MORE ON THE EFFABLE FRAMING of ineffability: Back in November, I wrote a flashfictional fable (or, if you will, a flashfable [term (c) 2010 Neal Ross Attinson]) “Awe and Inquiry”. I called it that because it seemed an apt metaphor…
Category: Crit
Examination, analysis, appreciation.
ORL Interview: Robert Anton Wilson
(AS A FOLO TO THE previous post, and at the urging of sinister forces who would prefer I remain nameless, I now present a reprint from the bygone Bulletin of Obscure Research, Far Corner (v1n5, c. 1991): an interview with…
ORL History, or Where’s Mine?
LONGTIME READERS WILL PRICK THEIR pointed ears at the mention of “Obscure Research Labs.” If you’re not one of them, but especially if you are, please read on: Back around 1989 or so, I became involved with a group billing…
See, This Is Why I Love Jack Vance
IT’S NOT THAT HE RENDERS whole worlds so vividly and so succinctly, peopling vast and history-thick galaxies with one or two spare sentences. It’s not the cinematic sweep of his prose, which respects his readers’ visual imagination by meeting it…
R. Crumb, Darshan
MOST REVIEWS OF R. CRUMB’S “The Book of Genesis Illustrated” seem astonished that the man who kept us truckin’ through the ’60s could possibly give the Goode Booke such a serious rendering. But what astonishes me is that Crumb has…
How To Write
SUCCINCTLY.
Journalism As Art Imitating Life
CAN WRITERS REPORT? THAT QUESTION nets a “yes” according to Daniel Elstrin in the June 19 Forward, reporting on the day Haaretz (think Israeli NYT) swapped its staff for 31 leading authors and poets: “Among those articles were gems like…
Happy Bloomsday!
105 YEARS AGO TODAY, LEO Bloom took his famous fictive walk through Dublin seeing the same places and eating the same foods as his latterday followers did, will do or have done today. (Me, I’ll be sitting on the floor…
Live Long and Kosh — er, Prosper
IT’S NOT ALWAYS NEWS WHEN a rabbi writes a book — but when he writes about Vulcans, Ferengi and Klingons, it’s bound to raise at least one fascinated eyebrow (I’m looking at you, Spock). Rabbi Yonassan Gershom‘s Jewish Themes In…
Invasion of the Sound Creatures
TITANIC THINGS ARE LURCHING ABOUT your neighborhood with awful speed and clumsiness — and by the time you finish reading this, you’ll hear them too. I speak not of the consequences attending long-term medication, nor of some Lovecraftian horror rolling…
Read This Book
THERE IS A Conversation THAT I’ve been having with a friend since we were both in high school, and the initial-cap in that word is due not to the colloquy’s duration but to its content. Its thesis is simple: that…
Re-Re-RE-Reads
SOME BOOKS ARE FINISHED IN a day; others, only when we are. If books are portable doorways, then stepping into a beloved-since-childhood instant Now every few years can sometimes tell us where we’ve been in the meanwhile. As one of…