PICASSO and POLITICS:
“Guernica represents something recently demonstrated in this year’s passionate torrent of anti-Bush agitprop, namely art’s ineffectuality in the production of concrete political results.” I wonder if the[…]

More comparisons:
Boris Akunin’s The Winter Queen has been called a Russian version of an Ian Fleming book. Sure it is full of restless adventure clich’s but actually the book is far closer to John Buchan’s style of derring do*. The[…]

LOST FROG
rainy just emailed me this link – it is self-explanatory (or maybe the other one)[…]

I have gotten Elmore Leonard and James Ellroy mixed up before. Not in a prose identification way, they are distinctive enough, but merely in the name filing part of my brain. I was reminded of this by looking at the blurb for David Peace’s Nine[…]

S’NDOR WE’RES: Antithin
At last it has leaked out – thin men are the cause of everything.
They wait in ambush on street corners and if an old woman comes by
they don’t even greet her. They are more concerned with exchanging th[…]

The cover of Murphy’s Favourite Channels is not very promising, it is indeed almost offputtingly poor. John Murray’s book which, in a cosy fashion, juxtaposes the life of a Northern lad made good with the television he watched is actually[…]

LOSERS
by Michael Lewis
Lewis is one of those guys who has inadvertantly become — I would never call him a favorite author per se of mine, in that I rarely read him or think about him. Instead I just keep stumbling across him, often by chance […]

READING COMIX MAKES YOU DUMM: the disproof is in the discussion surely?
this post-plus-comment at the usually-slightly-up-itself crooked timber is fascinating (abt teaching EngLit via neil gaiman; abt how modern tech-literate popculture-compexity-bo[…]

LOVELY VIEW:
the dying sun is staining the little rococo tower pink, but [office co-worker E] cannot see it properly as her window is still yucky and smeary from the tropical plant that used to stand against it until her predecessor left
as an art[…]

On the last chapter of Vernon God Little. Yes or no? See a similar issue I had last year about a film for potential clues to this question. You will need to read the much more entertaining than I expected* book to make up your own mind about the answ[…]