So That Happened

August Leave a Comment

Well, the old database died completely, and I was unable to export the data. What happened instead was that I salvaged the data from static files and spent the last two days reposting them by hand into a new Movable Type installation. The end result is that there should be fewer problems in the future, comments now work like they should, some of the data was lost (one or two posts only, I think), and the archives are no longer where they used to be, meaning that any links to individual entries are now broken (sorry, couldn’t help it). I haven’t quite figured out how to add all the existing comments, but I do have the data and when I figure out what to do I’ll put them back up. Hopefully I’ll be back to posting regularly by tomorrow, and I’m going to take advantage of this restructuring to tinker… Continue Reading →

#3 – Dr. No, by Ian Fleming

August Leave a Comment

In the interest of full disclosure, I will begin by saying that I am a long-time fan of James Bond. I am not a slavering, unthinking fan; while I enjoyed the action sequences in the Pierce Brosnan incarnation and many of the suave absurdities of most of the post-Diamonds are Forever efforts, for me the definitive Bond will always be the callous brutality of Sean Connery, with Daniel Craig’s vaguely sociopathic return to the character’s roots in Casino Royale coming a close, very close, second. It was in fact the latest Bond film that drew my attention to the recent Penguin re-issues of Fleming’s classic thrillers, complete with lurid covers painted in a vintage 1950s style. I have been reading them in order over the last several months, and so Dr. No marks my sixth literary adventure with the character. Let’s get comparisons with the film Bond out of the… Continue Reading →

#2 – Special Topics in Calamity Physics, by Marisha Pessl

August Leave a Comment

It’s going to be impossible to talk about this novel without revealing some plot details, including those of later (and sometimes pivotal) events. So if you haven’t yet read the novel and want to maintain the mystery and the surprise, it may be a good idea for you to read no further, as spoilers will most certainly follow. That being said, most discussions of Special Topics in Calamity Physics focus on a handful of things; the youth and beauty of Marisha Pessl (she is both young and striking, but that’s all you’ll read from me on the subject), the resemblance of her style to Nabokov (which I will discuss later), and the fact that it’s sort of strange for it to take 350 pages for a 515 page novel to really hit its stride; I’ll discuss that as well, but I think the most obvious and important place to begin… Continue Reading →

#1 – Lamb, by Christopher Moore

August Leave a Comment

My first book of the year was Christopher Moore’s Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal. It was, if you’ll pardon the expression, one of hell of a way to start of the year in reading. This book had been recommended to me by a number of friends as being remarkably funny, and one of those friends graced me with a copy for Christmas. Their descriptions of the book intrigued me (the image of a six-year-old Christ resurrecting a lizard by sticking it in his mouth is hard to resist), but I was worried that it would be stupid funny, and I’m not generally a fan of stupid funny. Hearing a few podcasts featuring Christopher Moore didn’t exactly help matters. I should have trusted my friends a little more. This book was amazingly funny, and not stupid funny. When you’re writing a humour book about the childhood of… Continue Reading →

Reading 2007

August Leave a Comment

I’ve inaugurated a new category here: Reading 2007. What I plan to do is blog my impressions, and a kind of review, of every single book that I read this year. Since I read somewhere between 70 and 90 books a year, there will be plenty to read about. I’m starting out with Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal, which is one of the books I was given for Christmas. I started it this afternoon. A few samples already in the wings, in no particular order: Special Topics in Calamity Physics, Marisha Pessl Famous Last Words, Timothy Findley The Children’s Hospital, Chris Adrian Uncollected Stories, William Faulkner The Autograph Man, Zadie Smith The Emperor’s Children, Claire Messud On Literature, Umberto Eco Invitation to A Beheading, Vladimir Nabokov Dr. No, Ian Fleming

The Sea As Hypertext

August Leave a Comment

“The Idea of Order at Key West” has traditionally been, if not an art object in itself, contained within an art object—a book, in fact. Books, along with films, are a special class of art object; they are copies without originals, and as such the “aura1” surrounding them is diffuse. No single copy of the book can be considered the single “authentic” copy, and neither can the manuscript (as it is a manuscript, not a book, and is therefore a different kind of art object), and so the aura of authenticity that would surround, say, a painting, must be diffused across all copies of the book, since all are equally authentic. A first edition would not be any more authentic than any subsequent edition, because any additional value it may be said to have is the result of it being a fetishized commodity, rather than an art object. That is… Continue Reading →

Appalling

August Leave a Comment

Appalling. There are almost no words for how ridiculous and horrible a thing this is. A UCLA student was arrested in a campus library and then repeatedly tasered by the police after he had been handcuffed.

Spam, Spam, Spam, Spammity…

August Leave a Comment

Comment spam has increased to the point where it’s crippling the database and making it almost impossible for me to manage it (although it never reaches you, the reader, or almost never), so I am going to switch over to MySQL. There maybe glitches and data loss because I tend to never do these things right on the first try.

Stephen James Joyce is an Asshole

August 1 Comment

It’s honestly difficult for me to phrase it any other way. Take a look at this New Yorker article and try to tell me that you don’t agree. I have no doubts at all that Joyce-The-Mediocre sees himself as protecting the legacy of Joyce-The-Genius-and-His-Family, but I very much think what he’s really doing is placing his own mark—a mark he has no more earned the right to place than the scholars he so derides—on the work of a man whose shadow he grew up in and whose legacy has entirely failed to live up to. Stephen has made his presence felt on a much broader front. Most prickly literary estates are interested in suppressing unflattering or intrusive information, but no one combines tolltaker, brand enforcer, and arbiter of taste as relentlessly as Stephen does, and certainly not in such a personal way. In 2003, Eloise Knowlton, a Joycean and a… Continue Reading →