Point A to Point B

Gimbling in the Wabe – Seeing the Story

In the first telling of the tale, I don’t pick up the book at all. It is a very short story. The next time around, the book is lying around, in a place where I need to while away some time. I pick it up, idly flipping through the pages. […]

Gimbling in the Wabe – On Paul Virilio, Integral Accidents, the Internet, the Olympics, Doctor Who, Feral Kittens and Not Going to Sea Without a Life Jacket

Recently, I read Elan Mastai’s novel All Our Wrong Todays, and in it he referenced cultural theorist Paul Virilio, who championed the idea of the “integral accident.” This belief basically states that every time you introduce a new technology, you also introduce the accident of that technology. Therefore, while the […]

Birthdays

On this day, August 11, in 1921, Alex Haley was born in Ithaca, New York. He was author of the 1976 novel Roots: The Saga of an American Family, a fictionalized account of his own family’s history, for which he was awarded a special Pulitzer Prize. One year later, the book was made into the popular television miniseries, “Roots”, which was seen by a record breaking 130 million viewers. He also was the ghostwriter for The Autobiography of Malcolm X. He died of a heart attack in 1992; he was 80.

Birthdays

On this day, December 3, in 1857, Joseph Conrad was born in Berdichev, Imperial Russia (modern
Ukraine, then a part of Poland). While he settled in England and wrote in English, he always considered himself a Pole. Heart of Darkness, one of the most famous of his 20 novels (which explores colonialism and the attitudes regarding what constitutes a barbarian versus civilized society) is considered one of the best English novels of the 20th century, as is his novel Lord Jim, which chronicles a crew’s abandonment of its disabled ship. Conrad died in England in 1924 at age 66.