Remember Stephen Donaldson?

If you do, you’ve probably read his fantasy series, The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant. Donaldson had a style of writing …uniquely his own in that series, which showed what can happen to a man under the influence of thesauri. In a recent discussion of Donaldson in rec.arts.sf.written, Joel Baxter illustrated his style as follows:

“Some coffee, Mr. Covenant?”

“No!” he panted, glaring. The gelid liquid was anthraciously black, atramentous, nigrescent as his carious and macerated soul. “No,” he groaned. “Do you hear? I will not!” Shaking, he fumbled for his empty mug, clawing at it with numb hands like blocks of rotted wood. Finally, gasping, he closed his fingers on the malefic vessel, upending it, then ramming it downward to the table again… violently stopping the irrefragable, ineluctable maw with intransigent formica. The sudden whipcrack sound threw a refulgent oriflamme of pain across his sight, and he closed his eyes with a febrile shudder. “No,” he whispered. No more. No more.

“All righty then, I’ll be right back with your check!”

It’s funny because it’s true.

It’s that man again

Speaking of demonising Pim Fortuyn…

Only the Dutch could have a gay sociologist fascist

The murder is further complicated by the fact that only the Dutch could have a fascist leader who was a gay sociologist. Maybe he was trying to build a liberal, inclusive fascism, dreaming of the day he could announce to his followers “and now, after a hard afternoon’s goose-stepping, let’s relax, massage each other’s shoulders and get rid off all that tension before invading a neighbouring country.”

His sexuality has been cited as one of the reasons that he couldn’t have been a fascist, but the far right seems capable of gliding over these contradictions. If Hitler had been gay, the only difference to history would have been the uniforms, when he’d thrown a strop and yelled, “Brown shirts and jackboots? Have you no sense of colour co-ordination”.

It’s typical that an English comedian did have the guts to take the mickey out of Fortuyn’s death, while our own cabaretiers haven’t dared comment.