"Tekeli-li, or Hollow Earth Lives": A huge (comprehensive?) annotated bibliography of Antarctic and hollow earth fiction. Wow. (Thanks, Jonah!)
Gallery - Tales From The Vault!: Canadian Pulp Fiction, 1940-1952: I love the French Canadian covers!
Fun and games with Google Maps: When farmers get up to not-safe-for-network-television hijinks.
Dorothy Parker in the Paris Review, 1956: "I wanted to be -cute-. That's the terrible thing. I should have had more sense." If I ever have a trans-historical dinner party, I want Dotty to show up, get smashed, and leave with Walter Rathenau.
"Latino" v. "Hispanic" in Google Trends: Settling an argument for some of my friends about regional variation in usage -- a very nice use of Google Trends.
Sir Thomas Browne's Hydriotaphia & The Garden of Cyrus: My education is lacking, as until a few weeks ago, I'd never heard of this overstuffed, Pynchonesque (Sternean?), melancholic slab of 17th century goodness.
English /R/ Us: On rhotic and non-rhotic accents, the Duke of Wellington, the wheatear bird's scandalous secret, and more (with bonus PG-rated etymology).
The Unmasking of JT Leroy: The gutterpunk-backgrounded cult novelist -- whose work has always sounded quite dreadful to me -- is apparently entirely fictional (and portrayed in public by a woman in drag).
Baltimore - 'Home of 1,000 slogans': Mobtown, represent!
A Wellman Bestiary: The critters of old-school horror writer Manly Wade Wellman. "They are an ancient race, an aboriginal 'people of the land' who went into hiding with the advent of man."
People Who Died 2005: The Baltimore City Paper profiles YA SF writer Andre Norton, the inventor of Valium, the James Brown backup singer behind the "It Takes Two" beat, and other less worldshaking people who died last year.
Fantastic Susanna Clarke post on Crooked Timber: It's good to see the smart nerds at Crooked Timber writing at length about the best fantasy novel so far this decade; it's -great- to see Clarke responding at length and making some fascinating points.
Index to Science Fiction Anthologies and Collections: An index to 3,900 SF anthologies and single-author collections published before 1984, containing over 38,000 stories by 3,880 authors.
Solaris, Rediscovered: An encomium to the great Polish science fiction writer Stanislaw Lem.
On bad sports nicknames: And The Register will not let that barreled fish alone.
How Race Wrecked Liberalism: A review of Nick Kotz’s "Judgment Days: Lyndon Baines Johnson, Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Laws that Changed America".
Proposed Standards for Vampires: Except the guy doesn't show much familiarity with the Stoker book (or, for that matter, the Hammer Films' definitive take, or for "Buffy"). Was this legislation written by a lobbyist?
Eggheads and Bookies: How "Scientific" Wagers Beat Wall Street: Starring Edward Thorp, the MIT mathematician who invented card counting, and Claude Shannon, the Bell Labs genius who might lead my all-history dinner party guest list.
A Guide to Isaac Asimov's Essays: The late doctor was once of the great popular science writers of the twentieth century (and insanely prolific).
Rules of Moopsball: Gary Cohn's 1976 Vance-ian science fiction piece -- a sort of precursor of Calvinball crossed with a medium-sized riot.
To the White Sea: Notes on a never-produced Coen brothers adaption of James "Deliverance" Dickey's novel of WWII meditative ultraviolence.
"The Burrower Beneath" by Robert M. Price: A remarkable Lovecraft pastiche. "I lingered a moment upon the Precipice of Noth to gaze at the fearful spectacle outstretched in the shifting infra-red vapors below me..."
Just Letters: A multi-user refrigerator alphabet game; spell out dirty words for people to read all over the world!
Selections from "A Century of Parody and Imitation": Meanspirited nineteenth century parodic poetry, including Swinburne doing a quite passable Tennyson.
Margaret Talbot on Roald Dahl: An appreciation, featuring Talbot's insights into why children continue to love a distant man's disturbing books.
On the language of prarie dogs: "Slobodchikoff believes prairie dogs are communicating detailed information to one another about what animals are showing up in their colonies..."
