Tip of the Quill: A Journal

Category Archives: Books

A beautiful pain: Criterion Collection sale.

I would be remiss if I didn’t point out to all my media-loving friends out there the buy one get one free sale currently going on over at DeepDiscount.com. My picks: Box Sets Monsters and Madmen (4 films) Olivier’s Shakespeare (3 films) Akira Kurosawa Sanjuro Seven Samurai Frederico Fellini La Strada 8 1/2 Ingmar Bergman […]

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On Heart of Darkness and Apocalypse Now.

This weekend I’ve been continuing some old quests: regular readers will know that I’ve been working my way through the AFI’s top 122 movies list (the result of combining the Institute’s original top 100 list and its revised top 100 list – 22 movies were added the second time around). As of this writing I’m […]

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On Maps and Legends.

This morning I finished reading Michael Chabon’s new collection of essays Maps and Legends (2008, McSweeney’s Books). I knew that I enjoyed Chabon’s work from the few essays and chapters of his I’ve read already, but this one really knocked it out of the park. An embarrassed confession: I have yet to finish reading The […]

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A magnificent deskful of guilty pleasures.

So. Earlier this week I did something perhaps I shouldn’t have done, and right now I’m doing something else I shouldn’t be doing by taking a break at my dayjob to blog, but right now I think the head of the lab and I are the only two people left in the lab (today being […]

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RIP Norman Mailer.

Awww. Norman Mailer passed away today. He was 84.

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Yeats on folktales.

I find it largely depressing that W.B. Yeats was bemoaning the acceleration of culture back in the 19th century: These folk-tales are full of simplicity and musical occurrences, for they are the literature of a class for whom every incident in the old rut of birth, love, pain, and death has cropped up unchanged for […]

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Kurt Vonnegut, 1922-2007.

Damn it. Kurt Vonnegut passed away this evening. I wish I had the time to write a proper memorium here, reminiscing about how much I enjoyed his writing when I was in high school and college. For now, though, I’ll simply say that I can’t believe that he’s gone. Damn. The New York Times piece […]

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