So, yeah. Among the books I have on my pile to review is the strangest thing I've ever read - and I speak as a fan of manga, and someone who's read Beautiful Losers, Nightwood, and parts of Finnegan's Wake.

I'm talking about The Malleus Mallificarum, of course - the greatest witch-hunter's manual of the Middle Ages.

( Maybe again the Burning Times? Plus, there's no good answer to the question, 'What does a witch do with stolen body parts?' )

So I just read American Gods, being the last geek in the world not to have read it ( Read more... )

So I just finished Reinventing the Sacred by Stuart Kauffman. Kauffman is a biochemist and biophysicist at the University of Calgary with a master's in philosophy from Oxford -- impressive credentials for the author of this book, which argues for the non-deterministic complexity and creativity in nature as an alternative both to deterministic/ ( Read more... )

I haven't been online much. I've mostly been working on writing -- with two edited copies back from editors. I've also been working on financial stuff, putting in extra hours at work, and what little time I've had to myself has been mostly playing Okami and reading Stuart Kauffman's book, Reinventing the SacredKauffman's been on radio shows ( Read more... )

I tried writing a long entry about an epiphany I've had around the concepts of morality and moral relativism -- how being exposed constantly to moral relativism during grad school made me realize that there is such a thing as good and evil after all, even if Western Civilization has gotten morality completely wrong for the past 2000 years ( Read more... )

You know, Irving Layton was an egomaniacal misogynist who slept around on his wife, couldn't decide if he was the übermensch or the messiah, was a prophet of Nietzschean cynicism, and spent his life resenting Canadians partly because we were the only people who read him, and he wanted to be noticed in some bigger country he thought mattered ( Read more... )