Monthly Archives: April 2009

Poetry Through the Ages

by Editor

penandpaperPoetry Through the Ages is an excellent site that offers clear and concise explanations of different poetic forms, a general history of poetry and a simple guide to reading and appreciating difficult poems.

“When a poem arises, it feels like the bosom of the poet lifts up and births the spoken or written moment. The point of origin lies at the furthest depths of the poet, often calling into play ancestral memories, divine or universal inspiration, and insights or truths that “magically” resonate with the reader.”

Tesfaye: A Film About Reforesting Ethiopia

by Editor | 1 Comment

Tesfaye is a film by Brent Gudgel, made for Eden Reforestation Projects. It’s the story of an Ethiopian man who blames himself for helping to destroy the trees of his country. Now he wants to help fix the problem. It’s a beautiful film told with great simplicity and seriousness. It is the clear and direct communication from the man in the film that makes it so effective.

Eating Meat Contributes Enormously to Global Warming

by Editor

Scientific American published the page of charts on the left.  Click the image to get a high-res version.  It explains how bad for the environment the production and consumption of meat really is.  According to the magazine, the annual beef diet of the average American emits as much greenhouse gas into the atmosphere as a car driven approximately 1,800 miles.

That’s very bad.  Here’s another statistic: According to Environmental Defense, if every American skipped one meal of chicken per week and substituted vegetarian foods instead, the carbon dioxide savings would be the same as taking more than half a million cars off of U.S. roads.

The New York Times: Students Make a Green House

by Editor | 1 Comment

The New York Times produced this environmental film that follows a group of Oberlin College students for a day of green ideas that they used on their group student house.  Their sustainable living ideas are easy to do and fun.  Their methods for capture and reuse of water are effective and cost nothing to implement.  I really like their very balanced view of sustainable energy and resources.  They also go out to peoples’ homes in the area and exchange regular incandescent lightbulbs for energy-efficient compact fluorescent lightbulbs.

Batman Dies: An Interview with Neil Gaiman

by Editor

DC Comics picked Neil Gaiman to write the final two issues of their monthly Detective Comics.  The two-part series is called Whatever Happened to the Caped Crusader?  It chronicles the death of Batman.  This July, both issues of the comic will go on sale in a hardcover version.  After a period of no Batman comics, DC intends to reboot the franchise with new stories.  That sounds interesting.

The Gaiman story about Batman’s death sounds fascinating and the artwork looks incredible.  The issues were pencilled by Andy Kubert and inked by Scott Williams.  This looks like Batman comics just the way I like to see them.

Wired.com has a nice lengthy interview with Neil Gaiman about the creation of the story and his perspective on turning great comicbooks into movies.

Heliotrope: Online Speculative Fiction Magazine

by Editor

Heliotrope is a free quarterly magazine of speculative fiction that publishes stories, poetry and articles.  This issue features a story by Neil Gaiman called One Life, Furnished in Early Moorcock.  There are also several articles about writer Michael Moorcock’s profound influence on the science fiction and fantasy genres.  His most popular works are the Elric of Melniboné stories.

Horror Podcast: Fear on Demand

by Editor | 2 Comments

Fear on Demand is an excellent horror story podcast.  Their latest offering is Room 412 by Michael Laimo.  The narrator is Gord Mackenzie.  When a man checks into a hotel during a business trip he is irritated by a constant thumping from the room next door.  What’s making that noise?  His terror mounts as the circumstances around room 412 become increasingly bizarre.

The story really had me sitting perfectly still with complete dread.

This story is not for very young listeners.

Listen to the Room 412 podcast.

Moon: A Science Fiction Film Trailer

by Editor

Moon is a new science fiction film directed by Duncan Jones. It stars Sam Rockwell as a man administering a lonely moon base for a shift that lasts several years. The trailer looks pretty good, but I’m not sold on it. I do like to see a serious science fiction film getting projected in theaters after the horrific damage that’s been done to the genre by clever little men like George Lucas.  In fact, I blame Lucas more than Tolkien for the fact that every bookstore loads its science fiction shelves with sword fantasy books.  As soon as the idiotic Obi Wan Kenobi pulled out a lightsaber, the sci-fi film genre was doomed. But this thing looks from its trailer to be a mashup of homages to 2001: A Space Odyssey, Silent Running and Solaris. I just don’t get into ‘homage’ movies.  A little subtle homage is fine.  But this trailer is just packed to the gills with barely altered rips right out of these classic films. No serious science fiction director makes a movie that’s an homage to other movies. Stanley Kubrick would have choked on a chess piece if someone had suggested such a thing to him.  So, I’m sure I’ll give this movie a chance and go see it, but I fear that it will be exactly the movie it appears to be in its trailer.  The effects do have that wonderful super-reality quality to them that 2001 and television show Space 1999 had.

