Writings, Reviews, Cultural Criticism
I wanted to write a protest songthen realized how, all alongI’d been beating time with my pulse. My cardboard sign was turned to mushin the rain, and the slogan, gone in the rushof feet pounding it into the mud.\ My chant was the choked hello I gaveto the Mumbai caller who said I’d savea lot…
I went last night to see James Cameron’s Titanic in Imax 3D. At least a couple times, I found myself dodging things that appeared to leap from the screen. There were the ice bergs, of course, and there were Kate Winslet’s tits.
When I was five, my dad sat me down in front of an Ouija board and told me to ask it some questions. Whatever I wanted. Anything at all. My dad was a good church-going soul and the son of a theologian, but a five-year-old doesn’t care about apparent inconsistencies.
I’m puzzled by the warning that appears before a lot of TV shows: The following program contains scenes of violence, language and sexuality; parental guidance is advised. The violence warning I understand. The violence is the stuff that hurts people. The language warning is more obtuse.
May I pet your dog? she asked with the breathy voice of a power-walker who has just paused. The husband said yes. The woman knelt before the dog and cooed and petted it. She looked up at the husband and, rising, asked if she might kiss him.
Birth and revelation, death and ultimate destruction. These have been bred into the DNA of Matt Bell’s slender collection, Cataclysm Baby, twenty-six delicious tales (one for each letter of the alphabet) about fathers and the more-often-than-not grotesque children they bring into a dying world.
When the man woke, he turned to see the woman mouthing words at him from across their pillows. He could see the lips moving, and the tongue pushing the words out between the teeth, but he heard nothing. Maybe he had gone deaf in his sleep. But he recalled the jarring buzz from his clock radio.
I want to talk to you about horses. Or at least the idea of horses. I want to talk to you about Plato’s idea of horses – the horseness of horses. The idea that all real horses – the ones that drop steaming platts in fields and swish flies with their tails – are instances of an abstraction. We recognize a particular horse in the real world because it corresponds to a form we carry around in our heads.
George found it amusing, Martha’s attachment to old technologies. There was the grandfather clock in the living room with its big brass pendulum and the Latin inscription on its face—tempus fugit—or as Giuseppe the barber liked to say: Time, she fly.
It’s been a long time since I last held a cage match here at nouspique—where I throw disparate thinkers into collision with one another and see if anything shakes loose. With the furor which has arisen since Jonathan Franzen’s disparaging comments about ebooks, I have decided to resurrect the practice.
Blueshifting is a physics phenomenon – the Doppler effect applied to light: if the source of the light is approaching, the light waves get scrunched together so they have a shorter wavelength (higher frequency) which shifts them to the blue end of the colour spectrum.
There’s a thread runs through everythingand a seamstress with a camel the sizeof a needle’s eye, though it’s not the eyethat worries me, but the other end,a steel point that runs me throughlike the pin the entomologists useto fix their bugs to the mounting board.The Fates don’t clip the thread, you know.Whoever said that was…
The vacuum cleaner wasn’t working. Back after three weeks on the road, Harlan wanted to clean out the van, get rid of the stray potato chips and gas station receipts and pea gravel tracked in from motel parking lots. He wanted to give the van a real going-over. But when he ran the nozzle across the upholstery, nothing happened.
I first encountered the name, Pico Iyer, last year while reading Geoff Dyer’s latest book, Otherwise Known as the Human Condition. Dyer refers to him while writing about the nowhereness of hotels and airports, locales that have become emblematic of the global era.
Futurist is not the first word that comes to mind when describing Julian Barnes. However, after reading Staring at the Sun, published in 1987, one wonders if he might not have enjoyed a fertile alternate career as a science fiction writer.