Kelly Link's first book released under Creative Commons license: This would happen, of course, a mere week after I bought my own copy. She's a slipstream/weird fiction author, Small Beer Press magnate, and Jonathan Lethem pal. The book is good. (via Crooked Timber)
H.L. Mencken's "Declaration of Independence in American": A belated happy Independence Day. (via Unqualified Offerings.)
Snark Hunting: a meanspirited blog about branding: Written by someone in the naming industry. Delightful.
Kottke reviews a thirteen-year-old book everyone's already read: Not to be a hater, but between this and his recent Minor Threat post (where he spelled Dischord Records' name wrong), it's been a bad pop culture week for Jason.
"Gary Robinson died hungry.": A New Yorker feature on Edna Buchanan, last of the great crime beat reporters.
William Dowling on Nabokov's "Pale Fire": Teasing out a great twentieth century literary puzzle -- who wrote "Pale Fire"? (Spoilers aplenty, so please read the wonderful novel first.)
The Seldovia Herald: I'm mostly helping a friend get around some domain squatters, but if you ever wanted to know what small-town Alaska life is like, here's your chance.
Accelerando!: Charlie Stross' novel of the singularity gets released under a Creative Commons license.
Things Magazine on "How to Write for the Papers": "In the first half of the twentieth century, London was awash with specialist publications, weekly and fortnightly papers that provided a steady diet of derring do, adventure, non-fiction and what we now call 'human interest.'"
Pop-up and Movable Books: A Tour Through Their History: Tarzan is a sentimental favorite, but the 1873 Dean and Sons "Beauty and the Beast" is spectacular. (via Things Magazine)
appelstein.com: from the lou and proud: Mike Applestein's "Caught in Flux" was a really great music zine back in the day. Are all my high school heroes back on the web, and I didn't notice?
Insider trading in the Harry Potter deathpool?: Bookies are refusing bets from the town where the new Harry Potter book was printed. (Warning: spoilerific!!)
Elves and Hobbits in Russian Woods: Russian's Tolkien LARPer scene. Who knew?
Matthew Yglesias' greatest thread ever: I'm thinking he should try stuffing the head with garlic, but that may be zombies and salt. (Bonus points for the 2:48 comment.)
Pow! Zap! Tips for reporters writing about comic books: Or, "It's not 1989, learn to write like it." I'd love to see a New Yorker profile of Steve Ditko and Mr. A sometime.
Untested: MIT takes a look and finds that length correlates very strongly to one's score on the SAT writing test (and facts, alas, do not).
"Harrison Bergeron" cited by Kansas lawyers arguing for unequal school funding: Meanwhile, Diana Moon Glampers just put a fire axe through satire's poor skull.
Jonathan Lethem to write a superhero comic: Now if we could get Ed Brubaker to write a sensitive novel about childhood and race in 1970s New York, we'd be all set.
robin_d_laws: ATIUBS: "This acronym would reflect the strong possibility that any news story remarkable enough to comment on may be debunked, thereby making the blogger look like a dope." (via Unqualified Offerings)
Yard Work: STOP ME BEFORE I BUNT AGAIN!: "The Red Sox, bereft of cheesecake, only recently won their first championship in 86 years. Coincidence? TMQ thinks not." Sheer genius.
Tonga: A Little Kingdom and a Great Queen: An American doctor's recollections of Tonga in the early '20s.
Sisyphus as Social Democrat: Brad deLong on the meaning and meaninglessness of J.K. Galbraith.
Creek Running North: Life and death: One man's encounter with a serial killer and the contradictions that keep us up at night. (With a Christian flamewar in the comments!)
Strangely Enough: Paul Maliszewski, Michael Chabon, satire, hoaxes, The Baffler, and the Holocaust.
77 Dream Songs: Confessionalist poet John Berryman's Pulitzer Prize-winner.
New York Press shreds Thomas Friedman's new book: The whole damn thing is premised on a metaphor that -didn't apply in 1492-.
Articles (the finest of the short nonfiction form): Aaron Schwartz cherrypicks magazine articles for his new blog.
More Words - Search for Dictionary Words for Word Games: Some nice anagram tools for games like Scrabble.
