Category: Reading Journal

  • who are you trying to impress? McDonald’s Hopeland and skiffy diasporae

    It’s yer man ADH, who else? “Space is dead”, sez he: The moon landing happened because capitalism and American empire actually had a rival. These forces had to prove they could outrace, outplan, and outspend communism and Soviet empire. It was probably the biggest PR campaign of all time, if you don’t count our bloated…

  • Brightbourne is a coy house

    Coming up on halfway through Ian McDonald’s Hopeland, and I already have about a dozen quotes of similar size to this one that I might have held up, as I’m doing now, as a way of saying that is how you do it, that is great writing. The music accompanies them up the drive, heard…

  • Coming to terms with learning to listen: Adam Soto’s This Weightless World

    Coming to terms with learning to listen: Adam Soto’s This Weightless World

    On New Year’s Day 2012, the SETI people finally receive an incontrovertibly extraterrestrial signal, which they announce in a hastily convened web-broadcast which, true to the time, much of the world does its best to watch despite the bandwidth issues. As one might expect, the enormity of this interjection into the rolling drama of human…

  • how you write is what it’s for

    Mike Harrison’s anti-memoir managed to be everything you thought it might be, but nothing at all like what you expected; that negating prefix to the generic category is an obvious warning, a hockey-stick graph where the y axis represents lateness of style, but such graphs—as has been demonstrated—are easily misinterpreted, and/or renarrated to provide comfort…

  • like a shadow anticipating its own body

    From the opening chapter of Wild Thought, being a fresh translation of the book by Levi-Strauss which was first translated as The Savage Mind: We should not, for all this, fall back on the vulgar thesis (which is however, admissible in the narrow perspective in which it is situated) that magic is a timorous and…