The oldest and most obscure weblog. Probably. Lovingly maintained and neglected by Shawn Kilburn.
in any even, the girl detective likes to dream or drink fish
there’s a clock swimming in the lotos bowl.
update: sadly broken even horizon, but ne’er fear!
lull and carnation, lily, lily, rose are replacements of a sort.
or you could visit the woman herself at her linkerlinklink.
So there’s this Icelandic band called Mum and there are some groovy mp3s on here for samplage. It’s good. (Thanks to Warren Ellis for the tip; thanks to google for the link.)
And, also, originally noticed at obscurantist (though it took me a very long time to check out): Webjay.
Remix Fight! is fun. Basically, they take a track and a bunch of people remix it. Then they put all of the remixed tracks up on the website to be voted upon.
The current track reminds me a bit of The Residents
Bearing witness to the fruit of my obsession, I have taken a stab at listing all of the books I’ve ever read. This is by no means a complete list, but it’s moving in that direction. It makes me feel weird that parts and fragments of all of these books are floating around inside of my brain…
In the comments for this entry on The Blood of the Lamb, I made a list of a bunch of “classic” or “literary” books from the early part of the 20th century which just leave me cold. Squub made me realize the silliness of an un-recommendation list. Only people filled with a certain kind of strangeness would go and read books from a list that someone hadn’t particularly recommended to read. Like me.
Anyway, in no particular order, the 21 best books that I read in 2003:
1. Quicksilver by Neal Stepehson
2. A Place So Foreign and Eight More by Cory Doctorow
3. City of Saints and Madmen: The Book of Ambergris by Jeff VanderMeer
4. Beyond Fear: Thinking Sensibly About Security in an Uncertain World by Bruce Schneier
5. Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail by Hunter S. Thompson
6. Singularity Sky by Charles Stross
7. Rogue Nation: American Unilateralism and the Failure of Good Intentions by Clyde Presowitz
8. Altered Carbon by Richard Morgan
9. Hundred Camels in the Courtyard by Paul Bowles
10. Dark Star by Alan Furst
11. Super Flat Times by Matthew Derby
12. The Pursuit of Oblivion: A Global History of Narcotics by Richard Davenport-Hines
13. Behindlings by Nicola Barker
14. A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson
15. The Girl in the Flammable Skirt by Aimee Bender
16. Breaking Open the Head: A Psychedelic Journey in the Heart of Contemporary Shamanism by Daniel Pinchbeck
17. Tomorrow Now: Envisioning the Next Fifty Years by Bruce Sterling
18. At the Gates of the Animal Kingdom by Amy Hempel
19. Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution by Howard Rheingold
20. Paris to the Moon by Adam Gopnik
21. Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny by Robert Wright
I believe that I have written about most (if not all) of these elsewhere here. This is when the search thingy becomes handy, as I am too lazy to link these to those.
A few days ago, The Nameless I expounded on God, suffering and etc. It’s thoughtful, as these kinds of writings so rarely are.
My meagre offering is here: someone named Dave describes an episode from Grant Morrison’s Doom Patrol about the ways in which some comics have addressed the “god” question.
UPDATE: Turns out this Dave fellow also wrote about Mr. Kalb, as Squub and I did in his comments some months ago… Imagine that!
UPDATE: I’ve fixed that non-link up there. How embarrassing!
Furl.net is a promising replacement for the ‘bookmark’. Especially, what with all these threadorati links and the like.
A couple of months ago, my good friend R., from Seattle, crashed here for a night. As a thank you gift, she picked up a copy of Dorothy Sayers’ Busman’s Honeymoon at Powells Books.
Busman’s Honeymoon is good, if you’re into the genteel, witty English detective genre. However, if you haven’t read any of Dorothy Sayers’ Lord Peter Wimsey stories, you’ll be lost. You’d be much better off starting with Whose Body? or Strong Poison, the first ones that I read.
I haven’t been much of a reader of mysteries in the last ten years or so–though I was mad for Sherlock Holmes when I was 12–and probably would never have started reading Dorothy L. Sayers, if R. hadn’t recommended them to me. I’m glad she did though. I probably wouldn’t have read any, otherwise.
Sayers was quite popular in the earlier 20th, about on the level of Agatha Christie, popularity-wise. Nearly all of her books have been turned into movies or television shows.
Shortly after writing Busman’s Honeymoon–a vacation where the busman is likely to be as involved with driving as he is throughout the rest of the year–Sayers apparently grew tired of the whole writing-detective-stories thing and turned to writing about religion, classical education, and translating Dante (or so I’ve been told).
Her detective novels are unique in that the lot of them contain a sort of ultra-narrative, focussed upon the courting of Harriet Vane by Lord Peter Wimsey. It’s fascinating. At times, more interesting than the murders themselves.
Don’t forget to check out the Dorothy L. Sayers Society.