narzos's New Writeups

Pickwick Papers (thing)

2003-04-26T05:21:47Z

The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club (serialized 1836-1837, published as a book 1837) was Charles Dickens' first novel, originally published under his pseudonym Boz. His publishers, Chapman and Hall, had originally proposed that he write the adventures of "The Nimrod Club", a group of inept would-be sportsmen who would wander the English countryside attempting, poorly, to engage in various pursuits of manly vigor, with hilarious consequences. The main selling point was to be the comic illustrations of the popular artist Robert Seymour, with the 24-year old Dickens as a journeyman who would write his prose around Seymour's drawings.

Dickens demurred, on the grounds, "that the idea was not novel, and had already been much used; that it would be infinitely better for the plates to arise naturally out of the text; and that I would like to take my own way, with a freer range of English scenes and people, and was afraid I might ultimately do so in any case,…

The Cold Vein (thing)

2003-03-19T00:04:23Z

The mind is its own place, and in itself
Can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven.
- Milton, Paradise Lost

Me and [Vordul], we just some stupid ghetto kids. We collect comic books, we know some philosophy... We just enjoy lunch, you know what I mean? We're on some dumb shit like that.
- Vast Aire, in an interview with Gavin Mueller of Stylus magazine: http://www.stylusmagazine.com/artistinterviews/vast_aire_pageone.html

The Cold Vein (Definitive Jux, May 2001) is Cannibal Ox's first and, so far, only album. Its most remarkable characterisic is its sheer range; by turns, and sometimes simultaneously, it's precise and frenzied, despairing and redemptive, hard-bitten and vulnerable, claustrophobic and expansive, apocalyptic and everyday. Def Jux head-honcho and former Company Flow mad scientist El-P produces, and is in rare form, even for El-P. While the beats can stand alone (and do, a…

Because the city is falling down (place)

2003-03-07T08:32:49Z

It was a Wednesday when we went to war with the people in Stairwell C. The snow was illuminated, transfixed, falling down past the mercury floodlights on the roof, which is how I know that the electricity was still on then, but that was certainly one of the last times it was. I can also remember yelling, improvised pole-arms made out of kitchenware; the blood being a brighter red than it is in the movies, though it dried out pretty dark.

Death was something we were rediscovering in those days, and the suddenness, the irreversibility, was something that I think had not sunk in yet. The only person that had died before the war of the stairwell was Mrs. Peterson from 107, who had cut herself up pretty bad on the pieces of a broken window after falling in the snow, and…

Father Brown (person)

2003-02-27T05:21:29Z

G. K. Chesterton's most famous literary creation is probably Father Brown, the Catholic priest and detective. Father Brown appeared in a series of short stories Chesterton wrote from 1910 to the mid '30s. Father Brown is quite unassuming, with "a face as round and dull as a Yorkshire dumpling" and gray eyes "as empty as the North Sea"; he always carries a battered umbrella and has a habit of stopping conversations dead with quiet and seemingly trivial and utterly irrelevant observations. This mild exterior, though, conceals a skilled deductive mind, a rare insight into human nature, and a deep and nuanced religious faith.

Father Brown's trademark is that he solves his mysteries through knowledge of character and motive, rather than, for example, Holmes knowing the murderer was in the foreign service because he recognizes the ash of a Burmese brand of cheroot¹. Occasionally, especially in the later stories, this can…

The Book of the Long Sun (thing)

2003-02-17T22:33:41Z

" ... as ambitious as Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow, as intricate and beautifully written as Nabokov's Pale Fire." - The Washington Post Book World
"... insidiously beautiful - it releases delayed detonations of pleasure days after you've read it.
This is art of the highest order. It has all the magic we expect from Wolfe: chilling beauty, dark intrigue, and huge invention, and much we do not expect: love, tenderness, and comedy." - SF Eye

The Book of the Long Sun (1993-1996) is a massive, masterful four-volume novel by Gene Wolfe. It is a sequel in a loose sense to his The Book of the New Sun (1980-1982), and is followed, much more closely, both thematically and in setting, by The Book of the Short Sun (1999-2001). It consists of Nightside the Long Sun (1993), Lake of the Long Sun (1994), Caldé of the Long Sun (1994) and …

Las Manitas Avenue Cafe (place)

2002-05-09T06:19:59Z

One of the most celebrated restaurants in Austin is a little Mexican luncheonette on Congress Avenue (between 2nd and 3rd), Las Manitas. It would be an unassuming little place, the standard booths along one side, formica diner bar on the other, some tables in the middle, until you look over and notice that one entire wall is filled with framed articles about the place from national travel and food magazines, and that the place is almost always full to overflowing.

The menu has maybe a dozen items, plus the daily specials, simple northern and interior Mexican. The service is fast; it's unusual to wait more than five minutes for your food. And the food is good. Really, really good. The particular crowd favorite are the frijoles, which are cooked with bacon, and are about as close to the platonic ideal of refried beans as I can imagine.

True to the luncheonette ideal, the place is only open for breakfast and lunch; it closes…