Jacob Bender's Blog, page 2

Part IV of The Epic and Audacious Adventures of the NAUTILUS! and Her Gallant Crew in the 19th Century: A Tragicomedy on Reverse Neo-Colonialism of Celestial Proportions

"Mars attacks! King Arthur duels Cyborg-Napoleon! World War breaks out! And the gallant crew of the Nautilus must commandeer the Confederate Moon Cannon and venture forth into the realm of Diana Herself! All this and more in Part IV of NAUTILUS!, fan-fiction for history!"  Yes, that's right, David W. Harris and I have released The Epic and Audacious Adventures of the NAUTILUS! and Her Gallant Crew in the 19th Century Part IV: A Tragicomedy on Reverse Neo-Colonialism of Celestial Proporti...

Edinburgh, Scotland

I was about to insist that it should really be spelt "Edinborough" if they're going pronounce it that way--but then I remembered that "-ough" has 3 different renderings based on if it's prefixed by a t-, thr-, or b-, so I let it alone and reminded myself that English is basically 2 steps from Chinese anyways.

My wife worked a trip to Edinburgh, Scotland this weekend, and despite having to be re-routed through a number of totally different airports, I was able to join her and sight-see for a da...

On Bob Dylan and John Ashbery

So one the predominant responses I'm noticing to Bob Dylan's Nobel for Lit. is (generally unfavorable) comparisons to John Ashbery, of all people, e.g. "Look, Dylan's fine, but he's no Ashbery" or "So when does Ashbery win a Grammy?" and etc. Implicit in these responses is the argument that Dylan, as a song-writer, is not a poet, that he writes in a completely different genre.

However, though I'm sympathetic, this argument is complicated by the fact that Ashbery himself blurs the lines between...

A Defense of "Rockism" So-Called

Nowadays, to be labeled a "Rockist" is a borderline slur: music critics lob it at each to slander their opponent as snobbish, stagnant, out-of-date and out-of-touch.  Among certain cultural critics, it is practically synonymous with "racist," inasmuch as "Rockists" supposedly only prefer music gate-kept by an overwhelmingly-white establishment of elderly men. A part of me is sympathetic to these anti-"Rockist" screeds, for indeed a myopic insistence on a single, aging genre can indeed cu...

Once Upon a Halloween in China

My one twinge of regret when I flew to China Autumn of '06 was that, for the first time ever, I would completely miss Halloween (even Puerto Rico has trick-or-treaters nowadays).  Little did I know that I was about to have the most intensive Halloween of my life.  For the private school I taught at wasn't just content to teach English with genuine American instructors, no--this place was all about cultural immerson, and as everyone worth their salt knew, that meant that these middle...

China A Decade Later

My wife is a flight-attendant, and this weekend she picked up a trip to Shanghai.  This has put me in a deeply reflective mood, because it was exactly a decade and a month ago that I first walked the streets of Shanghai myself.  At the time I was a junior in college, off-track at BYU-Idaho, and my chief goal at the time was to get as far away from Rexburg as I possibly could--and boy did I succeed!

Well, of course it was more than that.  At the time I had been home from Puerto R...

Part III of The Epic and Audacious Adventures of the NAUTILUS! and Her Gallant Crew in the 19th Century: The Geopolitical Perils of Sentient Automata and Additional Elementary Inquiries!

The ripening apples, the changing leaves, the crisp Autumn air, it can all only mean one thing: Guy Fawkes Day is coming!  And what better way to observe the anniversary of the Gun Powder Plot than by blowing up Parliament?  David W. Harris and I do just that in Nautilus! Part III--the high-flying sequel to Part II and Part I (the latter still free on Smashwords)--and boy did we sure had a lot of fun doing so!

From Amazon: "The brave crew of the Nautilus rescues the literal Undergrou...

The Catcher in the Rye Revisited; or, Catcher in the Rye as a Christmas Novel

When I was a teenager I read The Catcher in the Rye.  I also read Catch-22, Tropic of Cancer, Dilbert comics, wore Chuck Taylors, and listened to The Doors, Queen, Nirvana, and Dark Side of the Moon.  I wasn't exactly original. (Teenagers never are).

But maybe originality is overrated--not to mention a myth--and the reason why J.D. Salinger's lone novel continues to sell in excess of 250,000 copies a year well over a half-century after its publication is because there is nothing orig...

Venice, Copenhagan, Rekljavic

Look, I don't want no guff from you--because life is already so capricious and unfair as it is, that on the rare occasions where it is so in your favor, you learn to take the money and run.  Hence, when an opportunity arises to go on what is in effect an all-expense-paid round-trip to Venice--especially when you are a broke community college adjunct grad student--then you friggin' take it.  Because you are the sort of person who's not supposed to be able to do this; you are supposed...

The Last Day

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