Brian Palmu (Free subscription) | yesterday
I was rather naive on the meaning of the word "snark". I'd thought it was a short, dismissive review or comment, extremely negative in tone. In other words, an honest, damning comment on what one has engaged with. But I haven't given myself enough credit. Since my several dictionaries, including the on-line versions, either have no entries, or the lone meaning is pertaining to Lewis Carroll's...
Lower Earley Book Group (Free subscription) | 11/24/2009
Apologies for the lateness of this update, life seems to have got very hectic recently. We met (ages ago) to discuss 'Alice in Wonderland' by Lewis Carroll . To be honest there wasn't much to discuss! I think we were thinking that there might be some adult themes and hidden messages but it was exactly the same story I remember from childhood. I forgot to take a vote, but no one particularly hated it....
In Spring It Is the Dawn (Free subscription) | 11/23/2009
Monday Salon? I had most of this typed up yesterday but then it got late and here it is now Monday. I think it's still technically Sunday somewhere though, or if not we'll just pretend. Anyway, I didn't get around to posting my reading retrospective last month, so I thought I'd combine them this month. Taking a look back at my reading journal for 2002, the year I started recording what books I read,...
The Corner (Free subscription) | 11/13/2009
Some of the best Christmas gifts you can give to those little darlings are NR ’s acclaimed children’s books. We’ve got four great offers. The first is Volumes 1 and 2 of The National Review Treasury of Classic Children’s Literature . Two big, handsome, illustrated hard-covers featuring wholesome, fantastic, Bill Buckley-selected tales written by literary giants from Mark Twain,...
MediaBistro.com (Free subscription) | 11/11/2009
Building Twitter lists is like tumbling down a Lewis Carroll rabbit hole: bumpy, seemingly bottomless, but ultimately, enlightening. In an ongoing effort to make the GalleyCat Twitter feed more user friendly, we are building a few fancy new Twitter lists that will break the hundreds of publishing posts we read every day into curated, easy reading collections. The archiving process is taking longer...
Pat's Fantasy Hotlist (Free subscription) | 11/10/2009
It may be a bit surprising, but Neil Gaiman's A Game of You is my favorite Sandman story arc thus far. The author's hybrid of Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland , Stephen R. Donaldson's The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant , and C. S. Lewis Chronicles of Narnia was quite a treat! I have become accustomed to the fact that the plotlines had almost nothing to do with The Sandman: Preludes &...
Book Soup Blog (Free subscription) | 11/07/2009
Harper Collins has published a collection of children's book picks from over 100 actors, writers, artists, politicians, and activists. These are the books that made a difference to them, the books that changed their lives. I asked the employees at Book Soup for their favorite children's books, and these are the books we picked....some will be familiar, some have been forgotten and some are just crazy!...
The LRC Blog (Free subscription) | 11/05/2009
Here are the answers: Charles Dodgson [ Lewis Carroll] Alexsei Peshkov [Maxim Gorki] Publius Ovidius Nas [Ovid] Thomas Kennerly, Jr. [Tom Wolfe] Francois Marie Arouet [Voltaire] Marian Cross [George Eliot] Theodore Geisel [Dr. Seuss] Isabella Van Wagener [...]
Issa's Untidy Hut (Free subscription) | 11/01/2009
This past week was the birthday of rock great, Grace Slick , from one of my favorite 60's bands, Jefferson Airplane (a choice for which I took much flack from close friends). This week's selection is "White Rabbit," which is the second Grace Slick number to land on the Litrock list (here's the first , in case you missed it). Whether it's James Joyce or Lewis Carroll , Slick was always on...
Anecdotal Evidence (Free subscription) | 10/25/2009
We wandered the corn maze (maize maze?) on a pumpkin farm, the narrow paths slippery with gray mud. The effect on a cloud-dim day was claustrophobic. Looked at imaginatively, corn stalks where they meet the ground appear ambulatory, capable of pulling themselves from the soil and, well, stalking human prey. Halloween is number three in importance on the American kid calendar, after Christmas and one’s...
Strangling My Muse (Free subscription) | 10/22/2009
“It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see.” –Henry David Thoreau “Everything in the universe has rhythm. Everything dances.” –Maya Angelou “Nobody cares if you can’t dance well. Just get up and dance.” –Martha Graham “Sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”...
The Inkwell Bookstore Blog (Free subscription) | 10/21/2009
I'll give you Shel Silverstein and Lewis Carroll for free. But if you wanna see the other ten, you're gonna have to click here .
POE'S DEADLY DAUGHTERS (Free subscription) | 10/19/2009
I was looking at a list of banned books , and found myself amazed anew at the idea that anyone would feel so powerful and so right that they would take it upon themselves to attempt to control the flow of information into another person's life, another person's mind. And yet books are banned every year--books many of us consider great, important, wonderful works of literature. Consider the list below,...
LEMON HOUND (Free subscription) | 10/18/2009
From a piece in the New York Times last week about "How Nonsense Sharpens the Intellect," in which the author offers statistics that support a fact long argued by poets, that disjunction as found in poets as diverse as Emily Dickinson, Lewis Carroll, Rae Armantrout and Erin Moure, is actually a very useful poetic, that like the uncanny, makes the mind leap in interesting ways, opening up...
The Truth About Lies (Free subscription) | 10/15/2009
I've been trying to write this blog for over a year now. I kept meaning to start it but then I couldn't find my keys and then I realised just how much material I had to work with and the very thought of it made me tired. So, I'm not going to try and cover everything. What I'm going to talk about are the personal memories I have of Spike Milligan and why I'm so fond of him. I'm quite sure that someone...
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