My Favorite 10 Short Stories… For Today

It’s a meme, y’all: scififanatic and jade park have both posted lists of ten currently favorite short stories, and I guess I feel driven to do the same. Maybe because I’m taking a grading break. 10 exams down, 20-something more to go. (And then the midterm essays.) One thing I have to say is that this is much like any list I make: very, very much related to my mood and memory today. On another day, I’d probably be writing another list, though some elements will be the same. The other thing: I’m going to list linked stories as one, …

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Decent Derrida?!?!?

Okay, so I was discussing the pathetic understanding of science, and especially our developing scientific understanding of us humans, among the so-called scholars of the humanities, with a co-worker of mine. I was specifically panning Deleuze and Guattari, who have written some total claptrap about science, so bad I remember cheering when I finally found someone dismissing them wholesale over it. I have some patience for Foucault, though my respect was a little tarnished by discussions suggesting he based his work on, well, more on his own sense of how things were than on source materials and so on. Actually, …

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Jinni the Quae

I’m waiting a week or two before I start revisions on “Lester Young,” and in the meantime, I have a story idea — something very suited to Analog, in fact, or maybe Interzone since they have a submissions period starting soon — and the idea is a fusion of an old story idea I had, called “The Refugees,” and a totally different thing I was thinking about. I don’t want to talk too much about the story, so I’ll talk about the thing that got me thinking instead.

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Frankenstein, Bad?

Anyone think I should send this to the Guardian in protest? Anyone see any significant holes in it? Germaine Greer recently wrote: The latest sensation to galvanise the torpid lit-hist-crit establishment is the “discovery” by market research analyst John Lauritsen that Mary Shelley did not write Frankenstein; Or, the Modern Prometheus (to give the novel its full title). Who is Lauritsen? Apparently, some market-research-analyst gay-rights activist who’s mostly known for arguing that the kaposy’s sarcoma common among AIDS patients is caused not by AIDS itself, by a certain drug in vogue among gay clubbers, and that HIV doesn’t really lead …

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