The Better Chancery Practice Blog

• Cocktail parasols if your drink is expecting rain, or for your next party or re-enactment of the killer at the piano bar scene from High Anxiety.
• Ever find yourself yearning for the old drive-in movies? You can actually rent a full sized, inflatable screen for your next gathering of a “few hundred friends” from Southern Outdoor Cinema. Screens are availale in several sizes, from back yard to cow pasture.
• The classic 1949 movie Intruder in the Dust, based on Faulkner’s novel, is available on DVD now, just in time to screen at your inflatable drive-in! The film was shot in and around Oxford, and offers views of what the then-sleepy town looked like in the first half of the twentieth century. Caution: some of the language in the film may offend modern sensibilities, but it’s a fair representation of the era it depicts.
• In 1963, sixteen-year-old San Diego high school student Bruce McAllister sent out questionnaires to writers asking their opinions about the use of symbolism in their and other writers’ work. He received 75 responses, 65 of which survive. The astonishing results of his survey are captured in this Paris Review article, which reproduces the responses of Jack Kerouac, Ayn Rand, Ralph Ellison, Ray Bradbury, John Updike, Saul Bellow and Norman Mailer. Some of the other solicited writers, not excerpted in the article, were A.J. Budrys, Fritz Leiber, Henry Roth, Isaac Asimov, John Cheever, John Updike, Judith Merril, Lloyd Biggle Jr., MacKinlay Kantor, Norman Mailer, Saul Bellow, William Golding and William Melvin Kelley. Wow, just wow.
• If you’ve ever been to the Sistine Chapel, you will agree that the experience is lacking something special when you’re crammed in there with hundreds of other tourists. So here’s a virtual Capella Sistina, complete with baroque choir, sans the tourists, for your Christmas-tide enjoyment.

§ One Response to DICTA

• Anderson says:

  December 9, 2011 at 9:18 am

  Fritz Leiber! Barely in print now, which is a shame. One of the great old figures of the Golden Age of SF/fantasy. I think Jack Vance is the only survivor of their ranks.

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