For Millennia Man Has Wrestled with the Universal Truth That the Beginning of a Paper Makes a Meaningless Generalization: The disease seems common to math as well as English and history. (via Battlepanda)
Inscape & Outlandishness: On William Barnes and the gainrising of Anglo-Saxon speech. (via Making Light)
Maciej Ceglowski beats the crap out of "Hackers and Painters": He's got a beef with the Paul Graham/Dave Winer/ESR style of "hackers are" essay, and calls bullshit on Graham's qualifications to even -talk- about painting. (via Waxy)
Dictionary of the History of Ideas: "The articles contained in this Dictionary return us to time when it was still possible to speak with a confident authoritativeness about central ideas in the Western tradition." (via Mark Schmitt)
Google results for "dilemmae": At least -someone- thinks I'm important. Sadly, the plural actually seems to be "dilemmas".
"After the Party", a biography of Joe March: Author of "The Wild Party", the poem that summed up the hard-partying Lost Generation.
When a nineteenth-century African-American author turns out not to be: For decades, scholars believed that despite her novel's complete lack of attention to black life Emma Dunham Kelley-Hawkins was not white. (via the Little Professor)
The Roaring Girl, or Moll Cutpurse: The Dekker and Middleton play, otherwise only middlin', features my favorite Jacobean cross-dresser: she swears, she fights, she speaks to high and low, and she refuses to get married at the end.
Happy birthday, "The Maltese Falcon": Seventy-five years later, Sam Spade is still the one true private eye.
danger opportunity != crisis: This idea apparently came from the same place as the 25 Inuit words for snow.
How to read mathematics: Don't miss the big picture. Don't read too fast. Make the idea your own. (via delicious/gleusck)
A review of "American Jesus": A very nicely done review "American Jesus" that says what the reviewer wishes the book had been, provides a little NYRB-style platform for musing, and most importantly conveys whether I'd like the book. A model for me.
Locus Online: 2004 Recommended Reading: I've read about four of these books. Oh, my vanishing street cred! (via Uncertain Principles)
The Journal of Decorative and Propaganda Arts: Oh man, that's beautiful. I wants!
Crooked Timber: Faith in progress: Henry of Crooked Timber looks at Easterbrook's "Collapse" review in the context of right-wing extropianism.
Brad DeLong on Gregg Easterbrook: "Somebody's job should be to catch book reviewers who don't understand or don't accurately present the books they are reviewing." For Mr. Easterbrook, that seems to be anything other than pro football, defense budgets, and superbabes.
James Joyce's Bad Words: "[T]he book is short on the four-letter usual suspects when compared with British prosecuting counsel Mervyn Griffiths-Jones' fastidious selective concordance to 'Lady Chatterley's Lover'." (via remake/remodel)
Extraordinary Exhibitions: Broadsides from the Collection of Ricky Jay: Pieces from Ricky Jay's new book are being exhibited in San Francisco. And I'm not there! (via Redfox)
Dave "Ansible" Langford on Heinlein's "The Number of the Beast": All nasty reviews should be both this entertaining and this accurate. "This is just a story, he says. I am Heinlein; I need cast no fictional spell; unaided I am lovable; listen to me and enjoy!"
Blanco's Magic Tails & Dragon Tails: "I am Blanco Tailspinner - an ancient Dragoncat - and this is my friend Earth." Make sure to check out the free coloring book pages.
Outside The Beltway : California Professor Flunks (Awful) Pro-U.S. Essay: Watching people rationalize the essay (and smear a reasonably common polisci textbook) because the professor is a Marxist is amusing; discovering that defending the student has become, in the tiniest way, a -cause- is absolutely surreal.
Distributed Power News: There is very little in life quite so fascinating -- in principle, if not in fact -- as an obscure trade journal for an interesting industry.
Theodore Beale: "The Lesser Evil": Oh, man -- and this guy wrote a whole -series- of Christian lances-and-loincloths books?
The Robert Heinlein Interview and Other Heinleiniana, by J. Neil Schulman: Given how cripplingly insane the other things by Schulman I've seen floating around the internet are (most notably a few MST3K-ed by Adam Cadre), I can only assume that this is the best book ever.
"Losing the War" by Lee Sandlin: "It was as though the earth itself had shifted, and all the detritus of an empire had washed ashore." Among the very best things I've ever read about the Second World War. (via MetaFilter)
The bad science of Michael Crichton's new book: It's like Socialist Realism for TechCentralStation readers. (via Crooked Timber)
The Command Line In 2004: Deconstructing Neal Stephenson's famous essay, with an eye towads actual current thought about OS design, software engineering, and that time-honored practice of illuminating gaps and contradictions in the text.
