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 […]
Monday, September 8, 2008
Alan Moore’s Writing for Comics is a thin book (just under fifty pages) of essays by who you’d think, and it’s about what you’d think. Except Alan Moore doesn’t cover much of the nuts-and-bolts, as you may expect; he drives deeper, to the theory. Why comics work the way they do. He wrote it in […]
Sunday, September 7, 2008
Based on how much I’d enjoyed Bloom’s Seven Major Tragedies, I checked out another lecture series: Peter Saccio’s William Shakespeare : Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies, from the library. These lectures broadened my understanding of Shakespeare generally, and in regard to his specific works. Since I listened to Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies right after Bloom’s lectures, […]
Saturday, September 6, 2008
This series of lectures, by Harold Bloom, gave me an interest in Shakespeare I never had before. I never understood the hype, even after reading Romeo & Juliet and Hamlet in high school, and seeing a high school performance of Macbeth (which I realize may have lacked a certain… j’ne sais quois). It was ok, […]
Friday, September 5, 2008
Austin Grossman’s first novel, Soon I Will Be Invincible, is a fun, quick book that references the whole of superhero comics (and some other fantasy) with the usual tropes and plenty of in-jokes. (One such is the reference to criminals being “a cowardly and superstitious lot,” said with plenty of irony.) It redoes many of […]
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 […]
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. […]