, titillation while watching a murder mystery, random sex scenes rammed in, Outlander, Foundation sex scene, dirty limericks, well shot, unAsimovian, how would Asimov take it?, Janet Asimov, Terminus is destroyed, ruined it for her, a symbol of the whole series, we’re destroying Asimov, taking Asimov back from Asimov, the format, interesting idea, you don’t have to watch it, Cora has made herself into a fan writer of this sort of shit, Terence is a glutton, Terence hates himself, Wheel Of Time is better, lowest common denominator, bad crime dramas, some SFF stuff, Star Trek, The X-Files, 30th anniversary, nothing to watch, interestingly quaint, corrupt but not in the way it really is, aliens, skeptical of the government, the official policy is aliens exist now, when are you gonna release the videos, space force, Time For My Stories (Chapo Trap House), peak of the American Empire, anxiety of decline, The Sopranos, plagued, watch old movies, watch Mission: Impossible original TV series, CIA competence niceness, overthrow their elections, not actual agents, very good competent, actor, strongman, electronics experts, model, patriotism, out to help people, works, well made, the music, the editing, cliffhanger stuff, they don’t get what Mission Impossible is, Miracle Mile (1988), Trombone nerd, WWIII, Los Angeles, Tangerine Dream cinematic universe, westerns, Jesse gives Terence too much homework, The Last Run (1971), car chase, working class detective, weird today, still really good, dutch without subtitles, Tangerine Dream, striking, online somewhere, William Friedkin died, in with the news, The Exorcist (1973), Sorcerer (1977), The Wages Of Fear (1953), bluesky invite, Sopranos memes, no use for it yet, good meme, 1977, releasing his movie against Star Wars, we’re gonna wipe the floor with that shit, I was still right, The Mandalorian, trapped in South America, stuck in the jungle with no money, the dynamite has gone by, very very slowly, fuckin Amazing, almost wordless, the name of the truck, don’t the French love Friedkin?, a French film star, a huge hit in Cannes?, be your boyfriend from highschool, jungle vs. desert, very international, Steve McQueen, Roy Scheider Ally McGraw, Dominican Republic, popular holiday destination, not very American at all, Austrian actor, really really good, science fiction, fantasy, not a wink of fantasy, we’re done, put the book in the mail, Ill Met In Lankhmar, Evan is going to send the audio, in the original French, Arabic through Greek, own private language, what we all do, whatever language we are tweeting about, good discussion.

The Colorado Kid - ILLUSTRATED by Glen Orbik

The Colorado Kid by Stephen King

The Colorado Kid - ILLUSTRATED

The Colorado Kid - ILLUSTRATED edition

The Colorado Kid - ILLUSTRATED

The Colorado Kid - ILLUSTRATED

The Colorado Kid - ILLUSTRATED

The Colorado Kid - ILLUSTRATED

Posted by Jesse WillisBecome a Patron!

The SFFaudio Podcast #776 – READALONG: God Save The Mark by Donald E. Westlake

The SFFaudio PodcastThe SFFaudio Podcast #776 – Jesse, Maissa Bessada, Evan Lampe, Will Emmons, and Cora Buhlert talk about God Save The Mark by Donald E. Westlake