Espresso Book Machine 2.0

by Editor | 1 Comment

Well… it better not jam. That’s my two cents. But really this is a neat idea. A book printer. It lets a user download, print, and bind a real book in just a few minutes. The New York Public Library has one. I’m not sure if one is expected to return the books it prints, but if they think it’s a good machine, it probably is. The Bibliotheca Alexandrina in Egypt has one. This is the kind of machine that makes online book printing services like Lulu.com really start making sense. Of course, the shops and libraries must keep themselves supplied with the right paper and cover materials. But it is quite obvious that the days of publishers shipping cartons of books to bookstores all over the world in such bulk are very numbered. Pretty soon there will be a book printer in many homes. That’s assuming that everyone doesn’t switch to ebooks. But with companies like Amazon building portable cash registers instead of real ebook devices, that will not happen for a long time.

Podcast Discussion of Thoreau’s Walden

by Editor

486px-henry_david_thoreauI was very interested in a post about Henry David Thoreau at BoingBoing this weekend.  I got into one of those wonderfully dignified arguments in the comments with other Thoreau lovers and haters.  But one of the commenters posted a link to this fascinating podcast episode in which a Thomas Jefferson fan and expert named Clay Jenkinson discusses Thoreau’s masterwork and its connection to the thinking of Jefferson.  It’s a great listen and has me all excited about Walden again.  In fact, I think I’m going to do a full reading the book right here.  Perhaps I’ll start it this week.  We’ll see.  But I certainly think it needs to be read with all the punkish attitude and brilliant observation that I see in the book.  If you want to read Walden, you sort of have to become Henry David Thoreau for a while.  Not an easy task.

Meanwhile, you really should listen to this marvelous show about Walden.

Podcast Novel: A Princess of Mars (Chapter 3)

by Editor

DOWNLOAD MP3 AUDIO

A Princess of Mars

This is the first John Carter of Mars novel by Edgar Rice Burroughs, the author of the Tarzan books. It was his first novel, published in 1917 and it’s a work of rip-roaring science fiction that has inspired many of the great writers in the genre.

Chapter 3: John Carter finds himself on the red planet.  He finds that he can leap with superhuman ability.  His first encounter with deadly and peculiar martians gives him a surprise.

You’ll find regular podcasts of all the chapters over the next couple of months. Subscribe to our feed.

Duration: 00:15:15
Read by Alessandro Cima

All audio stories are Copyright © Candlelight Stories, Inc., All Rights Reserved.

A Wolf Loves Pork: Stop Motion Photo Animation

by Editor | 1 Comment

Takeuchi Jaijin made this film by photographing the action in stop motion then photographing the photos again in his room.  He makes the action seem to take place all along his walls, countertops and floors.  I love the way the boy dives into the filled sink and swims across!  The photo animation technique reminds me of the photo collages of artist David Hockney.

Thanks to David Pescovitz at BoingBoing for posting this.

Audio Poem by Walt Whitman: I Sing the Body Electric

by Editor | 2 Comments

471px-whitmaneakinsI Sing the Body Electric is a poem that celebrates the life of the body and its equal status with the soul.  Walt Whitman is probably the greatest poet in the English language since William Shakespeare.  Some might argue with this but there is no other poet who so muscularly tore the page to shreds with his wild, raging, soaring, lunatic language.  I think Shakespeare would have liked and admired this man because it is only he who is a match for Shakespeare’s fearless destruction and rebuilding of language.  I think that great poets always destroy before they create.  To read Whitman’s massive lifelong work, Leaves of Grass, is to wake up and realize that poetry is like blood exploding through your body and spraying its meanings and music out all over the city.  You cannot read Whitman and be the same as you were before reading him.  He is a shock to the system.

He lived from 1819 to 1892 and is often called the father of free verse.  His discovery of the loose free form of poetry is an astounding development that is still being worked out.  The problem for today is that Whitman still has the hardest punch and could do terrible damage to most poets alive and writing today.  It would not be a fair fight.

Here is the great I Sing the Body Electric, from Whitman’s Leaves of Grass book.

Download the MP3

Remember to enter a poem in our Little Poetry Contest.

Book Lovers in Paris with Piles of Books

by Editor

Here’s an excellent CBS Sunday Morning report about French book collectors in Paris. I love the piles of books in the apartments. The skinny book finder guy is a very amusing character. He reminds me of the character Johnny Depp played in the Roman Polanski movie, The Ninth Gate. That character is a shady and extremely skilled book finder who goes after rare books for wealthy collectors. The movie is fascinating for all its investigation of ancient texts and satanic illustrations.  One of the collectors in the video mentions how when a collector finds a book they like, then they must also acquire every other edition that they can find.  I totally understand this, having gone through something similar with various editions of Don Quixote.  That’s a really good book to collect because there are so many beautiful editions of it that include the work of great illustrators.  Not to mention the fact that Don Quixote himself is a maniacal book lover.