The words are common, and yet each imagines a distinction. But the paths do not diverge. I don’t if anyone remembers Uninvited, an Icom graphical adventure game from the 80s, but it also invoked fr. 60. How many times has “Burnt Norton” been quoted in the popular novel? Hannibal, that’s one. Is it always the [...]
I’ve been fascinated with this concept at a distance for some time now, though I can’t help but to regard it as faintly ominous. Having recently read Jane McGonigal’s Modern Drama article “SuperGaming: Ubiquitous Play and Performance for Massively Scaled Community,” I’m wondering again about the technoutopianist slant of the concept, mirroring, as it does, [...]
I’ve turned some of my recreational reading attention to Starwater Strains, and the aforementioned story is worth teaching as an introduction to reader-response theory. A lot of Wolfe might be, actually, but this exemplifies precisely. Another of the many interesting things that happened in 1926 was the switch to the Einheitskurzschrift system of shorthand in [...]
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I miss the times where the Victorian alchemist William Alexander Ayton could write an unadmiring biography of John Dee in Latin. I studied Old Norse a bit in graduate school, and it occurred to me at the time there should be a journal devoted to contemporary literature and media studies written entirely in that language. [...]
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Thirty pages into House of Leaves, I have to say that there’s an art to this, and that while Borges, Lem, and Wallace have it, Danielewski does not.
Michael Bérubé posts about Yeats, mentioning in passing that he’s the greatest English-language poet of the 20th C. I replied there that I prefer Stevens, Eliot, and possibly also Auden; but “prefer” is not quite the same thing as “consider the greatest.” Outside of some appreciative pockets, this kind of question is something I haven’t [...]
“The Tree Is My Hat” I mentioned earlier that I found the anthropology in this story to be dubious. What difference does that make, though? I’ve been wondering for some time now about the phenomenology of error in fiction. Are there ever legitimate grounds for determining when a writer’s incomplete understanding of some concept or [...]
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Is this such a bad thing to aspire to? “The fat man in the cloak and the brigand’s hat forever stopping for a pork pie and a beer while he scribbled yet another poem or article on his cuff or on the back of a sugar packet” (D. J. Conlon G. K. Chesterton: a Half-Century [...]
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For the Fall issue of the Virginia Woolf Miscellany, the subject is Virginia Woolf and Deviancy. Possible topics might be: “How and why did Woolf present what the dominant culture found deviant? How and why was Woolf deviant in her own writing? How did Woolf change the meanings of deviancy or the understandings of what [...]
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I’ll be joining the English Department at East Carolina as a Visiting Assistant Professor next month. The picture in the post below comes from Luigi Serafini’s Codex Seraphinianus, in case you were wondering. The internet puzzlers’ consensus seems to be that the numbering system is a base-21 and that the rest is what Peter Schwenger [...]
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