Your Happening World (November 21st through November 25th)

Your Happening World (October 3rd through October 7th)

  • Where Should We Bury the Dead Racist Literary Giants? – The Awl – At the same time, focusing on race in Lovecraft can also lead to a greater appreciation of his work, and a better understanding of its horror. Joshi may think he's protecting Lovecraft's legacy by minimizing the role of race in his stories, but the truth is that, to the extent that Lovecraft is still meaningful, it's in large part because of his portrait of his own racism. Lovecraft isn't a great artist despite being a racist, as Joshi would have it. Nor is he a lousy artist because he's a racist, as Older says. He's a great artist and he's a racist: Lovecraft's world is one in which racism poisons everything, in which the fear of anyone who isn't white is so overwhelming that it fills the seas and the skies and everything in between with gibbering demons and cosmic despair. The bleak, clotted hatred with which he renders that world is precisely what makes his work valuable.
  • What to read on the Tory proposals for a “Bill of Rights” | Jack of Kent
  • GUEST POST: Of Meat Hooks and Desire by Max Gladstone | Brian Staveley – There’s more to life than stabbing people in the gut. Or melting their faces off with a fireball. Or being dropped out of a helicopter, or tortured with a potato peeler.
  • Fantasy-Faction World Tour of Wonderment: The Netherlands | Fantasy-Faction
  • Marvel & Jack Kirby Family Settle Long-Running Legal Dispute – Page 5 – So what happened wasn't that the Kirby family sued Marvel just because they one day decided to up and want more money. They didn't even sue. What they did was file for termination of copyright assignment — the very thing that the law allows creators to do. They didn't do this against the wishes of Kirby himself — Kirby had been all for doing it, ever since the law had been changed. But they had to wait a certain amount of time, and Kirby didn't live long enough to see it happen. But he was always on board with it.

Bye-bye Charles! Bye-bye Jackie! Hello Caroline!

Unfortunately Hazel Blears kept her seat, but nice to see both Charles “safety elephant” Clarke and Jackie Smith finally were told to bugger off by their constituencies. Also good to see the Greens win their first seat.

The overall impression seems to be that, despite all the triumphalism, the television debates did not have the impact on the election itself they were predicted to have based on the polls. It became an almost normal two horse race again, with the Lib Dems doing nowhere near as well as “Clegg Mania” was supposed to make them. Currently they’re at 47 seats according to Wikipedia, with 565 of 650 seats declared. Last time they won 62, if the end result is the same, slightly better or even worse then it’s clear that Clegg has failed to deliver the breakthrough the debates seemed to hand him.

And the reason might just be that enough people took a second look at the likely outcome, saw the Tories looming and decided better to vote for the devil they knew. Labour might be bastards, but the Tories seem to be even worse bastards and a Lib Dem victory at the expense of Labour might just have delivered a Liberal-Tory government. Meanwhile the Tory voters the Lib-Dems were chasing refused to be caught it seems, rather having the real ones in power than a surrogate. A wasted opportunity, though the Lib-Dems might still end up holding the balance of power in what now looks like a well and truly hung parliament. They should’ve gone for the left of Labour vote, not chase lefty Tories.

Good to see Caroline Lucas become the first Green MP. Results from Poplar and Limehouse, where George Galloway is standing, aren’t in yet, but it looks like Labour has won that, according to the BBC.

What’s really worrying are the reports of polls closing while there were still voters waiting to vote; that’s a sign of bad organisation.