Colin Dickey

"Like a disease that gradually but inexorably blossoms into a pandemic, Alexander’s military band set..."

Tue, 30 Apr 2013 02:21:48 -0400

“Like a disease that gradually but inexorably blossoms into a pandemic, Alexander’s military band set off a craze that would result in various musicians, orchestras, and nations vying for higher and higher tones, with sharper and sharper notes.”

- Pitch Battles by Colin Dickey (via bestsimiles)

Radar LARB

Mon, 25 Mar 2013 20:08:06 -0400

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)

Fair’s Fair: An Interview with Neil Freeman by John Lingan

One Book Opens Another

Fri, 21 Dec 2012 12:02:43 -0500

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 “hermetically sealed,” after all, derives from the “Seal of Hermes,” the nickname for the stopper on the long-necked glass jar used in making the Philosopher’s Stone (the substance that would allow for a direct transmutation of an impure metal like lead into the pure silver or gold). We have alchemists to thank for the French name for a double boiler, the bain-marie (bagno-maria in Italian) — a reference toanother apocryphal alchemist, Maria the Jew, and her method of heating slowly using water — and for the fact that we refer to quicksilver as “mercury.”

Tintype of a guy’s hat. Entitled, “My hat.”

Thu, 20 Dec 2012 12:03:40 -0500

Tintype of a guy’s hat. Entitled, “My hat.”

Mourning tintype.

Wed, 19 Dec 2012 12:02:50 -0500

Mourning tintype.

thenewinquiry: It falls to literature to venture into dark...

Tue, 18 Dec 2012 12:02:49 -0500

thenewinquiry:

It falls to literature to venture into dark spaces on the map, where truth is elusive and historians fail, and to approach the endlessly contradictory landscape of Roger Casement’s inner world and textual life.. For years, the only such attempt was W. B. Yeats’ poem, “The Ghost of Roger Casement.” Yeats had blinked during Casement’s actual trial, refusing to sign the petition for clemency, appears to try to make amends some twenty years after the fact. It’s a strident poem, full of brio. It ends:

I poked about a village church
And found his family tomb
And copied out what I could read
In that religious gloom;
Found many a famous man there;
But fame and virtue rot.
Draw round, beloved and bitter men,
Draw round and raise a shout;

The ghost of Roger Casement
Is beating on the door.

- Colin Dickey, “Dark Pages”

Anti Bleak House, ad run during the first serialization of Bleak...

Mon, 17 Dec 2012 15:58:30 -0500

Anti Bleak House, ad run during the first serialization of Bleak House, 1852.

laphamsquarterly: ROUNDTABLE: A Fire in the Belly Lest one...

Mon, 17 Dec 2012 15:50:32 -0500

laphamsquarterly:

ROUNDTABLE: A Fire in the Belly

Lest one think that the fear of spontaneous human combustion as a result of drink was a fringe phenomenon, one only has to consider the work of the literary greats of the day. Thomas de Quincey confessed to fearing that his addictions might lead to such “anomalous symptoms,” including spontaneous combustion. “Might I not myself take leave of the literary world in that fashion?” he wondered. A drunk explodes in Melville’s Redburn, and Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland also features spontaneous human combustion (though, in a rarity, the victim there is not an alcoholic). And then there is Charles Dickens’ Bleak House, a novel notable not just for being one of the towering masterpieces of Victorian fiction, but because of its thirtieth chapter, in which the minor character—the alcoholic landlord Mr. Krook—spontaneously bursts into flames.”

Colin Dickey on the curious cases of human spontaneous combustion induced by liquor.

Image: Krook spontaneously combusting, from Bleak House. 1853.

Unbridled Books: A writer is not a camera

Tue, 27 Nov 2012 16:49:05 -0500

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…

unbridledbooks: The Onion’s AV Club called it “fascinating” and...

Wed, 24 Oct 2012 10:01:04 -0400

unbridledbooks:

The Onion’s AV Club called it “fascinating” and “at times laugh-out-loud funny”. Wired.com called it “captivating” and “authentic as hell”. We like the way they think—and oh, how we love the cover. It’s The Weekly Read: Cranioklepty: Grave Robbing and the Search for Genius by @colindickey.

"For all its erudition and analysis, The Golden Bough has for more than a century helped cement the..."

Tue, 23 Oct 2012 09:02:58 -0400

“For all its erudition and analysis, The Golden Bough has for more than a century helped cement the idea that magic is inappropriate, wrongheaded thought. Yet what separates magic from religion or science is not its methodology—Frazer himself notes that it ‘is therefore a truism, almost a tautology, to say that all magic is necessarily false and barren; for were it ever to become true and fruitful, it would no longer be magic but science’—it’s that ordinary people can do it, transforming their lives with the ambitious power of everyday thought.”

