A Good Smucking Book
A brief review of Stephen King’s novel, Lisey’s Story.
No Genius Here
In which I review Harold Bloom’s book, “Genius.”
Good Reads Review: Gravity’s Rainbow
My Rating: 1 of 5 stars
Okay, I’ve tried reading this book a couple of times now. This last time I got to about page 250 before I decided it just wasn’t doing it for me.
I know this is supposed to be one of the best books of the 20th century and all, but I just [...]
On Free Will
Rachel Pollack’s Unquenchable Fire imagines an America where the mystics have taken control of society by converting the secularists and technocrats to the fact that there is magic and power beyond their wildest imaginations. While the daily actions of individuals within the mystical society remain much the same as they are today (go to work, [...]
Dreams Made Real
{or} The Tragedy of the Atlantic Ocean
Allusions to the Garden of Eden are rampant in Part One of Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, but they are sparse in Part Two. In this annotation, I will try to understand why, and what the difference may mean.
The first allusion occurs on the very first page of the novel proper, in the introductory section of Part [...]
The other other thing
I want to write an annotation that argues with Annie Dillard’s theodicy, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. I want to argue with it because I think it says, with Leibniz, that despite the presence of evil, “this universe must be indeed better than every other possible universe” (Leibniz, 377), and that argument was parodied to [...]
Four pounds away from being stunningly gorgeous
From Samuel R. Delaney’s Dhalgren:
My life here more and more resembles a book whose opening chapters, whose title even, suggest mysteries to be resolved only at closing. But as one reads along, one becomes more and more suspicious that the author has lost the thread of his argument, that the questions will never be resolved, [...]
Flitting from Book to Book
You may have noticed from the sidebar that I’m “now reading” four different books:
Lolita, by Vladimir Nabokov;
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, by Annie Dillard;
Dhlagren, by Samuel R. Delaney;
and the His Dark Materials trilogy, by Phillip Pullman
Now, you may have said to yourself, “Hey Kyle, four books at one time? What the eff?”
First, let me say that [...]
A Little Sincerity Is A Dangerous Thing
Near the end of Bill McKibben’s Wandering Home: A Long Walk Across America’s Most Hopeful Landscape: Vermont’s Champlain Valley and New York’s Adirondacks, the author comes across “a truly giant white pine” (119) from which hangs this hand-lettered sign:
On this site in year 1845 this pine tree, a sapling of twelve years, was transplanted by [...]
What Does An Epsilon See?
In his novel, Brave New World, Aldous Huxley writes, “The hands of all the four thousand electric clocks in all the Bloomsbury Centre’s four thousand rooms marked twenty-seven minutes past two” (Huxley, 146). I want to know the story of the man or woman whose job it was to synchronize those four thousand clocks. In [...]
