Do you know of any fiction in which a character (or the narrator, better yet) describes or engages in mythographic research in the mode of Eliade, with all of the details being entirely fabricated? I suspect that something in the Lovecraftian mythos might fit here, though what I have in mind is more self-consciously metafictional [...]
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My sense is that the worldspirit has passed the genre* by, but I think that it would be a passable exercise to ask students in a first-year literature course to identify the rhetorical figures in the Old 97s song “House That Used to Be.” *Left deliberately ambiguous as to whether it is the genre of [...]
Everything I need to know about the UN from last night’s episode of 24: Redemption. Also, was the blue-helmet supposed to be French?
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I just learned about the altogether hilarious Martin Eisenstadt affair. While spending some time at the Harding Institute’s youtube channel, I watched the “impromptu” Reagan speech from 1976. This scene caught my eye: Though I can imagine what Kissinger is saying, I have to wonder what’s going through the mind of his companion (who may [...]
Though JSTOR has other issues they need to work on, I think it would be neat to have a random article sent to me every morning, much in the manner of the OED’s word of the day. There are ways to simulate choosing a random article with random keyword searches, I suppose, but it would [...]
From this fascinating LRB article by James Davidson: There is a nice irony here, for Constantine’s critical conversion was dependent, we are told, on old-fashioned battlefield oracles not dissimilar to those in which the Iamids – who were still apparently prophesying after perhaps a thousand years or more, but would not do so for much [...]
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I am quite curious about why the English edition of One Human Minute does not contain “Provocation,” whereas the German does (and is titled Provokationen, no less). I am reading the German translation, albeit slowly, not yet having adequate Polish. The remarks about Heidegger and Mann are of interest. Also “Der Nazi als Gangster ist [...]
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I carried my food-stained old copy of Infinite Jest to the voting fire station this afternoon. In the hour or so I waited to cast my ballot (mostly) against various stupendous Louisiana initiatives and (nearly) for the Prohibition Ticket, I read the first fifty or so pages. The insect crawling around the stereo equipment and [...]
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