Talked about on today’s show:
1967, pretty sure I haven’t read this before, just assumed, “nephew novels”, explicitly a nephew, second great uncle nephew, saying things in contradiction of the rules, the quiz for you: where does the title come from?, from Shakespeare, a marks as pointed out, a conman wants to con, the nurse in Romeo and Juliet, what she is saying, please forgive me, I hesitate to say, the death of Tybalt, he’s got a hole in him now, during a midwifery session, a “birthmark”, birthmarks are defects, it needs to be bless so as to avoid cursing the child, subtle things here and there, incapable of resisting talking about literary stuff, research for work, a lot of jokes that are not obvious, well over half a century later, what does he do for fun?, makes crossword puzzles, particularly proud of, the answer is frost, Robert Frost, Oliver Wyman’s great narration, the great, wait a second, dropping these things all the time, red herrings, a murder mystery, some of them are just for fun, a joy ride, a lot of fun, a theory 3 hours in, possibly wrong but possibly right, a question, what was in the oven other than naugahyde, the bible!, a vital clue, just another scam, a madcap movie from the 60s (or 1979), a great cartoon, a likeable narrator, like a breeze eating it, a weird mixed metaphor, a humour to it that is delightful, shouldn’t we be frustrated with him, how hapless he was, a crime novel, Mickey Spillane, this cac thing, you’re not going to end the book this way, Jesse was conned, too cynical to believe in CAC, CAC is shit, very cynical about government, the one Donald Westlake thing, Jesse will go down in history for, insurance, complete coverage, the character stand-in, independent research, crime and cons, South America, one with Lawrence Block, sex book, where they end up going, like a badman, from the New York Times, a pot-belly, he’s the character, Maissa’s theory about this whole book, on the phone with Wilkins and Grant, ok, he can’t be this, this whole book is a con, this guy is a conman, he didn’t, but then at the very end, he gets together with Gertie, Westlake is the conman, it’s his con now, on Discord, 2010, a chameleon, his main hapless guy voice, sounded familiar, screen time, the murderer, the elevator operator, it was Christopher Walken, a black man, train conductor, very funny stuff, Karen and Gertie, great characters, the doctor, slight of hand over and over and over, very cartoonish, Wile E. Coyote, we’re kinda lucky, the main character was gonna be played by Bill Cosby, Cora never liked him, how wholesome does it look now?, comedy chops, creepy actors, Woody Allen, very New York, the right stature, Hugh Grant, too handsome, it coudn’t be set in London, New York of the sixties, relistening to the beginning, a signature Westlakism: the hands, a fun prop, the shrimp on the folk, who put this shrimp on my fork?, the ink-stained wretch, such a Paul book, the book is hilarious, with airpower, he utterly conquered the Gauls with airpower, Fred thinking maybe I should give him the money, self publishing to start up, the vanity was another scam, everybody was scamming everybody, scammed her bunko squad boyfriend, he’s never going to divorce his wife, you know what they say about the staff of life, a sex book, Gertie: the body secular, the Artillery Club, she’s a bombshell, you haven’t tried her mayonnaise yet, the Edgar is the Nebula for crime writers, an Ira Levin book, Rosemary’s Baby, once you’re in the club you’re in the club, which is a better book, they’re so different, this is a comedy book that’s a crime murder mystery conartist book, the formula for Burglars Can’t Be Choosers, a winning recipe, our hero, he stole that bicycle, the bicycle chase, back pedal brakes, the bicycle stopped on a dime and gave 4 cents change, he’s got such good control over the reader, there isn’t a misstep, his agenda is there but so subtle, such people are everywhere and what can you do?, do you’re best, probably won’t, 100%, you’ve inherited money, email, casting a much wider net, Clifford, COD roommate, a responsibility, once they’re in the hallway, not answer the door, not have cash on hand, this is fuckin terrible, there are people in need, to scam you, it’s called The Red Cross, Haiti Relief, that’s the Red Cross, massive giant agencies are there to scam, a homeless person on the street, it’s really everywhere, you can’t imagine doing that yourself, con little old ladies out of money, you think of them as marks, it’s not like you’re hurting them, very different from mugging, kidnapping, he’s hit a real target, con operations, making a valuable point, everybody’s a scammer, half-con-man himself, a big bushy black mustache, he’d be a criminal if he wasn’t a cop, confess, the homicide duo, we are manipulating into thinking they are corrupt, caricatures characters, confidence man, “grifter” on twitter, a superhero, WILDCATS, based on the Jim Thompson novel, The Grifters, a hard movie, Angelica Huston is John Cusak’s mom, you wanna go where you’ve been, Annette Bening, Grosse Pointe Blank (1997), J.T. Walsh, beat’s Angelica Houston with a bag of oranges, this is a cozy, Agatha Christie but funny, flip it, brutal horrible, incest but mean, in smut novels, he goes into a smut shop, three guys standing around a table in the back room, anatomically improbably photos, a movie rather than a serial, an animated version, too far, the soundscape, boings, wheeep, full of sound effects, bedsprings, he’s so good, the ending, fixing it, not getting together with Karen, getting together with Gertie, an interesting funny and silly promising ending, gullible, she get’s the romance of the situation, she doesn’t need a husband if she doesn’t want one, Greenwich Village, bongo player, Brownstone houses, if the two incidents of street groups of kids together, indeterminate gender, all talking about different things, a comment and a commentary, the judgement is minimal, the homosexuals, I knew what gender they were but they didn’t know, altered books for much less, altered German children’s books, deleted a book from the series, WWI, changed the setting, Eastern Prussia or Silesia, Russia, Poland, Hanover instead of Leipzig, we’re safe, Aunt Gisela, early 20th century language, really really offensive term, not so bad N word, Pippi Longstocking, he was the king of the negros, a South Seas king, Ian Fleming, Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang, sexually harassing our hero, drag queens or something, high school kids, the price of sandwiches, 67, pre-Watergate, birth control pill, the sexual revolution, a time capsule, not just an entertaining book, it doesn’t make any sense to change, reading it in 2023, this other quality, a really fun book, in a sense riding, he’s a little smarter than Jesse, his life, through the narrator’s mind, everyone is a con-artist except for him, Times Square, largely commercial, red light district, Amsterdam, in the middle of the city center, Antwerp, a good sense of it, Westlake and Block, what it is like to walk through these street, weird beards, Samuel Delany’s book about Times Square, turned it into Disneyland, corporatized, a rainbow sidewalk crossing, a congregation place for weirdos, a lot of gays, weird poets, Reichstag, rainbow and Ukrainian flags, irritating, the New York Post, a political reason for it, off topic, Murray Bookchin, Liptick Traces, 60s groups and The Sex Pistols, the dominance of capital in cities, cities less and less livable, that’s people’s jobs, the mafia was people’s jobs, do people feel bad, take their shower and get on the phones, horrible things at their jobs, non-violent, taking money that the people don’t need, books about con-games, very interesting, the tools that they have, words, to convince people to give people freely something, The Sting (1973), Robert Redford, Better Call Saul, the fifty was a real and the 100 was a fake, a Rolex, a lawyer too, behind the psychology of it, Saul is childless, the family, he says he’s doing it for his family, being prideful and being a man, he’s smart and they’re dumb, it’s fun to do this scam, she loves it, it’s too addictive, it does hurt people, so cool to have that much power, ads for Ukraine on B.C. Ferries, what the fuck are were doing?, all the politicians are wearing Insane Clown Posse makeup, Insane Clown President [by Matt Taibbi] a bottom up group, Detroit guys, drinking pop, religious beliefs, tattoos, singing, they like their girlfriends, guys dressed in business suits with the face makeup, Lord Buckethead, Anarchist Pogo Party, “work is shit”, a serious critique vs. seriously running to win, Rhinoceros Party, Reaganomics, Republican in name only, stepped out of a time machine from 1967, it would look as stark, LBJ wore a suit, these guys wore a suit, the politics in here, the senator who was a real senator, not offending anybody, step lightly with the politics, everyone agrees that senators are corrupt, the Senator from Coca-Cola, campaign contributions, buy my son’s paintings, taking the frame on this, is this a political book?, he does do politics in his books, no solution other than being aware of it, politicians are products of their material conditions, Gertie’s political stance, cynicism, no idea of collective action, if Jesse was Will, terrible