Jerry Cotton posted:

I'm fairly certain Spillane was a nutter.

neongrey posted:

Oh, no, I know of this book.

The Vosgian Beast posted:

Reading people making fun of this back in the day was how I learned what female castration was.

Sham bam bamina! posted:

Female circumcision. Female castration would be, I don't know, a hysterectomy.

The Vosgian Beast posted:

Fixed

Hoover Dam posted:

Jerry Cotton posted:

 dick fic historian

quote:

https://www.wvencyclopedia.org/articles/1790 - Novelist Mittie Frances Clarke Point (April 30, 1850-December 26, 1937) wrote as Mrs. Alex. McVeigh Miller, the name of her second husband. The author of 80 dime novels published from 1881 to 1915, she was one of the best-known romance writers of her age. Her fiction brought her wealth and fame.

quote:

http://www.gutenberg.org/files/42100/42100-h/42100-h.htm - Her meditations were suddenly interrupted by a horrible sound. It was the far-off clank of a heavy chain mingled with the anguished wail of an unearthly voice. It broke so suddenly on the stillness that Lily started in affright, the very hairs on her head seeming to stand erect in her over-mastering horror.

She had never been a believer in the supernatural, but what was that, she asked herself, with a wildly beating heart. The sounds continued, muffled by distance, yet distinctly horrible and realistic. They seemed to rise from the floor beneath her feet. She covered her ears with her hands, but the sounds penetrated to her whirling brain in spite of her efforts not to hear—dreadful sounds of woe from the suffering lips of some human or inhuman creature. All the while the heavy chain seemed clanking in unison with the voice.

Was Haidee's ghost-story true after all, Lily asked herself, in doubt and bewilderment. No, she would not believe it. Only the narrow-minded and superstitious believed in such things. Suddenly the solution of the mystery broke on her mind like the light of an inspiration. She understood Haidee's anxiety that she should believe in the unearthly nature of the sound she was likely to hear.

Dabir posted:

It's true, there were no good writers from 1881 to 1915.

Tunicate posted:

The novel in its modern form was only just invented in the 1700s. It is natural to assume that people have gotten better at writing them over the years.

Amazon posted:

In this tome, the third installment of the Penny Dread Tales series, we explore not only the darker side of steampunk but also the black, sullied underbelly of the human condition. The nightmare of Jack the Ripper stalks these pages… drenching them in blood… twice. Slavery, the murder of the weak and helpless, dire choices of life and death: these tragedies and more become fodder for the mind, where the possessed and dispossessed steal men’s lives, and in some cases, their souls. This volume is rich with shadowy settings shrouded in fog, and the ensuing brutality is glimpsed piecemeal through windows of moonlight where dark shadows hide nefarious villains plotting murder and mayhem upon unsuspecting victims. PDT3 carries the reader to the four corners of the Earth and beyond. It traverses the centuries, from the Victorian era all the way into a future 40,000 years distant. It is an exploration of mankind’s darkest dreams and nightmares, and in its reading you too may experience nightmares where might In Darkness Clockwork Shine.

divabot posted:

p much false though, in fact. Techniques evolve and change (more elaborate, less elaborate, etc), but art doesn't "progress" in the manner of, say, physics. Everyone sets out to do the best one they can by the standards of the day.

Djeser posted:

one of them was Jack killing people to power a blood piano

neongrey posted:

Oh, no, I know of this book.

quote:

The Djimbi loved feeding children to hatchlings. They did it to tame the hatchlings, see and to accustom them to the Djimbi scent.

Then, when the hatchlings were sated, they would touch them. Sure, sure they would. Stroke the hatchlings’ scaled heads and gristle-packed crops and cool, dirty bellies. They’d reach beneath their whip-thin tails and slowly insert fingers where fingers shouldn’t go, then tongues and cocks and whatever else our imaginations could come up with…

quote:

Her old hemp tunic fell away from her body and slithered to the fur as if made of silk. She wore no bark-cloth leggings, must have shucked them prior to all this, and she stood there magnificently naked.

