This Christmas instead of gorging on my mothers latest wannabe Georgette Heyers I had a literary nostalgia-fest and read a bunch of 70’s sf books including the Phillip K. Dick novel A Scanner Darkly. Like all of Dick’s work much concerned with identity and reality and which is which. Scanner draws very explicitly on a time in Dick’s life when he’d ( Read more... )

This vid is totally kicking my arse. Right at the last, which happens to be the first and I know exactly what it needs to do and the kind of things it needs to do it but just can't seem to figure out exactly what. Had an inspiration this morning that almost cracked it only to realise that the colour was all wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong. So yay me for ( Read more... )

I read a book.

(  Spoilers for Never Let Me Go (Kazuo Ishiguro) )

Reading around in the wake of the new Harry Potter I came across this excellent essay by minisinoo about style and heart in writing. It was posted with reference to an earlier discussion of JK Rowling’s work possessing the latter quality despite the stylistic deficiencies and made a lot of sense to me. I like the Potter books, they’re fun and they do ( Read more... )

Well that’s probably the least appetising subject heading yet. All it needs is a good dollop of cold semolina and ( Read more... )

Call this a coda or a very late placed intermission for the ‘Ulysses’ melee. I still haven’t finished it due to feeling that the last two chapters should be properly savoured and snatching odd paragraphs by omnibus isn’t the way to do it. But I have found time to revisit a much shorter work that Joyce wrote while finishing ‘A Portrait of the ( Read more... )