Month: January 2017

Bruno Overload

gordsellar0 Comments

This post deals with some recent readings I’ve done on the subject of Giordano Bruno. It’s divided into three parts: Recent Readings covers the books I read, and my reaction to them, with a special emphasis on the system of artificial memory (that is, how Bruno modified the classical art of memory/memory palace system) that was one of Bruno’s biggest claims to fame in his own time. Side Note: The Temples? plays Six Degrees of Separation between Bruno and Jonathan Swift. I’ve narrowed it down to five degrees, too, which surprised me, but maybe it shouldn’t: Europe from 1580 to 1680 was a pretty small world, and …

Continue Reading

Blogging Pound’s The Cantos: Canto LIX

gordsellar0 Comments
This entry is part 44 of 57 in the series Blogging Pound's The Cantos

This post is one in a series of readings I’m posting of each poem in Ezra Pound’s The Cantos, a few at a time. The readings are atypical, for reasons made clear in my first post in this series. Also, since the table of contents that my post series plugin creates has gotten far too unwieldy to include at the top of each post, I’ve gone ahead and made an index of the Cantos I’ve discussed, with links to each post. I’ll try remember to update it as I continue with this project. That index is here. The index is new, so I …

Continue Reading

Hothouse (1962), by Brian Aldiss

gordsellar0 Comments

So, what in the world is going on in Brian Aldiss’ Hugo Award-winning 1962 stories that eventually got collected as Hothouse? Note that I wrote in, not with. I just finished the book the other day, though it took me ages to get through it and that’s given me a lot of time to ruminate on the parts I’d already read. The book is strange, in ways that I found both fascinating and frustrating. (But, honestly, the reason it took so long has more to do with my son’s newly developed Spider Man-like climbing abilities than the book itself.)

Continue Reading

More Prodigal News… and a Blowfish in a Pear Tree

gordsellar0 Comments

With the intensive courses I’ve been teaching, I haven’t had time to reflect much on 2016, or all the stuff that happened last year. (And since today’s my wedding anniversary, I won’t be doing it now.) I’ll have a little time for things like that soon—after my courses end and I get the grades uploaded, sometime next week or early on during the week after—but for now, some happy news: I’ve finally received my contributor’s copy of the December 2016 issue of Analog! Pretty exciting. I’ve actually had it for about a week, but have been too busy to mention it here. In …

Continue Reading