God's Hooks!: A Howard Waldrop classic about the one that got away.
Kayne West and the Limits of Aporia: I'm not even saying it's wrong. It's just amusing as hell.
Greetings From Earth: MP3s of the Voyager messages to our alien brothes, or "why is the Ukrainian from Ithica"?
Reminiscences of a Stock Operator: Memories of the Boy Plunger, the frantic trader who made as much as $100 million during the 1929 crash. (PDF)
Catacomb: A story about MUDs and the online economy, circa 1985 (I read this when it came out, I think). (via)
Catacomb: A story about MUDs and the online economy, circa 1985 (I read this when it came out, I think). (via)
The Universal Whistling Machine: I want it to make friends with Blendy.
"Our culture, how we know it today, is under attack from every angle.": An Alabama legislator seeks to have books with gay characters yanked from the shelves and blows up my irony meter.
Hitherby Dragons, a blog of stories: A short-short a day. "Night of the Antimonian" is painfully good. (via)
Hitherby Dragons, a blog of stories: A short-short a day. "Night of the Antimonian" is painfully good. (via)
The Paris Review - Interviews: From Graham Greene to Haruki Murakami, fifty years of interviewy goodness.
The Paris Review - Interviews: From Graham Greene to Haruki Murakami, fifty years of interviewy goodness.
Malcolm Gladwell on emotional resilience: "We forget that other experiences will compete for our attention and emotions. We forget that our psychological immune system will kick in and take away the sting of adversity." I hope he's right. (via)
Susanna Clarke's "Antickes and Frets": "The Queen of Scots was impressed. She had heard of a poisonous dart sewn into a bodice, but she had never heard of anyone being killed by embroidery before. She herself was very fond of embroidery."
The eBay Reader: "he first book-length academic inquiry within the humanities into the cultural implications of eBay": Okay, I confess that even I want to make fun of this.
Science fiction citations for the OED: Collecting every-earlier appearances of words like "blaster" and "hyperspace".
symmetry, the magazine of particle physicists: The first issue is coming in October; I kind of want to sign up and put it out on my coffee table to scare my guests. (via)
"The Lonely Doll", a fabulously creepy '50s kids book: Cindy Sherman and Kim Gordon are fans. "As the publisher, I would get letters every day, saying: 'This book is disgusting and terrible. Why did you bring it back?'"
Days of tabloids past: An appreciation of the late Los Angeles Herald-Examiner, where "only a few" photographers carried broken tricycles in their trunks to doctor car accident scenes. (via)
Olaf Unleashed: An "Unfortunate Events" movie promo that somehow fails to work in any Magnetic Fields references. (via)
The Global Schoolyard Rhyme Project: "We had joy, we had fun / Flicking boogies at the sun" and similar ditties for nine-year-olds around the world.
Jacques Derrida explained: The piece is a hatchet job, but it does provide a decent -- if mean-spirited -- overview of the man and his work.
Miss Susie Had a Steamboat: A Critical Analysis: In my dialect her name is "Lucy"; where's the analysis of how wrong and weird "Susie" sounds? (via)
Jacques Derrida, dead at 74: Roland Barthes was right after all.
Today's front pages: It seems different when you can -see- them like that.
If all stories were written like science fiction: "Do you think we'll be flying on a propeller plane? Or one of the newer jets?" asked Ann. (via)
Yojimbo, Red Harvest, A Fistful of Dollars: Dashiell Hammett's novel became a samurai movie, the samurai movie became a Western, and Bruce Willis got sued.
"How To Build A Universe That Doesn't Fall Apart Two Days Later": Philip K. Dick on schizophrenics' reality, his most famous bon mot, cop shows, the Gospels, Disneyland, Heraclites, and the fake fake.
C.D. Wright wins a MacArthur genius grant: She was one of my favorite professors: a sweet woman, a dedicated teacher, and a great poet. (Also, I think I still have her copy of "Mrs. Bridge". Sorry!)
