(We’re writing a big “What is a Story Collider story?” piece, but it’s a big, unruly monster and taking a long time. So for now I’m going to write up one at a time some of the common notes we give about stories.)
When your story is over, stop.
Or, as Lewis Carroll put it, “Begin at the…
June 2013
15 posts
As Open Culture explains, this rare 1924 recording of Joyce reading from the Aeolus episode of the novel was arranged and financed by his friend and publisher Sylvia Beach, who brought him by taxi to the HMV (His Master’s Voice) gramophone studio in the Paris suburb of Billancourt. She writes in her memoir, Shakespeare & Company:
Joyce had chosen the speech in the Aeolus episode, the only passage that could be lifted out of Ulysses, he said, and the only one that was “declamatory” and therefore suitable for recital. He had made up his mind, he told me, that this would be his only reading from Ulysses.
I have an idea that it was not for declamatory reasons alone that he chose this passage from Aeolus. I believe that it expressed something he wanted said and preserved in his own voice. As it rings out–”he lifted his voice above it boldly”–it is more, one feels, than mere oratory.
Pair with these rare 1935 illustrations for Ulysses by none other than Henri Matisse.
Admiral Leo. An unidentified spacecraft is closing in on us.
On screen Commander Capricorn. Magnify.
OH NO!!! It’s Carl Sagan and his Spaceship of the Imagination!!!!
Astrology… Your future looks…………. Gloomy.
Quickly Major Pisces! Fire the…
Consider that you can see less than 1% of the electromagnetic spectrum and hear less than 1% of the acoustic spectrum. As you read this, you are traveling at 220 km/sec across the galaxy. 90% of the cells in your body carry their own microbial DNA and are not “you.” The atoms in your body are 99.9999999999999999% empty space and none of them are the ones you were born with, but they all originated in the belly of a star. Human beings have 46 chromosomes, 2 less than the common potato.
The existence of the rainbow depends on the conical photoreceptors in your eyes; to animals without cones, the rainbow does not exist. So you don’t just look at a rainbow, you create it. This is pretty amazing, especially considering that all the beautiful colors you see represent less than 1% of the electromagnetic spectrum.”
” —NASA Lunar Science Institute, We Originated in the Belly of a Star, 2012. (via setbabiesonfire)May 2013
23 posts
Paul came from Jersey but he said he came from New York. His plates were Jersey, though, so — so Jersey. He could’ve been a Turnbull A.C., he was THAT kind of New York, that kind of Jersey. He was great. Nobody in Winston-Salem knew what to do with this kid out of central casting with a goddamn…
We [Fraction and his wife, Kelly Sue DeConnick] were pregnant at the time, and while I was out there I started to realize that if I had a daughter, there would come a day when I would have to apologize to her for my profession. I would have to apologize for the way it treats and speaks to women readers, and the way it treats its female characters.
I knew that if we had a daughter, because I know my wife and I know the kind of girl she wants to raise and I know the kind of girl I want to raise, she was going to look at what I did for a living and want to know how the fuck I could stomach it. How could I sell her out like that?” Fraction continued. “That conversation is still coming, and I’m bracing for it in the way that some dads brace for their daughter’s first date or boyfriend. I became acutely aware that I had sort of done that thing that lots of privileged hetero cisgendered white dudes do. ‘I’m cool with women, and that’s enough.’ It’s not enough. It’s embarrassing to say, because we somehow have attached shame to learning and evolving our opinions, culturally, but I became aware that there was a deficiency of and to women in my work, and all I could do at that moment was take care of my side of the street.
” —Writer Matt Fraction on his role on expanding the profile of female characters in the Marvel Universe. (via goodmanw)






