Now you can find out the truth.
If you dare. 😉
I’m not kidding.
(Beware: slight orc-ish nudity.) The orcish poet Urrshahurruk-gah (Celadon Toadstool) was famed throughout the fifty-seven tribes for the quality of her poetry, and also for that time she put a mace through that one guy’s head, while shouting haiku. Her martial poetry was of course the most popular, including such works as “Warpig Sonnets” and “Ode to a Dagger Stuck In Somebody’s Eye,” which dealt with the perennial themes of melee and mayhem popular among orcs. But many believe that her finest work were her more delicate and introspective pieces, including “Reflections Seen In The Blood Of My Enemies,” and the elegant “Poem for Mushrooms Growing From The Skull Of A Dead Elf.”
It was perhaps not entirely politic for Celadon to recite that last piece at an elvish court during a rare cultural exchange program between warring kingdoms, but everyone agreed much later that it had helped to open a really honest dialogue, and there hadn’t been all THAT many casualties, and you couldn’t expect artists to compromise about these things, after all.
Well, don’t just sit there staring. Rush there in your thousands!
(eyeroll)
The image of the duckbilled haggis down at the bottom of the page also gives me pause.
…Apparently it’s a haggis-hunt contest sponsored by the Scotsman newspaper. There are prizes (a stay at Gleneagles, whisky, etc. You just have to spend all day looking at their HaggisCams and waiting to spot a haggis.
“I’m not making this up, you know…”
The British Museum has added something new to the “Turning The Pages” site: a Shockwavy virtual book of Mozart’s “thematic catalogue”, with 75 audio excerpts.
Also available on the same page: Mercator’s first atlas of Europe, and excerpts from the Sherborne Missal, the Lindisfarne Gospels, Baybars’ Qur’an, and da Vinci’s notebooks.
I didn’t know that he’d been writing science fiction, though. Neat!
I’m going to be changing the OOA layout a little here and there over the next couple/few days, so if things start to look weird, please bear with me. They’ll settle down shortly.
The problem with e-Junkie which would have asked readers for $599.00 for each copy of the MS Reader version of A Wind from the South.
(I think moderately well of my work, but, guys, not THAT well.) 😉
It took some tweaking, but it’s finally ready — see the sidebar at the Raetian Tales blog for the purchase link.
This version also contains (in an appendix) a set of maps illustrating Mariarta’s travels. (The .PDF version will also shortly be upgraded to include these: everyone who’s purchased a copy of the book in that format will receive an upgraded version as soon as it’s ready.)
Thanks again to the amiable “test-drivers” who ran the original .LIT file through its paces! You’ll all be receiving a free copy of the final version shortly.
Not much to say about this except that it’s sad to lose so un-diva-like a presence from the artform that invented the word.
Another legendary moment came after one of her frequent battle-of-the-high-note contests with tenor Franco Corelli during the second-act duet from Turandot. Enraged that no matter how hard he tried she could hold onto the climactic high C longer than he could, Corelli apparently got his revenge during their third-act love scene by biting her on the neck instead of kissing her. Ms. Nilsson is said to have telephoned [Metropolitan Opera general manager Rudolf] Bing to cancel her next performance with the explanation, “I have rabies.”
And another favorite:
Once asked what was the chief requirement for singing the role of Isolde, she replied: “Comfortable shoes.”
I’ve been reworking the basic map that will be coming with future e-versions of A Wind from the South. It’ll be a while before it’s ready, though, so here’s a stopgap measure.
For those readers who use Google Earth, I’ve uploaded a basic placemarks file that shows the major (and minor) locations involved in the book. You can download the file at this link.
(And yes, I’m looking into doing something similar for A Wizard of Mars. We’ll see how that goes.)
Re the He-Man/She-Ra Christmas Special: Peter Murray (stalwart keeper of the YW Timeline) says, “According to IMDB, Bob Forward and Don Heckman wrote it. But is that reliable? I don’t know.”
Sounds so to me. Bob would have just been getting started in writing at that point: and this would have been happening just before Filmation (lamentably) shut down. Bob quickly established himself as a writer / story editor of great skill — I watched with great pleasure what he did with X-Men: Evolution and Kong: the Animated Series. After a while, one story editor can start to hear another’s “tone of voice” even through other writers’ scripts. Bob’s voice is very sure. …Don’s is a name I don’t recognize: his work at Filmation seems to be kind of occasional.
Serge says: “There’s one thing I was wondering about… Why was a decision made to go for what was the source of Wagner’s Ring Cycle? I seem to remember that there had once been talk about Wolfgang Petersen wanting to adapt Wagner’s tale for a TV mini-series.”
And indeed he was involved in the early stages of the project — but he then became very busy with “Perfect Storm” and then bowed out entirely to devote his attention to “Troy”. When that happened, the project wound up getting restructured to suit another studio (Columbia).
But the German networks had long wanted to see a TV version of what has for many years been considered to be the greatest of the German epics. I admit that it took me by surprise when they hired a Northern Irish guy and an American woman to write it. But we were standing at the right place at the right time with our intentions to do the work clearly declared. The rest just sort of … followed … though there were many strange and sometimes hysterical episodes in between. Either way, the thing won the German TV industry’s DIVA award for best TV movie of 2004…and we pulled down a 30+ share (i.e., nearly one out of every three Germans watched the series: the ratings were even higher elsewhere in central Europe) … so we must have done something right.
Peter and I are of course both clear that what we did isn’t the pure Nibelungenlied… even if you could figure out what that was, as there are about six different versions of the story, and a number of ancillary but not-really-part-of-the-poem myths. Any version of this epic brought to the screen is going to be the result of a long, long series of compromises. We made the best compromises we could, under the circumstances. (And, by the way, nothing positive enough can possibly be said about our friends and production partners at Tandem Communications, who were a solid support to us and a never-ending help in times of craziness all through the five years we worked together on this thing.)
Jenny says: “Dear God, is there a special department that comes up with dodgy sounding names for this series?”
(grin) Each local market comes up with the one it likes the best. We think of it as The Ring of the Nibelungs, and who cares what anyone says? 🙂 But there are many many markets — something like ninety — who will be airing it in the next year or so, and I’d bet there must be fifty names. As for Channel Four, I have no idea what was on their minds. (Sometimes we had cause to wonder about this particularly hard, when the “notes” on a given draft came in…) Whatever: they aired it, finally. (Only fair, since they helped finance it.)