Originally published at The Mossy Skull. Please leave any comments there.

Of course it isn’t. It lives on in television infomercial hosts, wrestling announcers and multi-level marketing gurus. But I’m talking about the real thing-the carnival barker, the frontier snake oil salesman, the witch hunter. I didn’t think that was something you could see ( Read more... )

Originally published at The Mossy Skull. Please leave any comments there.


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Originally published at The Mossy Skull. Please leave any comments there.

I’ve been meaning to read Little, Big for a very long time. The only reason I hadn’t gotten around to it sooner was a misguided foreboding of immense depth and complexity that made me feel like I needed to be prepared for a challenge of such magnitude or I’d run out of steam ( Read more... )

Originally published at The Mossy Skull. Please leave any comments there.

This is going to be one of those long, rambly posts that touches everything. So you might as well go get a cup of tea. And maybe not come back. I leave that to you.

My first encounter with the myth of Johnny Appleseed was a big white hardcover picturebook which I swear was ( Read more... )

Originally published at The Mossy Skull. Please leave any comments there.

I couldn’t resist sharing a little bit more of Miguel Ángel Asturias’ The President, which, yes, I am still reading after all this time, partly because of all the TNEO crits piling up on the floor around my desk, but mostly because of the astonishing, cerebellum-like ( Read more... )

Originally published at The Mossy Skull. Please leave any comments there.

I think I may have finally burned out on the writing of Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

I know, crazy, isn’t it? That I, of all people, the nerd of the surreal, could possibly have read too much of him who is the Bob Dylan of magic realists, the eternal classic, the tentpole of his ( Read more... )

Originally published at The Mossy Skull. Please leave any comments there.

Judging by the time I’ve had trying to find translated copies of his work, Miguel Angel Asturias seems to be a writer who has fallen from the public eye, at least in the English-speaking world. I can’t quite figure out why. Born in Guatemala in 1899, he began his career as a ( Read more... )

Originally published at The Mossy Skull. Please leave any comments there.

Reading the non-fictions of Jorge Luis Borges is eerily like reading a blog, despite the fact that the one I’m in the middle of was written in 1932. Like most of his writing, none of these articles get much longer than one or two thousand words. His virtuosity is apparent as ( Read more... )

Originally published at The Mossy Skull. Please leave any comments there.

“You must realize,” [don Juan Matus] said, “that it is our cognition, which is in essence an interpretation system, that curtails our resources. Our interpretation system is what tells us what the parameters of our possibilities are, and since we have been using that system of ( Read more... )

Originally published at The Mossy Skull. Please leave any comments there.

“And listening to Tuahir’s dreams, with the noises of war in the background, he begins to think: they should invent a gentle, more affable gunpowder, capable of exploding men without killing them. An inverse powder, which would generate more life. And out of one exploded man, ( Read more... )