A long sentence is worth the read - latimes.com
"Your sentences are so long," said a friend who teaches English at a local college, and I could tell she didn't quite mean it as a compliment. The copy editor who painstakingly went through my most recent book often put yellow dashes on-screen around my multiplying clauses, to ask if I didn't want to break up my sentences or put less material in every one. Both responses couldn't have been kinder or more considered, but what my friend and my colleague may not have sensed was this: I'm using longer and longer sentences as a small protest against — and attempt to rescue any readers I might have from — the bombardment of the moment. When I began writing for a living, my feeling was that my job was to give the reader something vivid, quick and concrete that she couldn't get in any other form; a writer was an information-gathering machine, I thought, and especially as a journalist, my job was to go out into the world and gather details, moments, impressions as visual and immediate as TV.
When Will White People Stop Making Movies Like "Avatar"?
This is wrong on so many levels... Pandora was modeled after mainland China; I don't think any New World analogy was intended here. They even wear their hair in a queue! You mention that the protagonist is played by a white actor and many of the Na'vi are played by minorities, but ignore the other Na'vi played by whites, or the other humans who were Hispanic and Indian. You compare it to Dune, yet don't mention that Dune itself is about people with Arab names and vocabulary — and was clearly inspired by T. Furthermore, you decry the idea of an outsider joining to help an oppressed group, but don't notice that this is what always happens in history when one group is technologically more advanced than another. It's especially odd that you go looking for "patterns" in these movies, but don't even mention Joeseph Campbell, who did the same and found these same patterns dating back thousands of years, in virtually all cultures.
Tahmima Anam | The Good Muslim
Watch a complete 1990 documentary about cyberpunk, featuring a young William Gibson
They tapped into something fantastic at that time. The effect of recording in Berlin right after the fall of communism and just the genuine cultural experimentation that was exploding in the air everywhere. It was so brief but it really created some amazing things. Yeah, I tend to look at 1991-94 as the last hurrah of rock 'n' roll. This article is nearly old enough to hold a driver's license, but it's a pretty succinct rundown of how the recording industry was running on gas fumes by the mid-'90s.
IS (Roberto Bolaño's) "2666" A MASTERPIECE?
Reading "2666", "it becomes increasingly difficult to distinguish Roberto Bolaño's genius from his excess. Indeed, it starts to seem that Bolaño's genius is his excess", writes Garth Risk Hallberg... Special to MORE INTELLIGENT LIFE In his treatise on drama, "Three Uses of the Knife", David Mamet cribs a distinction from Stanislavsky. The late Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño had a foot in each territory. Bolaño, a poet by vocation, had initially (not to say quixotically) turned to fiction as a money-making proposition, and after the success of "The Savage Detectives", he might have settled into a lucrative middle age repackaging his dissolute youth. In real life, Santa Teresa was Ciudad Juárez, and by 1998, it was home to the largest serial killing in recorded history. This 900-page book unfolds in five novel-length sections, each with its own characters, style and chronology. The prose, too, diverges from Bolaño's earlier work. Which brings us to "The Part About The Crimes."
The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy Books of 2011
Huh. Interesting. I'll be 40 in two months, and I completely adored the book and your analysis of it (which I think is valid, by the way) totally sailed over my head. Now, I'll be honest. My husband and I have no kids. We live in a remix culture. The fact is that we're becoming a cultural ouroboros—feeding on ourselves, remixing and mashing up the remixes until eventually we may not even recognize the original source material anymore. And that, I think, is what I loved so much about the book.
James Baldwin: Witty, Fiery in Berkeley, 1979
Hot on the heels of Independence Day, here’s a chance to listen to one of America’s best writers declaring his own form of Independence — a freedom from some of the more troubling assumptions embedded in the English language. Starting with a dry, mild questioning of phrases like “black as night,” “black-hearted,” and “black as sin,” Baldwin turns quickly to a critique of the name of the civil rights movement itself, which he suggests would be more accurately described as a slave rebellion. The logic and eloquence with which Baldwin makes his case is much better savored than explained. Enjoy the clip, and especially make sure not to miss his remarks on Huck Finn at minute 3:00, or the lovely description of Malcolm X at about minute 5:00. And, to be sure, we’ll add this to our collection of Cultural Icons. Related Content: Great Cultural Icons Talk Civil Rights Malcolm X at Oxford, 1964
THE FIRST CON (1937)
In January 1937, the Leeds chapter of the Science Fiction League brought something new into the world: the first ever SF convention. (A counter claim is made for an earlier visit of New York fans to meet Philadelphia fans at the home of one of their number, but this is hard to take seriously - see THE FIRST EVER CONVENTION, link below.) At a time when travelling any distance was much more difficult than it is today, several of those attending travelled hundreds of miles to be there. After the convention - or conference, as they called it - a souvenir report was issued (see below). Early convention literature did not contain a list of those who attended, unfortunately. "Although the conference's OFFICIAL SOUVENIR REPORT claimed an attendance of 'about twenty', Eric Frank Russell, who had been there, stated there were thirteen, and an extant photograph of the group shows only eleven. See list of those 14 known attendees below. Known attendees:
Same-as-that—By Dale Peck
From a speech given in December 2011, at the New School, in New York City. Dale Peck is a novelist and critic. The first time I heard the word samizdat was at an ACT UP meeting. The term was applied to the vast stacks of photocopies that every member picked up on the way into the Monday-night meeting: treatment guidelines, drug studies, bureaucratic analyses, action plans, contact lists, and announcements of events ranging from performances and gallery openings to house parties and memorial services. This collection was never referred to as anything other than “the table” (even though it usually spread over two or three), a twelve- or eighteen-foot-long banquet of paper down both sides of which several hundred gay men and lesbians, nearly indistinguishable in their Doc Martens and Levi’s and sloganed T-shirts, bent their spiky or shaved heads and served themselves and one another with the ordered geniality of an Amish wedding. He died of AIDS! My dear Gino, What a wonderful surprise!
