Inherent Vice on film
I was gratified that PT Anderson decided to include the “dark crews” passage in the film version of Inherent Vice. However, I did regret the exclusion of the “1 percenter…
Tag: books
Actually we DIDN’T Pay for this…
You can get “Stories from Austin: A Collection of Short Stories from the Austin Creative Fiction Writers Group” for free, a limited-time offer that expires on Monday. Click Away!
Eye Pouches
Graham Greene buried this great description in the middle of a paragraph in A Burnt-Out Case: “The pouches under his eyes were like purses that contained the smuggled memories of…
And We Paid For This?!?
And We Paid For This?!? is not, despite your deepest hopes, the name of a new self-deprecating alt band, with a pithy throwaway name that you grumble on your way…
Co-opting the Alternative
Pynchon may be documenting the end of a specific era in American life in Inherent Vice, but there is a universal resonance in his description in which the mainstream co-opts…
Turn the Survey Inward
Philip K. Dick’s story “Survey Team” was so prescient for its time that it has completed the cycle and now seems passé. He sees a future where we are stuck…
Thoughts like Fish
Many awesome passages percolate up from the thick tome that is Roberto Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives (Picador Edition). “…[S]trange ideas would come to my head. Ideas that were like dead…
A War on “Casual Violence”
Let be known on this date, and for ten years hereafter, the phrase “casual violence” is heretofore stricken from usage in the English-speaking world. No longer will embryonic Nabokovs carry…
Inundated with Similes
Karen Russell makes excessive use of similes throughout her book Swamplandia!, at least in the first half. Some are clever or insightful, such as “We were watching the small TV…
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…