Category: Literary Matters

Well, I finished everything on my stack. The Milagro Beanfield War was remarkable, and Twisty Little Passages offered up many interesting insights into the development of all kinds of interactive experiences.

Next up: Dark Age Ahead by Jane Jacobs (chiefly known as the author of The Death and Life of Great American Cities):

We in North America and Western Europe, enjoying the many benefits of the culture conventionally known as the West, customarily think of a Dark Age as happening once, long ago, following the collapse of the Western Roman Empire. But in North America we live in a graveyard of lost aboriginal cultures, many of which were decisively finished off by mass amnesia in which even the memory of what was lost was also lost. Throughout the world Dark Ages have scrawled finis to successions of cultures receding far into the past.

Penguin Book U.K. is celebrating their 70th anniversary. They have thrown up a cool little website with an unusual and elegant Flash interface.

I have always liked British book cover art. It seems much more free-form and playful than the American style.

Yup. I am finally reading it. Don’t know why it took me so long to get to it.

The nightmares appeared to Hungry Joe with celestial punctuality every single night he spent in the squadron throughout the whole harrowing ordeal when he was not flying combat missions and was waiting once again for the orders sending him home that never came. Impressionable men in the squadron like Dobbs and Captain Flume were so deeply disturbed by Hungry Joe’s shrieking nightmares that they began to have shrieking nightmares of their own, and the piercing obscenities they flung into the air every night from their separate places in the squadron rang against each other in the darkness romantically like the mating calls of songbirds with filthy minds.
Joseph Heller, Catch-22 .

There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning. And that, I think, was the handle – that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting – on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave.

So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark – that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back. – Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas .

Hunter S. Thompson
1937 – 2005

…from Annie Dillard. From the article: Einstein likened the generation of a new idea to a chicken’s laying an egg: «Kieks – auf einmal ist es da.» Cheep – and all at once there it is.

Finished reading Outwitting History over the weekend. If you get the chance, I highly recommend picking it up. Especially if you are any kind of lover of books.

One of the first books I bought upon being hired at the bookstore many years ago was Writers At Work, a collection of interviews with writers, which were first published in the Paris Review. Now PR has put up on line, for free, all 300+ interviews in the Writers At Work series, each available for download as PDF.

I have just now finished reading The System of the World, the third volume in Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle . 886 pages in a little over 30 days. I guess I had some free time, after all.

Briefly, an interview with Neal Stephenson, author of Snow Crash, Cryptonomicon, et.al, over on Slashdot. The reader comments are every bit as entertaining as Stephenson’s answers to the interview questions.