I had a grand plan to read three of the books I got for Christmas before the 31st, so that I could add them to this disgracefully small list. But I have a much better understanding of my limits, these days, so I admit that it won’t happen. With no further ado, then:
Dead to Me Anton Strout Is it just me, or is there serious sexual tension between Simon and Connor? Ever since the scene early on when an antiques hawker takes them for a couple and Connor plays along, I could feel the undercurrents. Even while Simon is developing his heterosexual relationship with Jane, whenever he’s thinking about Jane, Connor isn’t far behind in his thoughts. Then there’s this symbolic moment at the end, where Simon’s ribs are so injured that he can’t walk, and needs help: "I can help you get through the theater at the very least."Though Jane still […]
Currently reading David Farrell Krell’s Archeticture: Ecstasies of Space, Time and the Human Body for academic reasons. This guy rolls in his language, revels in it, and it’s intensely enjoyable to read. He’s acutely aware of the rhythms and structures of his metaphors, to the point of self-satirization: "Professional philosophy is worse: utterly enamored of its own technical wizardry in argumentation, it runs its epistemological vacuum cleaner roughshod over everyone else’s language, scoring points each time an opponent’s ideas can be proven to be either false or trivial." (14) "We do not know if we are merely teasing ourselves with […]
Deception PointDan Brown One of the biggest problems I had with Da Vinci Code was the recurring tactic of withholding information from the readers, giving us vague, dire pronouncements instead of letting us judge the facts for ourselves. This amateurism is still in evidence in Deception Point; the second sentence of the book reads: "Geologist Charles Brophy had endured the savage splendor of this terrain for years, and yet nothing could prepare him for a fate as barbarous and unnatural as the one about to befall him." There’s nothing really barbarous about being shoved to your death out of a […]
Interesting fact of the day, which you might know but I did not: Okay or O.K., according to the Online Etymology Dictionary, dates from 1839, "only survivor of a slang fad in Boston and New York c.1838-9 for abbreviations of common phrases with deliberate, jocular misspellings (cf. K.G. for ‘no go,’ as if spelled ‘know go’); in this case, ‘oll korrect.’" It’s too bad I’m not a student of linguistics, because I can see a thesis right here on the evolution of this kind of slangy misspelling, from O.K. up through lolcats and lolspeak. I’ve been diverging from my review-only […]
And, almost back-to-back, my story "Seeing Stars" is up in Crossed Genres 23: Dreams and Nightmares. "Seeing Stars" is the story of an modern-day oracle with brain damage who’s driven to help a fellow patient, a human siren. This one’s a lot gentler than most of my stories, and I’m happy that the editors at Crossed Genres loved it enough to take it. I’ve heard good things about their operating process, and my experience has lived up to the reports–they use a standard contract, they get back to you with edits in a prompt fashion, and they reliably deliver the final […]