After reading Half-Blood Prince, I was wondering if the word “Horcrux” had any previous etymology, and looked it up on Wikipedia.
Only to discover that it really doesn’t… but that amazingly, less than 24 hours after the release of the new Harry Potter book, there’s a whole entry on the term on Wikipedia. Yet another very cool example of how amazing this site is.
Don’t read it, though, if you don’t want the plot spoiled! Just sayin’
Horcrux – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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Another UNCG MFA alum, Kelly Link, is connected to all the cool kids. At least, the ones who I think are cool.
And she’s even cool enough to make her book Stranger Things Happen into a Creative Commons licensed product…
Boing Boing: Kelly Link’s gorgeous short story collection now a CC download
Steve Almond is a guy I knew in my MFA Program. He’s (I think) the single most published writer from our little graduating class of ten or so people. Like, he’s an actual writer, making a living as a writer (and teaching).
Anyway, this interview he did with pre-teen-ish girl band Smoosh is fun: The Believer – Interview With Smoosh … Steve seems to keep getting published in all the truly cool places.
You can read more about Steve at bbchow.com. And I can definitely recommend his book My Life in Heavy Metal … I’d recommend the others too, but I haven’t read them yet. I’m far behind. But what the heck, read them too, I’m sure they’re awesome.
My daughter and I listened to Hitchhiker’s Guide and some of Restaurant, read by Douglas Adams, on our car trip this week. It made me think a lot about who this guy was and what genius he had at explaining perspective, relative meaning, etc.
In the current climate of “intelligent design” claptrap, I thought this a lovely bit related by Dawkins:
Edge: LAMENT FOR DOUGLAS By Richard Dawkins
To illustrate the vain conceit that the universe must be somehow pre-ordained for us, because we are so well-suited to live in it, he mimed a wonderfully funny imitation of a puddle of water, fitting itself snugly into a depression in the ground, the depression uncannily being exactly the same shape as the puddle. Or there’s this parable, which he told with huge enjoyment, whose moral leaps out with no further explanation. A man didn’t understand how televisions work, and was convinced that there must be lots of little men inside the box. manipulating images at high speed. An engineer explained to him about high frequency modulations of the electromagnetic spectrum, about transmitters and receivers, about amplifiers and cathode ray tubes, about scan lines moving across and down a phosphorescent screen. The man listened to the engineer with careful attention, nodding his head at every step of the argument. At the end he pronounced himself satisfied. He really did now understand how televisions work. “But I expect there are just a few little men in there, aren’t there?â€
Evidently the two book reviews I’ve written for Boxes and Arrows have been rated as “Good” here:
EServer TC Library: Authors: Hinton, Andrew
I never got reviews before!
Even though, really, these are reviews of reviews … which is kind of meta-ish. Fitting, I suppose.
I finished listening to Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell today. I’d gotten the audio book from Audible.com for listening on my trips to NC and couldn’t wait til my drive to finish it. It was, um, about 30 hours of listening. The narrator was terrific, by the way.
It was a very good book, and a special one. But I’ll get into the specialness later. The story and characters are very entertaining, engrossing even, but the specialness is in how the book is crafted.
Click for more, wherein I ramble about the book, but don’t give any spoilers that I know of …
Read the rest of this entry »
What exactly is the Ides of March??
The Believer is a cool magazine, and this is a fun interview… well if you’re entertained by philosophy chatter.
It kinda made me feel like I was in college again.
And I agree… screw Descartes’ “cogito”!!
gladwell dot com / Article Archive
Malcolm Gladwell writes some of the coolest stuff I read. I think I feel that way because his obsessions seem to be so much like my own. Except he actually goes out and finds stuff to write about, while I gladly sit back and benefit from his labors.
Anyway, I went looking for more of his articles and found his official site, with lots of his pieces available for download.
And while there I discovered he has a new book coming out next month called “Blink”. I’m totally jazzed to read this thing. Here’s a bit from the info on his site about it.
Certainly that’s what we’ve always been told. We live in a society dedicated to the idea that we’re always better off gathering as much information and spending as much time as possible in deliberation. As children, this lesson is drummed into us again and again: haste makes waste, look before you leap, stop and think. But I don’t think this is true. There are lots of situations–particularly at times of high pressure and stress–when haste does not make waste, when our snap judgments and first impressions offer a much better means of making sense of the world.
I’ve been pretty preoccupied with work and life, so this is the only post I’ve made in a while. And likely it will be the last before 2005.
So, have joyous holidays (in spite of the fact that they’re holidays), and here’s wishing you a better year in 2005, regardless of how good or bad 2004 was for you.
This is Moleskinerie, a blog dedicated to the proposition that not all notebooks are created equal. Its impeccable provenance notwithstanding this site will talk more about the places and adventures, life’s little dramas and other forgettable events that otherwise would have been lost were it not scrawled between the pages of these little black books.
Imagine my surprise when I heard Bob Edwards on NPR’s Morning Edition today interviewing one of my writing mentors from 10 years ago, Sena Jeter Naslund. NPR : ‘Four Spirits’
She’s a terrific person, and a fine writer, and has several other impressive popular but complex books to her name as well as this new one. Congrats Sena!!!
The horror writer Poppy Z. Brite keeps a journal online… and she finally went apeshit at fans who keep begging her to revisit old ground. She posted this two-paragraph “sequel” to her book Lost Souls: docbrite: OK, OK …
If you’ve read any of the book, it’s funny. Either way though it’s funny. I think so anyway.
About this blog
Welcome to inkblurt, the online home of Andrew Hinton. Read something, drop a comment, or say hello!
BTW I also tweet at @inkblurt.
