When we drove home from Florence and emerged from the Mordor mists of western North Carolina, I heard a song on the UNC-Asheville campus radio station, which I quickly glossed for the Clancerian audience as one of these cheeky young bands who try to emulate, as it were, the AOR/ADR/DMSCA/PSCDWEEF/ (examine Christgau for explications) sound [...]
On our porch: Their chief exports are morphetics, and they have no natural predators except for birds, who love them.
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Is fascinated with mirrors, particularly the passenger’s side mirror on my wife’s Civic. I see a male quizzically and somewhat aggressively pecking at its image there, sometimes even immediately after I pull up in the driveway. When I lived in Florida, one similarly assaulted my then vehicle’s mirror, but that one had a chrome-like exterior [...]
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A fun example from this highly entertaining Jeffrey Goldberg article: Before opening the door, she instructed me not to write down anything I saw—the third time that this particular directive had been issued. In some ways, the home office is not unlike the headquarters of the National Security Agency—both contain a large number of windowless [...]
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I just finished this work, part of the Viriconium collection by M. John Harrison. Anne Redpath’s “Houses near Las Palmas” may metaschematize it for a certain type of reader: The mood is inescapably nouvelle vague Dying Earth. (Gaiman notices this in the introduction. And a wearier Moorcock also.) Or pehaps Roger Ferri’s “Pedestrian City” works [...]
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From the UPI wire: TOPEKA, Kan., March 22 (UPI) — U.S. scientists believe an 1859 solar flare destroyed more of the Earth’s ozone than did a 1989 solar flare — the strongest ever monitored by satellite. Researchers led by Brian Charles Thomas of Washburn University used data on nitrate enhancements from Greenland ice cores to [...]
I see, so I’ll have to wait until next month and drive to Williamsburg to see it. I noticed that it somehow made it to Gainesville. By “local,” I mean “Raleigh,” of course. I read Hamann’s Socratic Memorabilia yesterday in O’Flaherty’s impressive scholarly edition. That “Uebersetzer” means both “ferryman” and “translator” and thus lends itself [...]
Is is just me, or do they look as if they are offering their daughters to the sun? Yes, I’ve been reading Voegelin a bit. One of the panels I attended at the recent Narrative Conference was a roundtable discussion on Against The Day. Several eminent Pynchon scholars participated. I haven’t finished the book (been [...]
I’m trying to track down an expression I found in Patrick O’Brian. The OED doesn’t know anything about it, though I did, while looking, discover that Beckett is quoted for two senses of the unmentionable word that forms the first half of this mysterious compound. The spam was about Samonsite repair, by the way. Or [...]
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In the time of Diocletian, mining engineers were called philosophi. As well they should be. (European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, 209).
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28 Days Later. The Long Goodbye. I haven’t seen this since undergrad. And both The Big Sleep and Kiss Me Deadly (which contains a Pythagorean Y) are on TCM-noir tonight, though I doubt I’ll get to see them. I also have some Syberberg and Billy Wilder’s Sherlock Holmes production coming at some point, alas.
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Contrary to what Clancy just told me while shutting my door. They are chemical wedding happy. I would like to have a comprehensive listing of every film that’s used them or the Gymnopédies in the background. The Royal Tenenbaums comes immediately to mind. Here’s a partial list. I’m reading, among other things, M. John Harrison’s [...]
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