I recently stumbled across a post taking shots at Tolkien, quoting George R. R. Martin’s usual grumblings about The Lord of the Rings - no tax policies for Aragorn, evil vanquished too ‘neatly’ when the Ring was destroyed, destiny over realism, and so on. The more I read, the more it irritated me. Tolkien wasn’t … Continue reading The Petty Jealousy of a Pretender: George R. R. Martin vs. Tolkien
Tag: books
The Machine That Would Not Stop
If you want to terrify a modern reader, you needn’t bother with haunted houses, poltergeists, or even climate change. All you need to do is thrust E. M. Forster’s 1909 short story The Machine Stops under their nose and whisper: “This is you. Right now. With your Wi-Fi password tattooed on your soul.” Forster, that … Continue reading The Machine That Would Not Stop
Strangers on a Train
The premise is diabolical in its elegance: two strangers meet, exchange idle talk, and one proposes a pact so grotesque it seems almost a joke. “You do my murder, I’ll do yours.” A child’s logic, but a murderer’s ingenuity. This was Patricia Highsmith’s debut novel in 1950, and like the serpent in Genesis, she slithered … Continue reading Strangers on a Train
Wilde’s Salomé: A Decadent Dance with Death
It’s almost too neat that Salomé should have been written in French. The language of Baudelaire, Mallarmé, and decadence itself lent Wilde the perfect tongue for blasphemy dressed in silks. The Victorians expected their theatre to teach morality, to improve the soul, to extol duty. Wilde offered them instead a necrophilic waltz in candlelight, where … Continue reading Wilde’s Salomé: A Decadent Dance with Death
All Roads Lead Back: On Darwish, Memory, and the Futility of Forgetting
Mahmoud Darwish once wrote: ‘All roads lead to you, even those I took to forget you.’ On first reading, it sounds like the lament of a man caught in the undertow of lost love, circling endlessly back to the figure he most wishes to escape. But linger with it a while, and the line grows … Continue reading All Roads Lead Back: On Darwish, Memory, and the Futility of Forgetting
Wording 