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The Blogger to His Sanity Checks
Here in the USA, April is National Poetry Month. (Yes, among all the other months it is. See here for a bunch of others — scroll down the page a ways. Frog Month! Straw Hats Month! National DNA & Genomics & Stem Cell Education & Awareness Month! (The posters for that last one are about [...]
Ineffable
[For information about this image, see the note at the foot of this post.] From whiskey river: There it is; the light across the water. Your story. Mine. His. It has to be seen to be believed. And it has to be heard. In the endless babble of narrative, in spite of the daily noise, [...]
Book Review: The Sparrow, by Mary Doria Russell
Over at The Book Book, I’ve posted my recent review. This time around, the subject is Mary Doria Russell’s novel The Sparrow, first published in 1996. Russell seems one of those novelists in the enviable position of writing whatever she wants, irrespective of genre. The Sparrow (and its 1998 sequel, Children of God) are frank [...]
It Calls Me On and On
[Image: audio-animatronic scene at the 1960s-era Disneyland "Carousel of Progress" display. See yesterland.com for more information and a larger version of this image.] From whiskey river: The Bones (excerpt) …Shells were to shut out the sea, The bones of birds were built for floating On air and water, and those of fish were devised For [...]
Unexpectedly Needed, or Not Needed At All
[Video: classic moment from The Treasure of the Sierra Madre] From whiskey river: We may be only one of millions of advanced civilizations. Unfortunately, space being spacious, the average distance between any two of these civilizations is reckoned to be at least two hundred light-years, which is a great deal more than merely saying it [...]
The Usefulness of Bad Things
[Cartoon found at the site of the Anxiety and Stress Disorders Institute of Maryland.] From whiskey river: Bad People A man told me once that all the bad people Were needed. Maybe not all, but your fingernails You need; they are really claws, and we know Claws. The sharks — what about them? They make [...]
Notice What This Post Is Not Doing
From whiskey river: The range of what we think and do is limited by what we fail to notice. And because we fail to notice that we fail to notice there is little we can do to change until we notice how failing to notice shapes our thoughts and deeds (Daniel Goleman, quoting R.D. Laing [...]
Book Review: The City & The City, by China Miéville
My full review of this book is up, over at The Book Book. Part conventional murder mystery, part dark urban fantasy, The City & The City is constructed on a bizarre high concept which the author makes somehow believable: two Eastern European cities are not just neighbors, adjacent to each other; they’re even closer than [...]
Perspective, Proportion, Sweet Spot
[Image: "Perspective," a portion of Engineered Biotopes; this was an entry in a 2010 Greek architectural competition called "Piraeus Tower 2010 -- Changing the Face/Façades Reformation." For more on the competition, and this entry in particular, see this page at the Bustler architecture/design site.] From whiskey river: To My Doppelganger You were always the careful [...]
Making the Trip
[Trailer for Adaptation (2002), starring Nicolas Cage, Meryl Streep, and Chris Cooper and featuring a whole lot of other favorite, familiar faces] From whiskey river’s commonplace book (the archives): Human beings can’t live without the illusion of meaning, the apprehension of confluence, the endless debate concerning the fault in the stars or in ourselves. The [...]
