Still new to this game…

Did a search for Blogging 101 on Google and came up with the following great page, with resources for Journalism, Creative writing, and teaching.

The Book List, circa 2007

What I read in 2007:

from Alice in Sunderland

“Reality is not enough; we need nonsense too. Drifting into a world of fantasy is not an escape from reality but a significant education about the nature of life. And reality is not an escape from nonsense. Our education goes on everywhere.”
- Edmund Miller, Lewis Carroll Observed

Alice in Sunderland: An Entertainment – by Bryan Talbot

From the back cover: “an epic meditation on myth, history and storytelling”

Somehow, Talbot explores and, perhaps, explodes the myths surrounding Lewis Carroll and Alice.  Now, the book is impressive: it is a full-sized piece of art (I mean 8.5 x 11 inches, and 319 pages of that). The art is great, combining black and white sketches with photos, or photoshop-effected photos, or old memorabilia, or drawings of old memorabilia, etc. I can’t imagine the drafting process Talbot went through for this…

As to the story, well, it achieves its own sort of mythic proportions, covering such varied topics as the Masons, dragons, the Venerable Bede, architecture, George Washington (related to Alice’s family, evidently), The Matrix, and, of course, Lewis Carroll. It keeps coming back to LC. But Talbot uses LC’s methods in his descriptions of them – the “narrator” continually wears different masks (literally), his favored being a white rabbit.

I feel like I just took a course on English history, mixed in with a bit of  myth, and a stretching of a genre. My head hurts.

Finished: 2/17/08
Pages: 319
Running page count: 3,498

Si, se puede! (or, McCain: Like Hope, but Different)

Although I love the cast of characters will.i.am brought together for his Obama-tribute, I think this one is more to the point.