I’ve been more-or-less frozen in here in South Louisiana the last few days, which isn’t too bad as it gives me a good excuse to eat massive quantities of gumbo and watch as the weather takes revenge on the many unwanted plant species in my yard. The city utilities folks also charged me for 29000 [...]
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Hep-Schmaltz Era is Dawning!
NEW YORK, July 4—Now that hepster Harry James has hit the heavy dough by hiring a flock of fiddles and blowing trumpet solos strictly from the sugar mill, and now that hepster Tommy Dorsey, in the heavy dough to begin with, has added catgut and a harp besides, the band biz finds [...]
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Once you know the cancelled pilot backstory, it’s hard to deny the narrative logic of transformative fantasy; but what complicates matters, for me at least, is that the dinner party scene and the rest of the putatively real content shows a Camilla so cruel that the viewer is tempted to forgive contract murder. More likely [...]
Much about the TLS annoys me, though I still subscribe. Here is one happy thing I found in the latest issue, a non-watermarked version of which I was unable to find elsewhere:
That’s “The Wanton Student” by Arie de Vois.
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I’ve said this before, but the proper analogy between an alien intelligence capable of placing impenetrable spheres around the exact boundaries of a human township is not ants to humans, as in King’s novel, but a virus colonizing some type of formicative intestinal bacterium to Colette, say.
I’ve been amusing myself thinking of the type of [...]
Ernst Bloch’s first wife owned gold mines in Russia: “I used to say that I paid 30 million marks for the Russian Revolution, but that it was worth the price to me!”
There’s something very cheerful about that remark, which was made in 1974 or so (note the “used to.”) I’m teaching selections from The Principle [...]
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I used a Mac in my office at Georgia Tech, and I’ve had one in my office at UL for about a year now. But I’ve only been using Macs exclusively for about a month now after the purchase of a Macbook Pro. Now, it’s important to understand that the Gateway laptop I had been [...]
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It’s still early, certainly, but none of the reviews I’ve read of this seem to understand its premise. There are acknowledgments of direct quotations in the back of the book, an unusual paratextual gesture, but a key conversation in it comes almost directly from an essay by Robin Hanson called “How to Live in A [...]
Since my last few posts have been about interactive fiction, an enthusiasm I tend to revive around the time of the annual competition, I will write a few words about Mike Roberts’s Perdition’s Flames (1993). I had students in an introduction to literature class at Georgia Tech write a brief IF interpretation of some the [...]
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These reseeded themselves from an adjacent vine the previous year.
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Though I didn’t finish his Snowquest, the likely winner of this year’s Interactive Fiction competition, I did play (and finish, without hints, albeit one point shy of perfect) Eric Eve’s The Elysium Enigma recently. In fact, I mostly finished it while the Florida-LSU game was on in the background on Saturday night, though I don’t [...]
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I’ve now played most of the entries in this year’s interactive fiction competition. I didn’t play the windows games because I don’t use that platform anymore (and I never played them when I did, to be honest). Nor did I play the Adrift games, though they might well have worked with Spatterlight. I guess I [...]
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The most recent NLR has a translated excerpt:
I believe that I loved my time like others love their country with the same exclusivity, the same chauvinism, the same partiality. And I despised other epochs with the blindness that they apply to despising other nations. And my time has been defeated.
I always thought that something, in [...]
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The recent dead salmon bit that’s going around is a wonderful distillation of contemporary received wisdom about neuroscience. In the world of Dollhouse, Joss Whedon’s latest scalp-massager on Fox, the salmon would not be actually in the process of transformation into a Deep One, but rather would be under the control of a mischievous adolescent [...]
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The best review I’ve read of Inherent Vice thus far has been Thomas Jones’s piece in the LRB. I was especially pleased with the surprising comparison to Smollett. Also, the proposed dialectic relationship between Pynchon’s anarchist utopianism and technocratic capitalism—that the true lesson is that one is not imaginable without the other—leaves us to conclude [...]
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If you visited here two days ago, you may have noticed that I had decided to start linking to several thousand sites selling cheap pharmaceuticals. Rather than a bold business decision, this was the result of an SQL-injection bug, which Wordpress, even the latest version (if you don’t take certain precautions and probably even then) [...]
Everyone is familiar, I take it, with the following passage:
the natural grammatical transition by inversion involving no alteration of sense of an aorist preterite proposition (parsed as masculine subject, monosyllabic onomatopoeic transitive verb with direct feminine object) from the active voice into its correlative aorist preterite proposition (parsed as feminine subject, auxiliary verb, and quasimonosyllabic [...]
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