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ukjarry.bsky.social
@ukjarry.bsky.social
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Just another Matthew on the internet
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ukjarry.bsky.social
It's decades too late but a Cyberpunk before Cyberpunk antho would have been fun.

My nomination would be Disch's "Concepts" (1978) offering ideas akin to internet (via headsets), vlogging, chat-roulette (to sexual intimidation), online romance/exploitation, AI children

archive.org/details/Fant...
She went out on the terrace where, yes, the receiver was propped against the balustrade. She lay down in the flowerbed, slipped on the headset, and toggled ON/OFF. Eeny meeny miny mo: the concept of Mrs. Manresa zipped through hyperspace until it had connected with... whose would it be tonight? A scrawl of a man was spread-eagled against what might have been graph paper and then resolved as a white tiled wall. Mrs. Manresa sighed, knowing all too well what this tableau prefigured. True to form, the scrawly Adam began to construct an Eve on the tiles, turning from time to time to check the screen of his own receiver to make sure his audience was still there. When the grafitto was complete, he started wanking off.
February 13, 2026 at 11:33 AM
ukjarry.bsky.social
It's an homage.
Fennell's reused the title format from the 1920 British silent version that also had the title in quotation marks.
Poster for Wuthering Heights, directed by A.V. Bramble and starring Milton Rosmer. Ideal Films, 1920. The text of "Wuthering Heights" is in quotation marks and a bold swooping art noveau font
February 10, 2026 at 8:15 PM
ukjarry.bsky.social
Odd fact hidden in Ricard Lupoff letter in SF Eye #5

1985 TV Movie "Scandal Sheet" with Burt Lancaster is kind of a parallel evolution of "Trust Me on This" by Donald Westlake. Westlake wrote a script in 1982, parted ways with the producers, but apparently the movie still hews close to his story.
A bound script "Scandal Sheet" by Donald E. Westlake, dated December 16 Deceber 1982 Photo from tv movie "Scandal Sheet". Lauren Hutton (as Meg North) and Robert Urich (as Ben Rowan) - counerparts to the novel's Sara Joslyn and Jack Ingersoll
February 9, 2026 at 1:40 AM
ukjarry.bsky.social
Let's say he wasn't its biggest fan:
LA Weekly 12 July 1982
January 25, 2026 at 12:01 PM
ukjarry.bsky.social
In a 1970 SFWA Forum Harlan Ellison reveals Robert Sheckley's agent removed a story from Again, Dangerous Visions to sell to a better market. Possible dates, venues, and "dangerousness" suggest to me the story was:

Can You Feel Anything When I Do This? - Playboy Aug 69
Now on Sheckley. Sheckley, it was beautiful. I’ve got a stack of correspondence, I swear to you, with all sorts of horrendous things. They took the story away after they had already sold it to me, after it was already in my possession. After I already owned it, they sold it some place else. We had a whole fight about it. They returned the money. It was incredible. Sheckley had to write three more stories. Three more stories, before he wrote one that I liked to put in the book. Right? And now we've got a contract that looks like you wouldn't believe it. So I will never again buy from Don Congdon. Any of his clients are, just forget it, I don't even want to speak to them. I wouldn't care if he had the greatest writer in the world.
January 25, 2026 at 1:15 AM
ukjarry.bsky.social
"Ecowareness" published 1974 in Ellison's "Approaching Oblivion" collection.
It was actually written in the early 70s to be illustrated by the Dillons for Michel Choquette's prestige comics anthology "The Someday Funnies". "TSF" was delayed for 40 years, this version finally published in 2011:
January 24, 2026 at 2:48 PM
ukjarry.bsky.social
Lionel Jeffries and Dick Van Dyke are both 41 here in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. Jeffries is older by about 6 months.

