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Laurel Krahn's weblog since August 1998.

I've mentioned this site to a bunch of people, but I keep forgetting to post it here: whatsbetter.com. Try it, it's fun.

An excellent article by Nick Gevers about Gene Wolfe. Wolfe is one of my favorite writers. I once heard Harlan Ellison call Wolfe the greatest living American writer (and I think he was sincere, really!).

From the article:

If any writer from within genre fiction has ever merited the designation Great Author, it is surely Wolfe. This Texas-trained engineer (he helped design Proctor & Gamble's original Pringle's potato-chip machine), born in 1931, a Korean War veteran, and a full-time writer since 1984, reads like Dickens, Proust, Kipling, Chesterton, Borges and Nabokov rolled into one, and then spiced with all manner of fantastic influences from H.G. Wells to Jack Vance, H.P. Lovecraft to Damon Knight.

His masterful style, alternately baroque and minimalist, is a vehicle for precisely calculated ambiguity, an ambiguity that so faithfully captures the texture of lived experience as to render his sf a sort of transcendent realism.

Word.

(Found this link via Bill Shunn's livejournal. Thanks, Bill!)

On this day/week/whatever in this weblog: in 1999, in 2000, and in 2001.

Man, I really was a good weblogger back in '99. Just saying.

This is a placemarker for me, as I want to read this New York Times article about the last 120 minutes or so of those in the World Trade Center, on the higher floors. Stuff communicating in emails, voice mails, 911 calls, all that. I just can't read it right now. (You can decide yourself whether you're up to reading it).

Stephanie Zacharek of salon.com writes about the Buffy the Vampire Slayer season finale:

It's pointless to spend much time wrestling with the question of whether TV can be art (of course it can be and often isn't). But there have been many days when, after a particularly potent "Buffy" episode, I've found myself feeling vaguely off my game, my mind clouded with a gauzy, muted sense of dread. When a show jostles your equilibrium to the point of haunting your days or robbing you of sleep, when it finds a place in your imagination that also rubs, hard, at the core of who you think you really are, it starts to look like something more than what we simply call TV.

I feel like saying "well duh" to that, it seems a no-brainer to me that some TV is definitely art. But then I've been preaching that for years. Anyone who has watched Buffy or Homicide or any number of good shows knows this. Sometimes even okay shows have the occasional brilliant episode.

Anyway, the rest of the piece is good. Good to hear people publicly acknowledge TV as art in any event. Should not be read if you haven't watched this season of Buffy (including the finale).

More Very Secret Diaries merch (t-shirts and so on).

Available at Thinkgeek (of course): caffeinated soap.

This is the week when the major US TV networks announce their new schedules for next TV season.

Over at tvpicks.net, I've been linking to press releases as they come out this week, and I've put together a page that shows next season's TV schedule in a grid format, it also lists which shows have been cancelled.

Wonder why I (heart) Gillian Anderson? Read her answers to questions of the month at GAWS. Especially the most recent one, where she writes about the last days of filming on The X-Files.

My heart hasn't been in (or with) The X-Files for a while now. I haven't watched many episodes this season, but I've still recorded 'em all. I still read the news about the show sometimes. I plan to watch the rest of the episodes this season.

I'm upset with Carter & company for a great many things. When I watch my DVDs or tapes of old episodes, I enjoy the old episodes but I'm also sad when I think about storylines that went nowhere or ended badly, when I think about so many missed opportunities. But still: it's a show I loved, it's a show I still care about even if I'm mad about some stuff. I'm sure I'll be sad once I realize there are no more new adventures to be seen. Of course, there's always fanfic . . .

They're posting behind the scenes clips every day up until the finale at this page on the official site. And I'm sure the Haven will have the best coverage of all things X around during these last days of the series.