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Archive for the ‘Literature’ Category

In a plot line inspired by Robert Frost’s poem Road Not Taken, fictional character Archie Andrews has already proposed to Veronica and will propose to Betty next month.  I wonder what it would be like if other comics were inspired by poems…(imagine dreamy music and blurry vision.)
On His Blindness—John Milton
Spiderman is blind, worries about his [...]

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Sophie Pollitt-Cohen writes:

FUN WITH SLANG: READ THE WHOLE THING TO FIND OUT HOW YOU CAN WIN A PRIZE!
 
I just got back from a trip to Greece, where I befriended a lot of Australians.  The best thing about Australians, besides their good looks and superior drinking abilities, is their slang.  I learned a lot of great [...]

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John Metcalf.
As I often note, we at Sans Everything are nothing if not eclectic in our passions: animal rights, free trade, and anti-imperialism are all causes taken up by the blog. But there is one particular flag that unites us (or at least most of us): John Metcalf, the extraordinary Canadian writer and editor. A.M. [...]

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Sans Everything depends not only on its writers, but also its readers. Given the huge difference between daily site visits and replies to our posts it is clear that the vast majority of visitors to the site are content to read quietly, which is perfectly fine with us. We are also delighted, however, to have some regular [...]

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Hebrides Holiday

Sam Johnson: A great dictionary-maker and fun on a road-trip.
Sophie Pollitt-Cohen writes:
The History Channel’s new show Expedition: Africa follows a group of travelers recreating Henry Morton Stanley’s 1871 journey through Africa to find Dr. Livingstone.  It (ok, an article in the Times about it) has got me wondering which historical trip I would want to recreate.
I [...]

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Blogs are driven by passion, and a notable feature of Sans Everything is the cacophony of competing obsessions that regularly bubble up here. Aside from my own interest in comic books and conservative intellectuals we have the various hobby-horses of A.M. Lamey (animal rights and immigration policy), Ian Garrick Mason (movies, foreign affairs), John Haffner [...]

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Plants, it is well known, have a remarkable ability — born, perhaps, of their immense patience and gradualism — to physically merge themselves with elements in their environment. Ivy will bind fast to brick, beans will curl around poles, and trees… well, consider the iron-eating sycamore of Brig o’ Turk, a village in central Scotland [...]

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As with all his writing, Kafka’s masterful story Ein Brudermord (A Fratricide) can be read on many levels.  Most immediately it is about the inexplicable murder of Wese by Schmar, with the neighbour Pallas a passive observer to the scene; Wese’s wife arrives too late, only to discover her husband is already dead. Yet on a deeper [...]

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There come moments in the lives of writers when the words that they use everyday seem suddenly and wholly inadequate to the tasks to which they have been set. Moments when every turn of phrase, every carefully-planned construction, fails to capture and convey the desired meaning, leaving the writer with a gnawing fear that perhaps [...]

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The following poem, a remarkably jaunty and sardonic performance and presumably written in the weeks before John Updike’s death, will be included in the posthumous collection Endpoint. Thanks to Reuters for making it available.
 
Requiem
by John Updike
 
It came to me the other day:
Were I to die, no one would say,
‘Oh, what a shame! So young, so full
Of promise [...]

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