Actors like Richard Vernon, Jeffries and John Le Mesurier aged very early but then spent the next 20-30 years not really aging thereafter.
Lionel Jeffries and Dick Van Dyke in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang
January 21, 2026 at 10:31 PM
ukjarry.bsky.social
Paula Gosling – Monkey Puzzle – 1985

Sprightly university-set murder novel, combines both police procedural and the late surprising character reveals of an Agatha Christie.
Hoped for more meta-commentary of one character’s lectures on crime fiction - and much less of book's prevailing homophobia.
In addition to studying the crime novel as literature and as entertainment, I also propose to investigate its structure and to compare methods not only of the detectives, but of the writers themselves. We'll examine their individual ways of achieving their aim – which is to keep the reader mystified until approximately five pages from the end. That is the so-called 'ideal contract.’ between writer and reader – the former fairly supplies the clues, and the latter agrees to suspend disbelief while trying to solve the puzzle. The reader does not want to solve the crime ten pages from the beginning, he wants to be mystified and dazzled – that is the entertainment he has paid for. But he wold like the opportunity to try.
January 18, 2026 at 11:32 PM
ukjarry.bsky.social
How about: A Specter Is Haunting Texas. By Fritz Leiber

Conquered Canada is North Texas. Continental America is ruled by primitive, redneck, anti-intellectual, giant, hormone-boosted, bio-engineered "good ole boys" convinced of their own moral superiority subjugating a Mexican underclass.
January 9, 2026 at 1:44 PM
ukjarry.bsky.social
There's a fun comic strip about Churchill as the Greatest "Dying" Englishman in Private Eye, 8 February 1963 making this same argument:
January 6, 2026 at 10:57 AM
ukjarry.bsky.social
One of the reasons he and Christopher Guest ended up in The National Lampoon stage show / rock musical "Lemmings" is because they could play their instruments live on stage for various rock pastiches
January 5, 2026 at 6:53 PM
ukjarry.bsky.social
His alienated, horrified, domination/supremacy over the wayward body - bringing to mind this quote from "THE WILL TO BEAUTY" by Stephen Schiff, Vanity Fair, Jan 84

which presages the popular and pertinent "EVERYONE IS BEAUTIFUL AND NO ONE IS HORNY" by R.S. Benedict
The will to beauty is part of a larger syndrome, peculiar to this culture, that takes the form of a tyranny—the tyranny of the image…But we have allowed imagery itself to tyrannize us, to dictate what we think and do and feel, and we have allowed it in the very face of our political freedoms. I think we're all at least subliminally aware of the tyranny of the image. And if it restricts the way we make our decisions, the way we understand the world and our place in it, well, that is perhaps its charm: it numbs the urgency of self-determination. The will to beauty is a sort of convulsion, a spasmodic contraction that regulates sexual desires and choices in a society that may be more frightened of them than it realizes. Real sexual freedom would mean the freedom to adopt individual sensual tastes, and that is something we have never had in this country, even in the most liberal of eras. It is also something we could have, anytime enough of us wanted it. We are very far from being a society that lets its members love whom they choose, and how. And so the body culture may be viewed as a self-imposed discipline, a barrier, a Maginot Line erected by those who imagine themselves the hippest and the freest, against the scary erotic temptations that the last two decades have made available. The will to beauty is sexual repression disguised as hedonism—a new repression for a "liberated" age. But when the athlete works out, he's reaching toward a body that's united with his vision. It is when the body is carved into an emblem not of individual vision but of a bland, commonly acknowledged beauty that we grow alienated from it. The parts of the body, which are ours, which function biologically as glands and organs, become the Other. They belong to what's Out There. And we begin to evaluate them as we evaluate almost everything else Out There—as commodities, products, aids to our social and economic progress. The body, our material emissary to the world, joins the other side. It becomes a turncoat, a metaphysical double agent. In fact, if the obsession with the body resembles any other cultural strain, it may be the aesthetics of fascism. The "no pain, no gain" body-building creed has accumulated a spooky, cultish aura; iron pumpers can now buy T-shirts that brag HURTS SO GOOD. Like fascism, and like the sadomasochism that is its erotic kin, the body culture is about fantasies of power and pain, domination and submission. -The laboratory where the new sexual tinkering transpires seems to be the health club culture…One reason it's a good place to meet people is because of the way everybody dresses. What you see is what you get." And this teeming miasma of Nikes and Danskins has begotten the hottest thing in fashion, sweats— exercise clothes designed to be worn on the street, to restaurants, to parties—clothes that, without being in themselves alluring, nevertheless advertise membership in the new army of machine-tooled physiques. The clothed figure has always tried to suggest a finished product. Clothes were an acceptable lie because they made the body—which had complex imperfections everyone acknowledged—look better than it could possibly be. But sweats perform almost the opposite function. Deliberately bland and unassuming, they convey process, not product. They say, "The body underneath doesn't need clothes, because it is perfect, and it is maintaining its perfection." Sweats are like medals on a military uniform; they're accessories that announce the accomplishments of the wearer. And of course the accomplishment and the uniform are both the body itself.
December 30, 2025 at 4:05 PM
ukjarry.bsky.social
Finally got William Gaddis – The Recognitions off the shelf. After 8 days my head felt like this – but as a good thing

