August 2009
5 posts
MOTD
“A book is a machine to think with”, I.A. Richards, 1924, Principles of Literary Criticism I’m noting the quirks in William Gibson’s writing—wristwatches, hotel rooms, Japan. In Neuromancer, Japan was the dangerous future. Twenty years later, in Spook Country, Japan is “a planet of benign mystery, source of games, anime, plasma tv”. I’m aware that...
Hypergraphia
From Wikipedia: Hypergraphia is an overwhelming urge to write. It is not itself a disorder, but can be associated with temporal lobe changes in epilepsy and mania in the context of bipolar disorder. Neurologist Alice Weaver Flaherty, in her book The Midnight Disease: The Drive to Write, Writer’s Block, and the Creative Brain, describes its relationship to writer’s block and to...
Michiko Kakatani on Thomas Pynchon's "Inherent...
via NYT: ‘“Inherent Vice” not only reminds us how rooted Mr. Pynchon’s authorial vision is in the ’60s and ’70s, but it also demystifies his work, underscoring the similarities that his narratives — which mix high and low cultural allusions, silly pranks and gnomic historical references, mischievous puns, surreal dreamlike sequences and a playful sense of the absurd — share with the work...
More on Twitter
From Stanley Bing at HuffPo: One thing that happens on Twitter is that everybody writes about him or herself. That is the subject of Twitter: Yourself. So you read a chain and most of it doesn’t really pursue anything. People read your tweet. They tweet back with something of marginal relevance, rotating the subject so it has something to do with them.
This was apropos of Something Jeff...
Phillip K. Dick
David Hellman’s SFGate review of the Library of America edition of “VALIS and Later Novels”:
What this volume ultimately tells us is that Dick was not a science fiction writer, but instead he was our writer. Some science fiction readers have chided him for valuing the fiction over the science, and he certainly did not write your typical space operas. But that seems to be the...