Tuesday, sitting in the natural beauty of Deokjin Park, I finished reading the first of the graphic novels I plan on reading this month: The Watchmen. (Next, I think, is Paul a un travail d’ete by Michel Rabagliati, so worry not, Jean-Louis… I just wanted to start with something relatively easy, ie. something in English.) In any case, I’d heard a lot about The Watchmen, and vaguely recalled the department did my undergrad English degree using it as one of the works of literature that was studied in the freshman lit class (though not in my freshman lit class, unfortunately). …

Prospect Magazine a worthwhile piece about Graham Greene written by Julian Evans; Greene is a novelist whose work is fairly available at the library where I work. Thanks to that fact plus the fact that my friend John Wendel sings Greene’s praises highly, I’m planning on reading what I can, while I can.

I was reading this article about Walter Ong, who I knew only a little about, and I found this fascinating quotation at the end: The spoken word, as we have seen, is primary, and yet from the start it was destined—or, in another way, doomed—to be supplemented with all the devices and even gadgetry which have reduced it more and more to space. The predicament of the human word is the predicament of man himself. Its very flowering bears within itself evidence of its own limitations and eventual transmutation. The evolution of the media of communication, with the continuous psychological reorganization which …

While I was in Canada, I took the chance to pick up work by several poets whose work I enjoy, as well as the latest works by people I know and whose work I like and respect. This includes two books of poetry by previous teachers I studied with, David Solway and Tim Lilburn, and it makes sense to talk about both books together because they both deal with that weird, bleeding-edge interface (in the old sense, not the new) between man and “nature” whatever that means. David Solway begins this book of poetry with—among other things—a quote from Henry …

Cory Doctorow is more than just an SF figure. He’s famous online for reasons other than his novels, which you can observe just by checking out how many webpages link to the blog he coauthors, BoingBoing. He’s a worldhopping Canadian, a volunteer activist, a freelance journalist, a mad cyclist (like me!) and a generally cool guy. Except for the fact he lives in America, I wanna be like this guy when I refuse to grow up. Ooops, he’s only 32. Gee. Now I feel a little inadequate. Ah well. There’s always hope, right? Anyway, I finished his novel, Down and …

According to Ben Yagoda, in this article pver at the Chronicle, style is something that emerges when writers are comfortable and proficient with their tools. Style is expressed unconsciously, but shaped consciously, in revision. It is a whispering, not a shouting voice; whether readers discern it depends on their familiarity with the writer and their own skill as readers. The writer himself or herself is aware of it; identifying, developing, and shaping it is one of the main pleasures of the craft. That is to say, it’s not what you get just by following the prescriptions in a book like …

Via Arts & Letters Daily, I found a wonderful extract from a book called How To Be Idle by Tom Hodgkinson. In it, he makes a simple and astute argument in favour of idleness. One particularly wonderful bit is this: For all modern society’s promises of leisure, liberty and doing what you want, most of us are still slaves to a schedule we did not choose. Why have things come to such a pass? Well, the forces of the anti-idle have been at work since the fall of man. The propaganda against oversleeping goes back a very long way, more …

While in Canada, I picked up a number of SF books by writers I’d never read before or, in some cases, even heard of. One of them was the novel Salt by Adam Roberts (who, it seems, has a web page here). I picked up this book used, and I did so mainly because it was published by Gollancz, which, if I recall correctly, put out work by Greg Egan. Salt, as Roberts himself describes on his page, is a novel about depression, about a psychological state that finds its correlative in the bleak landscape of the world, about a …

Here’s a website that explores the tensions that developed in the literary community around the development of new science and new technologies in the 19th Century. It’s worth a look-through, I think, if only just for some of the quotations and images that are included. The site is titled ‘Forces Wholly New’:A Perspective from Late 19th Century Academia on the Relationship between Poetry and Science And one more interesting link, about a moment in time when those opposing the teaching of science and the denial of Darwin (and for that matter science in general) began to lose their war. Let …

Here I sit at 9:40 in the morning, enjoying my summer holidays. The sounds on the street are the normal sounds in my little neighborhood: kids hollering at one another in Korean; cars honking; cicadas buzzing out their deafening symphonies. I bite into my breakfast, a scone (still a little frozen, but enjoyably so) and drink my coffee, coffee my girlfriend gave me, coffee from Canada that has somehow been made to taste like chocolate and raspberries. And I all I can imagine is, what if all this normality was just a very short-term thing? What if it was something …