Variations on original sin

At The Unarchivable, I've put up a footnoteless version of my American Fantastic Tales cento. Sample paragraph:

Aside from my teaching, I had for some years been engaged in various anthropological projects with the primary ambition of articulating the significance of the clown figure in diverse cultural contexts. I was interested in original sin and had dabbled in esoteric philosophy; my remote ancestors had been Salem witches. I owed the formation of my character chiefly to accident. I shall not pretend to determine in what degree I was credulous or superstitious. I shall tell you what occurred, and let you judge for yourself.

Last (Not Last)

My latest Astral Weeks column looks at the late Arthur C. Clarke's last* novel, The Last Theorem, a collaboration with Frederik Pohl.

I was hoping the L.A. Times would link to an appreciation of Clarke I wrote earlier this year for them—but...it's no longer on the site. (You can find it at The Unarchivable, your source for all manner of forgotten EP articles.)


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*Don't bet on it...

The beginning of the end?

E-mail from Levi: "The Gary Indiana novel is so good that it's finally convinced me to sign up for Twitter!"

Levi came across my rave for Do Everything in the Dark at New York's site; readers of The Unarchivable can get the unexpurgated version here.

Table-talk of Parkus Grammaticus for February 22

I. Serial reading: "When I was in middle school, I went through a period where I read little but Agatha Christie novels. (For those of you keeping score at home, that period followed the one wherein I read little but Doc Savage novels and preceded the one wherein I read little but Star Trek novels.)" —I've Been Reading Lately

II. Are my pieces disappearing from the PTSNBN archives? I wanted to find some fact about Henry Darger, which I knew was somewhere in the long piece I did for the PTSNBN Education Supplement...but the article wasn't there anymore! I had to search via Google and then get the cached version. Pretty depressing.

Anyway, I've added the Darger piece to The Unarchivable. And then I remembered that a similar thing happened to my (much more recent) review in the LATBR of William Gibson's Spook Country, so I added that piece to the site as well....I couldn't even find a cached version, so the one I put up might differ from the final edited version. (Similarly, my LATBR review of a Peter Kuper book is nowhere to be found...)

Note for my memoirs: Just because it's online doesn't mean you shouldn't save a copy for yourself! Everything is going to disappear someday!

III. At Vertigo, a Sebald interview (in two installments): "[A]ll kinds of things can be a novel."

IV. The movie Ratatouille contains the word rejectamenta.

V. Over at The Fanzine, there's an excerpt from a novel by Andrew Lewis Conn, author of P.