Since history is on my mind anyway…
From Jeff VanderMeer’s Ecstatic Days blog recently, by guest blogger Tero Ykspetäjä: the top five reasons “Why Finnish Is Cooler Than English.” Reason #5 (with slightly tongue-in-cheek coda):
There’s no future tense in the Finnish language. The present tense is used instead. “No future,” as the Tähtivaeltaja slogan says. This [...]

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For Halloween last week, in their contribution to the weekly around-the-Web Poetry Friday, the folks at the Seven Impossible Things Before Breakfast blog offered up Poe’s weird — and kind of forced — “Ulalume” (full title “To — – –. Ulalume: A Ballad”).
The ensuing discussion got me thinking once more about Poe — “once more” [...]

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Today marks the 104th anniversary of the birth of Lester Dent, a/k/a Kenneth Robeson.
Not exactly a household name these days, eh? But in his time, which occupied a substantial chunk of the first half of the last century (he died young, in 1959), Dent was one of the most prolific and most successful writers on [...]

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Per usual, the Friday selection from whiskey river:
We suffer not from our vices and our weaknesses, but from our illusions. We are haunted, not by reality, but by those images we have put in place of reality.
(by Daniel J. Boorstin)
…and a bonus:
Our greatest pretenses are built up not to hide the evil and the ugly [...]

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A new addition to the blogroll here, one “Cuff” of the Countersignature blog, recently made what I think is a stupendous find: a 1914 book, by one MacGregor Jenkins, entitled The Reading Public, available via Google Books.
Here’s how Cuff introduces the book’s content:
Jenkins divides the “reading public” into book readers and magazine readers. He further [...]

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I’m going to go out on a limb here and…
…no, I’m not going to write a post about posts which begin with long-dead metaphors, posts whose authors should really know better. Though I, or somebody, probably should.
What I am going to say is possibly heretical and, well, possibly something I should keep my mouth shut [...]

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At the Dennis Cass Wants You to Be More Awesome site, in a thread about dispensing with the whole query-an-editor/agent process, member Paul Mikos pointed me to an experiment by publisher HarperCollins UK.
The experiment goes by the name “authonomy” (a cute neologism I’m still trying to make up my mind about). From the authonomy page [...]

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The most recent category for the links here, all the way at the bottom of the right-hand menu, is labeled “The Pantheon.” These aren’t authors who’ve necessarily influenced my style (although no doubt many of them have); they aren’t all authors who’ve meant a lot to me for my whole life (although some of [...]

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From whiskey river:
The extravagant gesture is the very stuff of creation. After one extravagant gesture of creation in the first place, the universe has continued to deal exclusively in extravagances, flinging intricacies and colossi down aeons of emptiness, heaping profusions on profligacies with fresh vigor. The whole show has been on fire since the word [...]

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A number of things I’ve come across in the last week have reminded me — at a time (yes) when I really should be concerned with ending a story — just how little it takes to start one. In particular, they’ve reminded me of the way in which implied story lines radiate forwards and backwards, [...]

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