Tuesday, November 27, 2007
Q: Why didn’t the skeleton go to the party?
A: He didn’t have the guts.
Or she. Me. I don’t think I have the guts for all the stuff that’s cranking up for the “holiday” season.
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Wednesday, November 21, 2007
November has been so far the month of travel, first Austen, then Auburn, Alabama. (So A = travel?) Few, I imagine, go to Auburn, Alabama, if not for some sort of business or other, and in this case C and I fall into the majority (imagine that), and it was business for C that took [...]
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Tagged Alabama, art gallery, Auburn, books, Cincinnati, collage, Denis Johnson, Jesus' Son, Loachapoka, Nathaniel Hawthorne, National Book Award, Richard Powers, The Atlantic Monthly, The Echo Maker, Tree of Smoke
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Wednesday, October 31, 2007
To continue the pumpkin theme from last post, serendipitiously. I have in my hands, my wandering eye having caught the book’s spine over there across the room a moment ago while in the middle of a rather lengthy call taking a bit too long to end, Hockney’s Alphabet. Mine is not the $500 signed first-edition [...]
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Tuesday, October 30, 2007
Posthumously.
From A.M. Homes’ The Mistress’s Daughter:
Salt Lake [City] is “the mountain,” the mecca for genealogical information — home base for the Mormons, who go around the world collecting genealogical data. Every month five to six thousand reels of microfilm are added to their collection. Unbeknownst to much of the general population, the reason the Mormon [...]
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Two YouTube broadcasts:
Click first on Do not go gentle and then second, to open simultaneously in another tab (I just assume that you use Firefox, though I guess maybe other browsers do things to allow you to open several uris at once), We Share Our Mother’s Health, The Knife. This is for the auditory experience. [...]
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Wednesday, October 17, 2007
Around this time, October 14, 1988, to be exact, Katherine Mansfield was born (Wellington, New Zealand — see entry on the “little savage from New Zealand”), and on her 34th birthday she wrote in her journal:
Risk! Risk anything! Care no more for the opinion of others, for those voices. Do the hardest thing on earth [...]
Thursday, October 11, 2007
Went to the Hyde Park Square Art Show on Sunday and came across a painter whose work I like a lot. Ken Swinson. Check his website and his blog, and what he has on Augusta, Kentucky, where he lives and paints right now. I’d heard of Augusta a while back; now more of a reason [...]
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Saturday, October 6, 2007
Not my words; they belong to Richard Powers, in his novel The Echo Maker. What he says accurately describes our reading of his book.
He stuck with the story, to protect his investment, throwing good hours after bad.
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Saturday, September 29, 2007
Since before this year even started, everyone and their mother started writing about the 50th anniversary of Kerouac’s On the Road, and the traveling exhibition of the scrolled manuscript. Good stuff over at friend Xark’s, for example.
Remember that 10,000 Maniacs song: Hey Jack Kerouac, I think of your mother, And all the tears she cried… [...]
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Wednesday, September 26, 2007
Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could. Some blunders and absurdities no doubt crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day; begin it well and serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense.
–RWE
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