Author Archives: JE

Hilary Mantel mulls over myth, death, music and a production of Monteverdi’s Orfeo, mixed up with memories of her ghostlike father and (incongruously) Princess Diana. The myth that Diana-cult makes me think of isn’t so much Orpheus & Eurydice but … Continue reading →

The Weekly World News “the world’s only reliable newspaper” is ceasing publication. It was just like Lucian’s True History with ugly black and white photos. The cool thing about reading The Weekly World News was that you never really knew … Continue reading →

Synchronicity can happen at any time (as someone cleverer than me once said–probably Sting or Harlan Ellison). Yesterday I ran across two Troy-related items on the web. First, Cecil Adams at The Straight Dope gave a fairly accurate rundown of … Continue reading →

This is not a review of Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell. Partly because it doesn’t make sense to review a bestselling, prize-winning novel from three years ago. From thirty years ago, yes, or three hundred (if they were giving prizes … Continue reading →

Herbert West–Reanimator: the Musical! On reflection, it doesn’t seem as weird as the Lord of the Rings musical which is actually running now.

There’s a recent interview with Michael Chabon (the recent target of Ruth Frank’s condescension) online at the Onion AV Club. I still haven’t read The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, but I did pick up one of his earlier books, The Final … Continue reading →

It may be a nonce-word but the best new vocab I’ve seen lately is “terror clown,” coined to describe the recent less-than-professional outings of the ideological wing of SPECTRE in the UK. Clearly, this is no time for complacency, but … Continue reading →

Happy Fourth of July to those who care about that sort of thing. I decided to post this video rather than other more spectacular ones I ran across at YouTube (Hendrix at Woodstock, Ray Charles at the Bicentennial, etc.) because … Continue reading →

Was Ted Sturgeon up to eight feet tall, or did he just write that way?

When, a month or two ago, I read the following asinine remark in Ruth Franklin’s review of Michael Chabon’s new novel Michael Chabon has spent considerable energy trying to drag the decaying corpse of genre fiction out of the shallow … Continue reading →