a blog about ratiocinations out of thin air and elsewhere
I COME FROM A FAMILY OF READERS and rarely leave the house without a paperback stuck in a pocket. In this category I address/review/criticize books and the people who write them.
While my favorite genre is science-fiction—especially the so-called speculative-fiction of the ’60s and ’70s—my favorite author is James Clavell, whose Asian Saga novels I read every few years.
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MANY GOOD STORIES are good, but not necessarily so, even in an elementary way. For example:
“An old story has it that Queen Victoria was so enchanted with Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland that she asked its author to be sure to send her his next work.
So he did: it was An Elementary Treatise On Determinants—or, in some versions, a bundle of abstruse mathematical pamphlets. READ MORE
HUGO BALL’S SOUND POETRY may seem a mere stringing of words together to many readers or listeners. It is a form of verse without words. “Sound poetry is an artistic form bridging literary and musical composition in which the phonetic aspects of human speech take the foreground instead of the more conventional semantic and syntactic values.” Needless to say, sound poetry is intended to be heard, not read! READ MORE
EVEN A CURSORY READ of the facts (“Just the facts, ma’am”) and not someone’s opinions will reveal a mass of data that would lead anyone free of assumptions to assume that things just don’t add up. In 11/22/63, King does not deal with these inconsistencies, contradictions, and controversies surrounding the evidence or lack thereof.
Not that I expect that to be a part of the narrative, but it is a part of the background and should be considered. READ MORE
I HAVE JUST FINISHED 11/22/63, Stephen King’s recent novel. Published in 2011, it is a modern fantasy whose ‘gimme’ is unexplained, magical time-travel. In fact, the concept of walking into a small room and finding a gateway into another world is as old as, well—Narnia itself! The title of the novel should give away the destination of the time-traveling protagonist: he travels back in time to stop Lee Harvey Oswald from shooting President Kennedy. READ MORE
“WHEN MARK TWAIN OPENED HIS MOUTH, strange things came tumbling out. Things like hoaxes, jokes, yarns, obscenities, and non sequiturs. He had a drawl—his ‘slow talk,’ his mother called it—that made his sentences long and sinuous. One reporter described it as a ‘little buzz-saw slowly grinding inside a corpse.’ Others thought that he sounded drunk.
He loved to talk: to friends, to reporters, to the crowds of adoring fans who filled lecture halls to hear him. READ MORE