I don’t remember how the subject of Sisyphus came up, but my dad remembered he watched this animated short 30 years ago, found it and showed it to me, because he knows how much I enjoy such things. Marcell Jankovics directed Sisyphus in 1974, and it earned him a well-deserved Oscar nomination. The short is [...]
Oscar Wilde wrote Salomé, a one act in French, about Salomé, daughter of Herodius, and niece/step-daughter of Herod Antipas, the Tetrarch. I don’t know if what I read was a good translation, since I don’t know French, but the language felt stilted, perhaps forced, though all the characters’ repeated reference to the moon and Salomé’s [...]
I read Cages, which is written and illustred by Dave McKean, right after Signal to Noise, one of his many collaborations with Neil Gaiman. Cages is McKean on his own, and it shows, in new and pleasant ways, but also in some slightly tiresome ways. I like it; I think it’s very well done, and [...]
The Orwell Prize has started a blog, in which they’ll post the diary entries of George Orwell, every day, what he wrote on that day. They’ll also post helpful notes by Peter Davison, who edited the Complete Works. Today is the first one, from August 9th, 1938. On that day, Orwell picked up a snake [...]
Wednesday, August 6, 2008
I requested The Book of Kells from the library at Davidson College, through interlibrary loan, which is a great way to get obscure titles for free. I’ve been using ILL (InterLibrary Loan) more lately. I got Frederick Prokosch’s The Seven Who Fled, at Harlan Ellison’s recommendation, Alan Moore’s Writing for Comics, Samuel R. Delany’s The [...]
Wednesday, August 6, 2008
Reading this article, from Reuters, adds to my overall distaste for the People’s Republic of China. When I read it for the first time, I thought it was a parody in poor taste, possibly from the Onion, or something similar, submitted by mistake. But it’s not; it’s as real as Tienanmen Square, China’s continued occupation [...]
I’m pretty late on noticing this, but Joss Whedon (and Company) have made something delightful and fresh. Again. A supervillian musical, made especially for the internet and eventually DVD, with extras. Some people (not me) think one needs a reason to do something like that besides the self-evident ones. As in: supervillains, a freeze-ray, self-important [...]
The writer Alexandr Solzhenitsyn died yesterday. In his youth, he was imprisoned for eight years in Stalin’s gulag–prison camps, about which he wrote extensively and beautifully, with dry and subtle humor–for writing some “disrespectful remarks about Stalin” in personal letters to a friend. The magnitude of this injustice leaves a sour taste in my mouth. [...]
This clip spurred me to think about an aspect of music I haven’t thought deeply on. Music as language: Bob Kauflin, speaking on music as language I think music functions as language, and that we glean emotions, inspiration, etc. from it, but what is the criteria for language? Birdsong is beautiful, and could move our [...]
This collection of eight short stories by Susanna Clarke reads in much the same vein as her novel Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, which one might expect, since all but one of the stories are set in that world. The odd one out, called The Duke of Wellington Misplaces His Horse, is part of Neil [...]