Short notice, but I just found out myself. I’ll be interviewed this afternoon, at 4:30 p.m. on the Issues, Etc. radio program. We’ll be discussing the story of the new heathen Norse temple in Iceland.

You can listen live at the web site, and I believe you can also listen to an archived version if you miss it.

You’ve got to ask yourself one question: “Do I feel lucky?”

Growing interest in long-form storytelling has encouraged Hollywood bloodsuckers to ask more novelists to help them. They want story and backstory for these eight-episode or longer stories the kids like these days.

One agent said, “We are selling more intellectual property to television than ever before. What you’re finding in both television and film now is a recognition that a great storyteller is a great storyteller, regardless of the medium.”

For example, PW points to Gillian Flynn, “who bargained to stay on as the screenwriter of the film adaptation of Gone Girl when it was optioned. Flynn is now signed on to write an adaptation of the British series Utopia for HBO, as well as a planned feature adaptation of Alfred Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train.”

Speaking about a screenplay for Strangers on a Train, Raymond Chandler said this:

When you read a story, you accept its implausibilities and extravagances, because they are no more fantastic than the conventions of the medium itself. But when you look at real people, moving against a real background, and hear them speaking real words, your imagination is anaesthetized. You accept what you see and hear, but you do not complement it from the resources of your own imagination. The motion picture is like a picture of a lady in a half-piece bathing suit. If she wore a few more clothes, you might be intrigued. If she wore no clothes at all, you might be shocked. But the way it is, you are occupied with noticing that her knees are too bony and that her toenails are too large. The modern film tries too hard to be real. Its techniques of illusion are so perfect that it requires no contribution from the audience but a mouthful of popcorn.

Thoughts thought this week:



Somebody mentioned androids — those all-but-human robots we see so often in modern science fiction — on Facebook.

I don’t think we’re likely ever to see androids.

Not because the technology is too complex (though it may be). But because the technology will probably be unnecessary.

We already have a source of perfect humanoid organisms that we can exploit as servants and slaves.

In time it will probably be possible to alter their brains to render them compliant, and no more intelligent than we want them to be.

The organisms I mean are unborn human beings. Aborted babies.

Legally, they have no standing as persons. So technically, it would not be illegal to enslave them. Is it very unlikely that in a utilitarian future, aborted babies will not be disposed of, as they are now, but recycled, as labor-saving devices?

Seems almost inevitable to me, unless our hearts are changed.

I’ve thought about working this idea into a story, but it’s too Science Fiction for me to handle properly.

Somebody’s probably already done it anyway.

SUFFRAJITSU, the tactics of the women who fought for their rights in Victorian and Edwardian England. Now in comic book form. More on the story of these Amazons here.

Took half a day off today, because I had an afternoon appointment with my surgeon. Almost one year from the date of my hip replacement, time to zap my groin area with carcinogenic radiation.

But first, stopped at Fat Nat’s Eggs, a small local chain that serves only breakfast and lunch, to try their hot beef sandwich. I’ve become kind of obsessed with hot beef sandwiches since the great one I had in Minot, ND a couple years ago. My review: It was good, especially the mashed potatoes. But I still give the edge to Keys Restaurant, another local chain but a longer drive from my home. Neither is quite up to that Minot place (whose name escapes me for a moment, but it starts with a “K”), though.

Then off to see the sawbones. We both agreed that my new hip and I are getting along fine. She asked me when I want the other one done, and I told her certainly not before my graduate work is done. I don’t care to repeat last year’s catch-up effort, which in memory is worse than the operation. She’s OK with that, knowing that she’ll probably get me sooner or later. Though she admitted that the X-rays showed some changes in the “manufacturer’s original parts” hip, and not negative ones.

I also congratulated her, having perceived, through my extraordinary writer’s powers of observation, that she was about 8 1/2 months pregnant.

My spring classes began today. I actually started my assigned reading yesterday. The Christmas break (which I’m sure the school calls Winter Break) was nice, though I spent it mostly working at this and that. I think of myself as a lazy man, but I do manage to keep busy.

Before me stretches a year of academics. If I keep on schedule, I’ll be done with classes in December, and then there’ll only be the final testing (or whatever) to convince them I deserve my degree (a Master’s degree, I’ve learned, entitles you to put the suffix Esq. behind your name. I don’t think I’ll avail myself of that).

So it’s a matter of doing my time, like a convict. Each day I do the designated work, and I’ll tick the days off one by one until I come out into the light at the end.

On an unconnected note, I bought my first pair of loafer shoes on Saturday. I suppose you’d call them loafers, though they don’t look quite like what I was taught to think of as loafers back in the ’50s. They look a little dorky to my eye, but not as dorky as walking around with my shoes untied (I have complained about modern Teflon shoelaces in this space before), and way less dorky than stopping to kneel down on my old man’s limbs to re-tie them. These are the small indignities God gives us, in His mercy, so that the Angel of Death, when he appears at last, won’t look like such an unwelcome guest after all.

I think I told you that my classes resumed last Monday. I wrote that in good faith, but in fact they start tomorrow. I got another week of freedom I hadn’t planned on.

I’ve used my winter break for a number of different purposes. There was the ordinary Christmas stuff. I did another revision on my translation of a book on Norway in the Viking Age, because the text I delivered to the publisher was a rough draft, and it’s been nagging at me. To my surprise, after I delivered the revision, the publisher told me they’re probably going to go ahead with it. Most gratifying.

And then there were Christmas cards. And then there was taxes.

But I’ve loafed a little. Last night I watched a new TV show called “Backstrom.” Wikipedia tells me that it’s an Americanized adaptation of a series of Swedish detective novels. It stars Rainn Wilson, best known from “The Office.”

It was horrible. Or so it seemed to me. I kind of tuned it out after the first 15 minutes or so. Possibly it picked up while I wasn’t paying attention.

Comparisons to “House” come to mind. House was a rude and irascible genius. Backstrom is supposed to be the same.

But House had one thing this show lacked — wit. You couldn’t help liking House a little, most of the time. He was funny. He was obviously in physical pain, which made most of us cut him a little slack. And he had people around him — notably Dr. Wilson — who put up with his act because they had a history with him and had reasons (often opaque to us) for valuing him.

Backstrom has none of that. He’s just a jerk.

Memo to Hollywood: Being a jerk in itself is not the same as being interesting.

Chris Yokel talks about visiting an art museum. “I was in the Art of the Americas wing, looking at some of my favorite paintings by the early Americans, Gilbert Stuart and John Singleton Copley. Leaning in close, I could see the brushstrokes, still visible after several hundred years. I noticed the cracks seaming the canvas, sometimes even enhancing it.”

His creative spirit is wonderfully refreshed.

Elodie Quetant urges us to serve those around us. “We cheapen life by playing a peeping Tom to its events. Our gadgets have trained us for constant voyeurism, but we’re missing the bigger picture by not engaging friends, coworkers, and our children about monumental shifts in society. Avoiding the uncomfortable conversations is the perfect way for society to remain ignorant and biased.”