Is up at The New Yorker this week, and he starts off by talking about Fleetwood Mac and the Eagles, their similarities and differences. I only mention because no one seems to have told Gladwell, who has clearly done his research here, about an album named Tusk and how it’s objectively better than Rumors. (It [...]
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But I think this Mr. Lynch’s Neverland, whether it’s called Lumberton or Twin Peaks or Mulholland Drive, is by design timeless, fundamentally impervious to the grown-up perspective that lets most of us assimilate our experiences into something like a traditional detective story: a narrative that explains the past and allows us to move (however dully) [...]
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UPDATED DEADLINE: 3/10/06 Announcement and Call for Papers The Lebowski Cult: An Academic Symposium 28-29 September 2006 The Executive West 830 Phillips Lane Louisville, Kentucky The aim of this small symposium is to invent a critical program equal to the task of interpreting The Big Lebowski (1998) and addressing the Lebowski cult that has quickly [...]
I’m teaching “The Library of Babel” tomorrow, and I was pleased to find Quine’s piece from Quiddities (an elegantly written book) online. Dennett, who also mentions the Borges story in his “In Darwin’s Wake, Where Am I?” (citation available in my Citeulike directory), presents yet again the res cogitans as a “skyhook.” Has he ever [...]
That phrase, formerly much heard, had been absent from life recently until I read this (19). On a related topic, I’ve promised Clancy not to spoil 24 for her, but I have some comments on the show’s “libidinal economy,” so to speak, to share in the upcoming weeks. The word “insectile” features.
Contrary to Phil Kloer, Flann O’Brien is neither “obscure” nor a “surrealist,” properly speaking. The previously mentioned book by Casares seems to me to be much more influential on Lost, though two things are worth noting here: a) I haven’t seen all of the episodes and b) the creative team is the same as that [...]
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It was subtle of Borges’s prologue to place Louis-Auguste Blanqui among Origen and Augustine in the list of those who refuted the central conceit of The Invention of Morel. I am looking forward to reading the scholarly comment on this book, which I suspect hasn’t been satisfactorily explained. (Clute’s note in The Encyclopedia of Fantasy, [...]
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Number sequences, beloved of psychometricians, serve their purpose well enough, one supposes. But how about mascot sequences? For instance: Pirate, Mariner, Seahawk, Gator, Yellow Jacket. . .? Lawless seafarer, lawful seafarer, aquatic bird, aquatic reptile, eusocial insect. . .solitary mammal? A feline of some type? (A social feline, no.) Clancy suggested this might be ‘meme’-worthy.
I’m not sure if this one’s been done yet, but still: Richard “Dick” Cheney was a friend to the poor. He travelled with a gun in every hand. All alongside this countryside He opened a many a door, But he was never known to hurt an honest man. It was down in Harding County, A [...]
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The Codebreakers, I was alarmed to read this from James Bamford: What greatly concerns me as someone who has written more about NSA than any other writer is that in the past, when NSA was allowed to operate in absolute secrecy, without oversight, it became a rogue agency. When the agency discovered that another author, [...]
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Probably one of the most fascinating books you’ll have a chance to read is Hitler’s Uranium Club: The Secret Recordings at Farm Hall (ed. Jeremy Bernstein, Springer Verlag [2001]). From Heisenberg’s lecture to Charles Darwin:* Such an apparatus stabilizes itself at a certain temperature. If one wants to fix the temperature of the reactor, this [...]
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