When I’m feeling stressed out, I head for nature. I found myself driving to Old Rag Mountain in Virginia’s Shenandoah range this weekend.
I’ve done a few amazing hikes in this region: Mary’s Rock, Catoctin, Hawksbill, Big Schloss, sometimes with others and sometimes alone. The challenging eight-mile Old Rag hike … Read the rest
A few days ago I began exploring how writers from Plato to Sebastian Brant to Katherine Anne Porter have written about a “Ship of Fools”. This was inspired by my discovery that sixteen different songs with that exact title have been written and performed by major rock, punk, folk … Read the rest
“Do we really want writers to be okay? Just okay?” That intriguing response is one of many I elicited from J. C. Hallman, author of B & Me: A True Story of Literary Arousal
GET RID OF MEANING. YOUR MIND IS A NIGHTMARE THAT HAS BEEN EATING YOU: NOW EAT YOUR MIND.
I saw Kathy Acker’s name fly by in a tweet yesterday. Her name carries power for those who remember it. Alternative and transgressive literature blossoms in today’s Internet-powered cultural scene, but there … Read the rest
Twenty-five centuries ago, a Hindu scholar named Panini produced an analysis of the Sanskrit language so remarkable that later language theorists such as Ferdinand de Saussure would eventually cite it as the foundation of linguistics itself. Panini shows up in Geek Sublime: The Beauty of Code, the Code of Beauty… Read the rest
Update, March 13 2015: Daevid Allen has died, according to a message from his son.
Daevid Allen, a brilliant songwriter and archetypal hippie prog-rocker who co-founded Soft Machine in 1966 before reaching his peak as the mad visionary genius of Gong, has announced that he is dying of cancer… Read the rest
I used to read short stories all the time. At one point, I was more into short stories than novels.
Well, why not? This was back when Raymond Carver, Ann Beattie, Tama Janowitz, Lorrie Moore, John Updike, Cynthia Ozick, Alice Munro and William Trevor were all putting out stuff … Read the rest
You may have heard about Wittgenstein’s poker, or Wittgenstein’s nephew, or Wittgenstein’s mistress, or Wittgenstein’s ladder. For some reason that I don’t fully understand, people like to read books about Wittgenstein’s stuff.
Well, it’s fitting that Ludwig Wittgenstein shows up in a lot of postmodern novels … Read the rest
D. G. Myers, a celebrated literary critic, professor and blogger, died quietly of cancer in late September. For many like me who only knew D. G. Myers through his writings and online presence, his death was no surprise. We had read about it on A Commonplace Blog or in Time … Read the rest
