October 29, 2008 – 11:25 am
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, [...]
October 6, 2008 – 02:22 pm
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 [...]
September 29, 2008 – 10:35 am
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 [...]
September 8, 2008 – 10:00 am
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, [...]
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 [...]
April 10, 2008 – 12:33 pm
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 [...]
March 19, 2008 – 11:19 am
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 [...]
March 13, 2008 – 11:57 am
In his novel, The Blue Flowers, Raymond Queneau develops two parallel stories. The first concerns the Duke of Auge, a member of the French aristocracy who possesses an inexplicable talent for immortality (his story begins in 1264 and ends, though not with his death, sometime in the 1960s), while the second focuses on a [...]
February 29, 2008 – 11:52 am
[Editor's Note: In celebration of his blog's 7th birthday, Neil Gaiman convinced his publishers to put one of his books online for free. The idea, I think, is that either people will start reading the book online, and decide they like it enough to buy it; or they'll read the whole thing online, and like [...]
February 6, 2008 – 12:13 pm
Russell Hoban’s novel, Riddley Walker, demonstrates “what happens with peopl on the way down from what they ben” (17). Telling the story of Riddley Walker, a young man caught in the political struggles of his time, the novel takes place on the island of Inland (England) perhaps two thousand years after a nuclear apocalypse has [...]
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