Writings, Reviews, Cultural Criticism
The category, Head, is for posts that make us think.
The Atlantic Monthly reports that a tiny secret U.S. intelligence group, the Intelligence Advanced Research Project Activity (IARPA), has inaugurated The Metaphor Program with the mandate to develop a computer program which can scan large chunks of text and, regardless of the text’s language, generate an evaluation of the author/speaker’s mindset based upon their use of metaphor.
Did Doris Lessing influence David Foster Wallace? The question occurred to me as I read Lessing’s Shikasta, the first in her five-volume Canopus in Argos series of “space fiction” novels.
Mark Coker, the founder of Smashwords, posted an op-ed today in the Huffington Post, calling on authors to throw themselves on the gears of the machine. This is a reference to Mario Savio’s 1964 speech in which he called on students at UCLA to resist the administration’s attempts to curtail free speech.
According to the BBC news online, we now live in the Anthropocene period, which is a fancy way of saying humans have so altered the planet’s surface that we’ve left traces of ourselves in its permanent geological record.
Netsuke, by Rikki Ducornet – Coffee House Press. The psychoanalyst is not well. He could benefit from some of his own therapy, but lacks the insight to seek help. Perhaps we might best describe his difficulty thus: he confuses desire and obsession; what he takes for passionate feeling is something more mechanical and needless, like the hunger of a glutton.
If I were a seasoned and astute investor, maybe I’d regale you with tales of how, way back in 1977, I heard about a kid named Steve Jobs who was looking for a few private backers, how I cut a cheque for a couple thousand dollars, how the kid took his company public in 1980, and the rest – as they say—is money.
The Piss Christ scandal reminds me of the chocolate Jesus scandal, only this scandal has gone one better … or two … or three. In the case of the chocolate Jesus, the scandal was the work itself.
If David Bezmozgis’s novel, The Free World, were a drink, it would be a scotch, not peaty or smoky, but smooth and well-aged. It would have none of the surprising roughness of Laphroaig, tending more to the clean finish of Highland Park. As a drink, it would be safe, conventional, respectable.
When I was feeling my way into the art of blogging, one of my first posts was a short piece on The Mirror and the Lamp, M.H. Abrams’ critical masterpiece on modern poetics. Although poetics may seem like an arcane subject, what gives Abrams’ book enduring relevance is that he’s really writing about something bigger. He’s writing about how we communicate or, even before that, how we think.
Sometimes, when I read, it feels as if the words were always already written inside me and the author has simply drawn them to my attention. That happens most often to me with poetry and large novels, rarely with short stories.
Of all the things Heighton stares and stares at, the thing he fixes most intensely is the matter of justice. He wants to know why bad people sometimes thrive while the just are routinely crucified.
I’ve committed an act of theft and, if I’m lucky, I’ll get away with it. I’ve stolen some lives and a piece of property and I’ve hawked them for a novel. My novel is called The Land and I plan to release it on May 7th or thereabouts. Here’s what I did: I took four people (my sister-in-law, her husband, and their two boys), I ran off with their organic farm, and tossed them all into a bag along with a few unruly ideas to spice things up.
Curio is an echapbook originally serialized at uncannyvalleypress.com, it is now available for kindle or in epub format. The cost is a tweet or post to your facebook wall (i.e. it’s free).
What is it about storytelling that turns the storyteller into a threatening figure for those who hold power? That is the case for Wole Soyinka, playwright, novelist, poet and Nobel laureate, who spent most of a 27 month prison term in solitary confinement.
Three more days until the Oscars and four more Best Pictures nominees to get through in my “Dissing the Oscars” series. If I’m going to look at them all before the winner is announced on Sunday, I’ll have to double up my reviews. So why not lump together the “quirky” films from the “quirky” directors?