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Todblog

EAP Editor/Publisher Natters on About This and That.

Old Friends, Good and Bad.

July 1, 2022 by Exangel

Let me start by looking at the old friends, good. My favorite piece this issue, Rue Matthiessen’s “There Was a Time,” is a beautiful paean to old friendship, to the joy and mourning that go with having and losing such a friend. I also love the short essays always faithfully contributed by David D. Horowitz, and this one, detailing the love of every day objects, is a favorite: “Companionization.” Ron Singer subtly underlines the wonderful old friendship of a married couple in “On (Re-)Reading Eric Ambler’s Epitaph for a Spy.” And Jim Meirose made me laugh with his memory of childhood terror, “First Frankenstein Juggernaut.”

Then there was the wonderful coincidence of Gregg Williard sending on a piece, “Films of Drop and Descent,” about nostalgia, old friends, and much loved films. Among other things, he writes about “Mad God,” by my old friend Phil Tippett, where my dear husband actually plays the Mad God. He says he didn’t know. Whichever way, it made me smile.

Okay, now we get to the bad old friends. Followed by the pieces struggling to make good new ones in their place.

There are a bunch of our bad old friends rising up recently (surprise!) that I think most of us wish would just recede back into the swamp of memory. Authoritarianism is the big one. The dominance of a voice of one sex and class. The agreement that it’s only old white guys, and their satraps and houris and enablers who are allowed to talk, who are allowed to distribute resources.

Here they are, back again.

And it’s worldwide. The old white guys of the GOP are hanging out with the old white guy right wing rulers of the world: Orban. Bolsonaro. Putin.

Then there are the left wing authoritarians. They’re the ones who insist because they’re on the side of righteousness, they have the right to tell other people what to do. Noam Chomsky has recently fallen into this category. Our old friend. As if any of us ever thought in our lifetime that we’d see Noam Chomsky on the same side as Henry Kissinger.

Two sides of the same coin. Two sides of the agreement that it’s only certain people who are worth listening to. Have a look at David Selzer’s poem, “ART,” in this issue, written to soothe my own particular rage about this matter.

And look at “The Female Touch in Iranian Film Making,” by Brian Griffith and Zhinia Noorian.  New friends give you hope, I always think. This piece reminds me that the ‘John Dean’ of the January 6th Committee meetings is Cassidy Hutchinson, a 25 year old girl. None of the old white guys have dared to say what is really going on in the corrupt, even crazed, corridors of power. It had to be her. Clear, brave, straight out. She saw it all. We know why. We know it was because all those old white guys thought she was only there to serve them. She wasn’t important enough to have any agency for herself.

Their mistake.

We hope it was a fatal mistake, too.

Finally, I want to say that when we go into denial about trauma, it simply keeps repeating itself until it’s faced and released. Have a look at “My Mother and a Cat,” which was a startling, even frightening, example to me. My mother’s trauma of being bombed by Americans in Japan of World War II reappeared in my own life in a shocking way. Until it was recognized. And freed to turn into smoother paths to the future.

May all our traumas, past and present, be freed as well. That’s what we’re doing when we’re writing. So never give up hope. And never give up writing.

Welcome back.

Keeping My Head Above Water

March 31, 2022 by Exangel

Anyone who knows me, knows I’m not just a Glass is Half Full kind of a person, but a Glass is Half Full and I Don’t Want to Hear Anything But How to Fill It To The Brim kind of a gal. But even I, these last couple of months, have felt my head disappearing […]

Circle Back.

January 1, 2022 by Exangel

It’s another year, and a new chance to refresh our origins—rather than the present cultural activity of driving them into the ground. When does real life begin? As the old joke goes, when you ask a priest, a minister and a rabbi, the first says, “At conception.” The second, “At birth.” The rabbi, though, in […]

Visionary Future.

October 1, 2021 by Exangel

When the Newport Public Library suggested I do a three part Zoom series on Visionary Fiction, I was delighted. Of course. But I also had a secret hope for it. The present Emergency calls for as many of us who can to envision a way forward to a better world to get together and get […]

World on Fire.

July 1, 2021 by Exangel

This morning we all woke to a world wide environmental crisis. Other crises, sure, yeah, but they stem from the first one. When danger threatens from an uncontrollable source—weather, fire, earthquake, flood—anxiety rises exponentially. There is a biological response. For humans as animals, the biological response is fear. For humans as human, the response is […]

The Imperfect is a Pal to Evolution.

March 31, 2021 by Exangel

It’s an imperfect world, and we just live in it. But there is imperfect and imperfect. Perfection, as I never tire of saying, is the enemy of the Good—the end of all life, of all change. The Good is life changing for the betterment of all, and when I say ‘all’, I mean the entire […]

Forward March.

January 4, 2021 by Exangel

Happy New Year. So. 2020 is behind us, and what are we going to do about it? Normally, I would be focusing right now on this issue of EAP, and indeed, there is much to delve into here. I’d start, if I were you, with Rose Jermusyk’s “The Lion in Love,” which is my idea […]

Sort Of.