O'Reilly's "Gaming Hacks": Featuring Andrew Plotkin and Adam Cadre on Inform, among other things. (via)
Things unseen: James Tiptree's "The Women Men Don't See" and Karen Joy Fowler's "What I Didn't See" -- two women writing in one genre on one (?) theme, thirty years apart. (via)
One Day at Fenway: Baseball writer Rob Neyer's adventures with Amazon reviews and identities.
"The Hammer of God": The very model of a Father Brown story.
The Grandest Game in the World: A somewhat... individualistic... overview of classic British detective fiction, including and especially Father Brown.
Jason Craft: "Video games, comic books, popular media and literary theory."
Researcher discovers huge cache of unpublished Philip Larkin work: It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Bill Simmons and Chuck Klosterman yammer about the Olympics: ESPN needs to chain them to their desks and make this a regular feature. Skot "Izzle Pfaff" Kurruk and a tweaking Hunter S. Thompson can sub in if Klosterman and Simmons make a break for Canada and freedom.
Cracks and Shards: Oddities and inconsistancies in the Dragaera books of Steven Brust.
Coppola's Dracula: A film never made. And then some. (It will be extra fun for Dracula fans who have seen "Hearts of Darkness", the documentary about the making of "Apocalypse Now".)
Clubbo: Music to Believe In: Forty years of fictional failure, as told in words, pictures, and MP3s. (via)
How fast do you read?: More importantly, how much do you retain?
Izzle Pfaff: At the River: Skot's summer job: "I was, then as now, a puny ectomorph, ill equipped either mentally or physically to challenge Ma Nature in all her roaring, spuming glory."
The Order of the Occult Hand: "If true, the letters from Smith and Flanders reveal the origin of the Order of the Occult Hand. In the fall of 1965, several Charlotte News reporters had been drinking...."
"The significance of Wagner's scribbling is that it is exactly what you end up with if publishing and fiction writing become a pursuit of cheap hipness and movie rights.": Holy crow, that does sound awful.
Kill Your Idols: Not to be confused with the similarly-titled book of punk, hip-hop, and skater photography, it's a collection of contemporary music critics savaging the icons of rock and roll, from Brian Wilson to Wilco. (via)
Mark's Very Large National Lampoon Site: Dedicated to those halcyon days of "Trots and Bonnie", Henry Beard, Michael Gross, the "1964 High School Yearbook Parody", and an attempt to make MAD Magazine for semi-grownups. (via)
Dale Peck's "Hatchet Jobs": Dale Peck's novels are so damn incredibly fabulous that he is entitled to heap derision and calumny upon the heads of Joyce, Nabokov, DeLillo, Pynchon, and Powers, and he really, really wants you to know this. (see also) (via)
The Beast: The Making of the A.I. game: "It was street theater and a con game and a pennant drive rolled into one." (via) (see also)
Harry Potter in Attic Greek: It's like a breathtakingly dorky casemod tutorial, only for classical scholars.
The Lovecraft Library: "...it is told of in whispers around campfires and muttered about by grandams in the tents of sheiks so that all the tribes shun it without wholly knowing why."
Edward Jay Epstein's "The Diamond Invention": Epstein is a little bit of a nut, but he's an excellent writer, and the machinations of the diamond cartel -- and the efforts to spread the idea that diamonds are hugely rare -- are fascinating, so I bet this book is a swell read.
"There's just you, foisting your own ideal image of a black metal band onto us because you really liked our album.": John Darnielle of the Mountain Goats (an out of the closet metal fan) puts together an absolutely flawlessly clichéd fake interview with Kult of Azazel. (via)
"We never really heal; we just move further from the moment we were hurt.": Michael Barrish tells the tale of a relationship ending with betrayal and fireworks.
What MLA panels really look like: Damn those radical postmodernists! Propaganda like like "Aphra Behn's Religious Libertinism" and "Revisiting the Indian 'Renaissance': Vernacular-Anglophone Relations in Colonial India" will not stand! (see also) (via)
The Decembrist: On Barbara Ehrenreich and Elites: I want to check out "The Guardians" on smart cookie Mark Schmitt's recommendation, given that "God and Man at Yale" seems to me to be one of the three or four historically important postwar political works.
