Here's an entry from The Biographical Dictionary of Film in which David Thomson rehearses some of the concerns about "movie" addressed in the new book:Fortuitously - but purely accidentally - timed for the tenacious Madonna's return to visibility with an alleged return-to-form album.But what if the form being returned to is of no concern or interest to you? Or even actively repulsive, as with Thomson? I can't say I have never liked a Madonna record. The early club tracks, when she was almost a…
Thanks to Charlie Horse 47 and Killdumpster for their sponsorship of this post, via the magic of Patreon. ***Image by Tumisufrom PixabayA famous advertising campaign once claimed that it's good to talk.And that may be true.But what's even better is typing.Why, there are days when I can barely even stop typing.I'm like a literal typing machine.But what should I type?And, for that matter, what should any of us type?That's what we're about to find out because, bang on cue, it's the awe-inspiring…
A few weeks ago when I was browsing JetPens, my attention was captured by the Daigo Tea & Diary Time diaries ($11.50-12.50). These looked like the perfect little books in which to record a few simple thoughts of the day. Since I’ve written many times about how I struggle with daily journaling, I wondered if this might be the key! I ordered three versions: a Morning Diary, an Evening Diary and a Weekend Diary. I chose to test out the Weekend version for myself. All the books are A6 size which…
I want to be really clear about something because the internet has trained all of us to flinch: the catalog entries for The Cryptid Cataloger are free. Actually free. Not “free trial,” not “free if you give me your email and your firstborn.” Free. Every other Tuesday a new creature gets the full field-guide treatment, and a new one is live as of this morning. Click it, read it, learn something deeply useless and wonderful, close the tab, go about your day a little more haunted than you were.…
I don’t know about you, but I read more novels during the summer than any other time of year. I probably can fit in a few more novels before the school year begins. What have you read lately that you like? As for me, two recent fiction reads stand out as being of particular interest to philosophers: The Last Samurai by Helen DeWitt. I finally got around to reading this book, which was published in 2000. No, it’s not about samurais. Rather, it’s the story of an extremely bright young boy living…
I don’t know what it’s saying, but this tableau speaks to me.
The long-awaited day has come! The audio edition of The Besotted Baron is now available from Apple Books, Spotify, and Audible. This title has also been distributed to library channels, so you should be able to find it through Libby and Hoopla. In honor the audio release, I’ve put the ebook on $.99 discount in the web store for the rest of the month. Enjoy! And the other long-awaited day has also come! I finally gathered up the pre-ordering links for Lord Julian’s next adventure, A Gentleman of…
There are several absent fathers in this novel, with Mac’s death looming largest of all. In what ways does the absence of good dads affect Moon, Stevie, Adam, and their relationships to each other? Conversely, the mothers they’re all left with aren’t very nurturing and make extremely disappointing decisions. Then again, mothers are often put on a pedestal, even though they make mistakes and have their own trauma they’re dealing with. I was particularly impressed by the exacting way Choi…
Congrats to Manu Moreale on 150 interviews completed for his wonderful People and Blogs series. I was honored to be one of those 150.
Watching a 2005 series, like Friday Night Lights, means you encounter shaky camera aesthetic, grainy film quality, characters using blocky mobile phones, long unheard of music, and more. It’s true that these things date it. But it’s also true that there is heart which remains timeless, with characters, however flawed they may be, who you can root for. I value shows like this – more so than “trending” shows like House of Dragons.
I’m blaming the heat, but I have lost all motivation for writing. I’ve mentioned in the past that I’m writing a novel, and I’m at the stage of saying the rough draft is complete. So what I need to do know is read through a chapter, make some notes, and then rewrite. I’ve been at this stage for a few weeks now. It’s probably notable that I’m taking more time to craft my longer posts here, and have even toyed with writing a memoir (part companion to the novel, part procrastination). So I’m…
A random jaunt to derelict early-mid-2010s blogospheres landed me on a discourse about shoujo manga's cluttered appearance, where the blogger hurled profanities at the works he claimed to hate before confessing that he did like some shoujo manga because these didn't look like other shoujo manga. A couple paragraphs of self-hatred because he just couldn't stop reading a title he said was trash in all aspects. Below it, his readers piled onto the bashings and accused him of treachery when he…
This week’s prompt from Top Ten Tuesday is about books that live in your head rent-free, and I think there aren’t going to be many surprises here from me — many of my favourites are well-known! Let’s see. The Goblin Emperor, by Katherine Addison. I’ve reread this book several times and will no doubt reread it many times more: I love it a lot, and there’s so much around the edges of it that the story doesn’t cover. Some of that is covered in the Thara Celehar books, but even then, there’s so…
