Features

Last updated Thursday, 5 May 2011 — 2:54am

You may be looking for the Wednesday Book Club, a more or less ongoing feature in which I review or comment on a different book every week.

Posts of relative legend

Not everything I write for Nick’s Café Canadien is important or even very clever at all, but every now and then I produce a post that I can self-assuredly defend as being something worth saying.

Below, I’ve collected the posts that I gauge to be the most representative of this website and what I’ve always wanted it to be, the ones that made this entire time-consuming hobby worthwhile and gave me something to show for all those late nights at the keyboard. In the past, a number of my posts have also attracted the notice of much bigger fish in the ocean and produced sporadic explosions in traffic; I’ve included them here as well, though few of them can be classed among my personal favourites.

For significant posts written prior to August 2007, see Posts of Antiquity.

Here are some of the better posts from August 2007 onwards, if you’ll pardon the narcissism:

  • “Dumb and Dumbledore” (Saturday, 20 October 2007) — On Harry Potter, sexual orientation, interpretive freedom, and the utter silliness of vocal fans and opponents alike. As usual, everybody is wrong.

  • “A checkmate in Casablanca” (Tuesday, 12 February 2008) — The first time we see Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca, he’s playing chess with himself. I ask why, and dote on lost love.

  • “The National Scrabble Cataclysm, Day 3″ (Monday, 28 July 2008) — I wrote about the entirety of the 2008 National Scrabble Championship in Orlando, Florida (Parts 1, 2, 3, and 4)—but if you only have time to read one, make it Part 3, in which I fall in love with Scrabble again in spite of my disastrous performance at the tournament.

  • “License to Slum: The Novel of the Movie of the Game” (Sunday, 31 August 2008) — In what is surely the lengthiest piece I have ever written for the site (in five parts: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5) I ask myself if my prejudice against spin-off franchise fiction is just a prejudice. If you don’t want to read the whole thing, skip to Part 5, where I spell out my belief in the individual mind as the crucible of art.

  • “Dustbins of history, landfills of theory” (Tuesday, 30 September 2008) — Why do some postmodernist scholars in the humanities insist on writing so poorly? I show how they only marginalize themselves.

  • “The greedy strategeme” (Thursday, 15 April 2010) — I expand on a claim by prominent game designer Soren Johnson that World of Warcraft is a game about evolution. Part 1 of a never-completed series about how the copying of strategies in games creates competitive environments that are mildly Darwinian.

  • “IBM’s double jeopardy” (Tuesday, 8 February 2011) — A pugnacious journalist dismissed IBM’s Jeopardy!-playing computer as a gimmick without doing his research. I dispel his misconceptions about AI and investigate how standard journalistic style propagates sensationalism and disappointment alike.

  • “Here Be Cartographers: Reading the Fantasy Map” (Monday, 18 April 2011) — Maps of fictional places are often taken for granted as passive and precise. I read them in search of narrative perspective and voice.

  • Finally, of the many book reviews I have written for the site, one could do worse than to start with what I said about Le Ton Beau de Marot, The Dispossessed, The Rest Is Noise, Twilight, Watership Down, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, and The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle.