- Proverbs for Paranoids, 3: If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about answers.—Gravity’s Rainbow
‘Is it about a bicycle?’ he asked.—The Third Policeman
Tag Archives: literature
Georgious
Not many notes have been emanating from the basement recently. A lot has been happening upstairs, but the excitement generated there is unlikely to be of particular interest to you. And of course something big is afoot in the world outside, yet whenever I’m on the verge of writing about an especially funny or shocking [...]
Relaxing
The lefty blogs have gone so batscheiss crazy over the fact that Clinton is still in the race, it’s impossible to read them. So, for some weeks now, I haven’t. It’s very pleasant.
I finally got around to reading a novel a friend gave me a while back, Beyond Sleep, by the Dutch writer Willem Frederik [...]
Shanty
Fifteen men on a dead man’s chest,
Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum …
I always imagined fifteen guys stomping up and down on some poor guy’s chest. Maybe I’m the only one—I never really checked with anyone else. Well, today I came across this translation at a Russian blog: пятнадцать человек на сундук мертвеца, which back-translates [...]
Plagiarism
The recent news coverage of Barack Obama’s supposed “plagiarism” stirred up once again the confused pot of ideas I have or seem to have about originality and the overselling of same in the form of “intellectual property rights.”
Due to the unprecedented way my cortical convolutions took shape in the latter stages of my embryonic life, [...]
Terser
Okay, I’ve got a thing about verbal economy, but maybe this is too damn parsimonious.
A while back the online magazine Smith presented a six-word “story” by Ernest Hemingway:
For Sale: baby shoes, never worn.
A remarkably concise tale indeed—pathos concretized pithily. Smith invited its readers to go mano-a-mano with Papa, and six-word memoirs from its readers came [...]
Etude
I stumbled across a review of a book called Novels in Three Lines by Félix Fénéon, and given how I admire concision (or say I do, at any rate), I just had to take a look. The title in French, Nouvelles en trois lignes, is actually a pun: nouvelles can be taken as either “novellas” [...]
Intruder
And now—you be the photo editor (click to enlarge):
Yes, it’s pathetic. I take pictures of a dandelion instead of commenting on Virginia Tech, Alberto Gonzales, or Iraq. So it goes. Adios, KV.
Hello, babies. Welcome to Earth. It’s hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It’s round and wet and crowded. At [...]
Resolution
On December 31, I thought about resolving to be even lazier in 2007 than I was in 2006, but I never got around to it.
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Goldengrove
Gore Vidal was on Tavis Smiley the other night. He was as sharp and funny as always, especially on matters political and historical. True to his stage in life, though, a good chunk of the conversation danced with the notion—no, not the notion, the fact—of mortality. At one point Vidal quoted the last two lines [...]
Twofer