The Western Canon that Was

The “Five-foot Shelf” Reconsidered

On or about December, 1910,” Virginia Woolf wrote, “human character changed.” Woolf was not referring to a specific event so much as to a new cultural climate, a new way of looking at the world, that would become known as modernism. When he finished his introduction to the Harvard Classics in March […]

Philip K. Dick (1928-1982)

Philip K. Dick (1928-1982)

It’s also wrong to claim, as so many of his critics have, that Dick was limited by the conventions of science fiction-which are contemptuously dismissed by Dick’s admirer, Polish novelist Stanislaw Lem as a “threadbare lot of telepaths, cosmic wars, parallel worlds, and time travel.” Interested, like Burroughs and Ballard, in exploding […]

Art Spiegelman vs. the World

Art Spiegelman vs. the World
A comic.

Subjects: politics, cartooning

The Kleptones

There’s a certain kind of genius to the Kleptones new mash-up album 24 Hours (free download) which mixes together other people’s songs to make new, strangely familiar yet bizarre music.
Subjects: music

Literature in China

CNN.com - Red fades to gray - Mar 24, 2006
CNN profiles new Chinese writers.

Ma [Jian]’s last book, 2004’s “The Noodle Maker,” strikes a darker tone. Cynical to the point of almost being bitter, it is filled with tales of alienation and lost hope for the Tiananmen generation, with a jabbing finger of dark humor at […]

The Virginia Quarterly Review - The literary dark horse. By Meghan O’Rourke

The Virginia Quarterly Review - The literary dark horse. By Meghan O’Rourke

Virginia Quarterly Review: Winter 2006 issue
Over the past two days, New York media gossip turned away from its usual concerns—like Graydon Carter’s latest hairdo—to consider an improbable question: What is the Virginia Quarterly Review? On March 15, the nominations for the annual National Magazine […]

At least we can be thankful we’re not in Australia

Is literature dying in Australia?
The Australian: Lits out [March 18, 2006]
Subjects: literature

Wallace, Updike, Dostoyevsky

‘Consider the Lobster: And Other Essays,’ by David Foster Wallace - The New York Times Book Review - New York Times

Turning to literature in essays on Kafka, Dostoyevsky and Updike, Wallace employs a largely moral vocabulary to dismiss such older American novelists as Norman Mailer and Philip Roth as “Great Male Narcissists.” For him, Updike […]

Alan Moore on V for Vendetta

COMICON.com: ALAN MOORE GETS BEAT

What happened, at DC, they’d been asking if we’d do the Charlton characters and then they said, we don’t want you to use the Charlton characters, can you come up with your own. I said yeah we can and we were assured, if you come up with characters of your own, […]

The Vendetta Behind ‘V for Vendetta’ - New York Times

The Vendetta Behind ‘V for Vendetta’ - New York Times
I’m officially a big fan of David Itzkoff’s new Science Fiction column over at the Times.

Subjects: criticism, fiction, movies, sci-fi