Quick Hits
Links I like today, from Tor.com:
Frank Frazetta article by Gregory Manchess
I read about legendary heroes of folklore, myth, and history, in school. I understood the heroes and the legends, but Frank could make you feel it. He wanted you to feel what he felt. He let you have it, too, right in the guts.
Reflections on an empty studio" by David Apatoff, which discusses great artists and the empty studios they leave behind.
Objectively speaking, artwork like Frazetta’s should be created in a cave with flaming torches and skulls. Instead, it was created in a messy room by a grandfather wearing short-sleeved polyester shirts over his paunch, an artist who spilled coffee on his work as he raced to make deadlines. Frazetta’s studio, like the studios of other great creators before him, was a place where a temporary and unexplainable breach in the laws of physics permitted true alchemy to occur. With the creative presence extinguished, the laws of physics close in once again, and weigh on us more heavily in that spot than they did before.
Heavily indeed. I am still pretty broken up about it. He's the third person I've never met that I cried for when I learned they died.*
"His Dark Materials & The Assault on Sociopathic Organizations" by Dr. Kirtland C Peterson discusses fantasy's predictive nature as it applies to the changes occurring in the Catholic church.
My thesis (and I’m sticking to it): Fantasy can predict. Case in point: Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy and the child-abuse scandal currently threatening to “bring down” a very large and very old religious organization. I would argue this crisis is dimensionally different from earlier crises, that an important, permanent shift has occurred that will have effects beyond the organization in question.
Really interesting article.
* 1) Fritz Leiber, 2) Heath Ledger, dreadful losses, both.
Frank Frazetta article by Gregory Manchess
I read about legendary heroes of folklore, myth, and history, in school. I understood the heroes and the legends, but Frank could make you feel it. He wanted you to feel what he felt. He let you have it, too, right in the guts.
Reflections on an empty studio" by David Apatoff, which discusses great artists and the empty studios they leave behind.
Objectively speaking, artwork like Frazetta’s should be created in a cave with flaming torches and skulls. Instead, it was created in a messy room by a grandfather wearing short-sleeved polyester shirts over his paunch, an artist who spilled coffee on his work as he raced to make deadlines. Frazetta’s studio, like the studios of other great creators before him, was a place where a temporary and unexplainable breach in the laws of physics permitted true alchemy to occur. With the creative presence extinguished, the laws of physics close in once again, and weigh on us more heavily in that spot than they did before.
Heavily indeed. I am still pretty broken up about it. He's the third person I've never met that I cried for when I learned they died.*
"His Dark Materials & The Assault on Sociopathic Organizations" by Dr. Kirtland C Peterson discusses fantasy's predictive nature as it applies to the changes occurring in the Catholic church.
My thesis (and I’m sticking to it): Fantasy can predict. Case in point: Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy and the child-abuse scandal currently threatening to “bring down” a very large and very old religious organization. I would argue this crisis is dimensionally different from earlier crises, that an important, permanent shift has occurred that will have effects beyond the organization in question.
Really interesting article.
* 1) Fritz Leiber, 2) Heath Ledger, dreadful losses, both.