Reinventing Teaching

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Just a quick update on things. I’ve been working on trying to run labs in a a hybrid format with alternating attendance model and a concurrent online lab. Plus having an all online version for those who can’t attend in person.

Tomorrow is the first face to face lab.  We never start labs until the week after Labor Day because the holiday throws off the schedule, and it was a week late this year. It’s been hectic, especially the last few days of the week, and I don’t anticipate this week being much calmer, at least not at first. I have discovered that it is possible to kill brain cells if the student email to which you are replying is of sufficient stupidity.

I’m going to try to carve out time for writing and editing. I’m in the process of putting a collection of some of my short stories together. I intend to send it out into the world with the hopes that it will find work and send money home and not just die of loneliness.

I am probably not going to do a lot of reviews in the near future. I finished, after a number of interruptions, Melmoth the Wanderer about a week ago.  I haven’t had a chance to write the review. That will probably be the next post.  As I said at the end of yesterday’s post about Charles L. Grant, birthday posts will most likely brief tributes without any stories reviewed. Given the time crunch I’ll have this semester, I’m going to focus more on writing fiction than I am reviewing it.

Remembering Charles L. Grant

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Charles L. Grant

September 12, AKA today, is the birthday of Charles L. Grant (1942-2006). Grant was a practitioner of what is known as quiet horror. It’s the type of horror I prefer. In addition to being an amazing writer, he was one of the most influential anthology editors of the late 1970s and 80s.

I first became aware of Shadows, the groundbreaking anthology series he edited when I was in the 8th grade.  We had recently moved to Paris, TX.  The public library had a good selection of anthologies for a library of that size in those days, including at least one, and probably more, titles from the Shadows series. The first volume I read was Shadows 3. I was hooked. I hunted down the others, especially Shadows 2, which had “The Chair” by Jane Cozart and Alan Dean Foster, Foster being my favorite writer at the time.  This was about a year before I discovered Kuttner and Brackett. Continue reading →

RIP, Charles R. Saunders

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Reports are coming in on Facebook (which I’m not on, so this is all second hand) that Charles R. Saunders passed away in May. Saunders was born on July 12, 1946 in Elizabeth, Pennsylvania. Saunders founded the sword and soul subgenre when he began writing a series of stories about a warrior named Imaro in 1970s. They were set in an alternate Africa called Nyumbani.

Saunders isn’t as widely known as he should be. Fortunately much of his work is available. Check it out.

Rest well, sir. You will be missed.

Who Are the Giants?

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So yesterday’s post on Edgar Rice Burroughs and Harold Lamb and the recent post on the canon, coupled with today is the anniversary of the passing of J. R. R. Tolkien and the seventh anniversary of the death of Frederik Pohl, got me to thinking. I referred to Burroughs and Lamb as giants. In the canon post I quoted Newton talking about his achievements being due to his standing on the shoulders of giants.

So who exactly are the giants in the field? Continue reading →

Le Fanu, Vance, Kirby, and McIntyre

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Today, August 28, marks a number of birthdays in the fields of the fantastic. I’m going to focus on four of them. This was the first week of classes, and things have been hectic to a greater degree than normal. That is to say, I haven’t slowed down long enough to read anything by any of these folks. In spite of that, I would like to recognize them. Continue reading →

A Birthday Recognition for Two Ladies.

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I can say that, can’t I? “Ladies”, I mean. If that verboten? I mean Mike Resnick and Barry Malzberg got in all kinds of trouble for referring to a “lady editor”, but Mary Robinette Kowal, who (I think) was leading the charge against those two has a series about a lady astronaut with the word “lady” in the title. I’m so confused.

I guess the lesson is you ain’t gonna please everybody, so you might as well please yourself.  I’m gonna please myself be recognizing two ladies who have left their mark on the field were born on this day, August 24. The first was Alice B. Sheldon (1915 -1987), who wrote under the pen name of James Tiptree, Jr., and Bea Mahaffey (1926-1987), who was the lady Resnick was referring to when he got in trouble. Continue reading →

To Ray, With Much Thanks

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Today (August 22, 2020) marks the 100th anniversary of the birth of Ray Bradbury. If you’ll indulge a bit of nostalgia, I’m going to discuss the impact Ray had on my life.

It must have been the 6th grade, but it might have been the 5th. It’s been too many years now to be sure. One day in Mr. Thayer’s reading class, there was a guest waiting when we arrived from whatever class we’d been in before.

I don’t recall the gentleman’s name, but he was there to read to us. He told us was going to read a story by Ray Bradbury, who was a science fiction writer. Continue reading →

Firing the Canon: An Appreciation of H. P. Lovecraft

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I was going to do a review in honor of H. P. Lovecraft’s birthday (August 20, 1890-1937) , but then one of the usual suspects, a writer noted for ripping off writing in the styles of better writers from a previous generation ignited a small tempest in a teapot about the need of having a canon, or in his case, not having one. No, that’s not a typo in the title of this post. He wants to fire the canon, as in “You’re fired”. Those are my terms, not his, just to be clear.

So here are my thoughts, using the Gentleman From Providence as a key example since it’s become so fashionable to hate on him. And John W. Campbell, Jr., and Issac Asimov, and Robert E. Howard, and… Continue reading →

Hester Howard Slept Here

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Hester Jane Ervin Howard

I would like to thank John Bullard for his assistance in the preparation of this post.

Recently I was traveling through Carlsbad, Texas, something I’ve done many times over the years. There’s not much in Carlsbad, other than the San Angelo State Supported Living Center and some houses and churches, post office, and a few other establishments that owe their existence to the state facility. San Angelo is about fifteen to twenty minutes to the southeast.

I seemed to recall reading something about Robert E. Howard’s mother Hester having been a patient in a facility north of San Angelo, but it had been a while. Memory is a tricky thing, and I wanted to get confirmation. It happened that I was talking to John Bullard on the phone as I was passing through, so I asked him about it. He thought I was right, that Howard had mentioned such a thing in one of his letters. A few hours later he sent me the following excerpt from one of Bob’s letters. Continue reading →