Friedrich --

A delightful new participant in the culture-blogosphere -- Polly Frost's Notes from the Velvet Crypt, readable here. Polly's focusing mainly on sci-fi and horror, though she promises to make occasional excursions into other interests too. So far, she's put up postings about such topics as Bruce Lee, Japanimation, and Philip K. Dick, and she's wondered out loud about such key questions as "Do you have to be Catholic to love horror," and "Where has the eroticism in mainstream fiction gone." Judging from what's on her blog, she has a remarkably free-ranging, insightful and intuitive mind.

Sample passage:

I found Philip K. Dick's “Ubik” spiritual and moving -- it’s spiritual standup. Like Terry Southern, he’s a romantic cynic -- a bebop nihilist, really. Admittedly, Southern is body-centric, pop, and Rabelaisian where Dick is mind-gamey. Dick's universe is so cerebral. It’s about the disembodied consciousness of our time, and people striving for that. He’s prescient -- he got virtual reality ‘way before it existed. You can see the freak show. And, like Anthony Burgess, he paints a world that’s very Jacobean. But it’s not a sensual world.

I notice that Polly runs some other websites too -- she seems to be in the midst of a right little creative explosion these days. At Tantric Afterlife (here), she's writing and publishing erotic horror and sci-fi stories. Hot stuff! And at Scorpio Visions (here), she has some information about a play she's written on the theme of "a woman's obsessive love affair with her cell phone." That sounds like hot stuff too.

Best,

Michael