www.youtube.com/watch?v=vO31...
Reuben Skip – The Investigator (play) Thurber – The Wonderful O Mann & Carroll – OC & Stiggs Martin Mull – History of White People in America Jack Kirby – Jimmy Olsen / Forever People / Mister Miracle / New Gods Dan Clowes – Monica Charles Burns – Final Cut Tom Scioli – Godzilla’s Monsterpiece Theatre Diana Wynne-Jones – Tough Guide to Fantasy Land
December 23, 2025 at 11:09 AM
ukjarry.bsky.social
Warren Miller – Looking for the General. A picaresque of post-war American institutional paranoias and homespun crankery under the space age and nuclear holocaust, tinted by Melville and Gogol.

NYRB, Daunt or McNally should reprint it - I suspect it resides in estate limbo.
Helen Eustis – The Horizontal Man + ½ bk of 1940s ss Chandler – The Little Sister Charlotte Armstrong – Mischief / A Dram of Poison Jada Davis – One for Hell Jim Thompson - A Hell of a Woman / A Swell Looking Babe Henry Slesar – The Grey Flannel Shroud Harry Whittington – A Night for Screaming Jean Potts – The Evil Wish Ross Thomas – The Fools In Town Are On Our Side James Crumley – The Wrong Case Carolyn Heilbrun – Death in a Tenured Position Lawrence Block – Eight Million Ways to Die Elmore Leonard –Freaky Deaky Steven Womack – Dead Folks’ Blues Jack Clark – Nobody’s Angel John Sladek – Puff Love John Hersey – Hiroshima Peter Beagle – I See By My Outfit Lester Bangs – Rolling Stone reviews D. Keith Mano – National Review 1971-73 Edmund Wilson – Patriotic Gore Evan S. Connell – Son of the Morning Star Gifford & Lee – William Saroyan Biography Zipperstein – Isaac Rosenfeld Biography Sean Howe – Agents of Chaos Thomas King Forçade, High Times, and the Paranoid End of the 1970s Alexander Theroux – Strange Case of Edward Gorey Elizabeth Sandifer - Cuddled Little Vice, on Neil Gaiman
December 23, 2025 at 11:09 AM
ukjarry.bsky.social
Recommend Elizabeth Jenkins – The Tortoise and the Hare as the most perfectly formed novel for breaking your heart. Oddly, Barbara Pym – A Glass of Blessings offers an almost identical protag - but no longer isolated, in a community of Emma-like surprises.
Heinlein – Unpleasant Profession of Jonathan Hoag - .75 Cornell Woolrich – The Night Has a Thousand Eyes Ward Moore – Greener Than You Think (incl. revised ed) (1.5) / Bring the Jubilee / jnlism (.25) – 2.5 Clifford Simak – City Kutner / C.L. Moore / “Lewis Padgett” – 2ss Misc 40s horr/fantasy/sf ss - 1.25 Ray Bradbury – Dark Carnival Fredric Brown – Lights in the Sky Are Stars / Nightmares & Geezenstacks (ss) Pohl & Kornbluth – Search the Sky Ray Russell – horror ss PJFarmer – Green Odyssey / Inside Outside/ Maker of Universes / Gates of Creation Barry Malzberg – 1 ss Kate Wilhelm – 2.5 ss RA Lafferty – Not To Mention Camels Rachel Ingalls – 2 ss (incl. Mrs Caliban) Harlan Ellison – None of the Above screenplay Michael Shea – horror ss Terry Bisson – Talking Man Misc 80s sf/fantasy/horror ss - 2 Elizabeth Jenkins – The Tortoise and the Hare Charles Jackson – The Lost Weekend Michael Nelson – A Room in Chelsea Square Barbara Pym – A Glass of Blessings James Purdy – The Nephew / 63: Dream Palace (novella) George Baxt – A Queer Kind of Death / Swing Low, Sweet Harriet Justin Myers – Leading Man Edward Gorey – 1950s – 1971 (2bks) Alison Bechdel – Spent Summer Shadows graphic novel Toxic Summer graphic novel
December 23, 2025 at 11:09 AM
ukjarry.bsky.social
Read this year approx 117 booka.

