“Because the day nourishes dry dreams and wounds your angelical being, you will set off in search of night. . . .” – Jaime Sáenz Reading is a peculiar [...]
” The stories we tell about reading need to bound a potentially unending process of interpretation and imagination, even when we do not complete a reading. Or, come to [...]
Everyone has their quirks and habits as a reader, and one of mine is that I dislike not finishing a story. Many readers share this predilection; the reasons vary, from a [...]
“Critics seem to find it necessary, at least once in a career, to write a statement defending criticism per se.” – Joanna Russ. “By its function, [criticism] [...]
Last week I ended my column by stating that “[w]e need to draw deeper not just from those other wells [of inspiration], but from [our] own, understand our own depths [...]
“I went to the river but the river was dry I fell to my knees and I looked to the sky I looked to the sky and the spring rain fell I saw the water from a deeper [...]
“The fundamental idea underlying kingship is the separation of one human being from others. Being set apart is the very crux of the institution. The ways in which this [...]
I am still chewing on the tasty gristle of last week’s Mind Meld on monarchism in fantasy fiction. I can’t get the subject out of my mind, to the point where I [...]
REVIEW SUMMARY: A gathering of potent word-rituals MY RATING: BRIEF SYNOPSIS: A revised collection of Ligotti’s stories, both the old and new material probe baroque [...]
At last weekend’s Readercon 23 I led a panel on the subject of writing culture in fantastic fiction. This is the description from the program: In a 2011 blog [...]
“Not only does the imaginative consciousness allow us to transcend (depasser) the immediacy of the present instant in order to grasp a future that is at first [...]
I am heading to Readercon this Thursday, 12 July, and I am very happy to be a participant for the first time. It is going to be a very different experience and one that I [...]
“In metaphorical terms, one could say that the processes essential to the reading mind are not mechanical or computational, but more oceanic, that is, dynamic, fluvial and [...]
“For the future to be interesting your desires, or your fears, must have a home there.” – Tom Disch, from On Wings of Song On the SF Signal Podcast this [...]
“[J]etpacks and flying cars symbolize the gap between our imagination and our ability to impose our imagination upon our world.” – from You Call This The [...]
“Fortunately somewhere between chance and mystery lies imagination, the only thing that protects our freedom, despite the fact that people keep trying to reduce it or [...]
“”[R]eaders care not a whit about cover design or even good writing, and have no attachment at all to the book as object. Like addicts, they just want their fix [...]
“ESCAPISM: The desire to retreat into imaginative entertainment rather than deal with the stress, tedium, and daily problems of the mundane world.” – (via [...]
“All writing depends on the generosity of the reader.” – Alberto Manguel I have a lot of ideas rattling around in my head this week, so I thought that I [...]