This is somewhat shorter than my normal book round-ups. Normally, I would let this sit until it was a bit more full, but it’s finals week and I don’t have the brain power to really dive into something else.
Read More
Now, I’ve had a lot of thoughts on genre fiction in the past, and this list is going to be more useful for people interested in writing a secondary world story, with a particular (but not exclusive) eye towards fantasy fiction. As a result of a number of factors, there are going to be several works that I often make use of in my political thoughts, but this list isn’t primarily or solely focused on that.
Read More
My students, when they arrive, think they have mastered writing. They confidently hand in a paper with five paragraphs on it, and act confused when I tell them to change it. These students might as well have shown me five trees of the same kind planted in a perfectly ordered row on a lawn cleared of everything but those trees and the grass, and ask me to evaluate their forest.
Read More
Play – as Huizinga defines it above – is ultimately generative. It creates an order that would not otherwise come into being: in the middle of the twentieth century we see a narrowing of horizons. They are not so much being allowed to play as they are being encouraged to engage in what might be called a kind of “socratic” play. The doll or the model car has a specific way that the user is encouraged to engage with it in, and to do otherwise is a kind of perversion.
Read More
The semester is coming to an end, and I’ve spent a lot of time going to and from campuses — which gives me a lot of time to listen to audio. A lot of these were audio books, but there are a few print novels as well.
Read More