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 [...]

Well, I’m trying to get back into research and writing by revising an article I submitted to the Journal of Asian Studies, which got slammed by a reviewer. I’m being forced to “engage in the literature of war memory.” I’ve read plenty of that stuff and, frankly, don’t feel the need to jump through loops [...]

Thanks to my occasional reading of Caterina.net (Caterina is a Flickr Worker and self-proclaimed “book freak” from Vancouver, Canada who has quite a fan base thanks to her charm and intelligence), I have finally come across the buzz about Amazon’s latest addition: Statistically Improbable Phrases (SIP). Basically, these are phrases that distinguish one book from [...]

I nabbed this item from Taegan Goddard’s Political Wire, which I read regularly, so I claim no credit. It’s about Princeton professor Harry Frankfurt’s book On Bullshit, which I read about a while back:
“Bullshitters seek to convey a certain impression of themselves without being concerned about whether anything at all is true. They quietly change [...]