Christopher Barzak

Month: January 2009

  • Q&A

    I’ve been spending the past week doing Q&A at the Endicott Mythic Reader’s Group on Goodreads, and there have been some really thoughtful questions.  One came in today, to which I just responded.  And I’ve decided to post the question and my response here, too. Q: Ghosts and eldritch kids in and of themselves aren’t…

  • Why I love Dr. Seuss

    I like nonsense, it wakes up the brain cells. Fantasy is a necessary ingredient in living, It’s a way of looking at life through the wrong end of a telescope. Which is what I do, And that enables you to laugh at life’s realities.   – Dr. Seuss

  • Library Journal review

    I missed this review when it came out in early December, but having come across it now, am putting it up as I have with the other reviews that have come in since The Love We Share Without Knowing has been published.  It’s a good one!  🙂  (Deserving of a smiley face, especially since I…

  • Playing Security Check Point

    Have you seen this yet? Amazing, fascinating, scary, crazy, crazy scary, just plain odd.   Toys really do tell us a lot about the world we live in. But more importantly, check out the reviews of the product on its Amazon.com page. Brought to me and then to you via Jed Berry’s Facebook status.

  • Snow Day

    It’s a snow day here in Youngstown, always one of my favorite sorts of days since I was a little boy.  Magical things happen on them, it seems, or at least they do in my memory, which is simply the other side of dreaming, so perhaps that’s where some of the magic in my memories…

  • Palin san megane

    Dear Japanese readers who find my blog using the terms “Palin glasses” (in Japanese, of course): Those glasses are not cool.  Not cool at all, yo!  Kakko yokunai! By the way, since changing laptops to a MacBook, I’ve lost my Japanese language tool kit, which allowed me to type in Japanese, and I don’t know…

  • Goodreads/Endicott Q&A

    If you’re a member of Goodreads (which is a truly awesome social networking service for book lovers), and also a member of the group (on Goodreads) called Endicott Mythic Fiction (an incarnation of the community grown by the amazing Terri Windling and many other amazing writers, artists, musicians, etc, at the Endicott Studio and the…

  • Familiar Strangers

    Over at Bookspot Cenral, Jay Tomio has reposted an essayistic thing, “Notes Towards a Sort of Supreme Fiction”, which I wrote a very. long. time. ago.  In my mid-twenties.  Reading over it again is like reading the work of a familiar stranger.  It also makes me feel just a little bit old. 🙂 Here’s Jay’s…

  • Loneliness in a crowd

    An interesting BBC News article on the loneliness that pervades despite a crowded Japan, and how some people deal with it: Loneliness is a problem faced by many people on these crowded islands. But the Japanese are prone to believe that, in the right circumstances, money can turn a stranger into a friend… at least…

  • Fullest

    Recently, while communicating with friends and acquaintances on Facebook and MySpace, I’ve been reading the user status posts, and also the information sections where people describe themselves, and have been coming across self-descriptions in which people state that they are happy and live life to the fullest.  It’s an interesting statement to make, and I’m…