Recent content by prabe

It's not at all uncommon for bestselling authors to auction off character names, almost always (that I've seen) for charity.

This isn't wildly wrong, as like a rule of thumb, but I know I've lost a lot of the hobbies I picked up when I was in that adolescent window, and I haven't really acquired others. I also know I was exposed to stuff in my twenties that in many instances left deeper marks.

I tend to think of it as, roughly, a conversation. The audience is in conversation with the work, the work is almost always in conversation with its medium's past, and plausibly its present. (And yes those conversations might be unequal, each of them.) But as I said elsewhere, I'm much more...

Authors have concerns and issues and all of that. Sometimes the details are just details, though, and don't carry much weight or meaning. (I personally find "what is this trying to say?" to be a more useful question than "what does this mean?" the vast majority of the time.)

I'm saying that most literature classes--especially below college level, but also including 100 and maybe some 200 level stuff--feature instructors making unsupported assertions (or at least failing to adequate support their assertions) about literary works and testing their students on those...

They probably shouldn't make such assertions without adequate support, I agree, but that's not how literature is (or mostly has been) taught, at below like the 200-level college class.

Yes, and sometimes the curtains are blue because the curtains the writer is looking at--or possibly remembering--are blue. Not every single thing an author includes--or doesn't!--has deeper more-symbolic-than-words meaning.

You might find the book at this link interesting, it makes a pretty solid case that a lot of late-20th-century woo has its roots in Lovecraft and his circle. I'm pretty sure I remember lost continents figuring in (it's been more than a decade since I read it)...

That sounds like awesome practical joke material ... :LOL:

Wow, glitter, the most mundane form of weird available, that also gets everywhere and into everything, the stuff is like inanimate vermin.

"I've found weirder things than you in my breakfast cereal."

I like my pic better. (Yes, it's really my pic.)

Here it's just my wife and me, any recipe development we do is more a process of evolution than what you're describing. Or if we're setting out to try different ways to do a thing, we do them one at a time. Circumstance and all-a-that. (Usually we find a recipe that mostly suits us and evolve...

Well, at least St. Patrick's Day would have given you more time to work out a recipe than, er, today; and that's a holiday I can associate with corned beef.