Jane Haddam

I’d like to start off by pointing out that I never said that genre was synonymous with badly written–in fact, I’ve said the exact opposite, several times.  What I did say was the genre fiction before World War II was almost universally badly written, and it was.  Go back and look at the mysteries of…

It’s a dark morning and I have too much to do today, but I had a very good time last night, and that was because I ewatched a truly terrible movie. In fact, due to the marvellous inclusiveness of modern cable television, I watched two really terrible movies yesterday.  The first, in the early afternoon,…

The night before last,  I had one of those complete disasters I’m prone to on occasion, where I get up around three hours after I’ve gone to bed and then just can’t get back to sleep again. Actually, it might have been the three hours that was the problem.  The  United States Army has actually…

Here’s the thing, if I got started on the depredations of insurance companies, or the mess that is the maze of insurance law, I’d be here for another year, and I wouldn’t get anything else done.  So– Back to the books.   Or, specifically, to one issue in the reading of books, and of poetry. Robert…

Okay, I know that a lot of you reading this are not from the  US and are not much interested in  US politics, but this might be an interesting philsophical exercise anyway.  And I’m being driven slowly crazy by the whole thing, so I’m going to talk. There is, as most of you know, an…

Before I start this, a warning–the story I’m about to relate is both true and truly terrible.  If you think the pictures of clubbed baby seals make you ill, this will be worse. That said, I think narratives must arise naturally.  The problem with the Marxist narratives is that they were largely manufactured to fit…

John asks if it’s possible for someone to make science a religion, and of course it is–it’s even more possible for someone to take science on faith, like the guy on one of the Internet forums I contribute to on and off who, after several days of  declaring anyone who took intelligent design seriously to…

Every once in a while, I suddenly realize that I have spent the last several decades misdefining some issue I’ve been interested in, so that all the thinking I’ve done about it is completely and utterly useless. I’ve been having a creeping suspicion all night that that is about to happen again. The title of…

One of the peculiarities of living in a Protestant culture is the wway in whih concepts in Catholic theology morph into meanings often completely unconnected with the original idea, and then morph again in the popular media so that even Catholics begin to misuse them. The most obvious instance of this is the  Immaculate Conception,…

Okay,  I’ll admit it. I didn’t make that one up. I wish I had, but I didn’t.  It’s part of Allen Tate’s declaration that Keats provedthat Romantic poetry “could be more than ideal shepherds and abstract sheep.” I’m gong to keep it because it fits in with what I was thinking about for today.  Or…