Wednesday, March 5, 2014
Tuesday, March 4, 2014
Friday, February 21, 2014
The Beauty of the Clause
By the way, not that you asked, but it has become my (recent) goal to
write sentences with multiple clauses, which total about 5
words per clause, plus or minus 2 words, regardless of topic.
Wednesday, February 19, 2014
Sunday, February 16, 2014
Sayulita - Caliente!
Ummm, noisy beaches and soothing guitars. Cold beer and warm breezes. Spicy dinner scents and candlelight. Welcome to the Sayulita of my mind...
Monday, January 13, 2014
Exactly
"I can understand that people want to feel special and important and so
on, but that self-obsession seems a bit pathetic somehow. Not being able
to accept that you're just this collection of cells, intelligent to
whatever degree, capable of feeling emotion to whatever degree, for a
limited amount of time and so on, on this tiny little rock orbiting this
not particularly important sun in one of just 400m galaxies, and
whatever other levels of reality there might be via something like
brane-theory [of multiple dimensions] … really, it's not about you. It's
what religion does with this drive for acknowledgement of
self-importance that really gets up my nose. 'Yeah, yeah, your
individual consciousness is so important to the universe that it must be
preserved at all costs' – oh, please. Do try to get a grip of something
other than your self-obsession. How Californian. The idea that at all
costs, no matter what, it always has to be all about you. Well, I think
not."
As we walk to the door, Banks pulls one final, left-field surprise. "Do you know that I know what caused the cancer?" I think I pull a face like Macaulay Culkin in Home Alone. "Cosmic ray," he says. "I won't brook any contradiction; it was a high-energy particle. A star exploded hundreds or thousands of years ago and ever since there's been a cosmic ray – a bad-magic bullet with my name on it, to quote Ken – heading towards the moment where it hit one of my cells and mutated it. That's an SF author's way to bow out; none of this banal transcription error stuff." Then the moment comes that I was dreading … but he says "See you soon" instead.
Iain Banks
As we walk to the door, Banks pulls one final, left-field surprise. "Do you know that I know what caused the cancer?" I think I pull a face like Macaulay Culkin in Home Alone. "Cosmic ray," he says. "I won't brook any contradiction; it was a high-energy particle. A star exploded hundreds or thousands of years ago and ever since there's been a cosmic ray – a bad-magic bullet with my name on it, to quote Ken – heading towards the moment where it hit one of my cells and mutated it. That's an SF author's way to bow out; none of this banal transcription error stuff." Then the moment comes that I was dreading … but he says "See you soon" instead.
Iain Banks
Sunday, December 22, 2013
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