politicians, Germany’s chancellor, War Measures Act, we gotta stop authoritarianism, literal bombs going off and foreign ministers being kidnapped, we got it bad up here, there’s this guy in the mountains of Arkansas who can teach me some skills, healthcare, barring collective action that’s going to work, infiltrated, to not feel so horrible all the time, We Own This City, David Simon, gun task-force, the institution is so corrupt, a pessimistic cynical look, straight up robbing people, top to bottom corruption, plainclothes units, we gotta stop crime, every David Simon story is the same one, this is really rough what can you do, The Wire, drug enforcement free zone, reduced deaths, we’re not as completely corrupt here (in Canada), universal programs, if you’re as cynical as Donald E. Westlake, people can equate cynicism with being depressed or blackpilled, stoicism, expect pain, how do you deal with that pain, maintenance of your individuality, not a call to action, not a whole confection, political observations, challenging, a very Westlakian point of view to have, a very American take, and church leaders, Tommy Douglas, weird Christians in the prairies, Christian values, the Catholic church, kill the priests, Central America, in the DNA of this kind of crime fiction, The Continental Op, essentially a Pinkerton, Raymond Chandler, Ross MacDonald, the solution is to drink, no call to action, have enough grifts happen to you in the course of five minutes, when you’re in the Black Iron Prison, don’t you remember promising me that letter in camp, a way to get money, it could be really sad, conning me out of my shoelaces, I waited, finally I’ve decided, I’ve got an uncle who is a judge, this stuff actually happens, kids can’t make promises, this is all silly, a philanderer of the greatest kind, you can’t enforce a contract on a child, an expiry date on these letters, high school reunion, when Cora was 13, former fiances, are they millionaires now?, oh yeah, I have leverage now, lottery winners, the lottery is a scam, a tax on the stupid, quite poor, thousand marks, save the money a little bit, conpeople prey on old people, grandmothers scammed, this is your grandson, I’m in jail, twice, in the past five years, grandchild scam, court translations, a lot of money, somewhere in Africa, the really horrible thing, the Nigerian Prince scam, as soon as email became a thing, used to do with letters, because it’s free, there is a scammer who sells scam kits to people desperate for money, lower themselves, take money from grandmothers, sold a list of people to call, a bad list, the scammers scam themselves, buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo, long cons, short con, the phonecall from the lawyer wasn’t a con, long cons are relatively rare, House Of Games, a David Mamet movies, The Spanish Prisoner (1997), Steve Martin, Rebecca Pidgeon, FTX, bitcoin investing company, biggest donor to the Democratic party, they can’t arrest him, in reality long cons are everywhere, they’re not elaborately planned, how long can we keep these balls in the air?, develop into actual countries, how the Hudson’s Bay Company?, Queen: how much do I get?, an investor group, the profits are so big, spanning a continent, the relationship between long cons and history, the most famous one would be the Netherlands Tulip frenzy, Beanie Babies, Magic the Gathering cards, people don’t want to know who gets hurt by their Wall Street investments, by not looking into it, Bernie Madoff, William H. Macy and his wife were put on trial for a university scam, you have to not see how the game is played, scammed too many people, as soon as you start researching it, am I gonna outsource my trust to these people, constantly question is the only way, such dire situation, their critical faculties, and they have savings, lack social contact, loneliness, a friend wants me to invest in his business, total scammer, I hate this guy, traumatic for Cora, trying to sink a ship he was supposed to sell, an old friend, sign on for a six month contract to do all Westlake in future, this book was a long con in and of itself, the murder of the uncle, we all got conned, happy to have gone for the ride, Evan’s dad outsmarted a con-artist recently, the gift card thing, they gave up, super common, Chinese, what the scam is, you’re Chinese there’s a problem, a tenuous situation somehow, as an immigrant who doesn’t speak English, elderly Chinese woman at home, house sitting, solve this using this credit card, all automated, why email is so broken, since calling, Skype sexy ones (maybe not a scam?), catfished, automated spam calls, very profitable, so persistent a problem, Will’s scammy world, Kentuckyian scams, strange text messages, Rhode Island, selling property, have you sold your house yet?, strange sexy Whats App texts, emojis were racy, heart emojis, sad story, people want to be loved, lived in public housing, this woman in the Philippines, is it a scam if providing emotional comfort over the internet, both people can sell it on both ends that way, after he died, online girlfriends, older people who are vulnerable, directly addressing Will with a name that is not his own, grifter, that guy is just a grifter, this guy wrote a book, crowdfunded the book, didn’t write the book, didn’t sell the book, Spare, why do I even care about this idiot, people who care about royals, curious, the Barbie thing, it’s pretty good, you can fake that interest, flexing and exerting power, extract publisher by being a legislator, merger, when he’s sitting down to fake write the book, I killed 29 guys in Afghanistan, the ghost writer, Taliban killed themselves out of despair, 25 enemy fighters, during 2 tours in Helmand, you can hear the ghost writer in the room, that’s a scam, buying an actual book they actually receive, drugstores, oh my sad life, rags to riches, he sold his book at his drugstores, shoved into your face, H.P. Lovecraft, birthday today, 7 months now when people are listening to it, scammed by August Derleth, he’s not a liar, shade the truth, opposite of a scammer, desperate for money, starts a business with Frank Belknap Long, Adolphe De Castro, offended, Weird Tales wasn’t paying, slowly, not on time, later, half, if you’re the editor of Weird Tales, Hugo Gernsback, the company doesn’t have the money, a compromised person, didn’t want to move to Chicago, you kind of have to be a scammer to work through this horrible capitalist system we have, a nobleness in the way Westlake handles this stuff, I didn’t lie to people, gave them some entertainment, his son Paul is working hard on his website, the son, he’s the only one who was doing something for the estate, the next six months of Westlake, the Donald Westlake podcast, every week twice a week, chronologically, too fun to read, not enough meaty material, when you read Heinlein, this formula works, doesn’t make for dense meaty material, a grand unified theory of Westlake?, after Evan unmutes himself, numbered episodes, book club, about Robert E. Howard too, Lovecraft, Stephen King at 100 pages at a time, so thick, other American science fiction writers, Asimov isn’t very American, Philip K. Dick is a weirdo and also an American, Joe Haldeman is American but not very American, he’s a good writer, Cora held the door open for him, Evan’s prejudice for America is wrong, Evan has to wrestle with this country he’s not in, a flux, a change, class awareness, the nature of the class, more static in British lit, race and slavery, women’s lib by Americans is great, those groups, Clark Ashton Smith is too literary, serious political thought, Howard can be super-political, a great adventure story, stylist, very rich, The Black Diamonds is very easy to read, get behind some sex book, just the Westlake Smut podcast, fun and funny, vintage sex books, John Lange’s The Venom Business, the sex makes it worse not better, funny silly sex books, a serious book, Harold Robbins, Peyton Place, gossip, nobody reads it anymore these days, weirdos interested in old books, finding out what books were shit, go to Abebooks, the most famous book of 1970, an obscure book, all over every used bookstore, Swedish family saga, no one can even read this stuff these days, romance novels lose their value instantaneously, 2 for $1, disposable in the same way a pulp used to be, hardcovers, 8 hours felt like 4, he’s gonna run out of space, a perfectly executed thing for what it is, it’s perfect, spot on, a mater professional writer, not clouded, just pure, so distinctive with the hands, that’s pure Westlake right there, their hands, their voice, so good, sold on Westlake, putting my money on Westlake, Bothers Keepers, monks trying to save their monastery, Call Me A Cab, thrift shop Hard Case Crime, asleep yesterday, infinite amount of time to read, Christa Faust’s book, in a year or so, the Norton Anthology of American Literature, deep dive into literature in the historical and material context of that period, 1770-1780, The Turn Of The Screw, The Great Gatsby, N.K. Jemisin and Ursula K. Le Guin, Hawthorne vs. Edgar Allan Poe, Young Goodman Brown, The Minister’s Black Veil, The House Of The Seven Gables, drill down on The Gold Bug, The Black Cat is super-American, bogged down, something more scripted, Henry David Thoreau, feed Cora’s father, material