Much of it Americana bought long ago as I try to clear my shelves
Sherwood Anderson – Winesburg, Ohio Alan Kapelner – Lonely Boy Blues Robert M. Coates – The Bitter Season Bernard Malamud – The Natural William Gaddis – The Recognitions Alan Harrington – Revelations of Dr Modesto Peter De Vries – Blood of the Lamb / Mackerel Plaza Pynchon - V Warren Miller – Looking for the General Sol Yurick - Fertig Robert Stone – A Hall of Mirrors Sue Kaufman – Diary of a Mad Housewife Saul Bellow – Mr Sammler’s Planet Paula Fox – Desperate Characters Anne Roiphe – Up the Sandbox Gore Vidal - Burr Felice Picano – Eyes Richard Yates –Easter Parade John Irving – World According to Garp Laurie Colwin – Happy All the Time Bobbie Ann Mason – Shiloh (ss) Kate Wilhelm – Oh, Susannah! Valerie Martin – Consolations of Nature (ss) Anne Tyler - Breathing Lessons Alison Lurie –Women & Ghosts (ss) Michael Chabon – Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay Halle Butler – The New Me Walter van Tilburg Clark – The Ox-Bow Incident / 40s ss A.B. Guthrie – The Big It (ss) Charles Neider – The Authentic Death of Hendry Jones Theodore Sturgeon – The Rare Breed
December 23, 2025 at 11:09 AM
ukjarry.bsky.social
Wally Wood's Disneyland Memorial for Paul Krassner's "The Realist", May 1967 already delivered:
Not a chance in hell am I describing this - but think of a classic Disney character and most sexual activities and there's likely some combination of the two in this two-full-page cartoon spread
December 12, 2025 at 2:48 AM
ukjarry.bsky.social
from The Book of Sequels, 1990

Force 10 from Casablanca

- And like the original, it was packed with memorable lines, including "Shoot 'em again, Sam," "Here's taking another look at you, kid," and "This could be the continuation of a beautiful friendship."
pastiche film poster of Bogart, Bergman, Lorre, Greenstreet, Rains, Dooley Wilson all posing, wielding weapons, guns, knives, broken bottle, underneath large banner of Hitler
December 6, 2025 at 8:36 PM
ukjarry.bsky.social
One area where this falls short compared to Scrooged is a failure to satirically depict the worst of commercialised, pandering television.

However, this last page is much more acute about Scrooge’s redemption and hopes of improving television.
December 5, 2025 at 11:04 PM
ukjarry.bsky.social
A selfish, cynical TV executive haunted by three ghosts at Christmas Eve?

Scrooged from 1988, script - Michael O'Donoghue?

Nope! It’s The Return of A Christmas Carol (Esquire, Dec 1961), script - Harvey Kurtzman, art - David Levine

The original massive 1960s’s Esquire pages are truly impressive
December 5, 2025 at 11:04 PM
ukjarry.bsky.social
By the great, lamented cartoonist Richard Sala, this is his fabulous round-up (anatomy, even?) of

!!! PSYCHO SANTA MOVIES !!!