October 2, 2020 by Exangel

As if it wasn’t bad enough—and it was, is—to be in throes of the most devastating fire season in our lifetime, with our neighbors losing their livelihoods, their homes, if not their actual lives, as if that wasn’t bad enough, a vicious worldwide pandemic affects even our ‘leadership’—such as it is. There appears to be […]

Here We Are.

June 30, 2020 by Exangel

Well, here we are. And where we’ll be in three months time, with the next issue, is a mystery. But the one unmysterious thing about it is we have to look after ourselves, our loved ones, and those we can help, because the US and UK governments are too busy following their usual greedhead short […]

Here We Are.

April 1, 2020 by Exangel

Well, here we are, where we never thought to be, even a few weeks ago. And the GOT CHRYSALIS? issue was planned months ago, but if the chrysalis fits . . . Back at the start of February, I wrote a Jam Today entry about some wonderful crab I had then, which now seems, on […]

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Check Out Our Magazine.

In This Issue.

  • Who Was Dorothy?
  • Those Evil Spirits.
  • The Screaming Baboon.
  • Her.
  • A Tale of Persistence.
  • A Conversation with Steve Hugh Westenra.
  • Person Number Twelve.
  • Dream Shapes.
  • Cannon Beach.
  • The Muse.
  • Spring.
  • The Greatness that was Greece.
  • 1966, NYC; nothing like it.
  • Sun Shower.
  • The Withering Weight of Being Perceived.
  • Broken Clock.
  • Confession.
  • Francis Coppola’s Apocalypse.
  • Sometimes you die, I mean that people do.
  • True (from “My Life with Dogs”).
  • Fragmentary musings on birds and bees.
  • 12 Baking Essentials to Always Have in Your Poetry.
  • Broad Street.
  • A Death in Alexandria.
  • My Forked Tongue.
  • Swan Lake.
  • Long Division.
  • Singing against the muses.
  • Aphorisms from “What Remains to Be Said”.

In The News.

That cult classic pirate/sci fi mash up GREENBEARD, by Richard James Bentley, is now a rollicking audiobook, available from Audible.com. Narrated and acted by Colby Elliott of Last Word Audio, you’ll be overwhelmed by the riches and hilarity within.

“Captain Sylvestre de Greybagges is your typical seventeenth-century Cambridge-educated lawyer turned Caribbean pirate, as comfortable debating the virtues of William Shakespeare, Isaac Newton, and compound interest as he is wielding a cutlass, needling archrival Henry Morgan, and parsing rum-soaked gossip for his next target. When a pepper monger’s loose tongue lets out a rumor about a fleet loaded with silver, the Captain sets sail only to find himself in a close encounter of a very different kind.

After escaping with his sanity barely intact and his beard transformed an alarming bright green, Greybagges rallies The Ark de Triomphe crew for a revenge-fueled, thrill-a-minute adventure to the ends of the earth and beyond.

This frolicsome tale of skullduggery, jiggery-pokery, and chicanery upon Ye High Seas is brimming with hilarious puns, masterful historical allusions, and nonstop literary hijinks. Including sly references to Thomas Pynchon, Treasure Island, 1940s cinema, and notable historical figures, this mélange of delights will captivate readers with its rollicking adventure, rich descriptions of food and fashion, and learned asides into scientific, philosophical, and colonial history.”

THE SUPERGIRLS is back, revised and updated!

supergirls-take-1

In The News.

Newport Public Library hosted a three part Zoom series on Visionary Fiction, led by Tod.  

And we love them for it, too.

The first discussion was a lively blast. You can watch it here. The second, Looking Back to Look Forward can be seen here.

The third was the best of all. Visions of the Future, with a cast of characters including poets, audiobook artists, historians, Starhawk, and Mary Shelley. Among others. Link is here.

In the News.

SNOTTY SAVES THE DAY is now an audiobook, narrated by Last Word Audio’s mellifluous Colby Elliott. It launched May 10th, but for a limited time, you can listen for free with an Audible trial membership. So what are you waiting for? Start listening to the wonders of how Arcadia was born from the worst section of the worst neighborhood in the worst empire of all the worlds since the universe began.

In The News.

If you love audio books, don’t miss the new release of REPORT TO MEGALOPOLIS, by Tod Davies, narrated by Colby Elliott of Last Word Audio. The tortured Aspern Grayling tries to rise above the truth of his own story, fighting with reality every step of the way, and Colby’s voice is the perfect match for our modern day Dr. Frankenstein.

In The News.

Mike Madrid dishes on Miss Fury to the BBC . . .

Tod on the Importance of Visionary Fiction

Check out this video of “Beyond Utopia: The Importance of Fantasy,” Tod’s recent talk at the tenth World-Ecology Research Network Conference, June 2019, in San Francisco. She covers everything from Wind in the Willows to the work of Kim Stanley Robinson, with a look at The History of Arcadia along the way. As usual, she’s going on about how visionary fiction has an important place in the formation of a world we want and need to have.

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