I have only just discovered this blog, and am still testing water.It is good,good,good to know that some of the old-guard new-wave warriors are still around and kicking.Yourself kicking harder than ever it seems.Moorcock and Delaney are still around, but producing stuff that for me at least is too intellectual and obscure.I can tell you that the Void Captains Tale is a book i,ve read over a dozen times since first discovering it in 2003.For some reason i don,t know why i,ve never read Child of Fortune, but intend to do so very soon.The only other Spinrad books i have, are Jack Barron,No Direction,and Raising Hell. I think i feel instinctively that much of your work might be too serious and heavy for a bubba like myself.It is the flamboyantly,prismatically explosive, operaticism of works like Void Captain that blow the mind ,that stimulate,arouse and energise.Such works fire one up , and in that sense they politicize.Cos works like that give you something to fight for and preserve the freedom and culture that produced such an indulgent and somewhat undisciplined masterwork.Let me conclude by saying that even i, realise i gotta grow up and tackle some of the less fantasy-based Spinrad work if i seriously want to explore the ouevre, which i do.As for undiscipline, creatively speaking, that never has and never will be a bad thing.
Mr. Spinrad - I just had an enormous flash of realization of how the media wars in both Little Creatures and A World Between are being realized with the dawning of creative technologies not dreamed of (except by folks like us) when you wrote them. CGI and Deep Fakes, and the perfect manipulation of images that is becoming possible, are having direct-input effects on our brains. I just watched the supposedly benign movie musical Spirited . . . The quality, and the psych-hospital level of emotional manipulation pulled off with amazing power and expertise, put me right on Pacifica. Thank you for being in my head - so many lesser writers have tried.
THE ABNORMAL NEW NORMAL by Norman Spinrad (a presidential platform for a non-existent campaign) “Things are more like they are now than they ever have been before.” --Dwight Eisenhower “They wrote the biggest rubber check in history and passed it off on themselv...
ELECT YOUR PEOPLE'S POLICE by Norman Spinrad If something isn't done, and done fast, a civil war in the United States is just a shot or a Molotov Cocktail away. But how and by who? If there is one American who could stand up before the protesters and be listened to it is surely the one and only former President of the United States, Barack Obama. Live before the largest crowd possible and of course well televised. What should he say? He should speak the hard truth to the leaderless protesters that what they are doing is counterproductive to their own confusion of diverse and general causes which if even possible would take decades of legislation to accomplish. What is needed immediately is a strong significant and reachable demand. Demand that the head of all police departments in the United States--cities, towns, st...
Reviews of THE PEOPLE'S POLICE Tom Shippey on the Best New Science Fiction THE PEOPLE'S POLICE in THE WALL STREET JOURNAL Norman Spinrad's novel imagines much wilder Mardi Gras and with it the idea of the "People's Police of New Orleans": cops looking the other way on minor crime, especially vice. By TOM SHIPPEY The big event in our near future, warns Norman Spinrad in "The People's Police", will be the Great Deflation. The dollar will surge, prices and wages will fall. Who suffers in that scenario? Everyone with a mortgage. Americans end up like Icelanders not so long ago, saddled with debts they can't pay with now-deflated incomes. The next stage is foreclosures and evictions. In sadly shrunken New Orleans, Officer Martin Luther Martin ...
This is a kind of love letter to France, my original English text of an article commissioned in 1998 by the French national newspaper LE MONDE and a rough French translation done with Google because I couldn’t find LE MONDE’S French translation anywhere on the Internet. (Update: meilleur traduction francais --merci a Alain Gresh I’m putting it online on the occasion of my impending 6 weeks or so in France because it’s been causing me to reflect on what my 14 years living in France has meant to me and still does during my largely unwilling return to New York. What I wrote in LE MONDE in 1998 is personally even truer for me now that it was then. Since then, I’ve done appearances for the French Foreign Service in New Caldonia and Mexico, received a Career Achievement Award at the Utopiales festival in Nantes from the hands of Jean-Marc Ayrault, then the mayor of Nantes, now Prime Minister of France. I’ve had a hand in getting the prison diary ...
HAPPY 2020 NEW YEAR from Dona &Norman What doesn't kill you makes love stronger Norman Spinrad dances with Dona Sadock at his 70th Birthday party https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kejMBMabfbY Ten years ago it was probable that I wouldn't live to make it to this party. But reports of my imminent demise proved to be exaggerated. "Don't look back, something may gaining on you." ---Satchel Paige
The New York Post September 25, 2012 THE POWER OF DIRTY WORDS--Illustrated!!! by Norman Spinrad In memorium: Lenny Bruce Fuck, shit, piss, cunt. Have I gotten your attention? Of course I have! These words have that magic power. As we all know, fuck, shit, piss, and cunt are the rock bottom basic “dirty words.” Neither the New York Times nor any other establishment publication will print them. They may not be uttered on broadcast television...
DONALD TRUMP AGENT OF SATAN The Bluegrass Song Just in time for the impeachment! Whoever turns out to be the Democratic candidate for President is welcome to use it as their theme song. Free of charge! Pro bono! DONALD TRUMP AGENT OF SATAN click here
Donald Trump has turned the Republican Senators into craven political lemmings and willfully dragged the party of Lincoln to the edge of the tarpit of extinction. And not merely the Constitution with it but American democracy. In a mere 3 torturous years he has turned almost all of America's allies into enemies and made the United States the most hated country in the world. He has sullied the honor of the American military, handed Syria to Russia, unilaterally shattered the agreement with Iran that was keeping it from coming a nuclear power. Not a bad payoff to Vladimir Putin who colluded with him in being elected President in 2016 and has now openly announced his support for his reelection in 2020. He has turned American subcultures against each other not merely to a shot away from tribal warfare but beyond it already. Dixie versus Yankees, Coastals versus Middle America, Gays versus Straits, Blacks versus Cops, Anglos versus Latin...
I have only just discovered this blog, and am still testing water.It is good,good,good to know that some of the old-guard new-wave warriors are still around and kicking.Yourself kicking harder than ever it seems.Moorcock and Delaney are still around, but producing stuff that for me at least is too intellectual and obscure.I can tell you that the Void Captains Tale is a book i,ve read over a dozen times since first discovering it in 2003.For some reason i don,t know why i,ve never read Child of Fortune, but intend to do so very soon.The only other Spinrad books i have, are Jack Barron,No Direction,and Raising Hell. I think i feel instinctively that much of your work might be too serious and heavy for a bubba like myself.It is the flamboyantly,prismatically explosive, operaticism of works like Void Captain that blow the mind ,that stimulate,arouse and energise.Such works fire one up , and in that sense they politicize.Cos works like that give you something to fight for and preserve the freedom and culture that produced such an indulgent and somewhat undisciplined masterwork.Let me conclude by saying that even i, realise i gotta grow up and tackle some of the less fantasy-based Spinrad work if i seriously want to explore the ouevre, which i do.As for undiscipline, creatively speaking, that never has and never will be a bad thing.
ReplyDeleteMr. Spinrad - I just had an enormous flash of realization of how the media wars in both Little Creatures and A World Between are being realized with the dawning of creative technologies not dreamed of (except by folks like us) when you wrote them. CGI and Deep Fakes, and the perfect manipulation of images that is becoming possible, are having direct-input effects on our brains. I just watched the supposedly benign movie musical Spirited . . . The quality, and the psych-hospital level of emotional manipulation pulled off with amazing power and expertise, put me right on Pacifica. Thank you for being in my head - so many lesser writers have tried.
ReplyDeleteThanks foor sharing
ReplyDelete