OED gives Coleridge’s Table Talk the first citation of this fine word, also used by the aforementioned Fischer of fallacies. I taught the sunny pleasure-dome yesterday: “white moons, with black moons following them.” The Road to Xanadu. How about The Road to Solaris? The Road to La Maison de rendez-vous? The Road to The Road [...]
I haven’t commented on the recent Post series on Richard Cheney. One of the photoessays reveals that he cameo’d a Steven Seagal flic.
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“In every New England town library, there is likely to be an ancient Puritan virgin, shriveled and dried in the snows of sixty Massachuetts [sic] winters and suitably shrouded in black bombazine, who has been at work for the past twenty years on the story of her home town from 1633 to 1933, when Franklin [...]
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I wanted to write something about this, but it turns out it’s old news. Oh well. (Page 27 of the “Family Jewels,” if you’re interested.) I should draft a letter to the Birchite county newspaper where I grew up and alert the credulous citizenry about this perhaps unexpected comsympy, but I’m sure it’s already been [...]
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I read James Ellroy’s The Black Dahlia a few days ago and was struck by his reference to Hugo and the comprachicos. I believe that Rimbaud also identified the mutilated rictus as a metaphor for the artist, and the reader may infer substantial self-loathing from the excessively lurid details in Ellroy’s presentation. D. S. Neff’s [...]
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I’m sure others have noticed this, but Ted Tally’s screenplay for The Silence of the Lambs (on this morning on the SF channel) mucks up Thomas Harris’s reference to the phrase “stinks of the lamp,” apparently having Lecter apply it to Clarice’s father working in a mine with a headlamp, I suppose, rather than, as [...]
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I’ve been reading Lem’s Peace on Earth intermittently on this long, shelter-finding trip; and he envisions, perhaps influenced by Jaynes—though he doesn’t cite him as I remember—, ultrasonic callotomy emerging as nanotech warfare strategy. . .on the moon! (There was a piece linked on metafilter today about chemical efforts to homosexualize, halitosisize, or enflatulate an [...]
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