substitute

I knew Philip Pullman was a fan of my dad's work; an interview with him that ended up in The Week caused some friendly interest and was much appreciated.

Apparently he's really, really a fan. Woo!

Hello from Amazon.com.

We are pleased to report that the following item will ship
sooner than expected:

Thomas Pynchon "Untitled Thomas Pynchon" [Hardcover]

Availability: This title will be released on November 21, 2006.

Stanislaw Lem is dead.

He was an underrated and overlooked genius; it's not hyperbole to call him the Polish Borges. His body of work included some of the funniest and most inventive science fiction, mysteries, other novels, and essays. He wrote about space exploration, the horrors of war, the mathematical patterns of life, and the insides of our very strange brains.

I would give my left nut to write like him.




http://www.lem.pl/cyberiadinfo/english/main.htm official site
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanislaw_Lem

Food note: Today I rediscovered the beauty of a whole fat fresh scallion sautéed just until the green changes.

Geek note: It takes all freakin' day to compile KDE.

Drink note: The Macallan 12 year is a beautiful thing and on sale for $38 at Hi-Time.

Car note: based on an observation in the Hi-Time parking lot, the Lotus Elise is a beautiful thing if and only if you do not get it in a loud lime green color.

Love note: salome_st_john rules

End note: Everyone needs to read (more) Graham Greene

The Exile had James Frey pegged on Day One and even more so on Day Two, even before he was unmasked as a proven fake.

just another dry drunk asshole. They're popular these days. Representative quotes:

Rehab stories provide a way for pampered trust-fund brats like Frey to claim victim status. These swine already have money, security and position and now want to corner the market in suffering and scars, the consolation prizes of the truly lost.

Frey got those anecdotes the no-risk way: he stole them from a real druggie/criminal author. A much better and more honest one, a guy named Eddie Little-specifically, Frey looted Little's great debut novel, Another Day in Paradise.

The accusation of theft from Eddie Little is interesting; I'll have to find that book.

Thanks to salome_st_john for pointing this one out.

Today's blogtastic memesplosion is the anti Narnia piece in the Guardian. It's a crock of shit.

As a former Christian I have no brief to defend the faith. However, I loved the Narnia books growing up and I still enjoy them. They're in the great tradition of English children's books, presenting a group of kids separated from their parents and forced to deal with magic, evil, strange new worlds, death, and their own character. I grew up reading E. Nesbit's classics like The Railway Children and Five Children and It, and devoured the entirety of Arthur Ransome's Swallows and Amazons series. All of these books were written within thirty years of the turn of the century, and depict a lily-white sheltered imperial England that is completely foreign to modern children. They are not tuned to modern sensibilities, and parts of them are inexplicable or offensive today. As it happens, E. Nesbit was a Fabian Socialist and Arthur Ransome was a Communist who ended his life in the Soviet Union. C.S. Lewis, on the other hand, was a red-faced beef-eating English conservative and Christian convert whose books are obvious Christian allegories.

You can't ignore Lewis's religious ideas. He's not a subtle guy. Creation and Fall, the betrayal and crucifixion and resurrection of Christ, the challenge of Islam, and the Apocalypse are all covered in the Narnia books. As children of secular humanist liberal intellectual agnostics, my brother and I read the Narnia books as pure fantasy, and only later did we learn the allegorical meaning. Certainly I was prepared for the Christian story later in life at least in part because I'd been emotionally moved as a kid by Lewis's lion-Christ.

Polly Toynbee's clumsy hatchet job treats Lewis and the filmed interpretation of his book the way Bill O'Reilly treats Cindy Sheehan. She's helped by Disney's clumsy promotion of the film using churches and churchy music, no doubt a result of Mel Gibson's success with his emetic Passion S&M romp. They're movie promo idiots. And the movie may well be awful. But American 21st century evangelical culture is not Lewis's fault. The attempt to somehow make the Narnia books into a fundamentalist political statement is a failure whether it's the churchy types or the atheists doing so. They're children's fantasy books with the most vanilla Christian allegory imaginable behind them. There are far more heavy-handed and sectarian things dumped on kids in this country every day, starting with the entirety of Christmas entertainment. Our whole culture is immersed in Jesus Twee.

She doesn't like Christ as a lion and wants him as a lamb. He's both in the Narnia universe. He's a powerful and dangerous living God ("not a tame lion") and also a murder victim. Lewis's often frightening lion-God is a hint of adult spirituality for children who've been fed happy-Jesus in a world that clearly is more like coffee than like candy. It's a dangerous and flawed universe, and God is not your pet.

Eventually Toynbee loses her shit completely and starts blaming Lewis's story for Christianity itself. The best quote is Of all the elements of Christianity, the most repugnant is the notion of the Christ who took our sins upon himself and sacrificed his body in agony to save our souls.. Um, that is Christianity. The rest is setup and explanation. Later, she says that ...Lewis weaves his dreams to invade children's minds with Christian iconography that is part fairytale wonder and joy - but heavily laden with guilt, blame, sacrifice and a suffering that is dark with emotional sadism. Yes, again, that's Christianity. It's also adulthood, and it's not sadistic to present suffering and guilt in a fantasy novel intended for older children and young adults. Not to do so is to insult their intelligence and maturity.

The clearest descendent of Lewis's Narnia stories today is J.K. Rowling's wildly popular series of novels about the young magician Harry Potter. Like Lewis's children, Harry is fated from birth to do great things. Like them, he is taken out of the everyday world of English children into a magical one. And like them, he increasingly confronts a dark and puzzling world that has evil and sadness mixed in with the magic and joy. You don't have to believe in sorcery to bond with Harry and his friends; you just have to be a kid or remember what it was to be one, and follow him through that discovery of grown-up successes, failures, and emotions.

In the same way it's not necessary to believe in Jesus or in a magic world of talking animals and mythical creatures, ruled by a God-like lion, to enjoy the Narnia books. They're about childhood and testing your child's strength against an adult world. The religious marketers pushing Lewis's fiction and this new film in Christian bookstores will be forgotten fifty years from now but the books will remain.

Conservative religious types will attack Harry for his witchcraft and apparently anti-Christian activists need to bite Lewis as well. The kids know better in both cases.

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.

The Book of Imaginary Beings, by Jorge Luis Borges, Peter Sis (Illustrator), Andrew Hurley (translator).

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.