( via / via )

"A couple of professors told me that their students see reading books as akin to listening to vinyl records—something that a small subculture may still enjoy, but that’s mostly a relic of an earlier time." (via @saintsoftness

From Legion of Space by Jack Williamson (1935):

“…the far, strange planet of Barnard’s Runaway Star.” (p. 17)

“The night-side of it was utterly black, a round blot on the stars. The day-side was a curved and ugly crimson blade, stained with evil blood, clotted with dark rust. Its orbit lay close to the dying dwarf. And it was gigantic, John Star realized, many times the bulk of Earth.”

“…that dense red atmosphere hides the surface.”

“The remarkable motion of Barnard’s Star, they tell me now, is a thing of their own accomplishment.” (85)

“This planet is much larger than Earth. About three times the diameter. Its rotation is very slow, its day about fifteen of Earth’s. The nights are fearful. A week long, and bitterly cold…There is just one large continent—about equal in area to all Earth.” (89)

“The sky was a cold, lowering dome of sullen crimson; the sun burned low in it, an incredibly huge disk of deeper, sinister scarlet.” (92)

--Oddly, he never names the planet. Does The Big Jump (1953)? Apparently not. The Black Corridor (1969) doesn't either. I named it Janus in an unpublished story in '73 or '74...although surely Andre Norton has preëmpted that one. [Robert Forward deserves mention, too, for his several novels set in that star-system.]

Very feedbacky loop.

"(Spahr on 'the relationship between lyric poetry and language poetry': 'I think their relationship is not going so well although they seemed to have stopped yelling at each other. But I don’t think they will be dating much soon.' Umm, thanks!)" --Hotel Point, 3-18-05

The overzealous art critic.