Old Is The New New

I don’t know about you, but I’d say this gives that Gary Coleman and Michael Hasselhoff picture a run for its money.

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Snarkout‘s annual post is as keen as ever: an appreciation of Santa Claus Conquers the Martians becomes a link-happy history of literary invasions right back to Saki and Wells.

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John Scalzi calls them “The 10 Least Successful Holiday Specials,” but they read like alternate TV history to me.

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Kenneth Burke described literature as “equipment for living”: “A work like Madame Bovary,” he wrote, “is the strategic naming of a situation. It singles out a pattern of experience that is sufficiently representative of our social structure, that recurs sufficiently often mutis mutandis, for people to ‘need a word for it’ and to adopt an [...]

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“I, Robot meets the Risorgimento,” says my man Mike G. From a humongous thread of alternate geography at alternatehistory.com.

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“Do not fancy that an intermission of writing is a decay of kindness.”

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Jeet Heer, comics historian, on the half life of a stereotype, from the “Irish simian” to Jiggs to Homer Simpson.

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