Elsewheres
- Snakes on a Plane meets critical theory. This is one of the funniest things I've read in a while, which may say more about me than it. I particularly loved that it had to be labelled as a parody.
- For list lovers: What to read. And an interview with the listmaker: "Strangeness is an antidote to the awful sameness of received ideas. Seeking it becomes, I think, a moral imperative."
- Emerald City #132.
- An interview with Gwenda Bond.
- J.D. Daniels on Philip K. Dick and A Scanner Darkly: "There’s figurative garbage and there’s literal garbage -- there is grade-F beef from Taco Bell, and then there’s fecal matter or refuse: that to which one says No. When cows are forced to eat nothing but themselves, they contract a lethal prion disease called bovine spongiform encephalitis. What do you call a man who sees his own face everywhere?" (via Jenny Davidson)
- An interview with Clare Dudman.
- Clare Dudman interviews L. Lee Lowe.
- Elizabeth Hand's makeovers for writers.
- K.J. Bishop travelblogs in Jeff Ford's ditch.
- Jason Cowley on Yasunari Kawabata: "'Ma', in broad translation, means interval or pause, and Kawabata's best sentences in Japanese are distinguished by suspensions in the action and by pauses between clauses, the equivalent of the use of white space in Japanese ink painting, or the long pause in haiku. Perhaps it is this sense of something missing that gives his work its presiding ambiguity and vagueness." (via Scott Esposito)
- Do Space Aliens Have Souls?
- The linguistics of gay marriage and planets.
- Pluto in Science Fiction.
- Gilbert Sorrentino beautifully memorialized in a webcomic by Derik Badman. Derik has also begun a new serial webcomic, "Things Change".
- "Imperative: The Pressure to be Exotic" by Azita Osanloo: "These days, not only must the literary purist make posterity believe he did indeed live, but if he wants to find an agent, receive a decent advance, get published by a name house, and endear himself to a marketing and publicity team that will ensure a prime spot on the front table at Barnes & Noble, positioning his book to climb the sales ranks and thus securing a contract for his next book, he needs to make posterity believe--by writing it in his latest memoir--that he lived more dysfunctionally, more tragically, more multiculturally, more exotically than anyone else."
- Scott William Carter on "Great writing vs. great storytelling".
- Ten Neglected Science Fiction Movies.
- The Slush God gets slushbombed.
- John Banville sez: "Reality is round and language square. Writing, as anyone who has so much as written a letter knows, is about trying to fit a square medium into a round and amorphous reality. The thing keeps squirming away to escape the reality." (via This Space)
- Dumbass orientalism.