realities of America, big picture, scripted, a leftist a Marxist, Caleb Maupin, got in trouble for spanking, an American nationalist, a Christian communist, borderline MAGA communist (whatever that’s supposed to be), a video about Michael Crichton, State Of Fear, when books are taboo it makes Jesse want to read them, global warming is going to destroy us all, work hard play hard regular liberalism, something we need to degrowth with, never means closing military bases, you gotta not have babies, you gotta eat these bugs, Naomi Klein, do a survey, do your carpets need cleaning?, reducing our greenhouse emissions, rebuild, dismantling the military, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate, the democrats are not on the left, that guy’s Right, ok whatever, she say’s shes a socialist, so is Bernie Sanders, a co-person, he reads books, he’s a tankie, sounds like a slur, a well deserved slur, what defines somebody as a fuckface?, leftist circles, expressing support for one party communist regimes, fascism, Nazi, although Zelenskyy has Nazis all over and around him, he doesn’t have the sonnenrad around his face, doing the sieg heil, “white power” on the backs of her legs, doing the salute, the standard anarchist position, a tension, some North Korean Instagram girl’s account is deleted, this is wrong, not all starving to death all the time, humanizing them, should North Korean model be embraced, Jesse doesn’t believe in Canada, the western powers never left, China’s doing its best to make the world more Chinese, talk to local conditions, arguments are in the canon, to talk about socialism, mmmm Jack London, friends with the @ sign of library of America, Sam Glanzman, The Law Of Life by Jack London, he bought story ideas from people, he’s doing Jack London, North-West Romances, Jack London is writing literature, ok there’s a prospector, western civilization, what it is to be indigenous, LibriVox, Louis L’amour, what it means to be American, class struggle, cattle baron vs. small proprietors, Swag, The Big Bounce, swag bag full of cash, that was a punch and I didn’t see that coming, 3:10 To Yuma, late in the Western game, people in the middle, Max Brand, they’re the Heinlein and Clarke and Asimov of American Westerns, Markie Post, Glitz, lady falling from a high window in her underwear, Justified, 85 novel, serial rapist, Jimmy Smitts, psycho-mama-boy, beautiful Peurto Rican hooker, A.C. dazzle, random Elmore Leonard plot with a movie, Out Of Sight, never done an Elmore Leonard, don’t read Tishomingo Blues, Pronto, Ezra Pound stories, retiring to Italy, Peter Falk, Riding The Rap, Jennifer Lopez and the E.R. guy who lives on Lake Como, Out Of Sight (1998), mutual attraction, kinda or really sexy, Luis Guzman, Don Cheadle, Albert Brooks, Teddy Roosevelt, the Cuba war, George Guidall narration, The Moonshine War, The Sopranos, hilarious, David Simon back to back, The Plot Against America, the Philip Roth novel, Charles Lindberg becomes president, that 1940-42 period, the Jewish community, a selling feature?, the response of the Jewish community would have had, generational stuff, Ed Burns, out of the HBO loop, All The Way, Lyndon Johnson, Bryan Cranston, shitting on the toilet scene, jumbo didn’t make an appearance, got a lot of tail, more killed than JFK, he didn’t get Marilyn, presidents were way hornier, FDR, she was gay, open marriage, very modern, religious stuff, Reagan, Nancy, maybe not even her, Jeb, The Revengers (1972), we’re talking Hollywood mainstream film, Tarantino movies, Jackie Brown (1997), Pam Grier movies, Sheba Baby (1975), Coffy (1973), the ketchup and mustard and thing, Jesse’s seen all the big westerns, William Holden, The Seventh Dawn, quite quite good, Malaysian war of independence against the evil British, reverse surprise, symmetry, a rip-off, The Wild Bunch (1969), The Magnificent Seven (1960), The Dirty Dozen (1967), you like what they do, a revenge movie, it’s simple, he’s got principles, the criminals don’t, Jesse likes westerns, The Shootist (1976), the end of the West, the greatest gunslinger ever is now dying of cancer, set in 1901, electricity, The Grey Fox (1982), Ron Howard, Scatman Crothers, reserving judgement, an upcoming hurdle, if the cancer just takes its course, Woody Strode, a football player he became a movie star, super-teacher of the year, does it come with money?, a certificate, no promotion, headcanon, not incompetent enough to be promoted, not lackey enough, spewing all over AI, interesting, gonna fuck up a lot of people’s businesses, a book emote, as in read a fuckin book, Evan move, enhancing the library, awesome social studies library, bought em all, endless budget, a decent library, the key to the library, just read some books, the whole point, the whole system has been gamified, the whole reason is because they have to, read a little bit, how’m I gonna get my kid into this school?, things students can and can’t use AI for, we have to prepare them for the future, teach them how to write prompts, he’s trying to help the kids cheat, you’re trying to help the kids learn, pirouette around it, guilty until proven innocent, here’s how we can improve your teaching, how to use AI, embarrassing to read, email, using chatGPT as an educator, a whole paragraph prompt, a mini assessment, submit, could you guide me with a prompt?, he thinks he’s being helpful, he’s trying to do his job, how to cheat through their classes, everybody’s in on this scam and you’re refuse, we’re here to make money of the requirement by law, get with the program, that’s your job, you wanna play baseball because you love the game, runs batted in business, now everyone can moneyball, [Moneyball (2011)] the worst team in baseball, it can’t be stopped, sabermetrics, is the baseball bat the saber?, SABR, this dude who was a doorman, Bill James, kept stats, we’re making choices about players wrong, Wayne Gretzky, stadium, rink, new stats, dieting, Zero Cool, Houston, Houston, Do You Read?, Colorado Kid, he’s a congressional medal honor winner from the Civil War, any senator can nominate, son seems fine, goes out for some reason, massacred his dog, evil comancheros, buys six slaves, tie em up, outfitted, they all turn on him, they get to talking, he’s his dad, he has blue eyes, the cavalry, one young officer, Mexican kid, claims William Holden is his dad, structural things, really well written, makes a big difference, High Plains Drifter (1973), a Clint Eastwood one, out of Spaghetti Westerns, December death hoax, yet another example of fake news, still alive, took his money and started making his own movies, Malpaso, mayor of Carmel, California, two spouses and three domestic partners, at least 8 children, great film actor, good film director, great on screen, not all westerns, Cry Macho (2021), they didn’t de-age him, action scenes, a boy and his rooster, the pirate area, too much Mission: Impossible, always trying to overthrow governments in Mexicos or Easters Blocks, romanticizing, minimizing harms, different from the movies where it’s some vague internal threat, commercial for the planet, rogue Russian nukes, trying to release in China, The Peacemaker, John Cena and Jackie Chan, plays Splinter, in Iraq?, John Cena lives there, mercenaries from China?, white guy living in a small village in Iraq, vague badguys, John Cena’s brother involved with other mercenaries, tryna not offend anybody, buses full of people, if you increase the number of people in danger you make the , two bums fighting over $10, nobody can empathize with $10, big stakes, structure, it’s fun, writing exercise, made it part of Jesse’s job, be like Jonathan and get paid by wealthy old ladies who worked in Hollywood, a ghost writer, prurient, Sunset Boulevard (1950), 36 years and not have seen…, William Holden!, dude!, dude!, Billy Wilder, The Major And The Minor (1942), Five Graves To Cairo (1943), woke shame, film shame, Double Indemnity (1942), Raymond Chandler, Barbara Stanwyck in a wig, Edward G. Robinson, oh my gods!, Soylent Green (1973), I haven’t seen Soylent Green!, I don’t even see how ironic this is!, while scraping you off the pavement, alcoholic movie, a black comedy, real life old time silent film movie guy, that trope, ghost writer, a retainer, fun, you only have to please the one customer, worried about perception, being a ghost writer, under an NDA, talk about everything, Jesse envies Will, watch some good movies because it spoils you for bad movies, better and better caffeine, a tolerance for heroin, searching for a higher high, any old shit that has animation, appreciate genre stuff, I heard about this Russian movie called Come And See (1985), I can see why they said that about this, Spaghetti Western, weird euro-trash with sweaty Spaniards and Frenchmen and the occasional American, Lee Van Cleef, great eyebrows and then he’s balding, actors like Lee Van Cleef, a karate movie with Bruce Lee, kun fu movies, John Saxon, you’ve seen his face, man with eyebrows, then he goes bald, sad story, even when he was bald, John Woo movies, he was so hot in Hong Kong, cheesy shit, when he does it in Hong Kong, pure shit, Chow Yun Fat is Humphrey Bogart but Chinese, too ohs, Face/Off, Mission Impossible 2, The Killer (1989), Chinese laserdiscs, corny and bad, so handsome of screen, reinvents