John Berger and Susan Sontag’s delicious shoptalk and big hair
What a fabulous conversation this is, between two giants we’ve lost. You see here, in this quiet, quietly intense, intensely curious conversation — in which (a ...
Tag: literature
Baby Blues, Sugar Grumps, Cannibal Writers, & Other Reading
T. Delene Beeland’s essay on post-baby depression is among of the best such I’ve read. I judged myself against other mothers. It seemed everyone cared fo...
Glitter in the Net, 20 May 2014
Shiny things from the day: In Arrested development, at Mosaic, Virginia Hughes looks at a handful of girls who won’t age and an aging scientist who’s determined...
Peter Matthiessen In Paradise
Perhaps so. Rivendell Books, here in Montpelier, didn’t waste anytime putting this where it belongs, right out front. I think of Matthiessen late a...
Uncommon Reading – Eudora Welty on Virginia Woolf on Hemingway
One of the underrated pleasures of the internet is all the old stuff we can now read — goodies that 20 years ago you could read only by going to a major l...
Novels Change Your Brain. So What?
A recent study found that reading novels appears to alter one’s brain connectivity — a revelation that immediately spurred a lot of coverage, and I can se...
Virginia Woolf Was a Plant Sensitive and Tough
A glorious find for any Virginia Woolf fan. For a Virginia Woolf fan writing a book about a scientifico-botanical metaphor about the nature of sensitivity and f...
George Clooney Robs A Bank With a Lie & A Smile, and Other Scenes In Media Res
Elmore Leonard likes to start scenes right in the middle of the scene, as he does, more or less, in the scene above from Steven Soderbergh’s “Out of...
Tortoise Sex, Via the Eyes of Lucky Jack Aubrey
One of the many pleasures of Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey-Maturin novels, which follow through 20.5 volumes the Napoleonic-era adventures of British Roy...
Do We Need New Traits to Live Within Limits? Revkin Asks. Lopez Responds, from 1986.
To start the new year, Andy Revkin, over at Dot Earth at the New York Times, wondered what traits we humans might be able to develop so that we “fall forw...