Who Should Not Be Held Responsible
please select your preferred Big Society from the following checklist:
Big Society as the new Boy Band winners of X-Factor,
Big Society as a warm puppy with a wet nose,
Big Society through whole-grain organic 7-A-Day health,
Big Society sharing the trickle-down wealth,
Big Society living in fear but sharing the pain,
the fully-interactive red-button e-Big iSociety,
the free enterprise privatise ignobly-savaged Big Society,
the brand awareness celebrity-endorsed Big Society franchise,
the welfare-dependent austerity Inner-City Big Society
on an estate between the flyovers (no care-in-this-community),
the orgone energy Super-Hero Big Society in 3D
from ‘Cocaigne’ to cocaine in the ‘Land Of The Blessed’,
While but a callow youth, I subscribed to the Science Fiction Book Club. The club, wise in the ways of procrastination, would send each month’s selection of books to subscribers UNLESS the subscribers had sent the club a card informing the SFBC that one did not want the books in question. All too often I planned to send the card off, only to realize (once again), when a box of books arrived, that intent is not at all the same thing as action.
Thus, I received books that I would not have chosen but, once in possession, I read and enjoyed them. All praise to the SFBC and the power of procrastination! Here are five of my favorite unintended reading experiences…
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INTRODUCING BUTLER TO NEW READERS. Elizabeth Connor describes the work of “repackaging the Patternist Series for the Mother of Afrofuturism” in “How to Give Octavia Butler the Covers She Deserves” at
Literary Hub.
…After some back and forth and plenty of discussion with the editor acting as mediator we determined that by elegant, they likely meant more stylized human forms in more sophisticated poses, as well as a textural or brushy quality to the art (as there had been on the Parable books), that lent an air of being hand-drawn rather than machine-made. As for dynamic, we soon understood that the symmetry of the earliest comps was what the agent and estate were reacting against. By simply breaking the vertical axis and giving each cover a certain degree of asymmetry even as the figures revolved around a central “moon” shape that remained static they felt much more alive. The designer came back with revisions and, in relatively quick succession,
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INTRODUCING BUTLER TO NEW READERS. Elizabeth Connor describes the work of “repackaging the Patternist Series for the Mother of Afrofuturism” in “How to Give Octavia Butler the Covers She Deserves” at
Literary Hub.
…After some back and forth and plenty of discussion with the editor acting as mediator we determined that by elegant, they likely meant more stylized human forms in more sophisticated poses, as well as a textural or brushy quality to the art (as there had been on the Parable books), that lent an air of being hand-drawn rather than machine-made. As for dynamic, we soon understood that the symmetry of the earliest comps was what the agent and estate were reacting against. By simply breaking the vertical axis and giving each cover a certain degree of asymmetry even as the figures revolved around a central “moon” shape that remained static they felt much more alive. The designer came back with revisions and, in relatively quick succession,