Blogger turned off support for FTP publishing last night. Another vanishing technology – serve me right for getting nostalgic about mailboxes.
Everything Unfinished
The Magic Darkness of the Mailbox
Paul Auster’s The Locked Room brilliantly evokes a writer’s relationship with his mailbox.
Susan Palwick’s The Necessary Beggar
The Necessary Beggar makes it clear what Palwick thinks a Christian attitude to homelessness, healthcare, and immigration would be.
Haruki Murakami’s A Wild Sheep Chase
The novel is filled with such analysis-defying brilliances. “In the aquarium of my memory, it is always late autumn.” What’s not to like?
Melancholy Inscription Anecdotes
Anything to do with Disch gets me down nowadays.
Understatement and Overstatement
To Californians, England is a culture of understatement. To the English, California is a culture of overstatement. But from a more global perspective, both cultures are rather on the understated side of things.
Dehaene and Proto-Letters
In Reading in the Brain, Stanislas Dehaene asks “What does a macaque do with the brain areas that we now devote to reading?”
J.M. Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello
It’s exhilarating to find a novel in which such incommensurate world-views as Afrocentrism, veganism, and Catholicism are debated intelligently.
The Everetts and the Pirahã
I just read Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes, a book by Daniel L. Everett about his time with the Pirahã (pronounced pee-da-HAN) tribe in the Brazilian Amazon.
InsideStorytime BREAKDOWN
Events, tax day humor, and more.
Vonnegut and the Y-Axis
I guess happy endings aren’t an organic feature of the stories ordinary people are driven to tell, but rather a constraint imposed on us by capitalist realism or socialist realism as the case may be?
Series One of Skins
There are TV shows that, if you just watch whatever episode happens to be on the air right now, might strike you as kind of gratuitous — but if you watch the episodes in sequence and in the right spirit, turn out to have literary depth.
Eisoptrophobia
‘Who’s that?’ she thought, gazing in the mirror at the feverish, scarred face with the strangely glittering eyes looking out at her.
Norman F. Dixon’s On the Psychology of Military Incompetence
On the Psychology of Military Incompetence is one of my favorite non-fiction books.
