March 2010
18 posts
Hannibal Lector as Mary Sue? →
Over on LJ, John Crowley asks for help on a most intriguing query from a student:
Can anyone help the writer of this letter I received? Dear Professor, I am not one of your students but I have a question about a fictitious character I would hope you could help me with. I have a bachelor degree in English and French literature. I am also a member of an online forum called The Hannibal Lecter...
Stickney impact crater
2008 close-up of Martian moon Phobos, featuring the Stickney impact crater. Posted via email from K.’s posterous | Comment »
How to blog
Jorn Barger’s guidelines for bloggers:
My intent for weblogs in 1997 was to make the web as a whole more transparent, via a sort of “mesh network,” where each weblog amplifies just those signals (or links) its author likes best. 1998-1999 was for me the Golden Age of Weblogs, when the following principles were widely understood: 1. A true weblog is a log of all the URLs you...
Zola Jesus
Madtown opera-goth Zola Jesus got a decent notice in the NYT this morning:
Some tracks from “Stridulum,” her new EP on Sacred Bones, come across like proper love songs. (“I Can’t Stand” offers solace to a friend who’s given up on love: “I can’t stand to see you this way,” she howls from her great height, “It’s gonna be alright.”) They’ve still got sulfurous echo and war drums in the...
Mayhew Fowler, citizen journalist who first...
Fowler worked for Offthebus, a citizen journalist organization set up for the 2008 campaign. It had it’s ups and downs:
The writer, married to a successful corporate lawyer and with two daughters in graduate school, admits now that she at times sank into the sort of elitism she loathed in others. She complained she wasn’t getting enough attention from overseers at Huffington Post....
@BurroughsBot
@BurroughsBot retweets every Twitter posting mentioning William S. Burroughs. Posted via web from K.’s posterous | Comment »
Enderby meets William S. Burroughs
Anthony Burgess’ formalist poet Enderby encounters William S. Burroughs in Tangiers. He has entered a bar to retrieve a letter, and finds a nest of American expat writers:
There seemed to be no waiter about. There was a wooden bar in the distant corner, its lower paint ruined by feet, and three barstools were empty before it. To get to it, Enderby had to get past a dangerous-looking literary...
Six Delusions of Google's Arrogant Leaders →
From Valleywag
Mass market paperbacks
Scott Esposito wants to bring back the mass market paperback as a viable format for “literary” fiction. Count me in; I’d rather have a pocket book size edition of Joshua Ferris’ latest than a cutting edge eBook with all the bells and whistles. I’d really like to see it happen. As I understand things, there are two possibilities for why this hasn’t already happened: 1) we...
Reading
Marguerite Duras, The War: A Memoir. (translated 1986, Barbara Brey). A short collecton of pieces by Duras about the period between Liberation and VE Day. The first piece, “The War”, is a journal from spring 1945 when Duras awaited the return of her husband, Robert L., from a camp. Robert L. had been arrested and deported about a year previously and was feared dead; the statistics...
Twitter vs. LambdaMoo
Andy Pollaine had an interesting point about Twitter a couple of years ago: I was watching the general tweeting going on from those I follow on Twitter and have started noticing a lot of “goodnight everyone” kinds of tweets. That along with the @reply made me realise that Twitter is really just a giant MOO, just without the rooms. Or is it really without the rooms? I think that the ‘rooms’ that...
Lives
Patricia Travers, a violin prodigy, died in February, age 82. Between ages 10 and 23 she performed extensively. After a 1951 performance of the Brahms Violin Concerto with the Boson Symphony, she disappeared by hiding in plain sight, by living with her parents in Clifton, NJ. She seldom spoke of her career. Sudden disappearances are actually quite typical of prodigies. According to Ellen...
