Catapaults

I must admit: Roman history actually doesn’t interest me very much. As a Canadian, I have little experience with the tangible remnants of Roman rule: no ruins down the road, no aqueducts, no Roman highways as the basis of modern roads, no Roman law as the basis of existing law, no direct Latin origins to [...]

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Adventures in Wikipedia History Editing (!), Part 1. The Five Dynasties History

Almost every lecturer or professor who has instructed in the last few years has this to say about Wikipedia: “Don’t Use it As A Source.” A golden rule, that, and one most of us who have been educated in a university setting or intelligent enough on our own, and there are plenty of us, realize [...]

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Alfred Jarry, The Supermale

I first read Alfred Jarry’s The Supermale in French many years ago, a part of a massive Gallimand paperback collection of all of Jarry’s work. I read it in my teenage years, on the advice of Sam Lundwall’s 1977 Illustrated History of Science Fiction, because he claimed Jarry, along with Wells, Verne and George Griffith, [...]

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Chris Hedges, I Don’t Believe in Atheists

 I was eagerly anticipating this book; that explains my disappointment, and the frustration I felt at the near impossibility of actually finishing the thing. This is Chris Hedges third book, and as a long veteran of the New York Times, as a man who lived through Sarajevo, who tracked Al-Qaeda through the Middle East, [...]

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