More Thoughts on Prof. McMahan’s Essay

Reading yesterday’s NYT (online) essay, The Meat Eaters, by Rutgers University professor of philosophy Jeff McMahan (forwarded by reader Daniela and shared below by Steve), I’m almost more puzzled by my own need to comment on the piece than I am amazed by it. It’s tempting to lump this man’s essay in with the tiresome mass of …

Read more

Progress: My Days These Days

How I am doing, adapted from a few letters to friends and relatives: basically well if sometimes a bit frustrated, with only occasional moments of terror (;-) I was never a couch potato before, but my undiagnosed symptoms slowed to stopped me for almost a year and I had to work to get back. Now …

Read more

How to write

This whole thing is so funny and true I can hardly excerpt. But I’ll try: “Find that single cartoon frame from “Peanuts” that you keep in a box somewhere, the one in which Snoopy is reading a publisher’s rejection letter for his novel that goes, “Has it ever occurred to you that you may be …

Read more

Writers & Debt

An excellent Read- The- Whole- Thing piece by Megan McArdle in the Atlantic: Sample: “…writers are, as a class, extraordinarily at risk. They spend their twenties, and often their thirties, living paycheck to paycheck. They are extremely well educated, and all that education is not only expensive, but builds expensive habits. You end up with …

Read more

Writers’ Woes

Christina Nealson sends this grim item from salon about the state of mainstream publishing. “…On Dec. 3, now known as “Black Wednesday,” several major American publishers were dramatically downsized, leaving many celebrated editors and their colleagues jobless. The bad news stretches from the unemployment line to bookstores to literature itself. “It’s going to be very …

Read more

News

Sorry for light posting. Still haven’t found the bird. Realistically I am not sure what to expect. Of the longwings I have flown in the last 15 years or so, all but one were out at least overnight, and all but one of those eventually returned. Also, in one of the more notorious cases in …

Read more

Apologies

I seem to be doing this too much; that is, apologizing for lack of content. I think this (often) is an uneasily split- personality blog. Sometimes I am a link aggregator, sometimes a photo blogger; and sometimes I expose my own personality a bit. Trouble is, when I most “need” to do that is when …

Read more