Thursday, January 21, 2010
1. In life never do as others do 2. Seek out the cause of every suspicious “actual fact” 3. “If you go on a spree, go the whole hog, even the postage” (ie go all out) from Beelzebub’s Tales to his Grandson
Wednesday, December 23, 2009
The end of the year is often a time to look back and reflect on where we’ve come from, particularly through the easily-digestible form of the best of list, often reminiscing over music and movies and other popular media. Book reviewer The Millions is currently doing a series called A Year in Reading, in which [...]
Friday, November 20, 2009
I was already a big fan of Kenneth Patchen after reading his terrifyingly beautiful anti-war novel, The Journal of Albion Moonlight, but he really nailed it with his surreal Memoirs of a Shy Pornographer. The loose plot follows the comedic adventures of a shy man who accidentally writes a work of pornography and ends up [...]
Friday, September 18, 2009
“This is the incredible true story of a physicist who believed he could project himself to another solar system and live as a swashbuckling interplanetary adventurer. When he was a teenager and living on a Polynesian island, he had read a series of “strange and adventurous” science fiction / fantasy books by an American writer. [...]
Thursday, September 17, 2009
“Imagination is the new canary in the cultural coal mine; imagination death precedes loss of the soul.” -from an interview with Antero Alli
Monday, September 14, 2009
For my class on Narrative and Technology I was asked to create what’s called a literacy narrative, the story of my development as as “content producer/consumer” (to use the parlance of the age, focusing also on how our experiences with media have helped us develop standards of quality. The results were interesting and integrating, somewhat [...]
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Also tagged anarchy, dreams, ergodic, literature, love, magic, memory, myth, personal narrative, pittsburgh, Proust, punk, school, techniques
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I’ve been following the work of my good friend, the CMU graduate and Chilean visionary artist Alberto Almarza, for many years now. This weekend I had the opportunity to attend the first Pittsburgh Visionary Arts Festival, which Alberto organized and showed his work at, including his series of small intricate image boxes. It seems that [...]
“A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook [...]
This is also exciting: Made it into an incredible animated feature by Satoshi Kon in 2006 that I longed to read the original of, Paprika, the surrealist dream/detective novel By Yasutaka Tsutsui, is finally being released in English translation! “The setting is Tokyo’s Institute for Psychiatric Research. Major breakthroughs are taking place, using new machines [...]
Eduardo Galeano’s The Book of Embraces reads like a collection of politically charged fairy tales. He does this by drawing on the form, style, and tone of Aesop’s Fables (which was essentially the first collection of short short prose fiction) and inserting in moments of magic or myth at pivotal moments in his short narratives, [...]
