Interview: Alex Shakar, Author of Luminarium
Luminarium is a book brimming with ideas...To get Alex talking about it, I tried using an unorthodox interview structure.
David Foster Wallace and the Velveteen Rabbit
Interviewed by Stacey Schmeidel for the Spring 1999 issue of Amherst Magazine, David Foster Wallace said, “The truth is I don’t think I've ever found anything as purely ‘moving’ as the end of The Velveteen Rabbit when I first read it.”
K.M. Soehnlein
"I think what preoccupies me is transition, that zone between one place of relative stasis to another, in particular how we act, or react, when we don't know what will happen next. Or, put another way: during moments when external circumstances throw us into crisis or flux, what do we do?"
Another Perishing Protocol
Blogger turned off support for FTP publishing last night. Another vanishing technology – serve me right for getting nostalgic about mailboxes.
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?”