Literature

tags: Green Man, Blue Cat, literature, ONN, Onion News Network, comedy, humor, satire, fucking hilarious, streaming video Good news for those of you who wish to purchase a new book for your friends and colleagues for Christmas: the book, Green Man, Blue Cat has finally been published to rave reviews! The intended audience is children, but apparently working adults are the biggest fans. I can hardly wait for my review copy! Adults Go Wild Over Latest In Children's Picture Book Series How many thousands of copies do you think will be sent to George Bush as a Christmas present? I'm taking your…
I already made my trip out to Barnes and Noble today to pick up Stephen King's new novel Under the Dome. I have not been this excited about the release of a novel in quite some time. No doubt I am setting myself up for a disappointment, but I think this will be a long-awaited return to form for King. I have been a diehard Stephen King fan since before high school. His ouvre includes several slam-dunk masterpieces: The Shining, The Stand, Firestarter, Different Seasons, It and Needful Things, along with quite a few others that were merely very good: Carrie, The Dead Zone, Christine, Misery,…
tags: birds, literature, ornithology, Birdscapes: Birds in Our Imagination and Experience, Jeremy Mynott, book review Not too long ago, this unemployed scientist had the honor of being asked to write a book review for Science. The Science book review editor was looking for a review of Jeremy Mynott's new book, Birdscapes: Birds in Our Imagination and Experience. The editor, who peeks at my blog when no one is looking, noticed that I am a scientist and bird maniac who writes and publishes lots of book reviews on my blog, so he very kindly (and out of the blue) decided to give me a chance to…
How much more successful would Gravity's Rainbow have been if it were two paragraphs long and posted on a blog beneath a picture of scantily clad coeds? And why not add a Google search box? Want to become a high-profile Twitter superstar? McSweeney's tells you exactly how. Maybe Google is making everyone stupid, but if so, the bar for a successful writer is now much lower! w00t!
Okay, let's try again. Almond BR. Monstrous infants and vampyric mothers in Bram Stoker's "Dracula". Int J Psychoanal. 2007 Feb;88(Pt 1):219-35. "Vampires and the state of being "undead" are representations of intense oral needs, experienced in a context of passivity and helplessness." --- Stiles A. Cerebral automatism, the brain, and the soul in Bram Stoker's Dracula. J Hist Neurosci. 2006 Jun;15(2):131-52. "I suggest that Stoker's vampire protagonist dramatizes the pervasive late-nineteenth-century fear that human beings are soulless machines motivated solely by physiological factors." ---…
For Part One, go here. Let us return now to the weighty topic of great locked room mysteries. In Part One I focused on the works of John Dickson Carr, who is certainly a central figure in the history of the genre. There are plenty of other works to be acknowledged, however, and we turn to that subject now. This will certainly not be anything like an exhaustive list, which would be impossible in any case. I will simply list a few that made an impression on me, and I invite the commenters to mention others. The ever-useful Wikipedia has an interesting reading list, including quite a few…
Somehow I'm not in the mood for a heavy post today. So how about an essay on another of my favorite topics: Locked Room mysteries. Here are the first two paragraphs of what I regard as the finest detective story ever written: To the murder of Professor Grimaud, and later the equally incredible crime in Cagliostro Street, many fantastic terms could be applied -- with reason. Those of Dr. Fell's friends who like impossible situations will not find in his casebook any puzzle more baffling or more terrifying. Thus: two murders were committed, in such fashion that the murderer must not only…
The New York Times is reporting that author Ira Levin has died of apparently natural causes at the age of 78: Ira Levin, a mild-mannered playwright and novelist who liked nothing better than to give people the creeps -- and who did so repeatedly, with best-selling novels like “Rosemary's Baby,” “The Stepford Wives” and “The Boys From Brazil” -- died on Monday at his home in Manhattan. He was 78. No specific cause of death had been determined, but Mr. Levin appeared to have died of natural causes, his son Nicholas said yesterday. Rosemary's Baby and The Stepford Wives are two of my favorite…
Christian apologist John Mark Reynolds answers no: Recently, J.K. Rowling announced to the world that one of her characters, the heroic mentor of Harry Potter, Dumbledore was gay. Nonsense. There is no evidence of it in the books and the books (at this point) are all that matter. I have always thought the books deeply Christian not because Rowling told me so (which she recently confirmed), but because the text is full of Christian images and ideas. She had a chance to give Dumbledore a boyfriend, but she muffed it. I refuse to denigrate friendship by reading every close one as sexual . . .…
J.K. Rowling made some news at Carnegie Hall the other night: But when the questions began -- they had been submitted by audience members before the event -- she came into her own. Finally able to talk freely about the end of a series that had been so long-anticipated, she left nothing out. The big revelation of the night came when she was asked if Dumbledore had ever found love. With a sigh, she seemed on the verge of saying no, but then revealed, “my truthful answer to you... I always thought of Dumbledore as gay.” After a collective gasp, the audience roared with applause. Rowling was…
The intimidating skull of Prestosuchus, taken at the AMNH.I've been trying for quite some time now to get some information about a predatory member of the Order Rauisuchia, Prestosuchus chiniquensis so that I could write something substantial about it, but most of the references I've been able to get a hold of only mention it in reference to similar animals (i.e. Postosuchus, Saurosuchus, etc.). If anyone has any papers or technical literature they could send me on this animal (my e-mail can be found via the "contact" tab on this blog), I would be more grateful.
Progress on my chosen books for this past week has been a little bit slow; I had a very busy weekend and a presentation on the paleoecology of Laetoli, Tanzania at ~3.5 mya (which will soon become a post), so I haven't been able to read as much as I would like this past week. Still, I'm about halfway through the Encyclopedia of Dinosaurs and hopefully I'll finish it over the weekend (I think I can polish off 300 pages before Monday). I'm also about halfway through Molnar's treatment of the huge varanid reptile Megalania prisca (Dragons in the Dust), although I probably won't get to finish it…
And now for something completely different. As a high school freshman I was assigned to read a heavily abridged version of Victor Hugo's novel Les Miserables. I loved it immediately. Later I resolved to procure a copy of the full, unabridged version, complete in all of its 1200+ page glory. I finally got around to doing that in college. Despite its immense bulk, I found it almost impossible to put down. It was readable on many levels: As a ripping good yarn filled with suspense and plot twists, as a meditation on social justice, or as a study of some of the most interesting and memorable…