- 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 to hear the echo. Regardless, this idea, here, is key:

“…what separates magic from religion or science is not its methodology…it’s that ordinary people can do it, transforming their lives with the ambitious power of everyday thought.”

It is a strange, sad sort of thing to believe in the radical possibilities of magic but not magic itself. The ambitious power of ordinary people!

(via mollitudo)

Vampyroteuthis Infernalis

Sun, 21 Oct 2012 16:37:26 -0400

Ask not what you can do for the vampire squid from hell. Ask what the vampire squid from hell can do for you.

bookriot: Author Colin Dickey’s dog had his 15 minutes for...

Fri, 21 Sep 2012 18:46:05 -0400

bookriot:

Author Colin Dickey’s dog had his 15 minutes for Eastwooding. Dickey explains, and talks tree-hugging, life in Santa Cruz, and more with this week’s installment of Their 15 Minutiae.

No Success Like Failure

Tue, 14 Aug 2012 19:36:47 -0400

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 nothing inherently wrong with either its manufacture or its use. It was not the first time this phenomenon had been noted: three years earlier, the French engineer Jean-Victor Poncelet had struggled to describe how certain kinds of metal springs, in theory perfectly sound, could sometimes break without warning. Searching for a word to describe this malfunction, Poncelet wrote that these metal springs were susceptible to “fatigue.” Other engineers soon adopted this term: sometimes metal, like people, just got tired and gave up.

: Jonah Lehrer and the Lifespan of a Quote

Wed, 08 Aug 2012 23:46:51 -0400

: 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…

"This brings me to my last recommendation: The Afterlives of the Saints by Colin Dickey. 1. This is a..."

Fri, 27 Jul 2012 17:40:54 -0400

“This brings me to my last recommendation: The Afterlives of the Saints by Colin Dickey. 1. This is a book about saints. 2. It’s great. And now that we’ve gotten the important part out of the way, I want to tell you that Colin Dickey is so brilliant, it makes my eyes bleed. I try and imagine what the inside of his brain looks like, and all I can see is that scene in Bad Lieutenant when Harvey Keitel smokes crack and takes all his clothes off and cries. What I’m trying to say is Colin talks about things that never even register on most people’s radars. He speaks in a language only dogs can hear. And then translates it for the rest of us. And it’s awesome. I totally would have beaten him up in school for being so smart.”

- Liberty Hardy of The Well-Readheads (via unbridledbooks)

I’ll be reading as part of this on August 14, 7 p.m.,...

Fri, 27 Jul 2012 15:07:23 -0400

I’ll be reading as part of this on August 14, 7 p.m., along with Amanda Yates & Andrew Choate.

Book Notes for Afterlives of the Saints, at Large Hearted Boy

Wed, 25 Jul 2012 16:20:13 -0400

“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 the years, been categorized alternately as nervous hysteria or masturbatory fantasies. Even for those of us who aren’t religious, let alone Catholic, these saints have a weird and endearing impact on our landscape and how we approach the world, and that’s really what I wanted to explore with this book. And so for this playlist, I put together a list of songs about saints that weren’t necessarily religious or devotional, but nonetheless got to some aspect of the way the idea of a “saint” can work in culture.”

More at Large Hearted Boy.

Little Johannes jumped over his bed, Little Johannes arrived on...

Mon, 23 Jul 2012 12:02:02 -0400

Little Johannes jumped over his bed,
Little Johannes arrived on his head.
Oh, what a thump!
Oh, what a bump!
Big as a plum, and nearly as red!

“Call the phrenologist!” somebody said.

The great man came! Oh, wasn’t he wise,
With a pair of blue spectacles over his eyes?

He felt the boy’s head with finger and thumb:
he stopped at the bump, and remarked, “Ha, Hum!”
Oh, wasn’t he wise?
He said that Johannes -if nothing went wrong-
Would likely do something before very long!

And this is the end of my beautiful song.
But, wasn’t he wise?

(From Jack of All Trades, 1900. Text by JJ Bell. Illustrations by C Robinson.)

King & I: Growing Up Reading Stephen King

Mon, 23 Jul 2012 11:23:40 -0400

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 from the Kubrick film in the middle. I remember my older brother asking him one day what it was about, and I remember my father saying something about it being about a family that gets snowed in one winter. But mostly I remember the utter, paralyzing terror that the book caused in me….

More at LA Review of Books.