The most recent 20 comments posted to Electrolite by Jim Meadows:

Show all comments by Jim Meadows.

Posted on entry Open thread 10. ::: December 07, 2004, 02:00 AM:
Just finished reading "Stan and Ollie", Simon Louvish's 2002 biography of Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy, the movie comedy team. As in his biography of W.C. Fields, Louvish overwrites a bit, and under-researches (citations of other people's books crop up in the text at least as much and perhaps more than primary-source research). But I'm very fond of the Laurel and Hardy films, and Louvish seems to do an honest job of trying to outline the lives of the two comedians, and the nature of their comedy. I also respect his efforts at trying to make judgements on the reliability of sketchy information, such as the fading memories of people interviewed about events that took place decades ago. Plus, he closes the book by comparing Laurel and Hardy to Vladimir and Estragon in "Waiting for Godot", and gets away with it --- at least he gets away with it for me.


Posted on entry Reviews we never finished reading. ::: March 09, 2004, 10:54 AM:
John Updike gave a sympathetic review to "The Confessions of Max Tivoli" in the New Yorker, and compared it to other novels using the aging-in-reverse device, all of them outside the science fiction tradition, I believe.

Inside the science fiction tradition, aging-in-reverse seems to be a rather frequently used device, going by the examples given in previous comments. Updike's review made me remember a Fritz Leiber story, in which the entire planet Earth aged in reverse, in rejection of mankind's invention of nuclear weapons. I thought it was rather eloquent. On the other hand, aging-in-reverse showed up on the old "Mork and Mindy" TV show, when Mork fathered a middle-aged man (played by Jonathan Winters) as a son. Maybe that's the sort of writing Christopher Farah was thinking about.
Posted on entry Keen are the eyes of the Elves. ::: October 23, 2003, 11:11 AM:
Yeah, I got one of the spams, too. It didn't take long to figure out it was some sort of spam. I thought at first it had reacted to one of my web-address typos, until I noticed that you really don't have a "www" on your address.

Posted on entry Your astrology moment. ::: October 21, 2003, 11:08 AM:
I live in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois. What's all this about Kevin Drum and Divine? I don't hear them talking about it at Cafe Kopi.
Posted on entry "Banned in Boston": ::: June 18, 2003, 10:31 AM:
I remember reading a collection of cartoons from the 1940s by the Boston Herald cartoonist Dahl, which had several references to the Watch and Ward Society. One of them showed a man walking into the Watch and Ward Society office and complaining that he had been misled. He had understood that only provocative cutting-edge books were banned in Boston. The Watch and Ward man was beaming with pride as the visitor talked up how much being banned in Boston could mean for a book. "But this book is tripe!", the complainer said, holding up the condemned volume. "How could you encourage me to read such trash?"

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