There’s a post about two million years old human fossils that were discovered over the past twenty years in Wushan County in Chongqing municipality in China over on Remote Central.
Archive for November 18th, 2007
Wushan Man
Sunday, November 18th, 2007The Lost Books of The Odyssey
Sunday, November 18th, 2007Stumbled across an interesting review of a book called The Lost Books of The Odyssey: A Novel by Zachary Mason on Starcherone Books that looks pretty good. It’s not out until March of 2008 though. There is more on it on the Stacherone blog. And the author is no workshop hack:
Zachary Mason is a computer scientist specializing in artificial intelligence. He got his B.S. at Harvey Mudd and his Ph.D. at Brandeis. He works for a Silicon Valley start-up. In recent months he has had short stories accepted by Pleiades and The Journal of Literary Imagination. This is his first novel. He is currently working on another novel about the mythology and culture of AI’s
It’s lazy on my part, but i’m thinking of Kadare’s The File on H if written by an unholy hybrid of Richard Powers and Enrique Vila-Matas.
mystic demonism trumps marriage, sex, and social upheavals
Sunday, November 18th, 2007Interview with Orhan Pamuk. Am I an idiot for being more interested in this novel than Museum of Innocence?
Pamuk: Yes, I have an unfinished novel, which is 25 years old, a Dostoyevskian political novel, in which radical leftist thought is melded with mystic demonism. But when we had our military coup in 1980 it became impossible to publish that novel. It was at that point in time I realized, not without shock, that some of my old Marxist friends were being tempted by radical Islam and its anti-Western logorrhea.
The continuing march towards social consciousness is not a complete turnoff though. Pamuk has yet to disappoint.
long knives for Eco
Sunday, November 18th, 2007A review of Umberto Eco’s On Ugliness on the Village Voice. It seems the reviewer judges it to be a lesser work, born of prior research. He also declares it to be Eurocentric, which is a bit obvious, in that this is Umberto Eco here. Why on earth would we expect him to start writing about Africa and Japan at this age?
Admittedly, i don’t expect much from this book. It’s essays from Eco. That’s enough for me, so the reviewer’s expectations seem too high.