January 2007
10 posts
3 tags
Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary...
Going out to eat at a restaurant can be a bit like watching a movie. You see what is on that plate in front of you, but often you have no idea where it came from or how it got there. There is no work involved: a beautiful plate of food appears before your eyes after a polite bidding to a complete stranger who appears more than happy (most of the time) to serve you. What a wonderful experience and...
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All Aunt Hagar's Children by Edward P. Jones
For as long as I have been writing, I realize that I am still (and will always be) learning how to write a story. Luckily, there are people that do know how to write a story. When I think about style or a writer’s voice and I realize that I can’t define - that my inability to even decsribe - what makes the writing so compelling, the reading transcends the page and becomes an...
3 tags
The 2007 Philadelphia Shakespeare Festival
The new schedule is up for the Philadelphia Shakespeare Festival. This season they’re performing Othello and Taming of the Shrew. I’ve seen a few performances, including Othello at the intimate Sansom Street theater - well worth the ticket prices. I am looking forward to seeing a good Shrew.
aside Leave it to Philly (once again) to get Rocky Balboa involved in the arts.
1 tag
State of the Union
(via condalmo.)
What will he have to say for himself tonight?
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New Bookforum
The Feb/Mar 2007 issue of Bookforum has just arrived in my mailbox - a ray of sunshine after a cold dreary day in a gray cubicle.
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The Audacity of Hope by Barack Obama
I am very excited about Barack Obama. I feel that he represents a new kind of politician. I’ll admit “new politician” sounds like a bit of an oxymoron - or maybe just wishful thinking. But Obama has charisma and the foresight to understand that most of the politicians leading our country into a new millennium are children of one or even two generations ago. We need youth. We...
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William Blake's Notebook
The British Library has a high quality version of one of William Blake’s notebooks.
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"Writing feels like self-betrayal, like failure."
Zadie Smith writes an essay in the Guardian on what makes good writing and what makes it fail.
But neither did they [what Smith calls critic-practitioners, writers who were critics - specifically, here, she writes of Woolf, Murdoch, and Barthes] think of a writer’s personality as an irrelevance. They understood style precisely as an expression of personality, in its widest sense. A...
2 tags
writing without distraction
mr. twoumbrellas, who has an uncanny knack for discovering (and creating) cool, innovative, practical, and simple software, pointed me to WriteRoom.
This program turns your screen into a blank slate (you choose the color) with a just a cursor: no email, no clock, no Safari (that siren) luring me away into the depths of the Internet. Just me and my writing. What’s great is that it...
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So many books...
“75 Books I Failed to Read in 2006” (via condalmo.)
48. Far too many literary journals to mention
When I conceived of this list, I thought, ha ha, this will be funny, a lark, an amusing way to end the year, a way to make up for all the dead air here of late, and then I saw myself typing out this entry, and I got real sad, because, it’s true: there are too many literary...