Lawrence of Arabia dominated the 1963 Academy Awards. It was also voted as "the best British film of all time" by leading filmmakers. It reached the top of the box office and managed a close 2nd overall for the year. Steven Spielberg stated it was his favorite film and the film that inspired him to becoming a film maker. This is just to say it was an important film with a lot of unusual pieces to reconcile. E.g. before Alec Gui...
This is what fools people: a man is always a teller of tales, he sees everything that happens to him through them; and he tries to live his own life as if he were telling a story. But you have to choose: live or tell. — Jean-Paul Sartre, NauseaI. LegacyThe majority of the legendary postmodernists in American fiction lived long enough to be disappointed by their legends. Don DeLillo (87), Thomas Pynchon (87), Joseph McElroy (93) and Robert Coover (92) can still, as yet, contrast life with lore...
Guys, I’m telling you, this is it. This is, this is… I’ve tried everything, okay? This is my shining moment as a father for you. I’ve tried wrapping up a pancake like a burrito with syrup on it, but that gets way too messy. I’ve tried taking a bite of a pancake, then just pouring syrup into my mouth to get that right ratio. That has not worked. What I have found works the best is you cut the center out of the pancake, right? You remove the center. Then you pour syrup into the center. So that’...
Book jacket for my forthcoming book Note: If you wish to receive, via e-mail, (1) my weekly newsletter or (2) daily copies of these posts, write to me at rrbates1951@gmail.com. Comments may also be sent to this address. I promise not to share your e-mail with anyone. To unsubscribe, write here as well.WednesdayI recently completed proofreading the galleys (if that’s what they’re still called) of my forthcoming book, which of course is tremendously exciting. Then I had the slightly ...
WUTHERING HEIGHTS, by Emily Brontë, is said to have been the 20th century’s favourite Victorian novel. Yet, in 1847, its sophisticated "Chinese box" narrative structure, its radical investigation of the primitive and the pagan, and its use of Yorkshire dialect baffled the reviewers, most of whom were metrocentric men.Writing in our post-feminist culture, Karen Powell has her own version of Emily narrated in the first person, as in Charlotte’s Jane Eyre and Anne’s Agnes Grey. This gives a shar...
Skip to content Reconstructionary Tales Tag: D. H. Lawrence New Year Rabbits (Norman Garstin, The Rain It Raineth Every Day: Penlee House Gallery & Museum) January, so far, has consisted—almost exclusively—of rain. Oh, food and drink, books and conversation—and the rabbit-holing so familiar to researchers, following...
All novels can be said to be in conversation with other novels. But while influences on the form and viewpoint of a novel are easily acknowledged, there are particular novels that more directly speak through borrowings. Notions of postmodernist intertextuality allow for all of this and in the novels of Kathy Acker, for example, unacknowledged quotations are seen as radical rather than robbery.In 1968, when Bound to Violence by Yambo Ouologuem, translated from the French by Ralph Manheim (Peng...
Review By Eoghan Smith John Holten, The Trains of Europe (Broken Dimanche Press, 2024)Since the Covid pandemic, there has been no shortage of fiction speculating on planetary catastrophes yet-to-come. As with typical iterations of this species of anxiety-driven literature, the cause of the apocalypse is never an abstract entity but a manifestation of an existing mega-threat already facing the world. Recent examples include the technocapitalist hellscape of Niall Bourke’s Line, the spectre of...
3 Body Problem’s most mind-bending question isn’t about aliens Skip to main content Vox homepage Give Give Newsletters Newsletters ...
Summary of the below text by Microsoft Copilot (AI/Bing) "The Lauriston Garden Mystery" is the third chapter of "A Study in Scarlet" by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. In this chapter, Dr. John Watson is introduced to Sherlock Holmes, who is asked by Tobias Gregson, a detective at Scotland Yard, to help solve the mysterious death of an American man named Enoch Drebber. The corpse was found in an empty house in Brixton, with no apparent wound marks or robbery evident. Holmes deduces the man's profes...
Near Matches Ignore ExactFull Text Everything2 Cinderella (thing) See all of Cinderella, there are 9 more in this node. (thing) by SophiesCat Fri Feb 02 2001 at 17:51:53 There are many versions of Cinderella, this version is a fairly cheery and happy one, some of the other versions have the stepsisters cutting parts of their feet off in order to try and fit into the glass slipper. Once there was a gentleman who married, for his second wife, the proudest and most haughty woma...
Near Matches Ignore ExactFull Text Everything2 The night a princess was captured (fiction) See all of The night a princess was captured, no other writeups in this node. (fiction) by Woodnot Wed Nov 03 2010 at 21:21:55 Pirate, Wizard, the recently reactivated Soldier and the recently introduced Georgina were walking back from the frozen monastery to the camp. "So, whats your names?" asked Georgina. "I'm Honshua" replied Pirate, "se's Samuel" pointing to Wizard "and we just call...
