Month: April 2019
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Treehouse cootie exclusion notice
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: Literary author writes book dealing with sf tropes and themes; author is asked if said book is science fiction; author insists it certainly isn’t, while describing it in terms ubiquitous in science fiction critical discourse; science fiction fandom predictably loses its shit and goes on to demonstrate…
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Battleground
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Lincoln
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Viral hit
I get earworms quite regularly, but never so reliably, nor so unshakably, nor inexplicably, as when I get ill. Sometimes no amount of attempts to read something rich in images and language will make a difference, and my fever-dreams end up spooling out a full night’s worth of mangled loops and iterations of songs I’ve…
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Event horizon
The modern world, cultural theorists tell us, has been characterized by the disenchantment of the natural world. In fact, this disenchantment was accompanied by a Romantic enchantment of the social word. Mimesis gave way to poiesis. We can see this more readily when we recognize, following Charles Taylor for example, that enchantment is a matter of meaning as much as it…