I say magnificently, for that was what she looked. No hunchbacked, cavern-chested, scrawny-limbed crone did I see, but instead an empyreal creature, her naked breasts full and taut, her belly softly rounded, her hips lush, and her buttocks high and ripe. What magics were these, to transform her so?

I should have felt fear, but I could not. the music held me in its thrall, was a fire in my heart, a spice on my lips, a yearning on my tongue. I felt swollen and languid and full of growing want.

Boj-est raised her knees in a child-birthing position. The onais who knelt about her leaned forward, still droning their intoxicating Djimbi chant. They reached out and ran hands lightly over her glorious body. Palms caressed her stomach, fingers trailed over her tip bones, down her thighs, disappeared into her dark cleft.

My nipples hardened; heat pulsed into my groin.

Lutche fought the muzzle pole hooked in his nare. His dessicated wings fluttered, fanning Nnp-trn, who held him still.

Boj-est panted and moaned.

“Now, oh, now,” she gasped.

Abruptly, the women pulled back. Nnp-trn unhooked Lutche. The dragon lunged forward, great arrowed snout diving between Boj-est’s legs.

I closed my eyes against the terrible sight but could not escape the inebriating Djimbi chants or Boj-est’s esctatic gasps, and desire bloomed within me, climbed higher and higher and so deliciously higher—

Boj-est cried out.

Her cry rang around the rotunda, sent a flurry of bats chattering into the night. My eyes snapped open and I found myself panting, sweat slicked, my trembling hands between my thighs.

Djeser posted:

This is a steampunk anthology I got as a gift one year. I'm not sure if I still have it or not, but out of like fifteen stories, only two were anywhere near good, and one of those two was a public domain story from the 1800's.


Bolding is mine, because the editor for this book got two Jack the Ripper stories, and went "gosh these are both so good I can't just pick one!" If I recall, one of them was Jack killing people to power a blood piano and the other was Jack as a vampire or something, I dunno.

I hate steampunk thanks to this book.

Tunicate posted:

I disagree. I think it's entirely possible to improve the quality of your artistic works by examining the successes and failures of others operating in the same medium.

divabot posted:

p much false though, in fact. Techniques evolve and change (more elaborate, less elaborate, etc), but art doesn't "progress" in the manner of, say, physics. Everyone sets out to do the best one they can by the standards of the day.

ThePlague-Daemon posted:

Dunno if there's anything like that for books.

Sham bam bamina! posted:

Those are techniques for simulating the world's physical properties. There are more and less accurate ways to draw a refraction in a sphere because are objective mathematical standards to measure against. There is no mathematical standard for the actual subject of the painting; the artist has to imagine that for themselves. Books are like that.

Djeser posted:

When a new medium emerges, there is a period of experimentation as people figure out the grammar of that new medium. It happened most recently with videogames, and a little less recently with television and film. I don't know if a novel is enough of a change from previous modes of literature to actually require that learning period though. I'm not a literary history buff.

Sham bam bamina! posted:

Nobody's saying that at all.

Sham bam bamina! posted:

You've never actually read a book, have you?

Sham bam bamina! posted:

The ancient Greeks worked out the "grammar" of drama millennia before anyone thought to put it in prose and call it a novel, so no, not really.

Tunicate posted:

You're the one who is arguing that it's impossible to learn anything about writing from reading other peoples' books.

I suppose seeing your posts as a sort of outsider art would contextualize them, though.


What works on stage, or in a novel, or on television is distinctly different. I'm surprised you didn't realize that! Different mediums require the use of different techniques, and it's entirely possible to learn from what other people did. It is, in fact, even possible to - and this may shock you - pay money, go to an institute of higher education and have a teacher (which is a kind of helpful person who has studied a medium intently) give you advice that can improve your artistic endeavors in the particular medium of their specialty.

In fact, the present day makes the ability to learn how to write available to everyone - there is no point in history where it has been easier to get access to education!

Alaois posted:

is there a class i can take to learn how to post this insufferably

Tunicate posted:

You're the one who is arguing that it's impossible to learn anything about writing from reading other peoples' books.

Tunicate posted:

In fact, the present day makes the ability to learn how to write available to everyone - there is no point in history where it has been easier to get access to education!