“Halloween,” from Sonic Youth’s 1985 Flower EP (later appended to the Bad Moon Rising LP) is music for a scene from a low-budget, 1970’s cult horror film. In the scene, a Super 8 camera reveals the grainy image of a dilapidated, two-story Victorian home in a clearing of dense forest. Shutters hang by one hinge and smack against the siding. The wood on the porch is rotten, warped and cracked. The little glass that remains in the windows is just jagged bits. Suddenly, a man rushes out into the night. His clothes are in blood-drenched tatters, his eyes nearly bursting from their sockets with terror. He stops in the tall grass and falls to his knees. For a moment all is still. Then, out in the distance, something begins to move. The music starts up.
The first question most people ask about Dark Sky Magazine is do we publish a print version. Not what type of writing we publish, or which authors have contributed, but whether or not a reader can hold in his hands a copy of our publication. This never fails to impress upon me the power and familiarity of the printed page. Online magazines have come a long way. Featured writing, consistent readership and Web site designs have made leaps and bounds. But print remains king, at least for now.
Profiled in 1996 by Ploughshares, Richard Ford said of his wife, “She’s a quite happy person by nature, and it might’ve been that she thought I’d find a wider audience if I stopped writing about dark souls and dark fates. In retrospect, I’d say she was right. I know it’s much more of a challenge—for me in particular—to find language for people essaying to be better and happier, than for people wrestling with murder and mayhem.”
Dan Brown’s new novel, the Lost Symbol, is due out in stores September 15th. The book has an initial print run of six and a half million copies. Thousands of people have already pre-ordered through Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Borders and the like. The author and his marketing team are notoriously secretive, especially when it comes to divulging information about plot. The book’s huge anticipation is based on Brown’s previous best sellers. Say what you will about the quality of his writing. The man sells books.
I received awards for penmanship in grammar school. The stern nuns that taught me found in my handwriting laudable traits, which, for small periods of time, outweighed my incompetence in other subjects and tasks (math was wicked sorcery and left handed scissors indescribably mean). For years I found joy in the act of putting a [...]
In “The Responsibility of Intellectuals,” Noam Chomsky in 1967 identified academics as people Washington usually ignored if they protested US aggression in Vietnam: “these nasty types [sarcasm intended] are often psychologists, mathematicians, chemists, or philosophers (just as, incidentally, those most vocal in protest in the Soviet Union are generally physicists, literary intellectuals, and [...]
