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The Art of Dying
Somtow Sucharitkul. Starship & Haiku. This isn’t how it should be! she thought. Each death should be a moment of supreme individuality, a moment before the dew drop joins the ocean Notwithstanding the odd notion of a dew drop directly … Continue reading
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Courteous memory and friendship
One theme that pervades Anne McCaffrey’s Killashandra is the occupational hazard of forgetfulness. It is directly linked to politeness. “[…] I can’t help it if singers lose their memories . . . and every shred of common courtesy.” “I’ll program … Continue reading
UHF
A prolonged meditation on various psychic states is what marks the short story by Brian Vickers entitled “The Coded Sun Game” and published in Quark 3 edited by Samuel Delany and Marilyn Hacker. The piece reads in part like a … Continue reading
Time Machine Brain: dancing dendrites
Paul Bouissac in “Three Mini-reviews: Focus on the Brain” quotes from Donald Pfaff Brain Arousal and Information Theory: Neural and Genetic Mechanisms Brains are foretelling devices and their predictive powers emerge from the various rhythms they perpetually generate. At the … Continue reading
The Way of Economy
Anne McCaffrey Crystal Singer embeds an intriguing aphorism in a passage reflecting upon the awakening of the protagonist, Killashandra, to her chosen craft and profession. That was ever the way of technology: to take the worthless and convert it into … Continue reading
inno’va-tion
Signed “James Downey”, the introduction to inno’va-tion: Essays by Leading Canadian Researchers contains an apt description of the ingredients of the research process While researchers may use highly sophisticated machines, they themselves are subject to the same vagaries of chance … Continue reading
The Ends of Names
Mosquito by Gayl Jones ends with a signature that displays the names of the narrator protagonist: Sojourner Nadine Jane Nzingha Johnson. The first chapter of The General in His Labyrinth by Gabreil Garcia Marquez translated by Edith Grossman ends with … Continue reading
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Re-purposing
Alan Fletcher in The Art of Looking Sideways reproduces Erotic Surrealist Handsigns. One discovers a clever juxtaposition of a chart of the handsigns from the deaf alphabet and associated with each of these letters a word. For example, “U” stands … Continue reading
Broken on Purpose
The chapter on “Perfection” in David Weinberger Small Pieces Loosely Joined No, we don’t think we’re perfect, but we think it’s just a matter of time before progress will protect us from every random misfortune to which our flesh is … Continue reading
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Delight and Contemplation
Virginia Woolf’s biography of Roger Fry of course quotes the painter and critic himself. “One thing I can say for myself,” he wrote. “There are no pangs of jealousy or envy when I see someone else doing good work. It … Continue reading