The Cambias Digression

Notes and thoughts on everything from what I had for breakfast to the fate of the Universe.

  • Moby Blogging: The Plot Arrives

    In Chapter 36 of Moby Dick, the slow start ends abruptly when Ahab finally makes up his mind to go ahead and let everyone know how awesomely crazy he really is. He calls the crew together on the deck to hear one of the greatest insane rants in literature. Ahab begins by nailing a Spanish…

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  • Ozblogging: Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz, Part 4

    Elemental Trouble From the Valley of Voe our heroes climb another long staircase up to the land of the Gargoyles. Along the way they have a couple of odd encounters. The first is when they pass a rift in the wall which looks out over another cavern, and a very strange place it is. The…

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  • Ozblogging: Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz, Part 3

    Un-Player-Character-Like Behavior The Black Pit isn't actually a pit, it's more of a tunnel. The Mangaboos wall our heroes into it with glass boulders, so Dorothy, Zeb, Jim, Eureka and the Wizard follow the tunnel to see where it leads. They go up for a long way and finally emerge in a "delightful valley" with…

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  • More Moby Blogging

    My son and I have gotten up to about Chapter 35 of Moby Dick; he's still interested, although Melville's language sometimes mystifies him completely. I had forgotten how much of a slice-of-life realistic novel Moby Dick is. We remember Captain Ahab's mad quest and the high-school English essay allegories, but we forget how much of…

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  • Ozblogging: Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz, Part 2

    Humbugs and Humanoid Plants The Sorcerer of the Mangaboos is named Gwig, and unlike the rest of those people he's not eerily handsome. In fact, he's all covered with thorns. Gwig, it seems, is a bit of a humbug, because after the first Rain of Stones he promised there would be no more. He gets…

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  • Ozblogging: Dorothy And The Wizard In Oz, Part 1

    In the Introduction to Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz, L. Frank Baum good-naturedly complains that "The children won't let me stop telling tales of the Land of Oz. I know lots of other stories, and I hope to tell them, some time or another; but just now my loving tyrants won't allow me." Every…

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  • Copyrights and Schadenfreude

    Apologies for the long hiatus. Among other issues, we took a family vacation and my internet access was limited. Anyway, I'm back. Yesterday I happened to read a posting on the usually interesting io9 blog (the science fiction branch of the Gawker Media empire) — this one, about the tension between expansiveness and self-referentiality in…

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  • No, I Haven’t Forgotten

    Life has gotten in the way of blogging recently, but with luck that's over. Expect new posts soon.

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  • How I Did It #5: Apocrypha

    I'm probably going to get into a lot of trouble for this one, but here goes. "Apocrypha" may be the weirdest story I've written. Rather than summarize it, I've posted it to a separate Web page here. Read and enjoy. Now that you've looked at it, you're probably thinking "What the hell was that?" That…

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  • Apocrypha

    APOCRYPHA by James L. Cambias A beautiful girl in trouble draws Joshua bar-Joseph into a deadly plot!    It is night in Alexandria, but the great metropolis never sleeps. Down by the waterfront, inns and taverns are filled with publicans and sinners. After dark the city vigiles only go there in groups. The worst dive of…

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The Worldbuilding Index