The past few months I’ve been immersed in the canonical Library America edition of the collected works of Philip K Dick, consecutively reading The Man in the High Castle, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, Ubik, Martian Time-Slip, Dr. Bloodmoney, Now Wait for Last Year, and Flow My Tears, [...]
[Warning: Potential Spoilers Below!] Last year when the reimagined Battlestar Galactica came to an end, there was a wide ranging response mostly peaked by WTFs at the deus ex machinas, Baltar’s referral to God or gods as an explanation of plot events, and, perhaps more agonizing, the impossibility of knowing whether Kara Thrace was really [...]
Short and sinister like one of Edward Gorey’s abecedariums, infamous freethinker and Islamic Scholar Peter Lamborn Wilson presents in Abecedarium a poetic, anarchic, and occult meditation on the original Egyptian-Semitic meanings and magics behind each of the symbols that eventually became the English alphabet. Deeply researched but thankfully void of any academic skulduggery, Wilson’s Abecedarium [...]
I was already familiar with a number of the world’s mythologies before I first read Gaiman’s Sandman comics as a kid, but the thing Gaiman managed to do was make the characters from myth living and real, still active forces at work in our contemporary skeptical world. In American Gods, he takes this to the [...]
Now that the semester’s over and I have more time to read, I’m attempting to keep up on writing reviews of all the interesting fiction that crosses my path. As a writer, I try to focus on issues of technique, influence, and the relation of form to content, that you don’t typically find in the [...]
“Insane people are angels who, unable to bear the realities around them, must somehow take refuge in another world.” – Reinaldo Arenas At the beginning of his autobiography about life under the Cuban dictatorship of Castro, Arenas states that, “if you cannot live the way you want, there is no point in living.” This book [...]
Thursday, January 14, 2010
The Satanic Verses gives an apocryphal retelling of the founding of the Islamic religion, in which the angel Gibreel (who spoke to the prophet) is actually the fever dream of a 21st century Indian movie star, all of which may have been a ploy of the Adversary, who narrates the novel. Told in Rushdie’s oceanic [...]
Post-Gazette review of the Unlimited Story Deck Reviews and articles continue to come in, along with emails from teachers who want to purchase copies once the deck is eventually published! This is a very exciting way to begin the new year, and I hope everyone has as blessed a 2010 as I plan on having.
Thursday, December 24, 2009
Carolyn Kellogg of the Los Angeles Times Book Review, has just posted a positive (and humorous) review of my Unlimited Story Deck! I am deeply flattered, as the cards are still only in a beta version (though available under a Creative Commons license for download) and not yet actually published. Hopefully someone who can resolve [...]
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 [...]
