i've just finished reading (literally put down the book, opened the laptop) the word exchange by alena graedon. yes, good, excellent, very. although i found that there is something indefinably lacking in the narrative-not the story itself, but the way in which it is told?-still i gulped it over two days. it's the first book in a long time that i ( Read more... )

i can never do those year in review questionnaires because i can't ever remember any of the answers. or, rather, my answers usually amount to "i don't know". but books i can do, not because i remember them any better than anything else, but because i have a goodreads account. nabbed from
( Read more... )

1. fixing firefox so that it handles redirecting URLs again. i don't know how or why it stopped doing so, but it wasn't fun.

2. anne carson: In her day job, Carson, who is 62, is a professor of erratic subjects (ancient Greek, attention, artistic collaboration) at various universities around North America, where she appears for a semester at a ( Read more... )

all my stories now begin, "i used to know..." or "i had a friend who...". there are no new stories ( Read more... )

there are times when something will open a door within you. we explain this by saying it happened at "the right time", as though if it had happened at any other time that door would not have opened.

this is probably true.

but what if the something created the door in the first place? what if instead of being a catalyst, it is the fact itself? and ( Read more... )

By Nick Flynn

December 19th, 2012
Originally a commencement speech given at Bennington College in 2010.

( just for me to keep )

i'm currently reading margaret atwood's in other worlds: sf and the human imagination. if you're interested in the development and antecedents of what we think of as science fiction, i definitely recommend it. it reads almost conversationally, or as a series of casual lectures. atwood has the slightly offhand style of someone who's extremely ( Read more... )

1. i saw beasts of the southern wild at the sydney film festival and it left me with an odd feeling. it was sort of an, 'eh', combined with a kind of lowered mood. like i'd seen something that had upset me, but i couldn't identify why. then i read this review by bell hooks and i suddenly understood exactly why i didn't like film. It is a major ( Read more... )

finally, after three weeks, i've finished reading the tome that is stella miles franklin, a biography by jill roe. it's a great brick of a book and i'm not sure i could've made it all the way through if i hadn't already had such a consuming interest in miles franklin. there's an enormous amount of information and roe's style is very dry, except in ( Read more... )

happy 133rd birthday, miles franklin!

i can't find my copy of my brilliant career, so this quote from her biography will have to do. I am tired of this symbol business and want now to assert myself as a natural fact.
--miles franklin, 1932

--

This entry was originally posted at Dreamwidth. If you feel inclined, comment there.