Explaining Dale Peck: Isn't "mediocre writer looking to make a name for himself" a good enough explanation? (see also)
"We regret the omission.": How and why a Lexington, KY, newspaper ignored the civil rights movement. (via)
G-8 and His Battle Aces: "America's Flying Spy is the Allied forces' first line of defense against a Germany that has recruited every mad scientist, zombie, Martian, beast-man, voodoo priest, and thawed-out Viking it could find to do its bidding!" (I finally found the model of Planetary's "the Pilot".)
The battle for kiddie lit: "It is not enough to give kids books. We must give them ones that don't suck ass."
The Amazon kneejerk contrarian game: Find a classic that someone dissed. "I think about Kenny G., for instance. His rythmic session is much more regular, whereas Coltrane's session seems sometimes to loose the beat."
England Have My Bones: Dedicated to T.H. White and his works (including my belovd "Mistress Masham's Repose").
The clones of Fu Manchu: Not, you know, literal clones, although you could probably get a decent short story out of that premise.
Robert Kurson has a book: He's a friend of my friend Johnny and an absolutely spellbinding writer. It's probably going to be very, very good.
William Tozier's bibliophilic expidition: 1 minivan, 1000 miles, 2000 pounds of books. Also, mummies.
Washington Post drops an f-bomb: Beyond the Cheney thing, does anyone reading the Washington Post ever really need to be protected from four-letter words? Or are kids trading Dana Milbank columns like Yu-Gi-Oh cards now? (here's why)
The LiveJournal of Zachary Marsh: I love you, Matt "Defective Yeti" Baldwin. If today's young victims listened to Metallica instead of Staind, they might be more prepared for their fate. (via)
R.A. Lafferty, "Slow Tuesday Night": A gem of a wryly deadpan story from the past master of same -- it's about Our Fastpaced Times, only even more so.
The Science Frontiers Sourcebook Project: "The ashen light of Venus; The Martian 'pyramids'; Kinks in Saturn's rings; Continuing debate about the Voyager life-detection experiments; Neptune's mysterious ring...." A series of Fortean anomalies; these look absolutely delightful. (via)
Pitchfork gets burned on a Beastie Boys review: Half the reviews they print are poorly disguised creative writing exercises to begin with.
The Urth List: The Urth List, a mailing list devoted to Gene Wolfe
Haikus for a newly neutered dog: Spring is here. Be glad / for the flowers in the field. / You're just a friend now.
Paradise Glossed: Nick Confessore lays into David Brooks' latest. The funny thing is that despite its image as Berkeley on the Beltway, the part of Takoma Park I live near is a working-class Salvadoran neighborhood.
Bloomsday 100: Thousands of tourists will converge on Dublin today to drink Guiness, feed kidneys to the cat, get rocks chucked at them, and masturbate. Ah, literature!
A page of Ulysses every day: Tune in tomorrow to find out what stately, plump Buck Mulligan does next!
Amy Sullivan on Left Behind: Ignore the suspect theology and wafer-thin characters -- I read the first one of these, and the prose is, unbelievably, much worse than Sullivan makes it out to be. Her take on why they sell is interesting but not entirely convincing. (see also)
P22 shows style, intelligence, dazzling good looks in pangram contest examples: They like me! They really like me!
Madeline L'Engle on religious literature: "...[Y]ou have to take truth seriously even when it expands beyond the facts." (via)
WhiteSmoke, "a revolutionary new language enrichment tool": "WhiteSmoke™ is capable, for the first time, to overcome word ambiguity problems. As soon as the text is understood, new adjectives, adverbs, phrases and replacements are suggested." Oh man.
"Would Lionel Trilling have behaved this way with 'A Wrinkle in Time', do you think?": Michael Berube on Harry Potter, Harold Bloom, and getting his developmentally disabled son to read. (via)
Yingzi: If English was written like Chinese: A surprisingly useful and easily understood introduction to the Chinese ideogram system. That rhyming thing must be a bitch to learn.
The Illustrated Invisible Cities: Despina can be reached in two ways: by ship or by camel. The city displays one face to the traveler arriving overland and a different one to him who arrives by sea.
Ed Anger lives!: And he's a woman from Virginia, and apparently perfectly serious! (via)
Double-Tongued Word Wrester: Grant of the great World New York has a new project for etymological trufans.
