The other day I mentioned in conversation that we often romanticize jazz musicians, thinking that they’re usually best enjoyed once they are destroyed by some kind of awful oppression: Billie Holiday and the way her husband used heroin as a leash on her, for example, or the way Charlie Parker was pretty much controlled by his additions. Even Coltrane after he went clean had an air of a man who’d “seen the air of other planets” (to crib a line from the German poet Stefan Georg). It seems the same is true of writers… the romanticization, I mean. From Arts …

There’s a pretty good article over at Wired about The Second Coming of Philip K. Dick, specifically his popularity as a source for the Hollywood-movies machine these days. At a time when most 20th-century science fiction writers seem hopelessly dated, Dick gives us a vision of the future that captures the feel of our time. He didn’t really care about robots or space travel, though they sometimes turn up in his stories. He wrote about ordinary Joes caught in a web of corporate domination and ubiquitous electronic media, of memory implants and mood dispensers and counterfeit worlds. This strikes a …

I forgot about this, and only remembered because I did a little search to find his email address online. My good friend Charlie in Cyprus was published: he beat me to it, basically, getting a contribution into a book about his favorite football club and the horror of its fate at the hands of moron greedmongers. There’s a page about the book he was published in here, but I’ll excerpt the bio below: Charlie grew up in Wimbledon and followed Wimbledon FC from around 1980. He is a member of the WISA Committee. When he’snot talking far too much about …

Hugh Kenner is dead. I remember reading a lot of his The Pound Era when I was studying modernist lit with Andre Furlani at Concordia University. Kenner was probably the most interesting and evocative literary scholar whose work I’d ever studied. It made Pound’s world, and the world of his cohorts, so lucid for me, in a sort of mythic way, anyhow. I don’t know what he’s done of late, and I won’t mourn his death personally, for I know little of him personally. But on his passing it’s only fitting to stop for a moment and think of how …

Well, last night I finished reading a very interesting book by Vandana Shiva called Stolen Harvest: The Hijacking of the Global Food Supply. While I’m usually quite pro-technology, pro-science, and pro-“development”, Shiva’s book is a reminder of how deeply codependent science has become with business interests. And what businesses they are: I have always been deeply distrustful of agribusinesses like Monsanto and Cargill, and now I’m even moreso. The picture Shiva paints is quite shocking, and provokes a great deal of discomfort with the kind of strategies that companies like those I mentioned use to take control of something absolutely …

Here’s a poem I mentioned once to Sun Hwa in Seoul over coffee, talking about how writers excel most when they know which details to mention and which to leave out. While cleaning up my apartment I ended up looking through my copy of Rimbaud and found the poem. Seems I misrembered a detail about whose boots Rimbaud was describing, but anyway, it’s still a beautiful detail, better still in the French despite the wonderful translation by Wyatt Mason. This poem is taken from his translation, Rimbaud Complete. Enjoy. At the Cabaret-Vert, Five P.M. by Arthur Rimbaud Eight days of …

Not having read Kafka’s The Metamorphosis is an oversight that it took me years to address. It’s probably strange that this wasn’t the first Kafka work I’d read… I think most people read The Metamorphosis first and then move on to other tales or to Kafka’s novels. Yet what I’d heard about The Trial was much more compelling to me in the past, and I read that book last year. It wasn’t until this morning that I decided to pick up the beaten old copy of The Metamorphosis that I’d picked up a few weeks ago at the Foreign Book …

The New Yorker ran this article on Edmund Gosse, John Churton Collins, and a very bad book review. There’s a moral to the story, so read to the end.

I just finished reading Jules Verne’s Paris in the Twentieth Century about fifteen minutes ago. This book was quite surprising, for Verne is now much more well-known for his adventure stories, like Around the World in Eighty Days and 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. In fact, there is a reason that this book remained unknown until the 1990s… his publisher, Hetzel, ironically rejected it as being too unbelievable. Far too unbelieveable to us is this verdict, for in Verne’s Paris of 1961, we see Paris with a working Metro, with electric lights and tap water everywhere, gas automotives and spun-metal …

Here’s the BBC news report on the death of Palestinian literary scholar Edward Said.