Posts by author
Jeremy Hatch
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Details on DFW’s Pale King
As you probably already know, David Foster Wallace left an unfinished novel called The Pale King upon his death. Today Tim Martin of the Telegraph UK wrote a remembrance of DFW that, among many other things, includes details of the…
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Blogging’s Capacity for Timelessness
“There can be no argument that the blog format gives ‘now’ the pride of place; novelty leads, and the past recedes into a string of ‘older posts’ links and archives pages. But it is a mistake to think that blogs therefore…
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Recollections of a 1903 Fireman
A Journey Round my Skull doesn’t just publish wonderful things to his blog; he also tweets about wonderful things on other people’s blogs. Today he posted a link to a blog called Dreamers Rise, whose author wrote about an extraordinary…
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Seven Thousand Skulls and a Tolerant Spouse
“How many people want to spend their entire day — their entire life, I guess, at this point — collecting heads from rotting marine mammals? Well, Ray does!” From Shelf Life, a 25-minute documentary you can watch here, about Ray…
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Lethem on the “Squandered Promise” of Science Fiction
“In 1973 Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow was awarded the Nebula, the highest honor available in the field once known as “science fiction” — a term now mostly forgotten. “Sorry, just dreaming… [T]hough Gravity’s Rainbow really was nominated for the 1973…
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The Web is the New Phone
“We talk too much about television as an antecedent to the Web, and not enough about the telephone… In America Calling: A Social History of the Telephone to 1940, the sociologist Claude S. Fischer argues that our customary mode of…
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Romantic Poets and Scientists
“A good history of science unreels like the practice of science itself. It wends through a world of experiments until a new reality arises. But the more layered story of that journey is that science is not just a process…
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Indie Bookseller Weighs in on the Kindle
In San Francisco there’s a great little indie bookstore called Borderlands Books, which sells science fiction, fantasy, and horror titles. In a recent newsletter, store founder Alan Beatts offered his perspective on the Kindle and Amazon’s power to unpublish titles…
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Some Buildings on the Skyline of the Past
It’s funny how memory works. Budd Schulberg’s death yesterday got me thinking about On the Waterfront and The Harder They Fall, which got me thinking about Hollywood, and Schulberg’s collaboration, when he was 24, with the down-on-his-luck F. Scott Fitzgerald. This…
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The Cost of a Thing
A couple months ago, we wrote about Matthew Crawford’s book Shop Class as Soulcraft, and around the same time I read another interesting review of the book, by Caleb Crain. (I refrained from posting about it at the time to…
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Big Man Japan @ Just Press Play
“With Tokyo constantly under attack by giant monsters, of course you need giant ultra-heroes to defend its citizens; but when something that catastrophic had become the mundane for almost a century, what happens to the hero’s status in society? Do…
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The Man Who Invented Borges
Dzanc Books is one of my favorite recently-minted small publishers, and not just because their first two titles were by my brilliant friend Roy Kesey. Just check out their mission statement for an idea why I like them. They have begun…