Skip to main content

The Roller-coaster

I was told today that some excerpts of my review of Chris F. Holm's The Wrong Goodbye made the front page of the Angry Robot "Robot Round-up." If you're checking out my blog from that link, welcome! Make yourself at home! If you're not, then please check out Angry Robot Books and look at their fine selection of genre novels including the excellent first and second volume of the "Collector" series written by the talented crime noir writer Chris F. Holm.

I've felt I've been silent for the past month on this blog mostly because it's hard to talk when you're holding your breath. This election has got me wound up. I can't even watch the news any more. I can't listen to the radio. I have to be careful what websites I go to. I am a mess.

I guess I had gotten so used to the polls not making sense for Obama that I had assumed that the polls didn't need to make sense. Sure the economy is bad and will be bad for the conceivable future. Sure a solid half of the country hates the President with rabid foam-flecked ferocity. Sure the equivalent of the GDPs of small nations have been marshaled to defame and attack Obama. But, for September at least, what was up didn't seem to need to come down.

Gravity has a funny way of announcing itself.

Still, the RCP poll average nosed into positive territory for Obama for the first time in nearly three weeks today so maybe the second debate was a game-changer. I think, in all honesty, it merely stopped the bleeding. My sense is that this thing will be very, very close.

In other news, I put my name in a few hats for panels at 2013 Arisia, including a panel with my friend David Nuremberg on the Future of Schools. I am literally counting the days until the doors open.


Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Reading Response to "A Good Man is Hard to Find."

Reader Response to “A Good Man is Hard to Find” Morgan Crooks I once heard Flannery O’Connor’s work introduced as a project to describe a world denied God’s grace. This critic of O’Connor’s work meant the Christian idea that a person’s misdeeds, mistakes, and sins could be sponged away by the power of Jesus’ sacrifice at Crucifixion. The setting of her stories often seem to be monstrous distortions of the real world. These are stories where con men steal prosthetic limbs, hired labor abandons mute brides in rest stops, and bizarre, often disastrous advice is imparted.  O’Connor herself said of this reputation for writing ‘grotesque’ stories that ‘anything that comes out of the South is going to be called grotesque by the northern reader, unless it is grotesque, in which case it is going to be called realistic.’ This is both a witty observation and a piece of advice while reading O’Connor’s work. These are stories about pain and lies and ugliness. The brutality that ha...

Death's End by Liu Cixin

Having recently finished the last book in Liu Cixin's instant classic "The Remembrance of Earth's Past" series, Death's End, I can only report a feeling of total amazement and awe. There is so much about this novel that blew my mind, that offered different and better ways of viewing the universe. This novel did what I wish more novels would, serve up a new universe entire, evoking beauty and horror, nobility and disgust, in a timeless monument to unfettered speculation.  Obviously, in discussing the events of the last of a trilogy books, spoilers are to be expected. I am, however, going to try to avoid discussing much beyond the first 100 pages of the third novel. I read the translation of this novel, as ushered into being by the amazing talent of Ken Liu. Ken has written of a certain prickliness when it comes to translating work. He makes an effort not to anglicize the source material, not smudging away the occasional difficulties in bringing Cixin...

With the title World War Z

Early on in the mostly disappointing zombie epidemic thriller World War Z, UN Investigator Gerry Lane (Brad Pitt) hides out in a Newark apartment, trying to convince a family living there to flee with him from the hordes of sprinting, chomping maniacs infesting the city. The phrase he uses, drawing from years of experience in the world's troubled war-zones is "movement is life." Ultimately he's unsuccessful, the family barricades their door behind him and they join the ever-swelling ranks of the undead. As far as a guiding philosophy goes for a pop-action thriller like World War Z, 'movement is life,' isn't bad. And for the first half of the movie or so, it follows its own advice. Similar to other recent zombie movies (Dawn of the Dead, Shaun of the Dead) the warning signs of what the rest of the movie will bring are subtle and buried until all hell is ready to break through. The television mentions 'martial law,' Philadelphia traffic snarl...