The other reason — besides Goya Day — that May 8th is one of my favorite days is that it is the birthday of my favorite author, Thomas Pynchon, who is — unbelievably — 71 years old today. Somehow I can’t picture him as that old. Maybe because the only image I and most of […]

That’s about the only explanation I have for no posts in April (until now). Even now I shouldn’t be fiddling on the web while I have several chapters to read for my next class session. We’re reading Ian Condry’s book Hip-Hop Japan this week; had fun with it in class today as we talked about […]

This is weird. Not more than two days ago I mentioned the cultural criticism journal The Baffler to Sara when she asked who Thomas Frank is (whose name I mentioned in conjunction with his book What’s the Matter with Kansas?). Frank founded The Baffler in 1988 in Chicago while I was a grad student there. […]

I will be reading another novel soon: Thomas Pynchon’s long-awaited latest, Against the Day, is officially out and my pre-ordered copy from Amazon will arrive in a week or so. It is listed as coming in at 1120 pages, just how I like ‘em. Amazon has posted a description signed by the author himself. Here […]

You know you’ve made it as an (academic) author when your work is cited in a Yahoo Discussion Group dealing with Japan-related role-playing games (RPG):

I actually find this citation to be the most gratifying of them all.

If you are a fan of profanity, history, popular culture, and etymology, then you must read the Wikipedia entry on the word “fuck.” It’s actually very interesting and is one of the longer, more involved entries. I had occasion to look it up because in the book I’m using in my Popular Culture in Early […]

Glaswegians hosted — again — the World Science Fiction Convention this past August. The poster for it was pretty cool (you can get a big PDF version of it here). While there are a good number of British sci-fi authors, I don’t usually associate Scottish people with science fiction. Rather, I think of kilts, Mike […]

I have good excuses now for not reading nearly as many books as I intended so far this year. Of course, the first excuse is that I’m a slow reader. The second is that I was reading Cryptonomicon, which is a zillion pages long. And finally, the really really good reason is because I’ve been […]