31 March 2006 – 11:59 pm +0800
i am going to bed. i will have nightmares involving huge monsters in academic robes carrying long bloody butcher knives labeled Excerpt, Selection, Passage, and Abridged.
— Helene Hanff, “sunday night and a hell of a way to start 1960″, 84 Charing Cross Road
31 March 2006 – 6:19 pm +0800
Is anybody reading this connected with the travel/tourism industry? Specifically with hotels? I’ve got some questions I need answered, but nobody to ask.
31 March 2006 – 5:11 pm +0800
C.M. Kornbluth’s strength was the short story. He wrote several classics of the form, many of which are remembered today (”The Marching Morons”, “The Little Black Bag”, etc.).1 But he only published a handful of novels. This one suggests a major reason why.
The set-up and background are intriguing and fun. Sometime [...]
30 March 2006 – 11:59 pm +0800
God, give me the means, give me the means to hit back, to avenge myself. Vengeance might be Thine, but hey, throw me a crumb, let me help out just a little bit.
— James Herbert, Nobody True
30 March 2006 – 3:38 pm +0800
Continuing from this…
He called his friend the tinker,
And the haberdasher, too,
And told them of his flaky plan
In terms of derring-do.
“I’m gonna rob the Stateville Trust,
That dirty, thieving bank!
A decimal mistake they made,
And wiped my savings blank!”
The tinker and the haberdasher,
they both were stunned, aghast!
The baker clearly must be stopped,
but who would ever da’st?
The baker spied [...]
29 March 2006 – 11:59 pm +0800
The peculiarity of prudery is to multiply sentinels, in proportion as the fortress is less threatened.
— Victor Hugo, Les Miserables
29 March 2006 – 7:16 pm +0800
The troll saw fit to email me with more of his wisdom, insight, and reasoned opinion:
Subject: Laughing My Ass Off At You
BWAHAHAHAHAHA! Delete my comments? Label ‘em spam? How lame can you be? BWAHAHAHAHAHAA!
So typical of radical right bloggers to delete dissenting opinions. From Red State and their plagiaristic BoxTurtle Ben to the [...]
29 March 2006 – 3:34 pm +0800
[What follows is a piece of cuteness unconnected to any story. I was on a long nocturnal walk, clearing my mind and venting a pile of frustrations, and I began imagining a dark, unpleasant situation, along with a few sketchy characters involved in it. It was dark, brutal, and, with any luck, will [...]
29 March 2006 – 11:49 am +0800
The new DVD release of A Streetcar Named Desire will include quite a curiosity — an until-now-lost screen test of Marlon Brando auditioning for the leading role in Rebel Without A Cause, in 1947(!).
28 March 2006 – 11:59 pm +0800
Now, after five straight book club selections, she wasn’t so sure she could handle another novel about a dysfunctional woman whose life was a mess because her father never gave her the attention she deserved.
— Vince Flynn, The Third Option
28 March 2006 – 8:37 pm +0800
[Most of my blogging lately has been really old, taken from my paper notebooks, where "blog entries" co-exist with novel notes, research notes, private journal entries, business ideas, and other odds and ends. My paper notebooks are a catch-all, and it's rather sad (but predictible) that I've been "blogging" even while avoiding the internet [...]
27 March 2006 – 11:59 pm +0800
The servants by this time rushed in, and being, by great chance, tolerably sober, separated the incensed opponents[.]
— Sir Walter Scott, Waverley
24 March 2006 – 11:59 pm +0800
“I pray you to keep better rule with your tongue when I am the theme of it.”
— Sir Walter Scott, Ivanhoe
24 March 2006 – 3:11 pm +0800
That Conrad is a major stylistic influence over Poul Anderson is now a dead certainty.
That Nostromo or Gould are models for Francisco D’Anconia is questionable, though in a general sense there are a number of similarities that are curious, at least.
That this novel represents Conrad’s greatest technical achievement as a novelist I am willing to [...]