News & Blog

Last weekend, Alexa and I went to Syracuse University’s Palitz Gallery, housed in an oh-my-God beautiful building on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, to take in their current exhibit: Orange Pulp: The Pulp Magazine and Contemporary Culture. Though it was a delightful exhibit, it was disappointingly small, fitting entirely into a tiny, single-room gallery, mostly because it showcased only 61 works, the great majority of which were digest-sized magazines.

Also on display were some gorgeous oil paintings for pulp book covers by Norman Saunders. This one reminds me a lot of the paintings Glen Orbik did for the Gabriel Hunt series I wrote for:

An unexpected treasure was this copy of the issue of Astounding Stories that features H.P. Lovecraft’s “At the Mountains of Madness”:

And my favorite exhibit piece of all, this certificate of payment to H.P. Lovecraft for “At the Mountains of Madness.” He was paid a whopping $350. Alas, some things never change!

The exhibit runs through April, so if you’re in the NYC area, I highly recommend checking it out. Admission is free! In the meantime, here are more pictures from my visit to tide you over.

Lost in the debate about whether Florida’s controversial Stand Your Ground law applies to George Zimmerman’s actions when he shot and killed Trayvon Martin is, I think, the question of whether that same law applies to Martin’s actions.

The law states, in part, “A person who is not engaged in an unlawful activity and who is attacked in any other place where he or she has a right to be has no duty to retreat and has the right to stand his or her ground and meet force with force, including deadly force if he or she reasonably believes it is necessary to do so to prevent death or great bodily harm to himself or herself or another or to prevent the commission of a forcible felony.”

Here’s what we know from Martin’s phone conversation with his girlfriend, DeeDee, shortly before he was killed: Upon returning from a nearby convenience store, Martin sees a stranger (Zimmerman) staring at him from across the street. Martin subsequently sees this same stranger following him in a vehicle. (According to DeeDee: “When he saw the man behind him again he said this man is going to do something to him. And then he said this man is still behind him and I said run.”) But now the stranger gets out of the vehicle and approaches Martin, possibly in an aggressive manner.

Zimmerman claims he had not drawn his gun at this time, and even if that’s true, we do not know if Zimmerman’s gun was visible to Martin on his person. It is quite possible that at this point Martin, approached by a stranger who has essentially been stalking him since he came back from the store, has no reason to believe his life is not in imminent danger. So Martin punches Zimmerman in the face, breaking his nose and knocking him down. After that, either immediately or after further fighting, Zimmerman shoots Martin in the chest, killing him.

This story is eight-thousand kinds of tragedy, with possibly nothing more than a string of misunderstandings and preconceptions leading to the death of an unarmed seventeen-year-old kid who only wanted to go out and buy some Skittles and iced tea; and one of those tragedies is that Trayvon Martin may very well have been killed while exercising his legal right to stand his ground.

Welcome, everyone, to my brand new website, brilliantly designed and implemented by Matt Kressel of Sunray Computer! Check out those rotating book covers on the front page. Snazzy!

If you’re looking for someone to revamp your website, you could do worse than to give Matt a shout. As you can see, his work is amazing.

By the way, if you’ve been reading me for the past eight years on LiveJournal, nothing will change. My blog entries here on the website will automatically crosspost to LJ. No worries there.

Enjoy the new site, folks, and be sure to let me know what you think of it!