The Man Show, c. 1870

John Winkelman

While using it to help one of my cow-orkers discover the fate of a colony of bats in her hometown, Google led me to an interesting and amusing site called The Journal of Manly Arts. No, this is not a sex magazine; rather a collection of articles about “European and Colonial Combatives, 1776 – 1914”; the supposition there being that fighting (as opposed to dueling) became a Gentlemanly thing around the time of the American Revolution, and became, well, kind of beside the point once Europe began to eat itself 140 years later.

Most of what I read was not new to me. All of the arts – quarterstaffs, various forms of boxing, Savate , I have heard of, if not actually seen in person. There was one, however, which stopped me for a moment: purring . Two contestants stand facing one another and, not to overcomplicate things, kick the bajeezus out of each others’ shins. Last one to give up wins. Apparently this fine tradition was abandoned in the late 1800s, although it is still seen today in schoolyards throughout the country.

Oh: And should the opportunity arise, never get in a fight in pre-Revolutionary Virginia :

I would advise you when You do fight Not to act like Tygers and Bears as these Virginians do – Biting one anothers Lips and Noses off, and gowging one another – that is, thrusting out one anothers Eyes, and kicking one another on the Cods, to the Great damage of many a Poor Woman…

Go Read Something Else

John Winkelman

Over the weekend I picked up an issue of NFG Magazine, published in Toronto, showcasing Edgy Writing. A lot of small, independent magazines (and a great many literary journals) tend to be full of writers who miss the forest for the trees, writing technically proficient but boring stories. NFGs stories seem to suffer less from this trend than most, perhaps partly because they have a section called 69 which contains dozens of 69-word stories, aimed at readers with “attention spans of less than 22 seconds”, and partly because, well, the Writing tends to be Edgy.

A writer would have to be amazingly accomplished to become boring in 69 words.

Normally this is the kind of thing I would read in the bookstore, spill coffee on it, and put it back in the magazine rack. I bought this one because it contained an interview with an author whose work I started reading over twenty years ago: Michael Moorcock . When I joined the Science Fiction Book Club back in 1984 the collected Elric Saga was the first book on my list, sight unseen and words unread. I devoured the entire thing in a long July weekend of adolescent obsessive/compulsive behavior, and spent the rest of the summer wishing I was a thin, red-eyed albino with a vampiric sword.

From there I moved on to the chronicles of Corum, and a few random stories about the Eternal Champion. All in all, probably about a dozen of Moorcocks’ 60-plus books.

Now I see that he has a website: Moorcock’s Weekly Miscellany . It is not updated all that often, but it is well-done and contains a wealth of information on a writer who doesn’t get as much attention as he deserves.

Books and Blank Stares

John Winkelman

Something woke me up at around 4:00 this morning. I couldn’t get back to sleep so I got out of bed, worked out for an hour or so, then sat down to do a little work on version 2.1.0.4.6.9b of the Flash Photo Album application. This will be, I think, the fifth time in the past year that I have started to rebuild it. I won’t bother posting a date when it will be ready because, frankly, I just don’t know.

Last night after teaching the Kendall class (in which nobody cried) I stopped out to the local book merchant and picked up the new Neal Stephenson book, The System of the World. It looks quite beautiful on my bookshelf next to the first two volumes of the Baroque Cycle, Quicksilver and The Confusion . It was my intention to only pick up the one book but I stopped past the remainder tables and there, in their shiny hardcover glory, were Baudolino and The Collected What If? , which brings together What If? and What If?2. So much for saving money. So much for sleep.