The Early Days of a Better Nation

Sunday, January 16, 2005


New Kids on the Blog

And it's a big hello and welcome to The Inter-Galactic Playground, in which Farah Mendlesohn watches ice turn to slush and (she fears) her brain turn to mush reading children's SF: 'Why is it,' she asks, 'that any title configured " The X of the Y" is calculated to inspire gloom in the critic's heart?' In fact her brain is in no danger of turning into mush. She finds a lot of good (and bad) children's SF books to write about, sparks off conversations about children's reading, admires nature's needlework and experiences cognitive dissonance in New Brunswick.

Elsewhere, Ellis Sharp, writer of experimental fiction, gives the world The Sharp Side of his fluent tongue. Sharp's work has included a study of Charles Fort's authorship of Capital, an investigation into a receipt for thousands of roubles in payment for Lenin's trousers, and the connections between Che Guevara and the hunt for the Loch Ness Monster. He includes links to three of his stories, headed by Dead Iraqis, a work whose power the years since it was written have done nothing to diminish.

Mutualist militant and scourge of vulgar libertarianism Kevin Carson has started blogging, perhaps by way of light relief after completing his remarkable Studies in Mutualist Political Economy, a work which attempts to integrate the insights of two schools of thought not often thought compatible: the Marxian and the Austrian. It's a project that might seem like one of Sharp's imaginings - Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism by Ludwig von Mises, say - but it displays an admirable range of reading and the style invests the driest economic questions with a certain peculiar charm.

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