Elsewheres

• A Curious Singularity: A group blog about short stories. (via Out of the Woods Now)
  
• Mark Thwaite's "Brief Thoughts on To the Lighthouse".
  
• A description of "Writing the Unthinkable", a workshop with Lynda Barry. (via Gwenda Bond)
  
• A comparison of William Gass and E.L. Doctorow by Garth Risk Hallberg.
  
• William Gibson's typewriter.
  
• Classic Film Preview on Fritz Lang.
  
• Chris Barzak on M. Rickert and on failures of imagination.
  
• Invented Usage on postmodernism and jargon.
  
• 25 Years of Weird Al: "Somehow, at an age when Weird Al's early pop muses have died or retired or been charged with pedophilia, he still has something to tell us about youth culture."
  
• Hauntology.
  
• Lauren Cerand on bloggers and publicists.
  
• A plea for science fiction that "opens up the world rather than closing it down".
  
• A conversation about "the best science book ever written".
  
• Paul McAuley:

  There’s no one right way to write a novel. There’s no one correct style, or tense, or subject, or angle of attack. But the one thing all novelists should be doing is aiming at the Universal nerve. Literary novelists try to hit the Universal by particularising the experiences and inner life of a character. Science-fiction novelists try to hit the Universal by particularising the Universe. And since the Universe contains pretty much everything, SF should be a big, roomy mansion that welcomes all kinds of fantastic fiction. Instead, it’s becoming a shabby little theme park jealously guarded by self-appointed narrow-minded gate-keepers.