“A long time ago when I was writing for pulps, I put into a story a line like ‘he got out of the car and walked across the sun drenched sidewalk until the shadow of the awning over the entrance fell across his face like the touch of cool water.’ They took it out when they published the story. Their readers didn’t appreciate this sort of thing: it just held up the action. And I set out to prove them wrong. My theory was they just thought they cared nothing about anything but the action; that really, although they didn’t know it, they cared very little about the action. The things they really cared about, and that I cared about, were the creation of emotion through dialogue and description; the things they remembered, that haunted them, were not for example that a man got killed, but that in the moment of his death he was trying to pick a paper clip up off the polished surface of a desk, and it kept slipping away from him, so that there was a look of strain on his face and his mouth was half open in a kind of tormented grin, and the last thing in the world he thought about was death. … [Read more...] about Raymond Chandler on What Haunts the Reader.
Archives for February 2018
Don’t Panic! SpaceX Falcon Heavy Launches to Cheers!
The SpaceX Falcon Heavy, also known as the BFR which stands for "Big F**ing Rocket, successfully launched into space today, to the excited cheers of engineers and scientists. The BFR is the most powerful operational rocket in the world. Only the Saturn V moon rocket, last flown in 1973, has ever delivered a comparable payload into orbit. With a total of 27 Merlin engines, Falcon Heavy is capable of 5 million pounds of thrust. Three cores made up the first stage of Falcon Heavy's test launch. The duo side cores, or boosters flanking the center core, returned to earth in perfect unison, landing on target in a dazzling display of technical prowess. SpaceX CEO/Lead Designer Elon Musk made the mission personal, by changing out the usual steel or concrete block payload, for his own midnight-cherry Tesla Roadster, in honor of the red planet. The Falcon Heavy will attempt to place the Roadster, with its space-suited mannikin, into a continual precession, Earth-Mars elliptical orbit around the sun. And in a tribute to David Bowie, the song "Space Oddity," … [Read more...] about Don’t Panic! SpaceX Falcon Heavy Launches to Cheers!
