December 2011
35 posts
Salt in the Eyes: A Portrait of a Plagiarist as a Dead Man. →
salt-in-the-eyes.tumblr.com
An interesting assertion: The author of this post claims that Bolaño’s story “The Colonel’s Son” exactly follows the plot of Return of the Living Dead 3. To be fair, the story is about watching a movie on late night TV, and you can’t copyright fictional ideas, just the concrete way you express them. Although I (Jeremy) admit I haven’t seen the movie, I think that Bolaño’s retelling of the film through the eyes of his narrator differs enough from the presentation of the story as a motion picture to avoid any actual charges of plagiarism. Maybe the fact that the film is real rather than a product of Bolaño’s imagination makes this story less stellar, but it’s still a really interesting look into how one of the masters of South American literature approached something as quotidian as watching a zombie film.
(discussed in this review: Roberto Bolaño’s short story “The Colonel’s Son,” the translation published in Granta’s Autumn 2011 issue #117, and Brian Yuzna’s Return of the Living Dead 3)
Perhaps it is out of a bit of hesitant doubt that I call the late Roberto Bolaño a plagiarist, but…
Play
“In the remainder of his life, however, Nietzsche seems to have caught an early dose of syphilis, very probably during his first-ever sexual encounter, which gave him crushing migraine headaches and attacks of blindness and metastasized into dementia and paralysis. This, while it did not kill him right away, certainly contributed to his death and cannot possibly, in the meanwhile, be said to have made him stronger. In the course of his mental decline, he became convinced that the most important possible cultural feat would be to prove that the plays of Shakespeare had been written by Bacon. This is an unfailing sign of advanced intellectual and mental prostration.”
—Christopher Hitchens (1949-2011. RIP). “Trial of the Will.” Vanity Fair, January 2012.
A rebuttal to "Mr. Blatchford's" anti male hug article. Genius. →
maisonneuve.org
Today, on Maisonneuve’s blog, Mike Spry comes back at Christie Blatchford with a SCATHING rebuttal, making fun of “his” love for Third Eye Blind, the Fords, and antiquated sayings.
“I know he writes for The National Post, but still, a newspaper’s level of writing should at least exceed that of an underachieving college student.”
And that’s only a line from the beginning. A very smart reply to an article that epitomized the opposite of intelligent journalism.
