Cody R Brown

You can't logic your way out of being burnt out. Unless you're me. Who should be able to do it and it's a personal failing that I can't

for the NYT to give Doug Wilson any kind of platform is honestly shameful

there are many things that TransLink could do to improve service in Vancouver, but living near the SkyTrain and two major bus routes means I rarely wait long for service & I'm rarely more than 15-30 minutes ride from anywhere - now I can't imagine living somewhere without that level of service

Brilliant, looking forward to watching it! There's SO much to discuss in Murnane.

"What Was 'The Animal'?: Ontology and its Discontents" by Cary Wolfe (Keywords: Language; Lifeworld; Derrida) "How did human beings ever find it remotely plausible that the world is neatly riven by an ontological divide?"

This essay by Cary Wolfe might be useful, and provides lots of directions to pursue:

this is a basically undeniable take when reading robots in terms of their origin in Karel Čapek's play R.U.R.

I need the mariners or the jays to make it

Japanese Can Opener Gangy Kankiri Made in JAPAN. Please, hand wash and dry thoroughly when finished.

I'm a die-hard for the Ganji Kankiri carbonknifeco.com/en-ca/produc...

oh man I've been thinking about this a lot since seeing it last night - there's something there about a shift from PTA's early Altman relationship to what's happening now with the Pynchon streak in his work

Pritzker: "In any other country, if federal agents fired upon journalists & protesters when unprovoked what would we call it? If officials marched down streets harassing civilians & demanding their papers, what would we say? I don't think we'd have trouble calling it what it is: authoritarianism"

time to root for the mariners and the jays for the postseason

or possibly Slaughterhouse-Five. in my late teens/early twenties I had a compulsion where I bought every copy of either that I found in thrift stores, eventually I had probably ten copies of each

What book have you bought the most copies of in your life?

a classic "Torment Nexus" scenario

Me: *through sobs* you can't just say everything is about climate change.... Please....

Weird theorists: *points at any weird fiction nearby* cli-fi hyperobject

a huge pet peeve, and one I had to do significant work avoiding in my own dissertation haha

sick list, would have loved to see these heavy hitters on a syllabus when I was in undergrad

I've noticed what usually seems like a 50-50 split between students who use plural possessives correctly and students who just add apostrophe-s to all possessives—can't really say why, tho, although I imagine it's just a bit of usage that's falling by the wayside in K12 language instruction

it's kind of a perfect book imo

One of the best!

God, Joel Lane is great, huh?

I've got lots more of these, but I wanted to share a handful of my favorites since the discussion of how much more evocative sff and horror covers used to be is bubbling about. While there are definitely still good covers out there, I think these represent a good slice of what else is possible!

Ernest Callenbach's Ecotopia. The cover is bright yellow with stark black titling. The centre cover image is a multicolored painting of several overlapping human profiles within a transposed circle and square.

This is the cover of Ernest Callenbach's Ecotopia, which I love for the weird transposed profiles in the centre. I can't track down the artist, but isfdb suggests it might be Leo & Diane Dillon (which I kinda doubt).

Bob Pepper's cover of Dunsany's The Queen of Elfland's Daughter, featuring a mulitcolored composition depicting wolves attacking a unicorn in a forest while a warrior watches,

Bob Pepper's cover of David Lindsay's A Voyage to Arcturus, depicting two figures riding a multicolored, scaled dragon.

These two are Ballantine Fantasy titles both with covers painted by Bob Pepper: A voyage to Arcturus and The Queen of Elfland's Daughter.

on the right is a copy of M. John Harrison's The Pastel City, the cover of which depits a lone horseman on a cliff surveying a burning city. on the left is the cover of the same author's A Storm of Wings, featuring a knight in thorned, red armor who is cast in shadows and holding a glowing sword. The sigil on the knight's armor is a locust.

Next, two covers from M. John Harrison's Viriconium series. The Pastel City features a painted cover by Bruce Pennington, while A Storm of Wings is painted by Michael Whelan!

A gradient cover, red at the bottom moving to blue the the top. A large tree is in the center. A woman reaches out of the tree line towards a blue and green furred alien creature who rises from the top of the tree. These figures do not have definite boundaries.

Another favorite: Octavia E. Butler out-of-print novel Survivor. I love the way the tree is composed out of the two central figures of the novel.

A pink hardcover copy of Samuel R. Delany's Nova. The cover illustration is an impressionistic rendering of a supernova, white at the center and green around the edge. Closer inspection reveals the explosion to be human figures.

If we want to think about what a good minimalist version of this might look like, we should examine another Delany. This is the hardcover of Nova, featuring an impressionistic composition by the artist Russel Fitzgerald. Fitzgerald also illustrated Delany & Marilyn Hacker's brief journal "Quark."

The cover of Samuel R. Delany's Tales of Neveryon. It features a large, muscled man fighting a dragon, whose head creeps into frame from the spine o the book. This action takes place on a veranda or terrace, and feature one woman fleeing from the scene while another appears to have fainted.

The next is a Bantam Books copy of Samuel R. Delany's Tales of Neveryon. Clearly meant to evoke a kind of Orientalist, sword and sorcery fantasy setting, a ruse for what is actually a very dense exploration of slavery, liberation, and semiotics.

Le Guin's first three Earthsea books, with wraparound covers of a seascape, complete with islands strewn with castles and minarets, dragons, and ships.

Le Guin's first three Earthsea books, with wraparound covers of another seascape, moving from a falcon in flight, to Ged piloting his boat looking towards what appears to be a seaport.

First, these wraparound covers on Le Guin's first three Earthsea books. The cover art by Pauline Ellison effectively summarizes the series through travel!

I just want to re-post this and use it as an opportunity to post some of my favorite paperback covers from my personal collection: