Karavansara

East of Constantinople, West of Shanghai


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West of Zanzibar

mary nolanIt all started with a photo – the photo you see here on the right.
I found it by chance on the web – it’s a portrait of actress Mary Nolan, a picture taken in the ’20s.
I find her achingly beautiful.
So I decided to learn more about her.

As Imogene “Bubbles” Wilson, Kentucky-born Nolan was a Ziegfeld girl that was kicked out of the show because of her scandalous affair with a married comedian.
To escape the scandal, Nolan moved to Germany, where she worked as an actress, using the name of Imogen Robertson, making seventeen movies in two years.
She returned in the USA in 1928, and in that same year she acted in Tod Browning‘s West of Zanzibar, that is a thoroughly wicked, evil little adventure movie.
If we can call little a movie produced and directed by Browning, and featuring Lon Chaney and Lionel Barrymore. Continue reading →


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My weekend with Athena Voltaire

Scan_Pic0049I ordered it on the third of the month, and because I’m a Prime subscriber, Amazon said the book would be here in three days. The courier service confirmed my book would be here on the 9th.
Today.
For some, mathematics is something that happens to others.
And that, not counting the obvious delays caused by the snow.
But the book arrived on the 6th as planned, and so I was able to spend the weekend with Athena Voltaire.
And it was quite a good weekend indeed. Continue reading →


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Back to Scythia-Pannonia-Transbalkania

The Gollancz Gateway ebooks are one of the best things that happened to imaginative fiction in the last decade – the idea of making a huge back-catalog of out of print classics is simply wonderful.
Granted, the yellow covers are a bit off-putting, and often the price tag is a bit high, but the quality of the books is extraordinary.21193920

To celebrate the completion of yet another chunk of my work in this overworked, rather disconcerning beginning of the year 2015, I got me The Adventures of Doctor Eszterhazy – to replace an old battered paperback called The Investigations of Doctor Eszterhazy, which I bought in London in 1992 and was lost somewhere (or more likely, “borrowed” and never returned). Continue reading →


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Words & Numbers – running my stories through the FK Test

So, yesterday I discovered this java thingie that runs a text through the Flesch-Kincaid Readability Tests.

Now, the Flesch-Kincaid tests are basically algorithms that express through a number the readability and the grade level of a text.

It has been pointed out that the numbers may have a less than intuitive value – writing at a grade level of 4 does not mean that you are writing “for fourth graders”, in other words.
Hemingway scored a full 4, after all, in terms of grade level.

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So, of course, I found the app, I ran my texts through it.
What else would anybody do? Continue reading →