Upon further reading of Jane Austin’s Emma, I’ve taken to it a bit more than I thought I would. It is quite worthy as literature, although the actual text itself is a bit stuffy – and insufferably long-winded. But it does avail itself to insight on perspective. Specifically, it reaches deep into the psyche of [...]

Good Novels Don’t Have To Be Hard Work But let’s look back for a second at where the Modernists came from, and what exactly they did with the novel. They drew a tough hand, historically speaking. All the bad news of the modern era had just arrived more or less at the same time: mass [...]

Lord Byron’s Great Insight: Mad, bad, and dangerous, he understood what women wanted. It is easy to see Byron as a cad, a narcissist and, at bottom, a misogynist. But that would be unfair. Byron’s great insight, in an era where women were expected to be placid and insipid (not that they were!), was to [...]

Recommended: Where There Is No Doctor The book can be viewed by chapter or downloaded for free here, and if one finds it useful enough it is also available for purchase in print on the same page. Don’t be put off by it’s apparent lack of “sophistication”, it’s village medicine orientation, or it’s occasional foray [...]

I just saw this great post on Synchronium about Sam Harris. It’s basically an excerpt from his book The End of Faith, which looks wonderful. Especially if you take moral judgments to have only a single root, and that being emotion – not reason or rationale. (Which isn’t to say some of it isn’t logical [...]

Are We Recording? Hit Record.: I can see excellent reasons for allowing drug experiences to unfold as ephemera. I get it. I really do. But when it comes down to it we need more data, damn it, and I feel like I have a duty to the community to gather as much information as I [...]

I never bothered to point out that Discharge 5 started up some time ago. Really good stuff from these cats. I was kind of sad to see the end of Discharge 4 (except, you know, I never really did like much of cocainejesus’ art. just sayin’). I will be getting the chapbook if I can [...]

… For and Acted Upon Through Diversions might be the most singularly relaxing album I’ve listened to in quite some time. Venice Is Drowning’s Azar comes close (although it does have vocals). Both are complex and not entirely “soft” (although neither goes batshit punk-rock hard either). I’ve also been jamming out to Black Moth Super [...]

Kid finds To Kill A Mockingbird offensive because the characters use historically and contextually accurate language. Ok, so the book is chock-full of niggers, but it’s widely known to be anti-racist and used in school curriculum for that very reason. This is in England, but the same argument comes up in America regularly. Nobody in [...]

A review of Brevity at Luna Park: Brevity, the online journal of “extremely brief” creative nonfiction, was first published in 1997. The journal accepts and publishes works of less than 750 words; a heartbeat on the page. Brevity proves that the stunted narrative is better suited for literary fact, not fiction. While many criticisms of [...]