FROM THE NOVEL “GOLDFINGER,” PAGE 056 of the Penguin Centenary edition: Bond sat back. He was prepared to listen to anyone who was master of his subject, any subject. (This is one of those quotes that keeps coming into my…
Tag: books
My first best friends.
First Graf: Moby-Dick
SO FAR, IT HAS TAKEN me two years to read Herman Melville’s classic of monomania and cetology, mostly because I don’t want to finish. And so I haven’t, yet. It’s the language. Melville rolls so many word-clad notions around his…
First Graf: Ringworld
SINCE 1970, LARRY NIVEN HAS written four books and a number of articles concerning the Ringworld: an Earth’s orbit-diameter ribbon made from disassembled planets and populated by its builders with all manner of adaptive species, each with its own culture…
First Graf: Winnie-the-Pooh
“GENTLE FUN FOR ENGLISH TAOISTS” is as good a description as any of A. A. Milne’s two booksful of stories of the Hundred-Acre Wood’s most famous resident. These are not children’s tales any more than “Bullwinkle” or “Le Morte d’Arthur”…
First Graf: VALIS
IN FEBRUARY AND MARCH OF 1974, science-fiction author Philip K. Dick had a series of experiences which might have been psychosis, hallucination or divine grace. Phil often tended toward the last explanation, at least in print, and based a handful…
First (Two) Graf(s): The Universe Next Door
THE TITLED BOOK IS PART of a trilogy, and it’s hard to say it’s the “first” part since Robert Anton Wilson wrote Schrodinger’s Cat such that the reader can open any of its constituents (The Universe Next Door, The Trick…
First Graf: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead
THIS MOST ELEGANT OF STOPPARD plays is, I think, best viewed live — the 1990 film, for all its polish, loses something as it’s translating. Live it should be: for “live” is what it’s about, and specifically but not exclusively:…
First Graf: The DQ of UK
THIS TITLE DOESN’T REFER TO either German nobility, soft ice cream or the British Isles, but the first paragraph (“graf” in news-speak) of one of my favorite novellae, H.P. Lovecraft‘s The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath. Though mostly famous for his…
Harvey Pekar Z”TL
A MOMENT OF SILENCE WOULD be inappropriate to mark the death this morning of autobiographer, comix legend and music critic Harvey Pekar, since (depending on your view) the former Cleveland Heights resident is right now either a) arguing with “God,”…
5 Thoughts: Fiction- v. News-Writing
1. YOU STOP WRITING A NEWS piece when you run out of facts. But when do you stop writing fiction? When you run out of story, I suppose. 2. In news, the most important information goes up top. In fiction,…
5 thoughts: James Joyce
IN HONOR OF BLOOMSDAY 2010, five thoughts on the man who made it possible: 1. James Joyce is yet another proof that one man’s mind can be bigger than his skull. (If not, generational banks of Joyce scholars would have…
Pithyism #1440
RESEARCH THROUGH BOOKS WALKS A vast flagstone patio; online research is a path laid stone by stone.