Near Matches Ignore ExactFull Text Everything2 Thou shall not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind (idea) See all of Thou shall not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind, there are 2 more in this node. (idea) by apathy42 Fri Aug 29 2003 at 4:01:27 This statement is the primary commandment of the Great Convention in the universe of Dune (written by Frank Herbert). It is not only a civil law, but also a religious commandment, featured in the Orange Catholic Bi...
Near Matches Ignore ExactFull Text Everything2 Lily (thing) See all of Lily, there is 1 more in this node. (thing) by Narya Sat Sep 27 2003 at 21:06:29 The moon hung sick and pallid in the stale night, a sliver, giving off no light. I was leaning against the wall of some monolith of a building, trying not to breathe the thick, rotting air. Another night in this hole. I was considering going back home, but thought better of it. I had left her there, and I didn't need to go ba...
Near Matches Ignore ExactFull Text Everything2 coming alive (fiction) by secondchances Wed Apr 04 2007 at 6:55:15 Where the fuck have my balls gone. This is a statement, not a question. "Where the fuck have your balls gone," Eli says. When he says this, he doesn't really care where they've gone. He's saying that they're not there, that you may have never even had them. "How many times have you hit this in training? Don't act like this is hard. Come on, Nate." Hands sl...
Welsh Fairy Book: Owen Goes a-Wooing The Llyn Cynnwch referred to in this story is Cynnwch (Cynwch) Lake which is located in what is now Snowdonia National Park in Wales. The Faery Folklorist blog reports several different versions of the story, and includes pictures of the lake. Explore: For other encounters with the "otherworld" of the fairies, see Why Deunant has the Front Door in the Back and Einion and the Fair Family. [notes by LKG] This story is part of the Welsh Fairy Tales unit....
In Sonali Bhattacharyya’s two-hander, Two Billion Beats, which premiered at the Orange Tree a year ago and now returns with a new cast, 17-year-old Asha and her 15-year-old sister Bettina struggle to behave in an ethical way when confronted by racism and bullying. As Bettina reminds us, most human beings have two billion heartbeats per lifetime so it’s a real struggle to not waste these on heightened anxiety and fear. Set in Leicester, over a number of weeks as Asha’s secondary school ca...
Heads emerge from toilets, constructed from our own debris. Birth control pills lead to pregnancy. Foxes bleed gold. People connect over ghost-watching. In Cursed Bunny, Bora Chung takes us on an unforgettable journey through folkloric caves and modern-day apartments, unearthing the horror and injustice that are engrained in the fabric of human civilization. https://bookshop.org/a/269/9781643753607I refused to read Cursed Bunny while I was alone. Translated by Anton Hur, the South Korean shor...
Required Materials:Star Trek: TNG, "Cause and Effect"$14.95 at amazon.com Optional Materials:Roland Barthes, S/Z$11.20 at amazon.com Some text-based or web-based introduction to narratology and film THIS CLASS, ENGL 373 (Science Fiction and Fantasy) doubles for me as introduction to a number of theories. The allegorical and speculative nature of science fiction makes the genre a helpful tool in teaching students what are often quite difficult concepts. The students tend also to get a ki...
The Singing Stones (review) See all of The Singing Stones, no other writeups in this node. "The Singing Stones" is a 1968 novel by Juanita Coulson, published as an Ace Double, along with Derai by EC Tubb. At the time of publishing, Coulson had published only one other book, but was already well known in the science-fiction community for her work on the fanzine Yanro, together with her husband, Robert Coulson. She would write many other books, mostly in the 1980s. All of which I d...
Short story author and novelist Elizabeth McCracken has just published a book, The Hero of This Story, in which the main character is Natalie Jacobson McCracken, educator, writer, and former editor-in-chief of Boston University alumni magazine, Bostonia. Elizabeth herself is the narrator of this novel. And, also, the daughter of Natalie. In the novel. In real life. To make matters even more interesting, I worked as Natalie’s assistant from 2000 to 2003 and know Elizabeth via her mother. In...
Long before time was measured in the way we mark it now, humans have been telling stories about the animals around them. Animals have been our predators, our prey, and our companions—and yet, modern life has pulled many of us so far from the natural world that it’s become easy to think of ourselves as separate from, and sometimes even superior to, the rest of the animal kingdom. In my collection of short stories, What We Fed to the Manticore, I wanted to reduce the emotional distance between ...
★★★★★Reflecting on the enchantments that nature casts on people, The Sandpiper’s Spell is a beautiful poetic mosaic.Tom Pearson’s The Sandpiper’s Spell contains poems that meditate on nature, life, death, and memory, using language in startling and dazzling ways.Organized in seven parts, each beginning with a piece of "The Sandpiper’s Spell," the poems revolve around imagery borrowed from beaches, waterways, and birds in flight and at rest. The first poem in the series finds meaning in the ab...
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