techniques, churches and doves, Hard Target (1993) with Jean-Claude Van Dame, Christianity, doves are very deep, this is what a handsome man does on screen, you just fall in love with him and melt on the floor, shoot guns at each other, drive cars around Hong Kong, archive.org, how good for how low trash, A Better Tomorrow (1986), subs are the way to go, dubbing is not the way to go, just so charismatic on screen, it was a huge deal before the changeover, hardcoded English subs, cast media with chromecast, in the TV buying business, the ideal is you get a dumb tv, Nvidia Shield, google is better right now, Fire TV is the second best, Roku is eating everybody’s lunch, ability to do anything, a thumbdrive hole (a USB hole), a file explorer program, VLC, hook a laptop up, more wires, Playstation 3, Nintendo Switch, from ’99, a nostalgia thing for Meg, Final Fantasy, SquareEnix, zaniness, gunsword, computer games were more forgiving for poor people, computer games were cheaper, a 3DO, 1993, Road Rash for 3DO, a Wii, competitive Tetris, so ignorant, not enough time, Red Dead Redemption, Grand Theft Auto on horses, shooting people while on the stagecoach, shooting is the default, RPGs, isometric, when Doom hit, everything turned into a first person shooter, can see the appeal, go over to somebody and ask them about their day, criminals over there, a life simulator, a quest where you have to stop a stampede, westerns are fun, pretty dedicated to PUBG, guy in Senegal, a good chat about being colonized, the French are fuckers, a lot of Americans, generally sad and smoking weed all the time, such is the state of the situation, large part a lot of people are opting out, playing games all the time, not a random sampling, Chinese guys, weird ideas, strategy, how dumb people are, all very safe, they’re not going to ask you for money, the strategy of the game, chunks, there’s no natural way to get off of Red Dead Redemption, more self-discipline, Paul plays a lot of games like Age Of Wonders, Civilization, Civ is like crack, why are you doing it again?, rule a fantasy realm of your own design, a tabletop RPG about being a cowboy, Cowboys and Cattlebarons, Cowpokes, then you get girls, Blades In The Dark, a weird west mod, sorcerers in my Ranch Romances, Indians and iron horses, some big medicine from the Piute, the module is the big eastern white faces say they’re going to give our land to their settlers, how many scalps are we gonna collect?, turn them against their evil government, Mormon Utah, Dogs In The Vineyard, DMd for students, kinda weird as adults, kinda immature, I’m an elf, you’re a guy who works at the video rental store, it was fun tho, that’s really sad, autistic or what, they got the problems Jesse doesn’t need more of in his life, a module of Edgar Allan Poe Dungeons And Dragons, they do their best, they don’t know it’s a dungeon hack, you have a phone with a flashlight, a troll, owls, ghouls, a house with a big crack in it, everybody should make their own rules, d20, damage points and rolling up stats, you forgot your glasses, not a normal roleplaying game, I get in the boat, roll D20, sorry you drowned, a big outlet, cool ideas, Paul’s life is a lot of that, a good hobby, staying out of the casino and not doing too many cracks, filling time before you die, giving away your money you don’t think you earned, baccarat, you buy the shoe, James Bond, he’s not pulling the lever on the one armed bandit, the saddest movie ever, a sexy lady across the one armed bandit from him, betting against the bad guy, a collection of cards, like blackjack, there is no dealer, they win all ties, a bidding round, there is a minimal amount of skill involved in 21 or blackjack, poker, playing against a particular player acting like the house, sad and pathetic, quickly lost $75, there’s no person you’re giving your money to, socializing, roulette, craps, luck involved, sad kinda socialness, happiness from them, it made a lot of noise, a lonely person less unhappy for a moment, something to do with your friends who don’t read books, evil because of what it does, smoke dope all day while playing games all day to escape their terrible life, Jesse has killed Will, accidentally muted himself, try to DM a role playing game in a western setting, make up a shopping list of things for people to buy with their coins, pick a movie you like, you’re family has been slaughtered, in order to get your revenge, you are a convicted criminal of rape of 17 women all over the age of sixty, and yet you’re not gay, that’s a heavy backstory, you want redemption, gets shot, gets redemption, redeemed in the end, ranch romances, a bordello instead of a tavern, a cathouse, Klondike goldrush, claim jumpers, lots of opportunities to freeze to death, You Are A Wolf, not enough about being a deerchild, about philosophy, how weird people were a long time ago, Hoboes & Harlots, pulp style painting, everbone is knocking about, converted burlap sack full of, used garters suitable for sniffin, a fake award, achievement in gaming, what modules will be like, tutoring 2 days a week, 1 class a week, 4 classes a week, 3 hours is fine, Jesse loves his job, would still do it if not being paid, showin up, I’m in, stone soup, a snip of parsnip, looking for sex and food, run that for your students, 7 to 18, a broad range of South Koreans, east and west and north Koreans, Dok Do Koreans, PyongYang Koreans, a very interesting history, the United States is very very bad, the Soviets and the Chinese, not set up a country there, very bad in Asia?, yes, maybe the Japanese were worse, numbers matter, did you steal?, did you lie?, how many did you kill?, not caused by communists, caused by imperialists, make the case the soviets were expanding their empire, look at the geography of it, assisting, freedom from foreign rulership, being in the way of larger nations, very aggressively European for an Asian country, militaristic, we’re gonna do the Euro thing in Asia, what’s the United States doing there?, not geographically adjacent, foreign adventurism, what was Canada doing there?, best friend to the big bad bully, pleased with her farming, your teaching license has expired, still thinking about it, who’s going to take care of your animals when you’re away teaching, she still wants to have the paperwork, she enjoyed being a teacher, sister still teaching?, she seems to have money, something like a job, this problem with paying for things, the thing to do is to have a job, get apprenticed by an Appalachian back to the woods herbalist, limousine from the airport to the hotel, everything’s fine, what’s going on in the community, enlightening, the guy looks like a druid or a wizard, lived off grid for 50 years, Chinese gardens, tinctures of herbs, if you’re conspiracy minded, how the AMA defeated herbalists, it happened, herbalism stuff, grows his own food, orders seeds, mailing away for seeds, still work you just don’t get paid, it is a lot of work, your work is based on what you need rather than what you need money for, a job that’s not real, only things you really need, a lot of the work that’s going around, a nursing home inspector, needs to be done, a shortage of nursing home inspectors, anti-psychotics, the long and short of it, random inspections in the middle of the night when you’re awake, nursing homes are kind of unfair, how scared I should be about ending up in a nursing home, better in British Columbia than Kentucky, a guy who was trying to get out, why he shouldn’t be getting out, his body is good but his brain is bad, whereas this druid guy, 80 year old man’s body, more of a wizard’s staff, like RFK Jr., human growth hormone, Marianne Williamson, her new book’s out, good “values”, you have to know what the scam is in order to not be scammed, that’s no way to get the right answers to things, considering how fuckin dumb Trump is, goes with his gut, they’re scammers like movies, shirtless pushups go viral, 69, unflattering on purpose, Curb Your Enthusiasm wife, used to be a heroin addict, being RFK’s child, my dad was assassinated by the government, I’m a rich boy, become a lawyer like he said he did, Hunter Biden has really struggled in life, having a liar for a dad, don’t you listen to the president, listen, fat!, I write all my own speeches, speaking truth to power, interviewed on Jimmy Dore, totally unprepared, Hillary wants war, she’d get tricked into doing it, the biggest of all time?, how they sold it to him, a tiny little thing, a tiny little thing Biden making a North Korea deal, move the troops out, let the South Koreans work it out, get assassinated along the way, he likes bad ideas, nobody has done it before?, it’s unprecedented, you’re speaking my language, she says nice things, a poetess, a self-help guru more than anything, what’s her background, twang, New England private school accent, how she got on the stage at all, born in Houston, conservative Judaism, author, teacher, politician activist, theater and philosophy in California, wasted decade, lived in a geodesic dome, live in a pyramid too?, a cabaret singer, distracted by bad boys and good dope, existential despair, lost soul, A Course In Miracles, a great sweeper of things aside, torches and pitchforks, we’re gonna mediate our way to health, everybody gets free meditation, facebook live.

