Right: these are about a year old, so they feel fresh again. MGK takes a short, hilarious tour of Asterix & Obelix(2,3,4), Matt Fraction does the same with Doom Patrol (2,3,4). When a creator's (or creative team's) productivity on a single project goes long enough, it's pretty much impossible to not notice their personal idiosyncracies. It's ( Read more... )

Writers! I ask for your aid. I am updating and tweaking my rèsumè, trying to include items that reflect on me as a writer and editor. Unfortunately, things I can take credit for are thin on the ground. Here's one: there was an early-00s poetry collection that I was involved with. The editor proper sent me a selection of poems that I read, ( Read more... )

American Casino is a documentary that lacks focus, but the director's wandering eye helps it portray the huge scope of its subject: the subprime mortgage crisis. Produced by wife-and-husband team Leslie and Andrew Cockburn, the documentary is part of a steady stream of media works produced in the last year that examine the economic crash. It has ( Read more... )

Few biblical names failed to be bestowed on one new England baby or another. Some parents cultivated a spirit of scriptural uniqueness. One unfortunate child was named Mahershalalhasbaz, the longest name in the bible. Another, the son of Bostonian Samuel Pond, was baptized Mene Mene Tekel Upharsin Pond. There is evidence that parents sometimes ( Read more... )

If you dislike Neal Stephenson, Anathem is not going to change your mind. If you don't know Stephenson's work already, your time would be better spent sandwiching Gödel, Escher, Bach between A Canticle For Leibowitz and Contact and reading all that as though it were one book: the page-count is pretty close to Anathem's hefty 900 pages and the ( Read more... )

This is the poem referred to in the previous post: Clive James' "The Book Of My Enemy Has Been Remaindered." Like "We Who Are Your Closest Friends," I love how it makes a potentially destructive habit of mind into something we can laugh at.

Try reading it out loud and feeling the gloating.

The book of my enemy has been remaindered ( Read more... )

Like the Natalie Goldberg post earlier, this is an excerpt from Anne Lamott's Bird By Bird, another writing book in a similar style. Lamott's book is a bit more linear, but only to the extent that there is a coherent structure that rewards you for sitting down and reading it straight through. If you dip in for little sips at a time, like I ( Read more... )

I want to extract one thing from Israel's current round of bombing the fuck out of Gaza and examine it: a prank call. It's a bit bland in terms of content, but in execution, it's absolutely golden ( Read more... )

If you write and talk about it, someone has probably told you to read Natalie Goldberg's Writing Down The Bones. Unlike The Elements of Style and Writer's Market, Goldberg's book is something that's great to keep around even if writing isn't a major part of your life. Like Zen And The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance earlier, the author wrote it ( Read more... )

GLASS: One theme that we keep coming back to on the show is people in extraordinary circumstances. One way that happens is that people leave their ordinary circumstances for one reason or another and have to cope. Another way, though, which is no less interesting, is when people stay the same and "ordinary" shifts out from under them.

musical ( Read more... )