A masterpiece of terrible writing from the Times: "She took up horses to please Daddy, joined the riding council to please Daddy. Daddy, Daddy, Daddy."
Letters from Normandy: "He must have been a very fine lad and I feel that their marvellous young spirits can never die and that they together will go into battle with the others to inspire and encourage them."
P22 pangram contest: I moved twenty-six glyphs, a quick job for a prize.
Rezedents Rights & Rispansabilities: A HUD pamphlet mistakenly translated into Jamaican patois instead of Haitian creole. "Dis brouchure briefly liss some ahf yuh muos impowtant rights ahn rispansabilities fi elp yuh fi get di muos owt ah yuh owme." (via)
"The Blue Cross": The first (and somewhat unrepresentative) Father Brown story, from G.K. Chesterton's "The Innocence of Father Brown".
The Violent World of Parker: My favorite series of crime novels -- Parker is ethical but utterly amoral, and Donald Westlake essentially gets you rooting for the sociopath.
The Transcendant Tigers: A little lagniappe from that lover of children, R.A. Lafferty. The cap is important. If it weren't important, it wouldn't be mentioned.
The Mathematical Fiction Homepage: "This is a story of a love triangle with a definite mathematical twist. Henderson's roommate, Czogloz, steals away his girlfriend, Milla, when all three were math graduate students. Years later, seeking revenge, Henderson attends a conference and very impolitely points out an error in Czogloz's proof."
The music is God's, but the beat...: Personal hero Johnny Marr on the rise of the Christian anti-rock treatise.
The Army War College Journal of Science Fiction: Using future history to make a point. (via)
Deconstructing Ira: Ira Glass, Steven Berlin Johnson, Todd Haynes, and the Brown semiotics mafia
Why I Take Good Care of My Macintosh Computer: By Gary Snyder (via)
The Little Professor on Helen Vendler on the humanities: The Little Professor is one of my favorite academic blogs; Helen Vendler is the most important critic of contemporary poetry living in America. Had it not been for TLP, I'd have missed this.
The Mystery of the Ghost Writer: "I don't know anything about literature," Frank joined in, holding up a massive tome by Thomas Pynchon, "but I sure know a lively adventure story, packed with mystery and action, when I read one."
Columbia Journalism Review on red vs. blue stories: And one particular clichéd, almost Brooksian piece in the Post.
Teonaht, language of the feleonim: I wish I remembered my imaginary worlds from when I was nine. Bonus -- links to many more constructed languages.
Audience, Uglossia, and CONLANG: Inventing Languages on the Internet: On beyond Klingon.
"A number of hours in the company of one of the worst prose stylists in the history of literature": A little bird told me that additionally the history is a mess and the plot is a mishmash of "Foucault's Pendulum" and "Holy Blood, Holy Grail" (via)
Wormtalk and Slugspeak: A blog from the editor of "Tolkien Studies"
Pantheon and on: "Oh, Loki. When did you lose your talent for this job?"
Jonathan Lethem's "Marvel Years": Jack Kirby, Sue Storm, and the titanic conflict in one young bookworm's soul. (via)
Thousand-Faced Moon: Comics, movies, books, queer old things. Who wants to read a blog about -those-??
Stump the Bookseller: Spend $2 to get the name of that children's book you vaguely remember from 3rd grade.
Ultan's Library, the online journal of Gene Wolfe studies: Not much on 'The Knight' yet -- curses!
Cave Canem: A Gene Wolfe page: Dedicated to 'The Fifth Head of Cerebus', rather than Wolfe's vast masterpiece, 'The Book of the New Sun'
"Under the Big Top": If Janet Davis' prose style is any good, this cultural history of the American circus could be a hell of a lot of fun. (see also)
Not actually a parody: Although "The suicide planet resembled Earth except for its killing machines" might have won this year's Lyttle Lytton. (via)
"Lolita": plaigirised, pseudoplaigirised, other?: I like Rosenbaum's work a lot ("The Secret Parts of Fortune" is excellent), but his ideas about "Pale Fire" are consistantly insane, and this article is basically unreadable. (via)
THEN: A history of British s.f. fandom. (via)
2004 Lyttle Lytton Winners: "We write the year 2347, a world abound with nuclear alacrity, when suddenly Frank enters with a smile." Congratulations to wife-of-me V. and friend-of-me Skot "Izzle Pfaff" Kurruk for their award-winning entries.
