Tag: literature
Unbearable
The always useful and entertaining Maciej Ceglowski explains better than I ever could exactly how hard The Unbearable Lightness of Being sucks. “The Dave Matthews of Slavic Letters” is just about perfect. It’s a dumb, trashy book.
But he fortunately doesn’t stop there. The rest of the article provides a guide to the best in Slavic dating literature! Including one of my personal favorites, The Good Soldier Svejk.
But if you really still just need to get laid, the Kundera is there for you. The cock has its reasons than the mind knows not of.
Literature in these here now United States
ABOUT THIS BOOK
Christy Castleman, a pretty, young novelist, has made a name for herself writing books about mystery and intrigue. The Sassy Snowbirds, a group of lively ladies, spread fun, friendship, and good deeds around the seaside town of Summer Breeze. Everyone is content in their cozy world–until a message is found in a small Victorian glass bottle half buried in the sand.
“Call the police. Someone is trying to kill me.”
Believing the note to have been written by a missing realtor, the Sassy Snowbirds jump into the mystery with Christy. Using her research and know-how as a novelist, the young woman and her unflappable friends succeed where a team of forensic experts stall. But solving real life crimes is much more dangerous than writing them, and Christy must fight for her life when she uncovers a shocking truth and a real murderer.
A contemporary Southern cozy mystery with a touch of romance, When the Sandpiper Calls is a fast-paced and inspirational look at life choices, consequences, second chances, and deepening faith.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Peggy Darty has published 26 novels, numerous articles and short stories. An award-winning author, her novels, A Mountain to Stand Strong and Angel Valley, were CBA best-sellers, along with numerous novellas. She has worked in film, researched for CBS and has been a popular speaker and workshop leader around the country. She and her husband spend their summers in Colorado and winters in Alabama.
Eagerly awaited preorder: The Book of Imaginary Beings
The Book of Imaginary Beings
Borges is one of my favorite writers. Hyperintelligent, funny, bizarre, fantastic without being self-indulgent, cryptic without being annoying, calm. civilized, and an obsessive craftsman of words. I want to learn Argentine Spanish just to read him in the original, sometimes.
This work is a compendium of 116 imaginary beings from myths and stories, some well-known and others deeply obscure, some from traditions and others from more recent authors. It’s almost literally magical to me. If you don’t have the cash or the interest to buy it, there’s a nicely done web interpretation of the book. A sample: The Eater of the Dead.
Sweet Zombie Jesus
Anne Rice has always been a crap writer, but now she’s really losing her shit in a big way. $5 says “scientology in a year”.
Eustace Clarence Scrubb died for your sins
There’s a film adaptation of C.S. Lewis’ classic children’s fantasy The Chronicles of Narnia on the way, and already people are fighting about it.
The books are explicitly Christian allegory. The Narnia universe is parallel to ours and has a creation narrative, a Savior, stories of temptation and redemption, unbelievers, resurrection, an apocalypse, and an opposing faith that’s an obvious parallel to Islam.
It’s also a kids’ fantasy book with talking animals, magic, an evil ice witch queen, ordinary children who become powerful adults in a different universe, dragons, and magical sea voyages to the end of the earth. So this isn’t The Passion of the Christ, here. I read the entire series many times as a kid and remained a loyal secular humanist agnostic intellectual liberal.
Naturally, atheists are annoyed by the arrival of this film and evangelicals are delighted. I’m sure the churchy folks will press the opportunities they get as hard as possible, and lots of us will be invited to see the movie and have a “discussion” afterwards. I think you have to be pretty hardcore antireligious to object to that.
The more serious problem is Lewis’ pseudomuslims. They seem culturally to be Turkish or Persian, and their God is a terrifying war-daemon. It’s as though he conflated the Ottoman Empire, the Persian Empire, and Thuggee into one generic Eastern Challenge to Christianity. For his time it was an awfully enlightened picture of the Mysterious East; the worshippers of Tash aren’t bad people, their cultural differences are shown as interesting rather than abhorrent, and there isn’t any over-the-top Fu Manchu racism. But it’s not very helpful in 2005 to imply that nonchristian turban-wearing people from the Mediterranean area are demon-worshipping empire-building militarists. I have no idea if this part of the story is addressed in this first movie; it won’t be if it’s just a filmed version of The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe so that will be a future problem for the filmmakers to work out.
For my own part I hope they didn’t castrate Lewis’ story and make it less of a Christian allegory. The temptation to make it easier to swallow for a large audience must be great, but it would be doing the works and the author a terrible disservice to “improve” this into a sword & sorcery romp without a point. As a lifelong Lewis fan and ex-Christian I’d rather be bothered by a simplistic Bible analogy than patronized with meaningless Masters of the Universe quality entertainment.
If you read Lewis’ autobiography, you can see him as a child completely absorbed in the Norse myths, reliving the doomed and noble fight of the Gods against evil. He didn’t grow up to practice Viking religion, but he wrote some damn fine myth-based kids’ books. Leave the myth in there, whether you believe in it or not. Please!
I hate you, milkman eyeteeth
Yes, this was an actual Disney animated television show pilot in 2003. The artist who did this is mostly known for gay beefcake art (NSFW), apparently. He’s also a successful caricaturist (ranai do you know this guy?). I wish he didn’t look so much like Jeff Gannon but I guess that clone look goes with the territory. Walt Disney presents: Tom of Finland… on ICE!
The Brontës, though? Disney? WHAT THE…
“Diary of a Madman” b/w “Dead Souls”
Mr. Lagerfeld, whatever shall I do with this pig?
Joan.
Joan Didion is taken to task here.
When she isn’t telling us all about her childhood in the California white-shoe aristocracy or orating about the extreme importance of the events of the 1960s as experienced by privileged college kids, Joan takes time out to give moral instruction to the lesser classes. She’s Gore Vidal without the humor, or Lewis Lapham without his pithy talent for the short sweet essay. She writes with a heavy didactic tone and a dramatic sweep; the heroic novelist/journalist is always on the scene of tremendous events with her trenchant and outraged prose. Her typical gesture is to detail some nasty business in politics that’s very well-known and then draw herself up to her full height and say “What everyone seems to have forgotten, and only I can testify to, is…”
For the last ten years, since she moved away from California, she’s been writing about California from New York. When she’s not re-telling the stories about wearing hats and gloves to the California Club in 1950, and how that world has gone the way of the Raj, she occasionally notices that there are a lot of Asian people here now and that we’re short of water.
The latest set of tablets to come down from her mountain addressed the Terry Schiavo case, and Joan got the science, the politics, the morality, and several of the facts completely wrong. I’m glad someone took the time to detail her failures, because so many people seem to swallow everything she writes.
The baby boomers won’t all be dead until I’m at least sixty. I can’t wait.
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