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?
Everything Unfinished
Everything Unfinished is a literary blog out of San Francisco, by James Warner.
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.
Great Story: “The Country of the Blind” by H.G. Wells
There's always terror at the edge of Wells's vision, linked to his awareness of how much humanity has to lose.
Norman F. Dixon’s On the Psychology of Military Incompetence
On the Psychology of Military Incompetence is one of my favorite non-fiction books.
Jo Walton’s Farthing
Farthing is a country house murder mystery, set in an alternate time-line where Britain and Nazi Germany have made peace some time after the fall of Dunkirk.
Asserting Our Lack of Connection
"In the act of trying to save the old from destruction, we are asserting our lack of connection to that world."
Gift or Trade?
"It is the exception, not the rule, to be paid for writing of literary merit, and the fees are rarely in accord with the amount of labor."
Suicide and Self-Obsession
I suspect self-obsession is a side-effect of depression rather than a cause of depression?
A Zing, Even
This line became even more depressing to read after Disch himself joined the ranks of poet-suicides in 2008 -- the more so since I never detected any threat of such a thing in anything Disch himself wrote anything.