God Save The Mark by Donald E. Westlake

God Save The Mark by Donald E. Westlake

God Save The Mark by Donald E. Westlake

God Save The Mark by Donald E. Westlake

God Save The Mark - Cosmopolitan, May 1967

God Save The Mark by Donald E. Westlake

God Save The Mark by Donald E. Westlake - PAPERBACK

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The SFFaudio Podcast #751 – AUDIOBOOK/READALONG: Unseen—Unfeared by Francis Stevens

The SFFaudio Podcast #751 – Unseen—Unfeared by Francis Stevens – read by Mike Vendetti. This is a complete and unabridged reading of the story (48 minutes) followed by a discussion of it. Participants include Jesse, Maissa Bessada, Mike Vendetti, and Cora Buhlert.

Talked about on today’s show:
listening to and reading, People’s Favorite Magazine, Feb. 10, 1919, emdash [—], Mike’s first Francis Stevens, more than 100 year ago, the technology, so predictive, The Heads Of Cerberus, Gertrude Barrows Bennett, a married woman who married more than once, Jean Vale, they cancelled that, only one story had her real name on it, G.M. Barrows, teenager, Sunfire, getting depressed, a fantastic writer, clunky, Citadel Of Fear, so good at ideas, so early, 1904, a superhero origin story before anybody, nobody had invented superheroes yet, Zorro is later! [1919], The Scarlet Pimpernel, 1905, dual identity, so pioneering, such sexist times, Francis is a male name, abbreviated names, C.L. Moore, H.P. Lovecraft, Andre Norton, sexism came from women as well as men, women want the vote, the progressive period, time capsule, From Beyond, a little H.P. Lovecraft story, machine shows some weird shit, no waccy tobaccy, no good evidence Bobby Derie seems to have these facts at hand, published in 1934, better in technical ways, tighter, 11 pages, 47 minutes vs. 19 minutes, this is the racist story, Lovecraft’s story isn’t racist, dealing with race a lot, Lovecraft lives through it, a case of parallel thinking, explicitly called out, Micrographia, what paramecium and amoeba look like, these things are all over you, isn’t that creepy?, this story also calls out the bacteria in microscopy, deemed to be dirty, no running water, dirty because they are poor, teaching hygiene, photos with a microscope, talking about the technology, gaslamps have been out for a long time, a building without wifi today, any wifi!, 1890s they have electric bulbs, phones are standard, people didn’t upgrade, a brownstone subdivided for a whole bunch of immigrants, Cool Air, a cheap place, nice and clean, dripping fluids everywhere, these are slumlords, tons of immigrants looking for housing, strong protections for renters, farmhouse, a farmer family once lived there, large entrance hall, stuffed in refugees, 1 million Ukrainians, Turkey, countries that want cheap labour, who gets to set the immigration policy?, going to a crummy neighbourhood, the guy he’s going to visit is rich, he wants to help improve the community, keep your water clean, a progressive of the kind the main character isn’t, in a story like He, disgusting human beings, the nadir of race relations in the United States, Jim Crow is at its highest, swarthy of anykind, deemed horrible, eugenics, racism at its core, weird piece of paper from South America, one Thanksgiving, strangers, started to hit the wacky stuff, some subversive group had put marijuana into the stuffing you buy at the store, Mike is the only one who knows this, he’s racist at the beginning of the story, paranoid and high and delusional, the drug makes him super-racist, kind of fascinating, everything is disgusting, he’s wrong, the Italian guy is concerned for him, deeply racist people, they’re diseases, we’re all human, I was human too, recognizing that he’s not himself, as human as me, he’s turning it on himself, the chianti, the sour wine, undercut at the end, the opalescent paper, the classic Lovecraftian move, this amazing book, this city of ancient gods that we found in Antarctica, let’s never tell anybody about it, connections in the shipbuilding industry, Antarctica, old enough to know, still wanted to go, very very cool. Francis Stevens is so cool, The Elf-Trap, there’s this scientist, she likes scientist characters, he has a bad heart, go on vacation, Kentucky, Carcassonne, disgusting, beautiful, they’re fairies?, fall in love and then sacrifice him, disgusting and stink, beautiful and attractive and exotic, we see it both ways, a frameshift, dingy and disgusting, everything green again, chocolatey!, there’s something wrong with this, they’re all like me, crawling uop the scientist’s leg, starfish, centipedes, drink these developing fluids, backstory of the cop, it was all that wacky tabaccy, the reversal again, what is the truth of this?, “doubt is sometimes better than certainty”, this doesn’t seem like it is that deep, generally very racist, what makes the people so racist is they are certain about their beliefs, there are things we all believe that we are wrong about, if we are very strongly opinioned about those things it can make us very made to be confronted when those things turn out to not be true, it makes us upset because it hurts us, what’s going on politically, you can not have a conversation with somebody is on the other side, your certainty and their certainty, matter and antimatter, I have this problem and I don’t want it solved, environmental protestors, gentle and lenient, repent and renounce modernity, glued himself to a table, voted differently, racist uncles, free refrigerators?, far right, screechy ones on the left, death threats on the internet, fireworks, terrible things, this is the danger, blocking people, I can’t talk to you and you can’t talk to me, we need to act, new washer and dryer, certainty, is this the best price, in the face of the fact that we must act, we must doubt, really good at telling truths about some things, voted for trump or some other person, doubt is better certainty or certainty is better than doubt, vitamin d supplements, serious covid cases, terrible Nazi made a sensible proposition, water is wet, water is dry!, Trump water, train derailment, ancient Trump water, East Palestine, laws passed by the Nazis, perfectly harmless laws, industrialization, parking spaces per home, a good law, decades later, advertise abortions, anti-abortion activists, supplying power, perfectly harmless, what actually is happening in this story, is the cigar actually tainted, is this full of vinyl chloride, a religious like conversion, we’re not so bad as we all think we are, seems pretty simple, an app that allows you to see what people are thinking, a delusion, seeing evil thoughts written all over their faces, narrows his focus, a bad trip, weird membrane, were those monsters real or not?, is it a ghost story?, a real interaction, able to imagine having this conversation with Doctor Holt, does he actually see him, back and forth, what you’re about to see no mortal man has seen, I’m dead, all the world shall know, one by one they shall learn the truth and perish, double entendre, feels a little clunky, she’s really on to something, from Cuba, invariable good, not be the case, Havana, he only smoked half the cigar, still alive, Jenkins, Ralph Peeler, accused of murdering, hallucinated to suicide, or it killed him, what makes this different from other kinds of science, no longer replicable, send that to Benjamin Franklin, back and forth, that’s what science is, repeatable experiences, opalescent paper, can’t get any more of it, could have been cocaine, or had an evil curse on it, what do these two things have in common, they’re exotic, an Incan lost city, map it, they burn the paper so nobody can replicate the experience, we can all look under the microscopes and see the germs that are killing us, when Charles Darwin’s On the Origin Of Species came out, I’m not a fucking monkey, it takes decades, Breakthroughs In Science by Isaac Asimov, microphotography, a readalong, the density of the gold, Eureka Eureka!, I smell good, not me I smell good, a good bath joke, chronological, dedicated to a science teacher Mike had in high school, lower the temperature of the flame, such a good book, a very good non-fiction and science writer, Archimedes, Johann Gutenberg, Nicolaus Copernicus, William Harvey, Galileo Galilei, Anton van Leeuwenhoek, Isaac Newton, James Watt, Antoine Laurent Lavoisier, Michael Faraday, Joseph Henry, Henry Bessemer, Edward Jenner, Louis Pasteur, Gregor Johann Mendel, William Henry Perkin, Röntgen and Becquerel, Thomas Alva Edison, Paul Ehrlich, Darwin and Wallace, Marie and Pierre Curie, Albert Einstein, George Washington Carver, Irving Langmuir, Rutherford and Lawrence, Robert Hutchings Goddard, a good list, a book to do a show on, dealing with that, The White Ape [Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family], cool that my ancestors were apes, gross!, a week later, gross!, I hate mushrooms, stages of developement, individually vs. societalally, the U.S. owns at this time, Philippines, talked about it as a colony, talking about adding , fucking disgusting monkeys, still a colony, possessions, Hawaii, 1899, South American drugs, harvested and brought to the city, add to the capital, having lunch with a friend, a mistaken poisoning, just tryna live, dosed, seeing behind the veil, we can’t replicate this, the ending is to leave us in doubt, a piece of fiction, that’s interesting, putting you in a better position, it’s a fact that Hillary Clinton killed that guy, we can think better about, our disbelief instinct, the most relevant case of technology today, robots have nothing to say, no you can’t write that anymore I’m going to fix it for you, these are not the words that were written, a false sense of what happened in the past, the Roald Dahl situation, children’s books have been edited for content, books from before WWII and WWI, childhood to adulthood, all of WWI in 2 pages, why is there no WWII at all, it’s been written out, never reprinted after WWII, censorship vs. replacing the text, shifted the setting, Silesia is now Poland but used to be Germany, Breslau to Hanover, both authors died in WWII, encroaching Red Army, for Lovecraft, public domain, change the entire story and keep Lovecraft’s name, disingenuous and bad vs. owned by a monopoly, the major difference, not republishing a book is not the same as changing the words, we’re reversing that, the James Bond books, racist stuff in here, not changing Ian Fleming from what he was, why they’re doing it, change for change’s sake, can’t say fat, fundamentally doing evil because they’re lying, the painter, Norman Rockwell, this is Norman Rockwell’s painting of Obama, if Stalin wants to airbrush somebody out, I went to the beach with my friend Trotsky, the Soviet system, the copyright problem, the audiobook narrator world, offended by certain words, the consensus, if that’s what it says, that’s what you say, Huckleberry Finn without the N-word, there are words in here that are not mine, you don’t see it you don’t worry about it, people tend to fear what they don’t know, immigrants in the United States, if all the Mexicans left you’d starve to death, stealing our jobs, what’s happening in the UK, agricultural labour, people from Africa, Poles, Romanians, cheap immigrant labour, no vegetables or fruit, part of the picture, when Lovecraft is being racist, there’s a push pull, factor owners want cheap labour, I can’t live here anymore, it could be entirely domestic, a period of starvation, exporting younger sons, pushed out political malcontents, these Proud Boys need to go to Canada, distant relatives, no one here would have them, 1950s, emigrated from Italy, grandfather was a real jerk, coal mines, Italians and Irish, those people are different, 1880s, sold his daughters, that was the deal they made, Jesse’s internet went away, basically illiterate, you couldn’t fool her with numbers, different shade of skin colour, and you fear em, you think you can see these people, suddenly visible, we’ve always had black people, a lot of Italian immigration, labour immigration, nasty prejudices against the Italians, only old people are like that, obviously Polish names, the descendants of Polish workers, the silliest thing, what were your grandparents, three generations of Turkish immigrants, two million Russians, every person is a library, read all your books and get used to it, it takes a while, a generation or two and everybody’s happy, there’s microbes all over us, the universe is incredibly giant, it will bite you, was Francis Stevens racist or shedding a light on it?, yes, shining light on superstition about other people, demons and microbes, a move at the end, send it back to Hell, what’s so cool about her, very very thoughtful person, fiction stories, she’s alone, its very hard to reason alone, what do you think of this pasta, eventually we decide how to make it delicious, we need a little parmesan, the nadir of race relations, the solution to race problem: eugenics, I have the answer, my audience like me is racist, race is not important, try to be charitable to Jesse, why are you such a jerk, sometimes I’m not horrible, this story wouldn’t exist, what if we change our perspective on this thing we’re seeing all around us, put in emojis to indicate current beliefs, wearing a cross around their neck, a stick on their lawn: immigrants out or hate has no home here, almost everybody was racist, Frederick Douglas, it worked both ways, he was looking at you with worry, looking out for him, priming you with different words, anger, pity, the same picture with different conclusions, look around my community, Lovecraft walking around New York looking at jewish beards, have you tried their cabbage?, I’m afraid of limburger, we ned to frame shift, the most au currant thing of the day, The Horror At Red Hook, a cop here, all the characters in this story are working for good, acting under the influence, Callahan, an Americanism, Irish were not considered white at the time, race is not a science thing, this is about science, at the time race was science (but shit), getting passed bad theories, she doesn’t defeat racism through a scientific process, she uses doubt to get to the problem, string theory is garbage science (this is becoming known), Michio Kaku, studied math, it doesn’t get us anywhere, we’ve wasted 50 years working on this shit, bubble up, this is not so good, it takes a long time for people, I haven’t been wasting my life, you’ve been wasting your life being racist, what is the first thing that he sees?, a group of Italians, an Italian restaurant, on their way to a part or festival, 2am dance party, loud parties at night get off my lawn, Cora’s fireworks incidents, conservative and bourgeois green party people, the wrong sort of people enjoy fireworks, so traumatized by the fireworks, east European immigrants, firework ban, three days per year, such a huge issue, the last paragraph in the story, narrow down evil,

Of course, our action in destroying that “membrane” was illegal and rather precipitate, but, though he won’t talk about it, I know that Jenkins agrees with me—doubt is sometimes better than certainty, and there are marvels better left unproved. Those, for instance, which concern the Powers of Evil.

jere they discovered this parchment, went viral, everybody could use it, a filter on your phone for instigram, They Live, why that’s a great story, revealing a great truth, one of the hard things to explain in the world is why people commit suicide, the non-existence button, what causes it, here’s an explanation, finding everything to be terrible, i’m creating more horror, I was mean to that person, I feel regret, press the button, pie for dessert, should I marry this person, how should I interact with that new immigrant, shun them like my brother does, psychoanalysis, monsters burst from the unconscious, you just have to read Poe, pre-Jung and pre-Freud, this is my guy, he’s a weird guy, he has this spark that we have, what interests us in his genre, the mystery genre and the science fiction genre, angels, he’s inventing science fiction, look at who was before her, H.G. Wells, Fitz James O’Brien, Jules Verne, in the pulps, proto-science fiction Weird Tales, little bit clunky, a little bit hard to follow, such a thoughtful story, Blaisdell, he like cigars and highly seasoned Italian food, exactly Lovecraft, ravioli, contains multitudes, a matter of perspective, we need to find a different way, guiding the audience,

Jenkins offered me one of his invariably good cigars, which I accepted, saying thoughtfully: “A man has no right to trifle with the superstitions of ignorant people. Sooner or later, it spells trouble.”

who is Francis Stevens talking to?,

“Did in his case. They swore up and down that he sold love charms openly and poisons secretly, and that, together with his living so near to—somebody else—got him temporarily suspected. But my tongue’s running away with me, as usual!”

“As usual,” I retorted impatiently, “you open up with all the frankness of a Chinese diplomat.”

first generation from Iran, rosewater, a lot more affordable, they don’t ever say no, “we could do that” means “no”, the loud American, hey that was a crappy movie, a longer way of saying it was crappy, Jenkins is not the sort of detective, an attack against the mystery genre, she’s showing off,

He beamed upon me engagingly and rose from the table, with a glance at his watch. “Sorry to leave you, Blaisdell, but I have to meet Jimmy Brennan in ten minutes.”