Gene Wolfe's "The Arimaspian Legacy": If the short fiction of O. Henry and Neil Gaiman had a baby, this would be it.
A topical Point/Counterpoint: It's like they read blogs.
The Dictionary of Canadian Biography: From A-CA-OO-MAH-CA-YE to SEBASTIAN ZOUBERBUHLER! (via)
Too many Cooks: Stupid Anglo-Saxon last names!
The curious case of Sidd Fitch: George Plimpton's wonderful April Fool's prank from a 1985 Sports Illustrated
Lauren Slater's misrepresentations of psychology: I enjoyed her Guardian piece and her description of the Rosenhan experiment was fascinating, but B.F. Skinner did not, in fact, raise his daughter in a box.
George Orwell on Boys' Weeklies: "In reality their basic political assumptions are two: nothing ever changes, and foreigners are funny." How I wish to be called Vernon-Smith, 'the Bounder of Greyfriars'! (via)
Why I hate David Brooks: This piece doesn't quite convey his dripping condescension, but it's close. (via)
Michael Lewis and Coach Fitz: The 'Moneyball' and 'Liar's Pokers' encomium to his hard-assed high school baseball coach
Garth Marenghi, sculptor of nightmares: "Let me clarify my position on this matter. 'Slicer IV' was not technically part of the 'Slicer' trilogy, although it was, indeed, part of the 'Slicer' series. 'Slicer IV' stands as a book in its own right even thought the character of Blade features once more in the plot line." (via)
Your Literary Masterpiece Was Delicious: Maciej explores the world of brute force textual analysis (via)
Secrets of the Magus: Actor, learned scholar, wonderful writer, dazzling slight of hand artist: a portrait of Ricky Jay, one of my personal heroes. (via)
Too Old to Rock, Too Young to Die: Greg "Soundbitten.com" Beato on the rock and roll lifestyle of an aging metalhead roadie.
Dame Darcy and Lisa Suckdog: Because in my head, it's always 1995.
Edlund, a font for Scandanavian scholars: When Þ just won't do.
NY Post cribs Girlhacker?: Journalistic laziness or sheer coincidence? You make the call!
A.Q. Khan and the Bomb: Seymour Hersh's hugely disquieting article on Pakistan, Iran, and nuclear proliferation
"No spaceships, no aliens": Hell, I'd read it. (And wouldn't 'no spaceships, no A-lines' be a wonderful slogan for something? Vogue Mars, maybe.) (via)
Gentium: A universal typeface. (via)
Reading A1: Nicely done, left-leading Times criticism focusing not on nitpicking but on how media narratives are formed.
The Mikhail Bakhtin Manuscript Smoking Page: "Assuming 1,000 double-sided pages of text, that's 500 smokable sheets."
Free books from Baen: Lousy interface and only a few interesting titles in my mind, but it's good to see a whole publishing imprint try raising sales by giving out free samples.
"Today, Patricia Highsmith is hot.": Icy cold, is more like it; Ripley's affectless, merciless desire make 'The Talented Mr. Ripley' and particularly 'Ripley's Game' two of the finest crime novels I've read. (via)
David Sheen's Myberry: David Sheen, like Mark Anderson, is running a filesharing app for his bookshelves. (via) (see also)
Bookninja: Industry gossip, reviews, criticism -- seems like a useful resource for book dorks.
Ray Davis on Bruce Sterling's "Dori Bangs": Christ, can Ray write: "What rock critics have (thanks to Bangs) is the opportunity to speak complexly of simple things.... What we have in 'Dori Bangs' is an attempt to speak simply of something complex."
The best book review ever: Norweigan black metal and the neoconservatives (and funny in its own right) (via)
The Combinatorial Engine: An old hack -- still fun years later!
"McCarthy Witch Hunt": By Kim Newman, author of the similarly fun "Ubermench", about a certain German Superman. (see also)
The Evelyn Waugh diaries: "The young (and some of the old) were amazed to learn that drunkenness and fornication had been practised as far back as the 1920s."
Discovering Dickens: republishing "A Tale of Two Cities" as a free serial (via)