A glorious rant from one of the keystone authors of my first couple of decades on this spinning rock, Harlan Ellison. This is a clip from the documentary Dreams with Sharp Teeth, which is itself quite good. (I’d forgotten that I’d linked to this clip before. Forgive me!) I was pleasantly surprised to see that [...]
Tagged kindleOn my 1998 “sabbatical,” I read about 25 or so books. Among them were the collected works of the Canadian novelist Robertson Davies, one of that country’s great literary lions whose rather old-world style and eccentric areas of expertise led to some fascinating novels — What’s Bred in the Bone being a particular favorite of mine [...]
One of the things I discovered about myself during the past year is that I’m a student, not a scholar. I’ve always thought of myself as a “lifelong student,” but I’m not sure I really understood what that meant till recently. In my view, a master’s candidate is a student, a PhD candidate is a [...]
Here’s a quote from Stephen Fry’s novel Making History, one of the few passages that struck me as admirable in that lamentably bad book. If there is a word to describe our age, it must be Security, or to put it another way, Insecurity. From the neurotic insecurity of Freud, by the way of the [...]
In this excerpt from Roald Dahl’s Boy, his mother asks if he wants to go to Oxford or Cambridge. “No, thank you,” I said. “I want to go straight from school to work for a company that will send me to wonderful faraway places like Africa or China.” You must remember that there was virtually [...]
Tagged CommonplaceBook, Roald Dahl