Category: Criticism

  • On “Cornelius Cardew : A Life Unfinished”

    I had a couple of friends in college who both underwent huge personality changes during the time I knew them, both after encountering some philosophical concept that fundamentally changed their understanding of the world around them; one, unfortunately encountered Ayn Rand, and immediately embraced her — I don’t want to dignify it by calling it…

  • Hits from the Zettlekasten/”Tampa”

    I wrote a bit about the war of the zettlekasten as my last entry, and have been keeping two separate ones; one is a set of notes on Philosophy, thus far really just notes and nodes as I read Bertrand Russell, and another which is for… life stuff, the novel I am perpetually not writing,…

  • Roughly 1000 words about Power Electronics and Fernanda Melchor

    Let’s talk about Power Electronics. It’s a genre of music largely credited to the band “Whitehouse” (which is really more or less just one person, but for the record, I am a fan of those sorts of shenanigans). Whitehouse’s output basically consists of high pitched synth noises, very loud kick drum noises, and shouting. On…

  • The Death of ‘Sironia, Texas’ and notes about this year’s reading.

    So, “Sironia, Texas” didn’t happen. I got through 100 pages or so, and it wasn’t all that good. Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, at least from a blogging perspective. We could deconstruct the text, see what’s working, what isn’t, and why; analyzing what’s bad can sometimes illuminate what’s good. But “Sironia, Texas” also indulges…

  • That’s a Long One/”Sironia, Texas”

    I have touched on this briefly during the nascent days of this blog, but my fascination with long form works continues unabated. A bit ago, I took a look at what are considered the longest novels in existence, and like most things, there’s a bit of a debate about it. There have been attempts to…

  • Dog is Life/”Hell Hound”/”Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance/More on Authenticity

    I I got a dog a few months ago, and she’s taken a bit of my focus and attention. She’s also brought with her a bit more of a regular structure to things. Dogs are strange, in that they are creatures of routine, but also creatures who very much seem to live in the moment.…

  • Authenticity/”Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance”/Other ephemera

    I- Moaning, the ukulele, and podcasts The reason I haven’t written anything in a moment is because, well, I haven’t been inspired to. It’s a kind of failure: if you’re writing, you should write.  I play the ukulele, an instrument that gets a lot of crap for no particularly good reason. I’m an intermediate player,…

  • “Between Two Fires”/What I am Reading/What I have Finished

    Regular readers of this blog will know of my fondness for the band Cannibal Corpse. And, to be honest, one of the things I like about them is a consistent product. When you buy the new Cannibal Corpse record, you’re going to hear Cannibal Corpse songs. The newer albums will have better production, and they…

  • On not Finishing a Book/”The Luminous Dead”/What I am Reading

    I want to talk a little bit about not finishing books. My last didn’t finish was “Angkor and the Khmer Empire: A History of Cambodia’s Legendary Temple Building Civilization” which wasn’t a history of anything, but rather a poorly written guidebook which looked like it had been translated via google translate. It was awful, and…

  • “The Thing in the Snow”

    It’s kind of hard to write about a book like “The Thing in the Snow,” as a lot of what happens in it is very unimportant. By design, this book recounts the absurd and dull. It concerns itself with three caretakers at a remote facility in a perpetually snow bound landscape who perform absurd tasks,…