Ouch!

https://hyperborea.org/reviews/books/old-iron-dream/

#review #SF #ScienceFiction #books #LitCrit

Finished clearing out these shelves. Found a VHS tape of a short movie "Lemming Aid" from maybe 30 years ago, which iirc is a 🤣 comedy of misplaced and performative dogooding. And I wonder:

#LitCrit people of the Fediverse -- if a #drama is a story in which people change, and a #melodrama is a story in which people don't really change but end up where they started, what do you call a story in which people swap characteristics so the sum total is the same but everyone has in fact changed? 🤔

"We know the characters by their swearing." Michael Adams on Mick Herron's Slough House novels. New on the Strong Language blog:
https://stronglang.wordpress.com/2025/07/09/espionage-novels-that-give-a-fuck-about-profanity/

#swearing #books #SpyFiction #espionage #profanity #LiteraryCriticism #LitCrit #StrongLanguage #fiction

Anna Karenina

I just got to the part where Varenka is mushroom picking, and catches the eye of an older bachelor, Levin's brother.

Funniest scene so far. Tolstoy has it all. It's hard to believe he is just a few decades after Dickens.

Koznyshev and Varenka are walking farther and farther from the crowd, and more and more by themselves, and are rehearsing how to propose for marriage... and Koznyshev suddenly asks a question about mushrooms. It shatters the mood and they return to the group. I say funny but it's intensely cringey, that kind of funny.

The scene is forshadowed by a blade of dry grass that, as a developing mushroom tried to grow forward, split the mushroom, from one to two. Whooaaaaa.. Ha ha ha. Great chapter. #tolstoy #lit #LitCrit #russianLosses

https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/anna-karenina/varenka.html

An unexpectedly interesting compare and contrast: Samuel Johnson & David Foster Wallace.

They go a little hard on Wallace for having committed suicide, but it is a Divinity school podcast after all so... not surprising and there is a valid insight there: Going easy on yourself means going easy on others, compassion is born of faith, hope and charity. How to makes such old platitudes fresh again though? Satire, for starters. See also: Sun Ra, Devo, The Residents.

Ministry of Ideas: Genealogies of Modernity Episode 8: The Enemy of Morality Is Not Modernity, It’s Me.
https://www.ministryofideas.org/enemy-of-morality

#DavidFosterWallace #SamuelJohnson #MinistryOfIdeas #FaithHopeCharity #Satire #LitCrit

Ah, shit. RIP Fredric Jameson.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/23/books/fredric-jameson-dead.html

I did not usually agree with him—as a postgrad, one of my professors jokingly called me a “postmodern hardliner”—but still surprisingly often. He was eloquent and insightful and often brilliant. It was always a pleasure to read him, and think really hard about what he had to say. He will be missed.

#literature #litcrit