Elevator Boy, Where Are You Hiding?
Jul 13My favourite part of Franz Kafka’s Amerika is the (dare I say Kafkaesque?) sequence in which the protagonist is fired from his job as an elevator boy; it’s a classic illustration of the impossibility of upward communication in authoritarian hierachies. (I recently reread it for a paper I’m writing on Othello, William Godwin, and the [...]
Who Said This
Jul 12I don’t like the military, but I have so many friends in it. I say I do not kill, but then I exterminate thousands. Easy question: who said this? Harder question: in what episode?
Space Bat
Jul 12Cool looking poster for the next Batman film, The Dark Knight Rises: (CHT AICN.) Click for enhanced magnitude.
Ayn Rand in the Land of the Dinosaurs
Jul 11Now that we know that the young Ayn Rand was a fan of Arthur Conan Doyle’s dinosaur novel The Lost World and used to play at being one of the pterodactyls from the book, it’s easy to see the likely influence on the following passage about Kira’s childhood from We the Living: The Argounov summer [...]
How the U.S. Military Protects Our Freedom
Jul 10Science fiction and mystery author Philip Wylie sounds, from his Wikipedia page, like an interesting guy. His stories and novels (When Worlds Collide is the best known, and the only one I’ve read) have been credited with inspiring some of popular entertainment’s most famous characters – Superman, Flash Gordon, Doc Savage, and Travis McGee. He’s [...]
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