April 2013
1 post
“Like a disease that gradually but inexorably blossoms into a pandemic,...”
– Pitch Battles by Colin Dickey (via bestsimiles)
March 2013
1 post
Radar LARB
lareviewofbooks:
What is the Business of Literature? by Richard Nash
One of Us: how humans have thought about animal consciousness by John Jeremiah Sullivan
The Addicted Life of Thomas de Quincey by Colin Dickey
Chinua Achebe and the Damnation of Faint Praise by Aaron Bady
Related: Chinua Achebe: The Art of Fiction No. 139
How Things Fell Apart by Chinua Achebe (2012)
...
December 2012
6 posts
One Book Opens Another
Alchemy runs alongside the traditional narrative of Western thought like a shadow. Long ignored, often discredited as pseudoscience, it has nonetheless had important effects on the cultures of Europe and the Middle East for the past two thousand (or more) years. It’s always been a hermetic field of inquiry, sealed off from mainstream intellectual pursuits, but its traces linger. The phrase...
November 2012
1 post
Unbridled Books: A writer is not a camera →
unbridledbooks:
As we’ve been doing all month long, we posed the question, “What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever given or received?” to one of our Unbridled authors, Colin Dickey. His best advice? Well, as often happens with Colin…he’s completely spun convention on its head… .
“The worst…
October 2012
3 posts
“For all its erudition and analysis, The Golden Bough has for more than a century...”
– Colin Dickey, from the most recent Lapham’s Quarterly.
When I first read this I was like oh snap. This is a question I have been mulling over all summer. One I’ve been writing about too. I am glad, in a way, I didn’t stumble on this until after I had finished what I did write, but its disconcerting...
Vampyroteuthis Infernalis
Ask not what you can do for the vampire squid from hell. Ask what the vampire squid from hell can do for you.
September 2012
1 post
August 2012
2 posts
No Success Like Failure
ON MAY 8, 1842, A TRAIN loaded with passengers from Versailles to Paris in the wake of a birthday celebration for King Louis Philippe derailed unexpectedly, crushing passengers in a horrific accident that killed over fifty people — one of the earliest mass casualty train wrecks. During the investigation into the crash, experts determined that a front axle had suddenly fractured, though there was...
: Jonah Lehrer and the Lifespan of a Quote →
lareviewofbooks:
Jonah Lehrer admitted to fabricating Bob Dylan quotes for his book Imagine, and then lying to a reporter about it. Today Lehrer resigned from his position as a staff writer at The New Yorker and the publisher has halted all sales of his book. The situation once again brings up the question…
July 2012
10 posts
“This brings me to my last recommendation: The Afterlives of the Saints by Colin...”
– Liberty Hardy of The Well-Readheads (via unbridledbooks)
Book Notes for Afterlives of the Saints, at Large...
“One of the goals with this book was to rethink just what a “saint” was, and how saints have appeared in surprising ways throughout Western culture—the way that Madame Bovary, for example, was written out of a failed attempt to write what Flaubert considered his true masterpiece, The Temptation of St. Anthony, or how Saint Teresa of Avila’s ecstatic visions have, through...
King & I: Growing Up Reading Stephen King
MY MOST FORMATIVE childhood experience involved Stephen King, and in particular my dread fear of his book The Shining. I was four or five years old, I think, though it may have been earlier. I had never read the novel, nor seen the movie; I was terrified of the book itself, the physical object. My father had this bright, taxicab-yellow paperback, a movie tie-in edition with a few glossy stills...
On Phrenological Insults
“On June 26, the Los Angeles–based artist Colin Dickey told me that the slope on the sides of my skull indicated that I was prone to failure, which would explain why I was an art writer and not an artist. It is safe to say that I will not be endorsing any revival of phrenology Dickey may spearhead in the near future.”
From a review of Machine Project & Southern Exposure’s...
June 2012
1 post
"Crying in Public": Lindsay Reckson reviews... →
“Colin Dickey’s Afterlives of Saints: Stories from the Ends of Faith offers what to most of us will be an unfamiliar (and thus seductive) litany. These are not the standard, well-behaved saints, the Johns, Jameses, and Josephs. They are instead, as Dickey notes, the miscreants: ‘saints who murder, saints who [gouge] out their own eyes and hold them out for inspection, saints who...
May 2012
1 post
Silver Lake Jubilee
This Sunday, May 27, I’ll be reading on behalf of the LA Review of Books, with Lisa Jane Persky & Gabrielle Calvocoressi at the Silver Lake Jubilee, at noon on the lit stage.
More info on Silver Lake Jubilee here.
Come on out!
April 2012
1 post