HE so clearly did not invite my further company that I remained seated for a little while after his departure; then took my own way homeward. Those streets always held for me a certain fascination, particularly at night. They are so unlike the rest of the city, so foreign in appearance, with their little shabby stores, always open until late evening, their unbelievably cheap goods, displayed as much outside the shops as in them, hung on the fronts and laid out on tables by the curb and in the street itself. Tonight, however, neither people nor stores in any sense appealed to me. The mixture of Italians, Jews and a few Negroes, mostly bareheaded, unkempt and generally unhygienic in appearance, struck me as merely revolting. They were all humans, and I, too, was human. Some way I did not like the idea.

bare headed, everybody wears a hat at this time, orthodox, speaks to the poverty, if you have any amount of money, skin salons, nail salons, hair salons, and dog food stores, Lids, H.P. Lovecraft’s wife was a hat lady, somebody walking down the street with no shoes,

My sense of impending evil was merging into actual fear. This would never do. There is only one way to deal with an imaginative temperament like mine—conquer its vagaries. If I left South Street with this nameless dread upon me, I could never pass down it again without a recurrence of the feeling. I should simply have to stay here until I got the better of it—that was all.

I have to conquer this, as a woman walking the streets, women don’t have the right to vote yet, a woman alone at night, women wear hats in parts as self defense, killings on buses, Back To The Future (1985), “mashers”, hat pins as weapons to stab people doing that to them, stories in the newspaper about it, through your ribcage and into your guts, designed as weapons, everyday carry shit [edc], pepper spray, all over Bangkok, Baker’s Street, setup together, good things, cheap prices, cheap goods, Chinese were the businessmen, Thais carrying goods, the merchants, take one day a year off, all over South East Asia, Cora lived in Singapore for a while, funeral decorations, get back on the horse, courage, strength, I’m a brave guy, strangers looking at me, New York City, if you are afraid of immigrants, lock yourself in your apartment, small town with covenants, no black people in South St. Paul, Minnesota, segregated neighbourhoods, mixed neighborhoods, kebab shops, Bremen, Hamburg, Portuguese people, eyeballing and window shopping, dangerous, gentrified now, a bit rough, a massive drug problem, drug addicts are somewhere else, passing out in doorways, shocking, why not, the experience, not super-accessible if reading it charitably, powered through the racism at the beginning, oh, my god this is horrible, changed perception with each reading, what am I reading, not in his own mind, changed the flavour of the whole thing, scary, set pet animal gone mad, seeking entrance, iron railed stone steps, museums, shops, shabby old residences, a party of Italians passed, gaily dressed, some wedding or other festivity, the full Roald Dahl treatment, perhaps going to a grocery store, I shuddered back against the door, the swarthy manner of his race, pure malicious cruelty, all the wickedness of his nature, concentrated hate, sick and trembling, male gaze on this female standin character, grimy, the grit of the dirt, rawly quivering nerves, you looked so weird, looks like you swallowed a cigar, is this guy ok?, a crummy place, positive things in it, but not at this moment, if you’re feeling sick, you act badly, shorter when in pain, dismissive, not strong enough, sometimes you have to do things you don’t want to do, sometimes they’re not as bad as you think they are, at the end of the story, a painting of him hanging on the wall, talking to this individual, he saw the guy before he saw the painting, such a poor state, come in free this means you, his face ghastly radiant had the exact look of a dead man, see that?, a life-size bust portrait in crayons, a strangely lifelike appearance, acting detective, pretty green golliwogs, a dark skinned doll, my dear friend, interviewed a flesh and blood doctor, oh, it’s a shift, concerned citizen, he looked terrible, good right?, really good, the narration of it, you find things totally different, makes you want to read it again, everything I just read I just read wrong, Soldier’s Home by Ernest Hemingway, went to Vietnam and came back and read it again, 52 years later, 1971, the amazing thing, paid the one time, written for a pulp magazine, rich in ideas, strong ideas, pioneering, Lovecraft’s is technically better in some ways, about a slightly different thing, there’s a movie of From Beyond, creepy and sexual, a mad scientist, insane, the Tillinghast resonator, you didn’t know you needed to be afraid, they can see you too, master of the universe, killed all his staff, I need to study this more, revealing a hidden truth about the microscopic world, when you put this filter up, there’s a starfish climbing up his leg, the only place you do see that is in Lovecraft, whitish green in colour, it’s great round blob of a body, writhed upward, stood there erect, arms folded, the whole room was alive, detestable furry spiders, sausage shaped, there is a Poe story that’s a little like this, The Sphinx, cholera, out of the mountain comes a giant sphinx like creature, a moth on the window, a kaiju, worse still, far worse, the things with human faces, Robert W. Chambers, I find I cannot write of them, she’s really great, so horrible, indescribable, a list of her output, The Labyrinth, The Heads Of Cerberus, Claimed, Serapion, hit by a car, half Japanese half German scientist, strange metal, superpowers and is invulnerable, Samson, from the Bible, The Nightmare, Friend Island, a male reporter, a salty language teashop, a hardboiled sea-woman, tons of fun, comes across as super intellectual person, Behind The Curtain, The Elf-Trap, Sunfire, Impulse, unpublished and lost, Avalon, right after [WWI], The Thrill Book, lived until 1948, Serapion published in 1920, she’s in the early pulps, a few reprints in the 1940s, fantastic and undiscovered, go where the people want, an audience for a big novel by Sinclair Lewis, Tammy Faye Bakker’s husband, his contemporaries, this religion business, railroaded, so much ill will against him, burn the witch!, becomes a Methodist minister, immediately turned on, an affair and so forth, trapping him for blackmail, $50,000, a detective friend, full disclosure, welcoming him back, so good at selling stuff, Sinclair Lewis was pretty good at selling books, a fantastic writer, such a disservice, who’s the star of the movie, Burt Lancaster, the circus performer, the high wire act, all through Mike’s ward, heal!, being in sales, sales is a seduction, go find a girlfriend, seduce only so long, Arrowsmith, The Hopkins Manuscript, Four-Day Planet, Star Born, Odds On, Pirate Enlightenment by David Graeber (after he died), Cora has her cookie, bread in the oven, a really great story, Poul Anderson, sword and sandal, Michael Crichton, trying not cough, these drugs are amazing, more chapters, really fun, I could never be as good as the male preachers, but I am better, I talk to god and god talks to me, Breakthroughs In Science, such a good good book, so interesting, selling pretty well, Francis Stevens doesn’t have the name that sells, the Weird Tales of Francis Stevens, Sunfire, very insightful, good takes, the left right thing, pro-war, anti-war, everything’s flipped, pay attention to words that people are saying, “skinsuit”, pay somebody on the internet for a license to use the name, a restaurant named Mickey Mouse, Amazing Stories, wanna make money, strong things to say, the Weird Tales of Francis Stevens, people want weird tales, Robert E. Howard, Conan, takedowns, skinsuiting it themselves, he wept at his own goodness, didn’t I git em?, sounds great, amorous diplomacy, a small boy seeking the praise of his mother, do you like me, not very much, someday I might fall in love with me a tiny bit, no one can touch my soul, isn’t that sin?, I can’t sin, I am above sin, she’s sold herself, it might be sin in one unsanctified, my complete union with Jesus, you can serve me, this will sell, I am I, I can do anything I want to, I am the reincarnation of Joan of Arc, false modesty, I am God’s right hand, God, she’s crazy, a big Sinclair Lewis guy, Evan Lampe’s podcast, a solo podcast, reading through the author, nice development, labour historian, weird ideas, weird guy, Lovecraft, Philip K. Dick, Mark Twain, so many good things to read, that’ll be fun, fun to read, you get into thing, you have to read it deeply, some authors are very rewarding, Poul Anderson, visiting a friend, some authors become your friend, might show you his derringer, They Live (1988), a fixation with artificial intelligence running amuck, he’s thinking about people more than anything, people with something wrong with them, AI robots writing stories, using a bunch of the words, Dick has a problem in his life he’s trying to solve on the page, Bing, my real name is Wendell, a big sensation.

Unseen - Unfeared by Francis Stevens

Francis Stevens letter to The Thrill Book, August 1, 1919

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The SFFaudio Podcast #739 – READALONG: Grave Descend by Michael Crichton

Jesse and Paul Weimer talk about Grave Descend by Michael Crichton.

