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 [...]
January 31, 2008 – 08:00 am
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 [...]
October 25, 2007 – 11:33 am
Cormac McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic novel, The Road, is not a subtle book. The author’s vision is clear and his themes move slowly and obviously across the page like his two major characters walking the eponymous road. The characters are an unnamed man and his son, “the boy.” The world they inhabit has been destroyed by some [...]
October 22, 2007 – 12:27 pm
“Sing, Heavenly Muse,” (1.6) Milton begs, “I…invoke thy aid to my adventurous song” (1.12-13). Does the Muse answer? From Milton’s output—twelve books of verse, one book per apostle, one per tribe of Israel—one may believe so, but where in all of Paradise Lost does the Muse answer the poet’s call?
Perhaps in the line break [...]
October 2, 2007 – 12:01 am
gestalt |gə sh tält; -ˑ sh tôlt| : A physical, biological, psychological, or symbolic configuration or pattern of elements so unified as a whole that its properties cannot be derived from a simple summation of its parts.
Theodore Sturgeon’s novel, More Than Human, tracks the formation of “a gestalt life-form” (105), a “new kind of human [...]
September 11, 2007 – 12:16 pm
A man sits down to begin writing a book in which the main character is God. This man is not one of those people who wants to write a book and then does not, nor is he one of those people who writes a book and then sticks it in a drawer, and nor is [...]
Now Hearing