This particular meme, via Eve Tushnet, seems irresistible for the bookish. 1. Pick up the nearest book (of at least 123 pages).2. Open the book to page 123.3. Find the fifth sentence.4. Post the next three sentences.5. Tag five people. OK: as usual I am reading about eight books but the nearest physically is John …
Tag: Writing
Meat!
Via Margory, some good food stuff: a new quarterly about meat called “Meatpaper.” According to their website, “Meatpaper is a print magazine of art and ideas about meat. We like metaphors more than marinating tips. We are your journal of meat culture.” According to the NYT: “This week the second issue of Meatpaper, a quarterly …
Dog Novels for Kids
A curious phenomenon of the thirties, forties, and fifties was the proliferation of dog novels for kids or rather what would be called “young adults” these days. They may just have been a product of a more “country” time– they were utterly un- pc, generally very good in natural history, and dealt forthrightly with issues …
Real Influences: Travel Writing
While reading Douglas Botting’s 2000 bio of Gerald Durrell I came upon these lines: “Young men woke up to find that the world was once again their oyster, and not just a place you went on a troopship. At almost the same time that the Durrell brothers’ two books werepublished [1953] a galaxy of talened …
Last word on Mailer, plus..
Phillip posted below on Mailer, and I agree. A last word, from an email I sent: Betsy once wrote, for the MIT paper, an announcement on him– something like “the overrated self- regarding egotist Norman Mailer will appear…” She assumed it would be caught in rewrite but it wasn’t. His Gary Gilmore book was a …
Nature Writing: Robert Macfarlane
My recent reading of Robert Macfarlane’s fascinating The Wild Places made me think a lot about the differences between (current) American and English “nature writing”, and why I usually like the second better. There are many reasons and not all are related. English nature and natural history writing, like the (I would argue related) genre …
What Remains
Or “Culling II”. I find the specificity of (very diverse) categories left in what I must call my “nature” section fascinating. Before there was so much stuff in there that it would have been hard to see categories beyond that vague term. Maybe negative as in “not too much botany or herpetology” though both exist …
Alumni
Far Away and Long Ago (in Craftsbury Common, Vermont to be exact) Annie Proulx started a writing workshop and talked me into being the first instructor, though I had never taught anything before. Two of my students published good books this year. Both are far wiser and older than I, and have written before, but …
Goshawks vs. Depression
Pluvialis has been having a rough time. I do not think she is ‘whingeing’, in the slightest; as she admits, ‘Death, relationships, job-loss, moving: four biggies in the World of Stress.’ The four I’d say– dealing with only two has on occasion reduced me to near- catatonia. What fascinates me is that she is finding …
Vicki Hearne
Her new Collected Poems will soon be available. I look forward to reading (and reviewing) them. Was there ever another first- rate poet who also trained animals professionally, had a degree in philosophy (she was at Yale with Howard Bloom) and whose writings still hearten us in our fight against such as PETA? HT Margory …