Comments for Vanishing Cities

Comment on Excerpt from “Zee Gee and the Blue Jean Baby Queen” by Vince

Vince — Fri, 11 Jan 2013 08:52:07 +0000

Joe, many thanks for the feedback! I actually have written more (in various styles), and I’m waiting for another publisher to show the same enthusiasm as you. Where did you happen to come across “Adrift”?

Comment on Excerpt from “Zee Gee and the Blue Jean Baby Queen” by joe

joe — Thu, 10 Jan 2013 09:06:33 +0000

Hey Nell, you can just as well comment on the work too, at least if you read it. Vincent I have your book and I love it, please write more novels. I like the style.

Comment on PROMETHEUS MAY BE THE WORST FILM IN A DECADE by Vince

Vince — Mon, 15 Oct 2012 16:13:19 +0000

Thanks for weighing in, Rich!

Comment on PROMETHEUS MAY BE THE WORST FILM IN A DECADE by Rich Santos

Rich Santos — Mon, 15 Oct 2012 06:47:28 +0000

You hit it on the head, Vince. Couldn’t agree more on all your points. Just saw ‘Prometheus’ on Blue Ray Saturday and was disappointed. Pointless storyline, cliché dialogue interspersed with so-called moments of horror and 2-dimensional characters. Moreover, the film plodded for over 45 minutes before anything substantive unfolds. This was all about visuals, and nothing more. I expected more than this mish-mosh…

Comment on Limitless, the Movie by Rana

Rana — Mon, 08 Oct 2012 01:21:04 +0000

Well that’s a bummer. I rellay loved The Illusionist. I’m still annoyed at how little play that movie gets. But seeing now that Neil Burger didn’t write this one, just directed it, I guess I’m not as surprised. I’ll probably Netflix this when it comes out because I’m still interested, just not enough to see it in theaters.

Comment on Black Tickets by Tim Chambers

Tim Chambers — Sat, 22 Sep 2012 09:14:25 +0000

Good to see you’re blogging again. I’ll have to look it up. I just finished reading Days Between Stations, which I was lucky to find in a library here in Nagoya. When I first discovered Steve Erickson’s work, he had just come out with his third novel. His first and second novels were out of print at the time. They have since been reissued. His books are like Dali’s paintings. Full of time warps and strange imagery. The style is mesmerizing.

Comment on A.S. Byatt, Possession, the novel by Vince

Vince — Tue, 13 Mar 2012 08:51:06 +0000

I don’t think you have quite enough evidence to support your assertion that Americans are stupid although some of us undoubtedly are. But we were speaking of academia, where the percentage should drop. You seemed to have missed the point. The point is not that American institutions have more money (I’ll take your word for it that they do); the point is that Byatt portrays Americans as interested ONLY in the relics of the authors, not in their words. And that’s simply mistaken. The point is that her villain isn’t so much a stereotype as an incredibly obvious character–down to his long, black “funereal car.” As I said in another comment, I’m simply disappointed in Byatt from an aesthetic point of view.

As for fast reads, that is hardly my interest. I have a degree in literature and another in comparative literature and I don’t think anything that reads quickly is bound to be worth much. I found there to be simply too much material extraneous to the story to wade through. Oh I sat back all right … but Byatt made reading the story impossible; it had first to be hacked free of all the letters, journals, and poetry she felt compelled to bury it in.

It’s not a *bad* book. I suppose I just expected more of Byatt, especially when the Victorian material is so well done.

But I don’t think she’d be flattered by your assertion she’s writing genre fiction.

Comment on A.S. Byatt, Possession, the novel by Miss Heliotrope

Miss Heliotrope — Tue, 13 Mar 2012 07:51:03 +0000

This review makes the “Americans are stupid” thing right. The character of MC is an exaggeration of things that do happen – american institutions with more money buy up as many artifacts as they can for many famous authors. The UK is not in the same price range. It is a stereotype, but they are usually based on something. Byatt was one of the first to do the modern characters researching the older ones rather than copying many others, and to say no one can use a meme in another book would destroy all genre writing. The novel is not meant to be a fast read – the pace is victorian as well as the poems & the victorian sections more so.

You seem to have been so busy reading these insults into it that you forgot to sit back & read the story.

Comment on AMERICANS AT THE GATES by Vince

Vince — Sun, 26 Feb 2012 00:41:41 +0000

That’s exactly what we’ll do. I’m now studying Vietnam & the American war there. Astonishing what I’m discovering–such as the Vietnamese NEVER established a country in the north–North Vietnam is a fiction invented by the Americans to conveniently serve American interests. The country was TEMPORARILY divided (the langauge of the Geneva Accords is VERY clear on this and echoed by President Eisenhower), but the US decided they knew better and could save the Vietnamese from themselves. It took three million dead Vietnamese, 60,000 dead Americans, millions more maimed on both sides and/or lives destroyed to find out how wrong they were–but then they did a little spin doctoring about a “noble cause” to cover up their complete, cold-blooded fuck-up.

Comment on AMERICANS AT THE GATES by Tim Chambers

Tim Chambers — Fri, 24 Feb 2012 22:06:07 +0000

Lest we forget. Great ending.