Kempton Mooney Less Profundity, More Secundity

One more quick note on recent reading. I just read E.M. Forster’s The Machine Stops. The short is a great little science fiction story that predicts television, the internet, youtube, internet chats and commenting all a good 60 years before the internet is invented. What is more, it does a good job of describing how [...]

I have been putting off jotting down some notes on Umberto Eco’s Six Walks in the Fictional Woods, so here are a couple bullets, partly so that I just get them down, and partly because I’m afraid Eco would intellectually beat me up if I misrepresent him.

Six Walks in the Fictional Woods is a book [...]

I saw the movie Drive this past week and was struck, as many have been, by the theme music. Here are three pieces I put together this weekend with that opening sequence moving through my head.

Following E.M. Forster’s ASPECTS OF THE NOVEL, this past week I read James Wood’s HOW FICTION WORKS, a poetic analysis of the novel illuminating parts not touched by Lubbock and Forster. Wood draws on examples from through out literature’s history, giving particular attention to Flaubert as the one who changed everything.
HOW FICTION WOKRS [...]

Last year I read Percy Lubbock’s THE CRAFT OF FICTION, which was insightful and entertaining in a slightly dated way. Reading it made me realize how few books have been devoted to the structure of the novel, and I believe this is one reason E.M. Forster’s ASPECTS OF THE NOVEL receives so much praise. Forster [...]

You know you spend too much time in Excel when it starts sending you invitations.
Because everybody loves a graph. No, really, let me show you with this chart. This axis represents the appreciation of visualized data…

Over the weekend I went on a roadtrip to New England with these guys:

in this car:

to here:

and here:

Mostly we did this:

If you would like to see more photos, they are here.

A little while ago, Craig over at the book review site Somebody Dies asked me to do a little guest blogging. I wrote a bit about setting’s place in THE COMMITTEE, which he posted on his site this morning. It’s a great little site for lovers of crime novels, with a bunch of other bits [...]

John Kennedy Toole’s Confederacy of Dunces does its best to capture the atmosphere of New Orleans through a handful of larger than life zany characters. These characters continually run into each other creating the affect that the city itself consists of only about twenty or so people, each of which has their own quirks and [...]