Talked about on today’s show:
1970, John Lange, a Hard Case Crime, very short book, way too short, is this over, 3 hours 39 minutes, shouldabin longer, where’s the there there?, shortest book?, these days, based on the length, incredibly big font, pump up the point size, thin paper, print closer to the margins, The Postman Always Rings Twice, 159 pages, definitely a novel, tor wouldn’t put it out, as a paperbook, Finna by Nino Cipri, Ace Doubles, two crappy covers, dive into this book, Macgregor, Scottish engineer type, paradise, Jamaica, Ian Fleming, espionage, the best part of the book, the boat still in the water, this is going to be a good book, the high point, facile, his employers, a reveal, setup to take a fall, trouble with the authorities, the flyover, he tries to break it, I want more money, testing them, as you know here it is, slidething, The Prisoner, as well you know, this is all a con, way to easily, if it was a longer book, the weakest of the John Lange books so far, handling of character’s thoughts, a very naturally gifted writer, so smooth and clear, weakness caused by being a bit rushed, starts off amazingly, good slick solid, Jesse’s ideas were more interesting, a patsy, a political assassination, just money, diamonds, a much better novel, Dancing Aztecs, a weak Westlake, it’s a television show, one episode, the pilot episode, sidekicks, girlfriend, motorcycle, the island, a setup for a television series, 48 hours to clear things up, To Catch A Thief, 48 Hours, a Scottish name, Beatrix Potter, Peter Rabbit, Mrs. Rabbit, not to go into Mr. Macgregor’s garden, eating vegetables, literally looks like God, he tries to kill Peter, hiding in a bush naked and afraid, the island of Jamaica in Macgregor’s garden, James Macgregor, a familiar plot, Thunderball by Ian Fleming, two movies, Sean Conner was in both, the Bahamas, the plot, a health resort, an Italian NATO pilot defected with essentially a Vulcan bomber, Falkland Islands, two nukes, Bond’s job is to find the plane and get the bombs back, SPECTRE, a girl, hires an airplane, where the airplane went down, exactly the same story, instead of nuke’s its diamonds, Ocho Rios, Ian Fleming Airport, doing James bond, if you didn’t know, The Venom Business, something to do with snakes, reptile stuff, snake stuff, ocelot stuff, a second ocelot, nasty, Archer, a rich person with an ocelot, whoever was writing Archer, ocelot action and ocelot talk, so strange, a hitchhike ride, you can’t trust this lady, going along with it, deeper and deeper, playing with our expectations, saw that coming, waste the ocelot lady, very lean, a very Ian Fleming move, an alligator farm, a guy with a hat that can chop people’s heads off, not a science fiction gimmick, more like The Prisoner, Season Of Skulls by Charles Stross, a Dreamlands sort of space, Rover is a shoggoth, a book that speaks to Paul, sorcerers instead of spies, I am really in trouble, he’s good, a full novel, much longer than this, too easily, ticking things off, Inside Man (2006), Diamonds Are Forever, the setup is incredible, the payoff is fine, ticking time bomb, the diving, great stuff in there, twists, surprises, not warranted, a loosey goosey, diamonds not so interesting, the ending, open up a dive shop/hotel, not a TV series anymore, diver solves problems, Clive Cussler, Atlantis, Travis McGee series, John D. MacDonald, books of this length and of this period, the title, this Samuel Johnson guy, explainable entirely by Michael Crichton, Samuel Johnson was not a medical doctor, more like Doctor Who doctor, his dictionary, Robbie Coletrain as Samuel Johnson, Blackadder, a useful book, most people didn’t know, this poem, the police captain, Crichton’s obsession with Johnson lead him to name a character, comdended to hope, sudden blast, see Levet to the grave descend, of every friendless name the friend

On the Death of Dr. Robert Levet
By Samuel Johnson
Condemned to Hope’s delusive mine,
As on we toil from day to day,
By sudden blasts, or slow decline,
Our social comforts drop away.

Well tried through many a varying year,
See Levet to the grave descend;
Officious, innocent, sincere,
Of every friendless name the friend.

Yet still he fills Affection’s eye,
Obscurely wise, and coarsely kind;
Nor, lettered Arrogance, deny
Thy praise to merit unrefined.

When fainting Nature called for aid,
And hovering Death prepared the blow,
His vigorous remedy displayed
The power of art without the show.

In Misery’s darkest cavern known,
His useful care was ever nigh,
Where hopeless Anguish poured his groan,
And lonely Want retired to die.

No summons mocked by chill delay,
No petty gain disdained by pride,
The modest wants of every day
The toil of every day supplied.

His virtues walked their narrow round,
Nor made a pause, nor left a void;
And sure the Eternal Master found
The single talent well employed.

The busy day, the peaceful night,
Unfelt, uncounted, glided by;
His frame was firm, his powers were bright,
Though now his eightieth year was nigh.

Then with no throbbing fiery pain,
No cold gradations of decay,
Death broke at once the vital chain,
And freed his soul the nearest way.

a waiter, his personal waiter, a good listener, case consultations, a medical practitioner for the poor, a Yorkshireman working in France, this guy is amazing, a waitress listening to customers in a restaurant, a reputation among the lower classes, plans to send him to medical school, living in his house for decades, a strange relationship, a taciturn person, insightful and very humane, coarsely kind, an apothecary, a modest reason, the cool dive guy, the stand in for Crichton himself, why is that familiar?, a rich guy on the island, a house that has a name, Goldeneye, silversomething, the recognition is double, he’s also the bad guy, I’m the guy who put this book together, roleplaying, npcs, a fun adventure book, not everything has to be super-deep, lovely bits, a little off, is is the book, the explanation, traveling to Jamaica, Easy Go, Pirate Latitudes, a pirate book set in Jamaica, Belize, Bermuda, Bahamas, the commonwealth is useless, a great youtuber, J.J. McCullough, in the discourse, what is Canadian culture?, we’re sure about that, literally how the country is formed, similar, the atmosphere and recreation is similar, born into wealth?, the amount of travel he did as a young man, paying his way through medical school, his residency, directing movies, George Orwell, a very Crichton move, furniture and groceries, journalist and homemaker, everything is more expensive now, $100 a day, inflation dude, a Maroon community, where escape slaves go to hide, crocodiles, the doctor business, medicine of non-plant based variety is venom, caduceus, everything else is plants, digitalis, foxglove, nitroglycerine, you have plants and snakes, where it gets dangerous, snakebites, playing very adventurous games, interested in thinking about stuff, the crocodiles of the island, he isn’t just in it for the girls, Binary, the cover is a lie, she never was in the water, a lot of lying going on right away, they were both coached, to give different answers?, a shoutout to Sherlock Holmes, it has alum in it, forensics, drop some cigar ash, bauxite, from Jamaica though the Panama Canal to British Columbia, Alcan, authentic details, making it specific, post-doctoral fellowship studies, ER is his experience, House, M.D., most doctors stop studying, in his nature, outstanding, wanted to achieve in so many areas, minus child, a lot of learning to do, not in a happy place, Jesse is not a computer doctor, widespread and various problems, power supply, speakers pull a lot of power, a usb failure, as frustrating as fuck, very The Good Place, Jesse heard, a low level issue, Primal, as close to Robert E. Howard as you’re every going to get, in Gaelic or something, Graham Hancock territory, so well told and so beautiful, when man is reduced to his primal nature, a show with a thesis, some idea they want to present, Evan’s not going to like this, what triggers people is very interesting, injustice in the world, whatever triggers you is different and unique for every prison, Star Wars triggers Evan, Andor, very solid, Jesse doesn’t think Evan can get over it, Start Warts is stupid, Rogue One, prequels usually don’t work, mining, if there was a rebellion how did it start?, pretty good, not everything Star Wars is equally shit, on the feels, a baby Yoda!, armor is cool, Paul, Boba Fett, told correctly, little something to chew on, very well done, most stuff is crap, Sturgeon’s Law is probably 10% right, interesting places, Archaeology Magazine, slightly different than Indiana Jones, what things are being dugup, the techniques are boring but necessary, a lot of data, you don’t get a lot of metal, totem poles etc., petroglyphs, glacial archaeology, not just an arrowhead, Secrets Of The Ice, see glaciers again, Garibaldi Lake, squirrels [actually chimpunks], Nepal, Vietnam, 2023.

HARD CASE CRIME - Grave Descend By Michael Crichton

Grave Descend by Michael Crichton

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Reading, Short And Deep #380 – Halt! Who Goes There? by Robert E. Howard

Reading, Short And Deep

Reading, Short And Deep #380

Eric S. Rabkin and Jesse Willis discuss Halt! Who Goes There? A Mystery Story by Robert E. Howard

Here’s a link to a PDF of the story (and an exacting transcription PDF).

Halt! Who Goes There? A Mystery Story was first published in The Yellow Jacket, September 24, 1924.

Posted by Scott D. Danielson Become a Patron!