Tuesday, September 16, 2008
Alberto Manguel wrote A Reading Diary over the course of a year, as he reread twelve of his favorite books. It centers around associative reading, by which he means that each book you read changes you, and will change the way you read the next book. The more you read, and the more widely you […]
Monday, September 15, 2008
Hunter S. Thompson makes me want to be a journalist. As with some other larger-than-life writers, I’m not sure where the legend ends and he begins, but since I’m interested in his writing and not his person, it doesn’t much matter. His love for language and his discipline are especially inspiring. I read somewhere, while […]
Friday, September 12, 2008
I was thrown off, initially, by the run-on, unfinished beginning of Piedra de Sol, or The Sunstone, by Octavio Paz. It’s all one jumbled sentence and it starts mid-way. I realized, when I finished reading, that the poem loops. When you get to the end, it’s not the end; Paz repeats the beginning stanza, which […]
Wednesday, September 10, 2008
This Flash app takes a song you upload and fills it with, as you might expect from the name, more cowbell—on beat, if it can. Then it inserts snippets of the Saturday Night Live sketch at random intervals (Christopher Walken & Will Ferrell dialogue, primarily) and saves the resulting file on their server. They keep […]
Tuesday, September 9, 2008
Based on the recommendation of Neil Gaiman, via his blog, I read The Jewel-Hinged Jaw, a collection of criticism and other essays by Samuel R. Delany on sf and the craft and mechanics of writing. It boggled me. His fresh, lighting thought, his ability to strike to the heart of whatever he was reading or […]