It’s always weird to see the mainstream press picking up on a subculture. Kind of like when your parents drop the latest slang: it doesn’t quite feel right. Nevertheless, it’s nice to see Steampunk get some respectful publicity.

The LA Times blog Jacket Copy had a post Saturday from Nick Owchar, the inevitably titled “Working up a head of steam”.

Steampunk is another entry point into the Victorian era by way of a wormhole: a subculture movement that is the result of an “intersection of technology and romance,” as it was reported in some East Coast newspaper this week. Philip Pullman’s alternate version of the world—with zeppelins, golden compasses and anbaric-powered gadgets—in “His Dark Materials” taps into it; so do the stories of Jules Verne and the movie “Brazil”; William Gibson and Bruce Sterling’s “The Difference Engine” anticipated it.[…]

According to Owchar, there’s a new Steampunk anthology from Tachyon that looks interesting.

The “some East Coast newspaper” referred to is the NY Times and its more sedately titled article “Steampunk Moves Between 2 Worlds”, which does more tracing of how Steampunk has been embraced by various groups for various purposes, but all in good, artistically spiffy fun:

It is also the vision of steampunk, a subculture that is the aesthetic expression of a time-traveling fantasy world, one that embraces music, film, design and now fashion, all inspired by the extravagantly inventive age of dirigibles and steam locomotives, brass diving bells and jar-shaped protosubmarines. First appearing in the late 1980s and early ’90s, steampunk has picked up momentum in recent months, making a transition from what used to be mainly a literary taste to a Web-propagated way of life.

To some, “steampunk” is a catchall term, a concept in search of a visual identity. “To me, it’s essentially the intersection of technology and romance,” said Jake von Slatt, a designer in Boston and the proprietor of the Steampunk Workshop (steampunkworkshop.com), where he exhibits such curiosities as a computer furnished with a brass-frame monitor and vintage typewriter keys.

Currently in production…

GET LAMP is a documentary about Text Adventures (later Interactive Fiction), the storytellers who created them, and their unique place in the history of computer games.

Larger version of trailer here.

(Seen on MetaFilter.)

Samuel Langhorne Clemens was born on this date in 1835, and the world is a better place for it having happened.

Casting about for an appropriate passage of his to share, I came across this one from The Innocents Abroad which seems applicable to bloggers everywhere….

At certain periods it becomes the dearest ambition of a man to keep a faithful record of his performances in a book; and he dashes at this work with an enthusiasm that imposes on him the notion that keeping a journal is the veriest pastime in the world, and the pleasantest. But if he only lives twenty-one days, he will find out that only those rare natures that are made up of pluck, endurance, devotion to duty for duty’s sake, and invincible determination, may hope to venture upon so tremendous an enterprise as the keeping of a journal and not sustain a shameful defeat.

This picture, by the way, is of Mark Twain in Nikola Tesla’s lab in 1894, which I came across on Wikipedia.

If you’re casting about for something to read, take a gander at Mark Twain’s works at Project Gutenberg.

A couple of other blogs mentioned the birthday this morning:

• Movie Morlocks has “Always the Twain” covering Mark Twain and Hollywood.
• World Hum posted “Happy Birthday, Mark Twain and Jonathan Swift”, (it’s Swift’s birthday as well) mentioning they were “creators of the World Hum’s No. 7 and No. 6 greatest fictional travelers respectively…”

Speaking of birthdays, yesterday was the 80th birthday of Vin Scully.

Happy Birthday to a couple of my very favorite writers!

Dorothy Parker was born on this day in 1893, and while she is most remembered for her days with the Round Table in New York, she spent a number of years in Hollywood as a screenwriter (IMDB). She passed away in 1967.

I’m never going to accomplish anything; that’s perfectly clear to me. I’m never going to be famous. My name will never be writ large on the roster of Those Who Do Things. I don’t do anything. Not one single thing. I used to bite my nails, but I don’t even do that any more.

And yes, you might as well live.

Ray Bradbury, also born on 8/22, but in 1920. (Funny to think of Mrs Parker at 27 when he was born, being fired by Vanity Fair for offending people.) A while back I wrote about Ray:

[He] is the ghost in the machine. He finds the soul in the rocket, traces the life in the Martian colony, points out the demons lurking in the fires of a burning book.

Always one to tweak the nose of too-serious folks, Ray has recently been talking about what Fahrenheit 451 really means. Some people have gotten a little pissy about it, which says more about them than Bradbury. And that’s kind of the point.

Living nearly a century and writing some of the best literature in the world gives you a smidgen of latitude. ;)

Scroll.

I need a hardcopy of this.