Translated by Brian Nelson This is the second book in Émile Zola’s Les Rougon-Macquart cycle, if reading in order of publication. A few years ago I read the first book, The Fortune of the Rougons, which lays the foundations for the rest of the series, but each novel is also designed to stand alone. The connection between them is that each book features characters who belong to rival branches of the same family, the Rougons and the Macquarts, all descended from Adelaïde Fouque, whom we met in…
I’ve been neglecting one of my favourite hobbyhorses lately. That’s right: it’s been nearly six months since I’ve bothered you about a really wonderful Latin name. That ends today, because I’ve recently managed to acquire the new, and utterly gorgeous, 3-volume Princeton Encyclopedia of Dinosaurs. (The three volumes are for therapods, for sauropods, and for […]
Let’s get to the point. These are the reasons why I was irritated by Chris Nolan’s Odyssey: It’s a cheap attempt at diversity. Hollywood has been giving me the impression that it’s not confident stories from other cultures would be “safe” (i.e., sell). So they decided to adapt a well-known, popular IP and throw in a diverse cast so they can tick off the diversity box. It’s cynical marketing. I’m 100% sure Nolan and the marketers know that by throwing Odyssey into the US culture wars, it would…
A favorite short story Three Hermits by Tolstoy
it’s writing the weather. Sentences, little vials of style and language, are here to hold a record of the internet’s contact with our body, our attention—its energy, pitch, vibe, vocabulary, tone, and how these qualities inform our own energies, pitches, vibes, vocabularies, tones. (Sentences are an old technology; before the internet, they contained the weather of phone lines, the weather of trains.) Because it’s never just the internet but the internet + us; the demand, here, is to…
requested a referral toan orthopedic specialist,left knee reigns with pain, ruler of my everyday routine…I am changing, and it hurts.
Because generative AI is in everything now, a shockingly high number of other blogs have adopted it, and, on Reddit, other people have occasionally accused my comments on that platform of being AI-generated, I’ve decided to make this short post clarifying my own position regarding its use. I began writing this blog in November 2016, long before the emergence of generative AI. I write every post I make on this blog entirely myself, and it takes me many hours to research, write, and edit each…
This year's word of the year seems likely to be 'hydrate'....
“Math” is not what it used to be anymore I feel AI is breaking our usual, shared understandings of what words mean. For the first time ever, we have a new kind of cognitive labor that isn’t humans, and that’s breaking norms for what we’ve forever implicitly assumed to be universally true. All our assumptions about how a domain comprising mainly of human activity is due for sudden shattering. e.g. With Jacob’s conjecture shown to be false using an AI, my twitter timeline is full of both…
2023 mystery, fourth in its series. Pentecost and Parker are engaged to look into the disappearance of an elderly woman with a photographic memory.
Another fantastic comedy, with an amazing opening title sequence and song as a bonus. The characters, the story, the gags… Perfection! Rating: 🚀Hey, thanks for reading my blog via the RSS feed! Feel welcome to get in touch!
Listening to the audiobook, my third book by Lem. Interesting indeed! *Still in progress* 🏃Hey, thanks for reading my blog via the RSS feed! Feel welcome to get in touch!
The root (or perhaps better to say roots) ענה anah is generally said to have four meanings in Hebrew. Klein identifies them as follows:: answersing afflictoccupy Let’s look at each of them and the words deriving from them.AnswerThis includes the senses of “answer, reply, respond”. It’s the most popular use of the verb in Hebrew today. A particular type of response is responding as a witness, i.e., to testify. This is the sense found in the ninth commandment:לֹא־תַעֲנֶה בְרֵעֲךָ עֵד שָׁקֶר“You…
When we tried to get an intuition for the differences in distribution functions, we learned that children subjected to a treatment had greater variation in their score than the reference group. (Continue reading the full article on the web.)
Only one more single-vote receiver to go after today’s installment of the Final ’90s Countdown! And like I always say, getting only one vote isn’t a thing of shame, but rather a testament to all the beloved books that came out during this usually maligned decade! That said, here we go with Supreme (Image Comics/Maximum/Awesome, 1992 – 2000) So, where to start with this comic? It’s got bit of a convoluted history but we’ll get through it! It all kicks off in Youngblood #3 (August 1992), where…
Dr. Johnson famously contributed several couplets to Oliver Goldsmith’s “The Traveller; or, a Prospect of Society” (1764), including: “How small of all that human hearts endure That part which laws or kings can cause or cure! Still to ourselves in every place consign’d, Our own felicity we make or find.” Five years later Johnson told Boswell in conversation: “Why, Sir, most schemes of political improvement are very laughable things.” We can safely nod our heads in agreement. In the eighteenth…
John Wyver writes: To the ICA on Saturday last for another fascinating programme in Michael Witt’s Jean-Luc Godard: Unmade and Abandoned series. This has been a revelatory season, shown more or less monthly, of films by Godard and others that, as Witt claims, ‘sheds light on the huge and varied phantom body of unmade and abandoned ventures that lies behind or in the intervals in his completed oeuvre.’ The screenings have been spun off from Michael Witt’s essential book Jean-Luc Godard’s Unmade…
