Karavansara

East of Constantinople, West of Shanghai


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Spicy

61ijN1LocqL._SX373_BO1,204,203,200_As I think I mentioned already, I’ve found that giving myself little prizes when I close or I reach a way-point in a project.
Sort of a Pavlovian conditioning.
It’s easy to find some interesting, cheap reads that work quite nicely, and cost me as much (or as little) as a chocolate.

Tying up a minor project yesterday, landed on my Kindle Wildside’s The Spicy Adventure Megapack which collects 25 stories, you guessed it, from the spicy pulps.

For the uninitiated, the spicy pulps were an infamous sub-genre in the days of old Рracy stories, risqu̩ situations, naughty bits.
So far, I had a very limited experience with the spicy pulps, and this is a good opportunity for learning something new.

No, wait… not in that sense.
Goodness!


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I caught the Pulp Fiction Bug

92184In Bruce Campbell‘s entertaining Make Love the Bruce Campbell Way. the author describes how he became sort of a healthy carrier of the B-movie bug: no matter how high-profile the production in which Campbell is involved, no matter how classy the leading actors, his sole presence on set is granted to turn the whole project into a B-movie extravaganza1.

I think I just caught a similar for of virus – the Pulp bug.
I tend to turn everything I touch into pulp adventure fare.

Consider the following… Continue reading →


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Where the unreal’s real

Rudyard Kipling 1865-1936[11]My friend Clare, over at the Scribblings blog, just published a post about Kipling’s poetry and the voice of objects.
And she says…

Whenever I read one of these poems, I can’t help thinking of those Japanese legends where an object takes on some sort of life by long association with and use by human beings… A concept I’ve always found highly poetic.

I was trying to put together some form of intelligent comment, and then I thought, what the heck, I’ll write a post for Karavansara.
And here we are – fast and loose.
Continue reading →


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Tracks in the Snowy Forest

41msnsIInOL._SX331_BO1,204,203,200_I’ll ramble a bit, if you don’t mind.
I’ve been looking for Tracks in the Snowy Forest for a while, now, without any luck.
I read a lot about it, summaries, criticism… but I still miss the real thing.
The book, written by Chinese author Qu Bo and published in 1957, was apparently published in English in 1962 – and never reprinted1. Alas, I can’t read Chinese.
The book – a thick affair over 500 pages long – is a historical novel. Or maybe not.
Based on true fact – to wit, the operations of a small unit of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army against warlords and bandit chieftains in North-Eastern China in 1946-1947 – it is nonetheless a novel, a work of fiction, and it was published ten years after the events. The author Qu Bo, took part in that PLA campaign, and the story is therefore based on his first-hand experiences.
Does it count as historical fiction?
Or is it something else – fictionalized autobiography?
Non-fiction novel?
I don’t know.

Continue reading →


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Tiger Mountain, finally!

It took me almost one year to get my hands on a copy of Tsui Hark‘s The Taking of Tiger Mountain – and the long hunt was well worth it.
The 2014 movie is a great adventure flick, straddling the line between historical narrative and pulp fantasy.

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I’ll have to write a lot about it – so expect a post or three in the next days.
In the meantime, the trailer…