literary pretensions
What single book is the best introduction to your field
That’s the topic of a interesting discussion happening over at metafilter - What single book is the best introduction to your field or specialization for laypeople? - behold the aggregating power of the ‘internets’. Here are a few I picked out that I would read if I ever had the time… sigh…
Notes on Nursing by […]
Bees
Featured in a recent New Yorker, Elizabeth Kolbert’s Stung is about just that, bees. She begins:
Not long ago, I found myself sitting at the edge of a field with a bear and thirty or forty thousand very angry bees. The bear was there because of the bees. The bees were there because of me, and […]
Antonya Nelson’s glimpse of Houston in Shauntrelle
Houston is not, to my mind, a particularly literary town, that is to say, it defies one to write about it. It has no deficit of aspiration of course and has played host to many a worthy practitioner - minimalist kingpin Donald Barthelme, poets Mark Doty, Edward Hirsch, Cynthia MacDonald, Vassar Miller, and of course […]
Inprint Brown Reading Series 2007-08 season lineup announced
The Inprint Brown Reading Series season lineup has been announced. My personal highlights include Michael Chabon and Dave Eggers, founder of publishing house McSweeney’s whose Internet Tendency is a daily read. See the Inprint Houston website for more information.
Houston Chronicle: Inprint Brown Reading Series
• Oct. 15: Richard Powers and Jennifer Egan. Powers (The Gold Bug […]
Perils of Translation
Economist Steve Levitt is an economist and author of Freakonomics, a bestseller in the U.S. and in the process of being published in myriad countries and languages all over the world. From his recent post Levit and Dabner?.
The second thing I noticed is that it was written by Stiven D. Levit and Stiven Dz. Dabner. […]
The poet Derek Walcott on NPR
Derek Walcott has been one of my favorite poets for a very long time. This was only confirmed when I saw Walcott speak at the Margaret Brown Root reading series some years ago. His reading of his poems is at once the most elegant and most natural I’ve ever heard. Audio on the NPR website. […]
Vassar Miller’s ‘Christmas Mourning’
Vassar Miller’s “Christmas Mourning”
On Christmas Day I weep
Good Friday to rejoice.
I watch the child asleep.
Does He half dream the choice
The Man must make and keep?
At Christmastime I sigh
For my Good Friday Hope.
Outflung the Child’s arms lie
To span in their brief scope
The death the Man must die.
Come Christmastide I groan
To hear Good Friday’s pealing.
The Man, racked […]
Remembering Molly
The best tribute I could think of -
“If Texas were a sane place, it wouldn’t be nearly as much fun”
“The first rule of holes: When you’re in one, stop digging”
“Everyone knows the man has no clue, but no one there has the courage to say it. I mean, good gawd, the man is as […]
Reading: Sudhir Ventakesh, Off the Books
With a finite amount of time before Contracts starts, I decided my next read is going to be Sudhir Ventakesh’s Off the Books: The Underground Economy of the Urban Poor. Ventakesh was a colleague of Steve Levitt’s (Freakonomics) whom I’ve discussed here and here. Levitt and Dubner discussed Ventakesh’s work with Chicago gangs at length […]
Su Blackwell, Book Cut Sculptures
Amazing work. Su Blackwell, Book Cut Images
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