Dany is the villain. That is the point of her arc. She is turning into Mad King Aerys. We are explicitly told that when a Targaryen is born, the gods flip a coin: genius or madness. Dany's coin is starting to land the wrong way. Like her father, who was charismatic in...
Four years ago I wrote a post about hard to find, unpublished short stories by J.D. Salinger, including his short story "The Ocean Full of Bowling Balls." Since then I've taught a few English Lit courses that have had several of Salinger's short stories and Catcher in...
Joe Hill has a new book out, and it’s filled with references to his father, Stephen King, to David Mitchell, and to Gerard Manley Hopkins (and to others, I’m sure). Although the references to Mitchell are somehow the most surprising to me, it’s the references to...
I'm re-reading Stephen King's Dark Tower series (so I know the ending), and so far I've been very impressed. Having re-read the earlier ones again (I'm on the sixth book, Song of Susannah, right now), some of the things that I was on the fence about, and the things...
I'm binging through Supernatural on Netflix, and I just got to Season 4, episode 5, "Monster Movie." (Slight spoilers for jokes ahead.) I just wanted to let everyone know that this episode includes the 1931 version of Dracula (corny accent and all) driving off on a...
I just read "Story of Your Life" by Ted Chiang. You can find it here: Stories of Your Life and Others. The Kindle version is $7.69. It's really good. It's reminded me (somewhat) of that Star Trek: The Next Generation Episode, "Darmok,"...
Boy, Total Recall (1990) is actually a lot weirder than I remember it. This is probably because, as a kid, I often caught bits and pieces of it on TV, so I rarely (if ever) watched it straight through, and whatever I did watch was an edited-for-TV version. The mixture...
The Grey (2012) is far better than I would have thought. The quote on the DVD box -- "Terrifically exciting! Hold on tight! It's a true call of the wild!" -- really doesn't do justice to the film. You know how when you finally get around to seeing the original Rocky...
I've been binging through Stargate SG-1 recently, and my theory is that the show is secretly a sitcom. The sci-fi ideas in the show are not that innovative; some of the plot lines are quite bad; the effects are definitely not anything to write home about; the villains...
Simon Prebble's reading of Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell is quite good. I've been listening to it on my runs and while I'm doing mindless tasks like making dinner or cleaning. The Literary Theory course by Paul Fry from Yale (on iTunesU) is also...
I liked this movie. (Maybe from now on I'll just post "hey, here's a thing I liked." Huzzah for low-content posts.) This was my favourite exchange: The Driver (Ryan Gosling) and Benicio (Kaden Leos) are watching cartoons while Irene (Carey Mulligan) gets ready. The...
In Linguistics and Poetics, Roman Jakobson describes six functions of language. The phatic function of language is language whose function is essentially contact, language for the sake of language, regardless of signification. Anyone who owns a cat understands the...
(Note that at the time of writing this post, only four books have been released in what is expected to be a seven-book series. Also note that there are some spoilers towards the end of this post, which I've indicated with a rather prominent warning.) One of the unique...
I am not a fan of the vampire craze in today's media, because I think that vampires are being horribly misused. Being bitten by a vampire should be a very bad thing, not simply the means by which one gets a fun superpower. If you want to write about vampires, you can...
"A poem needs understanding through the senses. The point of diving in the lake is not immediately to swim to the shore, but to be in the lake, to luxuriate in the sensation of water. You do no work the lake out. It is an experience beyond thought. Poetry soothens and...
I'm studying Ivanhoe right now, and I came across some interesting articles about the book and its connection to a real-life trial by combat... in 1817. So I thought I would blog about the details, because though I think it is really interesting it will probably never...
I started a post comparing the writing habits of Anthony Trollope, Charles Dickens, and Ernest Hemingway, but I found that for each writer the most interesting theme about their writing was unique to them. Trollope is a machine. Dickens is concerned primarily with his...
So I got to wondering what would happen if ebook publishers somehow had a bunch of money to make ebooks really awesome (instead of kind of lame, poorly formatted, and with limiting DRMs). What would some of the advantages of ebooks be in an ideal world? Email your...
Back in high school, one of my English teachers gave us "Teddy" by J.D. Salinger to read and then talk about in class, and at the end of the term he put Salinger's "A Perfect Day for Bananafish" on the final exam. (And on a high school English lit final that's just...