Sala’s original comments on how much harder it was to compile this kind of piece back in 2003:

hereliesrichardsala.blogspot.com/2009/12/slig...
Header: a skeleton in a Santa costume clutches a butcher’s knife, in panel bordered by holly and candy canes “Knock back some eggnog and curl up in front of a warm TV screen - Here is your guide to PSYCHO SANTA MOVIES” 1st panel “And all through the house – a segment of 1972’s Tales from The Crypt, this is the daddy of all psycho-Santa-on-the-loose pix, adapted from the classic EC comic book and remade by HBO in 1989. – Eeeek!” (1972). A young girl happily says “Look who’s here, Mommy!”, pointing at a looming wild-eyed maniac in an ill-fitting Santa costume wielding a large ax. 2nd panel: “Black Christmas (1974) – No killer Santa Claus this time, but it’s the best phone-calls-from-a-psycho-hiding-inside-the-house-urban-legend film ever made. Don’t watch it alone!” A black-haired young woman in a yellow jumper holds a white telephone from which a voice says “Billy! What have you done with the baby?!!” and she replies “Who’s there?” A Christmas tree is in the background. 3rd panel: “Christmas Evil (1980) – This psycho Saint Nick is a sad schlubby loser traumatized by seeing Mommy doing Santa Claus! Watch out for that toy soldier! Ouch!” A real, but crazed-looking Santa extends a hand clasping a toy soldier which holds a long thin spike aimed at the horrified, comically bulging eye of his victim. 4th panel: “To All A Goodnight (1980) – You better watch out for Santa in this every-cliché-in-the-book slasher film, as he depletes a sex-hungry sorority with ax, knife, cross-bow, rock and propeller!” A raging Santa Claus looms out of the panel, wielding a crowbar and saying “I know where you’ve been sleeping, slut!” 5th panel: "Don't Open Till Christmas" (1984) – In a shocking twist, this time it’s Santas who are being slaughtered by a holiday hating maniac! Ho ho-oh!” A Santa Claus cowers before a towering monstrous-looking man wielding a knife over him. 6th panel: “Silent Night, Deadly Night (1984) – This is the one that upset all the parent groups, so of course it’s the one that everyone has seen. Remember? It’s the one with the blonde impaled on reindeer antlers!” An alarmed blonde woman is held aloft by Santa Claus on the panel’s left. On the panel’s right is a wall on which is a large stuffed reindeer head with prominent antlers poking toward the woman’s back. 7th panel: Silent Night, Deadly Night 5 (1989 – really 1991) – The beloved children’s classic PINOCCHIO is ‘reimagined’ as a twisted fever dream having something to do with toy-maker ‘Joe Petto’ (get it?) and his ‘so’, a murderous, sex-crazed, life-size doll. Scariest of all, the toy-maker is played by (gulp!) Mickey Rooney!” A round-faced caricature of Mickey Rooney in a Santa Claus costume with the beard pulled low to reveal his face says to the reader, “Hey, a job is a job! Merry Christmas, folks!”
December 5, 2025 at 10:44 AM
ukjarry.bsky.social
A nice anatomy of a centuries-old literary habit:

D. Keith Mano
National Review
JUNE 9, 1972

from a review of The German Lesson by Siegfried Lenz, translated by Ernst Kaiser and Eithne Wilkins
The digressive method has its venerable ancestry: Jacques le Fataliste out of Tristram Shandy. In The German Lesson we have predictable devices, “How shall I describe his hat?” “I must stop here and set the scene.” It puts a MAN WORKING sign over the author’s head. These phony associations are a substitute for the business of metaphor making. And the reader, with noticeable condescension, is made to participate in, to be present at, the artist’s great moment of creation.
November 23, 2025 at 10:43 AM
ukjarry.bsky.social
What happens if you think of Avram Davidson, less as sf writer, and instead as a contemporary of Saul Bellow, Delmore Schwartz , Isaac Rosenfeld, Philip Roth, and Wallace Markfield:

Avram Davidson: Jew d’Esprit

efanzines.com/SFC/SFC122L....
What Davidson’s readership delights in and celebrates is this rare instance of the style of the Jewish American Writer applied to the Roald Dahl/John Collier-type short story. At its Davidson-ian mostest his style exemplifies the brilliant, flickering style of Jewish American Writer-dom, animated action-paintings of the psyche. This self-attentive style is often employed by the Jewish American Writer on quasi-autobiographical materials, whereas Davidson is rarely so explicitly personal, instead employing it as the means of elliptically arranging the elements of his stories… Davidson’s particular method where readers trace his apparently multitudinous and inconsequential threads to the revelation that they constitute a singular perfect knot. The writer Avram Davidson, wearing a beard and yarmulke, stares down at a bagel, while attending a 1962 science fiction convention. photo from the Jay Kay Klein collection In a centennial mood I noted that 1923 gave the world both Norman Mailer and Avram Davidson. Assorted articles declaring the defining contribution Fanny Mailer’s little Norman had made to Jewish American literature invited a corresponding thought that Avram Davidson, the most rabbinical-looking author ever to wander a science fiction convention floor dispensing bagels, gets NO credit as a Jewish American Writer.
November 13, 2025 at 4:46 PM
ukjarry.bsky.social
Given these are excerpts from a mere magazine column I could easily, happily believe it's some extended scene-setting from Saul Bellow, “Mr Sammler’s Planet” or “Humboldt’s Gift” maybe.

D. Keith Mano
NATIONAL REVIEW
November 24, 1972
I have been in Hell; it’s a place where old men exercise. God, the bodies... Gross flesh meringues, invertebrate. You can memorize death from them. The belly fig-leafs over the groin; dewlaps serve as a saggy bib; varicose vein garters wrap the shin. Muscles no bigger than portions of ice cream at a Chinese restaurant. One strong push-up and terror bugs wide the eyes. Is it now? Is this the cardiac infarction? (Infarction—wonderful word. Let me die of an infarction. Satire to the end.) Stalls in the bathroom wait, confessional boxes perhaps. Not merely a metaphor, this. I have seen men worship before them, “Oh, Lord, please give me success this time. Protect me from the shark nip of my kidney stones.” They can hardly walk, but they’re in shape, in . . . shape, in-shape, three-four. It’s an old club: twenty stories plus above Manhattan. I belong; that is, I’m a member. You see, all my life I’ve wanted lats. Frankie Ritello on 181st Street had great latissimus dorsi muscles: we kids would pay him a dime to show us. They seemed wonderful things, a cobra’s sinewy hood, the vestigial wings of man. And, crucified now on the special lat-making device, I watch the old men come in. Impressive leathery faces, garnished below with wide-tie mod clothes, like John the Baptist’s head on his charger. Maitre d’ hailing heads; heads whose nods are influential. But that’s all they are — heads . . . the rest is hollow, amorphous cloth, like Kukla and Ollie, hand puppets. They stand in front of sunlamps hopefully: but their skins have glossed mirror scales and flash the tanning rays back. They make sauna sweat; they make steam-room sweat. Belt machines strop them, throwing stone and stone after stone into the flabby pools of their stomachs. The masseurs work, Rodinesque, in clod handfuls of flesh. And then the workouts are over. It enfeebles them to get dressed again. Putting on socks is an isometric exercise. I have seen one seventy-year-old man stand helpless, blindfolded, arms up — mugged by his own undershirt — until the shoeshine boy helped him yank it down. Mr. Zinsser waves distractedly, Sisyphus pushing his own body uphill, uphill…What makes Sammy jog? Health fear first. Then the payments, man, the payments.
November 12, 2025 at 2:21 PM
ukjarry.bsky.social
GDT's been very open about how mch he was inspired by Bernie Wrightson's illustrations of Frankeinstein, so finding Elordi probably made his day:
November 7, 2025 at 11:42 PM