My latest review at Guys Lit Wire covers some of my favorite comfort reading, Spider Robinson’s series of stories set in Callahan’s Crosstime Saloon. Other comfort reads I rely on? Stephen King’s Danse Macabre, written in such a great conversational style that it’s like taking a road trip with the man and talking horror the [...]
Posts under ‘Culture’
Ol’ Johnny Bulletseed
If, like me, you’re sick of effete liberals emasculating this great nation of ours, may I suggest the Appleseed Project? These patriots have figured out just what it is that made America great and free: Crackpots with rifles. With a simple plan to save America. Now, I don’t know much about Johnny Appleseed, but given [...]
ICFA: The Conference That Was
Oh, yes: last week, we attended the International Conference for the Fantastic in the Arts, and we took some pictures. We went to see Sandra present her paper: “Presenting Papers for Little Fun and Less Profit, Indeed a Loss.” And then, in a frenzy of intellectual exploration, we went to the Lego Store. All my [...]
The Liminal Space Between a Hat and a Wheelbarrow
I spent a little too much of my weekend at an academic conference listening to people talk about how various things dwell in a liminal space between two other things, not quite one or the other, sharing characteristics of both in a place and moment of great magic and ambiguity. It’s a trendy term, handy [...]
They Mostly Come Out for Yard Sales…Mostly
I’ve said this already on Twitter, but it bears repeating: If you believe that we are mere moments from the technological singularity, you need to hold a yard sale to get a better baseline of humanity’s current condition. The people I saw today in my yard, mulling over my furniture with disdain, didn’t seem even [...]
Check Out the Hook While My DJ Steals It
Ah, the stupidities of youth: Helene Hegemann, seventeen years old, has included more than a few errant pages that aren’t quite her own in her latest work, Axolotl Roadkill. “There’s no such thing as originality anyway, just authenticity,” she says, defending her plagiarism as a kind of “mixing,” comparing what she’s done to what DJs [...]