Writings, Reviews, Cultural Criticism
The category, Head, is for posts that make us think.
Sitting at the breakfast table this morning, coffee in one hand, e-reader in the other, I discovered a passage about books in Philip K. Dick’s Do Android’s Dream of Electric Sheep, his 1968 sci-fi novel which served as the inspiration for Ridley Scott’s film, Blade Runner.
Insight for needlesVoodoo dolls for charactersNovels for revenge I offer this haiku, remembering how, as a teenager, I fought with a friend who refused to see things my way. My view was obviously right, and his refusal was just him being mulish. Since I couldn’t budge him, I opted for the next best thing: I…
As of today, I’ve completed 48,000 of the 50,000 words required to “win” NaNoWriMo — National Novel Writing Month. It looks like my novel will be more in the 75,000 word range. I feel like one of those marathon runners who doesn’t realize he’s crossed the finish line and keeps on going because his legs have gotten used to the idea of running.
I locate my roots in the left — with my nice middle-class suburban liberal upbringing — but lately, I’ve felt disillusioned by the left’s effete response to power’s abuses which I find indistinguishable from complicity.
After day 1 of the National Novel Writing Month contest, I’ve completed 4,488 words of the 50,000 word target. However, I’ve come up against an important issue: research. I don’t know what I’m talking about.
This year, I took the plunge. On the spur of the moment (one of a thousand clichés I’m sure to spew this month), I signed up for NaNoWriMo, the National Novel Writing Month contest.
A couple weeks ago, in the Telegraph, Adrian Hon announced: “Your time is up, publishers. Book piracy is about to arrive on a massive scale.” He conducted an experiment: to see how long it would take to locate an unauthorized e-copy of a book he already owned but didn’t want to lug around. It took him about 60 seconds.
Here’s a koanish question to twist your brain in a knot: if you push an example of paradox against an example of irony, is the resulting collision paradoxical or ironic?
This is the second post prompted by reading James Wood’s How Fiction Works. As I wrote previously, this is not a book review so much as a handful of supplementary comments and speculations. Go here for the first part of this discussion.
The literary critic, James Wood, strikes a fine balance in his book, How Fiction Works. Although it could, the book never strays into the purely theoretical (unlike I. A. Richards’ Principles of Literary Criticism which I looked at last week) or the mechanical (unlike Jack Hodgins’ A Passion For Narrative which serves as a manual for writers).
Flaubert’s Parrot is a literary romp by Julian Barnes that tracks the obsessive research of a widowed doctor named Geoffrey Braithwaite. Along the way, Dr. Braithwaite considers all kinds of arcane details about the famed French novelist: his sexual proclivities, plots for unwritten novels, and the use of animals in his writing.
On planet Dave, there is a special governmental agency called the Department of Epidemiology and Immigration. I’ve come to regard these two disciplines as sub-specialties of the same concern.
While the question of cloud computing – is it a good thing? What are its benefits? How will it change the way we interact online? – sounds like it properly belongs in the province of geekdom, I’m of the view that it also deserves to be discussed as a social justice issue.
While searching through memorabilia, I found a magazine the hospital staff gave my mother when I was born (© 1959 by J.S. Hunt Publications Limited). The first item inside the front cover is a syrupy verse titled “God’s Masterpiece.” Yup, that’s me.
My grandfather did his undergraduate degree at Mt. Allison University in Sackville N.B. After his first year, he was seriously short of cash and thought he could make some easy money selling books door-to-door.