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, [...]
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 [...]
To Read, Perchance To Dream
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 [...]
Footprints
[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 [...]
Three Ways His Way
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 [...]
Forgetting the Impossible
In his story collection, Cosmicomics, Italo Calvino writes, “When space doesn’t exist having somebody unpleasant…underfoot all the time is the most irritating thing” (43). He writes this in all seriousness, with hardly a wink or a chuckle. Oh, there is a sense of play about it, of course; the whole experiment of Cosmicomics is born [...]
