Margaret Atwood Talks Modernity and Zombies

The title says it all. Care of The Hour's YouTube channel. This is just plain awesome. The english-lit-major and zombie-genre-loving parts of me are squealing with collective delight. Squee-ing, even. It's a good day.

Lessons in (il)Literacy: Ayn Rand

This post is the first in what I cynically expect hope will become a series of my favourite bad quotes in literature/academic writing. I have a few examples ready to go but hopefully I'll find more as I go along. Basically the idea is just to share the best examples of terrible writing by widely liked respected known authors. To start things off with a bang, I want to share an old favourite quote from Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged.

Slight disclaimer: I haven't actually read Atlas Shrugged in its entirety. I tried to get through it just to experience the batshit-crazy curious objectivist philosophy, mostly because my interest had been piqued by the game Bioshock. However, about 80 pages into the "timeless" classic I put the book down in disgust, partially at the politics but more so at the writing. It was just so... I'm not sure what the right word for it is. Pathetic, disgusting, amateur, horrendous, these are all words that come to mind, but none of them seem quite right. I'll just let the quote below speak to the general quality of the prose. It's always stood out to me as one of the most simultaneously painful and hilarious few sentences I've ever read, so hopefully you can get some sort of kick out of it too.

Eddie Willers shook his head, as the screech of a -rusty mechanism changing a traffic light stopped him on the edge of a curb. He felt anger at himself. There was no reason that he had to remember the oak tree tonight. It meant nothing to him any longer, only a faint tinge of sadness—and somewhere within him, a drop of pain moving briefly and vanishing, like a raindrop on the glass of a window, its course in the shape of a question mark.

R.I.P. Anne McCaffrey

I just learned from Topless Robot that Anne McCaffrey has passed away. The author of over a hundred books, McCaffrey will be sorely missed by fans of science-fiction and fantasy.

Anne McCaffrey, 1926-2011

McCaffrey leaves a wonderful legacy behind and hopefully her works will continue to be enjoyed for years to come. The Dragonriders of Pern series was particularly important to me when I was growing up and so I was sad to hear the news. If you're at all interest in sci-fi/fantasy then I strongly recommend picking up either Dragonflight or Dragonsong and letting yourself get lost in Pern.








PS: It might be wrong/insensitive to say this right now, but I don't see myself getting another opportunity: the photo of Anne McCaffrey on her Wikipedia page is the worst photo I have ever seen of a person, ever. Like, wow. So unfortunate.

James Joyce's Incredibly Dirty Love Letters

I was perusing the Hark! A Vagrant archives this morning, as I am wont to do, when I came across an old favourite:

As this comic points out, the famed erotic letters James Joyce sent to his wife Nora are among the most hilarious and depraved pieces of writing ever conceived. Joyce uses his considerable literary talent to verbally assault himself and his "little frigging mistress," and describes how he wants to "fuck fuck fuck fuck my naughty little hot fuckbird's cunt for ever." It's all very lewd and personal but since both parties are long dead we are free to chuckle at their private correspondences.

Or so I thought. When I was first told about these letters in 2008 they were widely available online, but when I tried to search for them this morning they seemed to have all but disappeared. Perhaps the Joyce estate has deemed the letters detrimental to the great author's legacy and had them taken down. Perhaps I was merely looking in the wrong places. Eventually I was able to find them here, but the nature of the link fails to inspire confidence in its long-term reliability. As such I am including the text here in full for the sake of posterity.

I should warn you again that the letters are extremely graphic and Not Safe For Work by any standards. Also, for those of you with high moral standards, it should go without saying that once you have read these documents you will never be able to un-read them, and the perverted ghost of James Joyce may haunt you as in the comic above. That said, you can find them after the break.

The problem with zombies in this day and age

I'm going to start out this rant with a Roger Ebert-style disclaimer: I never made it past page sixteen of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. With that out of the way, let me begin by talking about how bad the book is, and what that means.