The only downside of TiVo is that when a commercial is genuinely interesting, you still miss it. It was at gnosticpi and bigstokes80's that I finally saw the Levi's commercial featuring Will ("Grampa Walton") Geer's voiceover reading of "Pioneers! O Pioneers!" by Walt Whitman. And apparently, there's another one featuring a wax cylinder recording of Walt Whitman his ( Read more... )

Now this is an interesting piece of horror criticism: Nicholas Seeley's "The Dragon in the Time Machine: A Gross Anatomy of Horror."

Riffing off Stephen King's Danse Macabre, with its "Tarot hand" of Vampire, Werewolf, Thing With No Name, and Ghost, Nicholas Seeley seems to be trying to do for horror what Northrop Frye was doing for Story, or ( Read more... )

Happy 200th birthday to Edgar Allan Poe, the greatest genius the horror genre has ever produced ( Read more... )

So to celebrate my birthday yesterday, I went up to the North Side and ate pho and saw Takashi Miike's Sukiyaki Western Django, a hugely enjoyable mashup of chambara and spaghetti-Western films into an explosion of weird, postmodern spectacle that at times looks more like Baz Luhrman than Takashi Miike, with costumes blending designer post- ( Read more... )

I recently (two months ago, which is how far behind I am in usefully posting here) finished reading every work of science fiction by H. Beam Piper, with two relatively marginal exceptions (Crisis in 2140 and Fuzzies And Other People). This was as close as I can get to a sheer cultural lark these days -- nobody is breathing down my neck for an H. ( Read more... )

That subject line sounds like a particularly inbred law firm, doesn't it? Or maybe exporters of the Odd and Intricate to a Discerning Clientele.

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I'm writing the third of my "Tour de Lovecraft: The Settings" pieces for Weird Tales magazine, this one on Arkham, and it got me wondering if the "fictional city in the real world" trope is really ( Read more... )

I really wish I could remember where I read the following immensely insightful piece of criticism ( Read more... )

I realize that to some people, this is going to sound like a post beginning "there's this great album I just heard, Frank Sinatra's Songs For Swingin' Lovers". I realize that I certainly should have known all this long ago, and most certainly once I started dipping a semi-regular toe into the foaming waters of literary criticism. I understand and ( Read more... )

Neil Gaiman, writer of unquestionably the finest fantasy comic book in the last twenty years, calls Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke "unquestionably the finest English novel of the fantastic written in the last seventy years." One hesitates to tangle with the Dream King, but he's wrong-wrong-wrong ( Read more... )

Here's a thought. People who write Lovecraft and Doyle pastiches (two of my staple "crappy but beloved" collections) are actually Cargo cultists ( Read more... )