In 1983, Octavia E. Butler published “Speech Sounds” in Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, a short story that would win her her first Hugo Award a year later. Written, as Butler put it in the afterword, “in weariness, depression, and sorrow” and with “little hope or liking for the human species,” the story ends in a place Butler seemed not to have expected: not with salvation, but with a sliver of purpose carved from ruin.
Love, as it turned out, was Baldwin’s greatest subject. And when I finally finished my journey with Baldwin, these became my book’s last lines: “It would not be until close to the end of this voyage that I realized what I had actually been researching and trying to write all along was a new James Baldwin biography. But from the very beginning, I always knew it was a love story.”
Yet there are some people, so-called finitists, who reject infinity to this day. Because everything in our universe—including the resources to calculate things—seems to be limited, it makes no sense to them to calculate with infinities. And indeed, some experts have proposed an alternative branch of mathematics that relies only on finitely constructible quantities. Some are now even trying to apply these ideas to physics in the hope of finding better theories to describe our world.
While Pepys’s dark side has long been known, it is something else to be confronted with the evidence laid out quite so starkly. The man who emerges from De la Bédoyère’s meticulous filleting is no Restoration roustabout but a chilling embodiment of male entitlement. This newly explicit view of Pepys does not negate the continuing value of his diary – which remains a magnificent historical resource – but from now on it will be impossible to go to it in a state of innocence, let alone denial.
No matter how much we humans might research and theorise, some of the most entertaining stories throughout history remain disputed or tenuous at best. But in Half-Arsed History podcast host Riley Knight’s debut book History’s Strangest Deaths, this flaw of history is instead an asset. After all, as Knight often reminds the reader, who are we to let historical accuracy get in the way of a good story?
Campbell’s first devotion is to his art, and his primary feeling about that art, both in theory and practice, is gratitude. “To me being grateful was the key to everything… For the life. For the music.” The vagaries of ego, drugs, money and fame notwithstanding.
We all should be grateful for the art of Mike Campbell, and that he has celebrated his art so beautifully in “Heartbreaker.”