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Monthly Archives: January 2010

Cardiacs – a video primer

Sunday, January 31, 2010

Cardiacs are my new favorite band of all time. They’ve been around since the early 1980s at least but astonishingly I never heard of them until last year, when I discovered the video for their early song “Tarred and Feathered” (not for the faint of heart or ear), which made me gape deliriously with a […]

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Jeff VanderMeer: Finch

Sunday, January 31, 2010

After finishing Shriek: An Afterword, I dove right into VanderMeer’s third Ambergris book, Finch. This is in yet another style — it’s a hard-boiled detective novel set in a dystopian future a hundred years after the events of the last book. It’s pretty cool how willing he is to play around with many different styles […]

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Jeff VanderMeer: Shriek: An Afterword

Sunday, January 24, 2010

Jeff VanderMeer’s City of Saints and Madmen is one of my favorite books, a collection of stories and other strange forms (one item is a fictional bibliography, another is a medical report, another is written entirely in code) all set in the fantastic fictional city of Ambergris, built over the caverns of mysterious underground-dwelling mushroom […]

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I (still) don’t see anything when I close my eyes

Saturday, January 23, 2010

That’s right, I have no visualization ability. I wrote a fair amount about it here back in 1999, and nothing really has changed. I’m mostly adding a pointer to it from my blog here because I often get email from people who discovered the page and I don’t have time to reply to it all, […]

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Brian Aldiss: Helliconia Spring

Saturday, January 16, 2010

The idea is cool: the planet of the title orbits one star, which orbits another star in a very eccentric ellipse. So the planet, in addition to regular yearly seasons, has a thousands-of-years Long Season during which it goes from ice age to constant summer and back; and civilization never quite rises high enough during […]

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