Reading “Cholera”
Gabriel García Márquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera, like Midnight’s Children, was a long, hard slog, especially for one with a glacial reading pace. The text lives in thick…
Changing Places
E-books, tablets, iPads, they are flipping the concept of an ending. With DVDs and Blu-rays and VOD, all movies now have trackers, slide bars, countdowns, to tell you when the…
More Borges
A few lines from Borges’ “The Shape of the Sword,” with eerily similar qualities to a recently cited line from Midnight’s Children: “Whatsoever one man does, it is as though…
Me Read Slow…
Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children is one of those books that sits unread on bookshelves. Even that first page, with his predilection for long, unbroken paragraphs, discourages a quick dip into…
The Wisdom of Tobolowsky
Stephen Tobolowsky, in his new book The Dangerous Animals Club, has a great comment on drug use that really deconstructs our fascination with the practice – “[D]rugs create [an] ……
Pull a Pappy
“People like that RE-form. Maybe we should get us some.” Truer words have never been spoken in a campaign. In this case, Governor Pappy O’Daniel is trailing challenger Homer Stokes…
Meta-ambivalence
Creating a sense of ambivalence within a show is generally a quality of a good show, with good writing, good acting, etc. But what about meta-ambivalence? In “The Walking Dead,”…
Zombie Supreme Court
Over the years, we as a culture have expounded much on the impending Zombie Apocalypse. But one consequence I fear we have not fully appreciated is the effect on the…
If you had a President Romney…
A spokesperson for the Romney campaign recently said, regarding the protests and violence in the Middle East, “…if you had a President Romney, you’d be in a different situation…” Romney…
Has Brad Bird read Superfolks?
Most likely, since The Incredibles shares much thematically with this 1977 novel by Robert Mayer. Many of the concepts with Superfolks are familiar, but only because we have been immersed…