Not much courage, anyway. From the excellent long essay “Poetry Slam: Or, The decline of American verse”, by Mark Edmundson, in Harper’s for July 2013: “I found myself once talking with a fiction writer, a woman of considerable achievement and reputation, about the MFA program in which she taught. I put forward the idea that …
Tag: Writing
Two Falconers
Tim Gallagher, whose new book Imperial Dreams I have reviewed below, is visiting England and just sent this fine portrait of two generations of falconers. John Loft, on the right, is the living master of merlins,; he literally wrote the book on them, A Merlin for Me, a delightful but almost daunting combination of experience, …
Free Association
I have been kicking a few unrelated (?) things around, having plenty of material but not feeling, with our tough environmental conditions (no water, heat, impending possible rain making it an uncomfortable mix of steamy and dusty) much like writing a long essay. I was rambling freely through these things to L. and suddenly thought: …
Quote
From Michael Gruber’s blog, true and witty but not funny: “I don’t much like to talk about my work while it’s in progress or read reviews or give encouragement to people trying to enter a profession I know to be a miserable way to make a living, with a premature death rate that compares unfavorably …
Passenger Pigeons Again…
Another little sample from my evolving proposal: P { margin-bottom: 0.08in; } After the Ice … I will draw on contemporary scholarship from Pielou to Paul Martin to paint a picture of the late glacial world – one with little place for the passenger pigeon as a major ecological actor. One keystone will be Australian …
Light Blogging…
Emerging from a ton of writing as future investment, near cripppled from time in chair. Need to do our spring outdoor chores– garden, pigeons … Back soon I hope.
Quote
“There comes a time when you realize that everything is a dream, and only those things preserved in writing have any possibility of being real.” -James Salter
Christina’s Blog
Another post I have been kicking down the road: my friend Christina Nealson’s blog. I kept trying to think of original ways to describe her vivid writing and books, her nomadic life, her heterodox feminism and her support of the Second Amendment… Finally I thought: why not just let her describe her visit? Come back …
Quote
“… as soon as I went in the door I immediately recalled how great an experience a good bookstore was, to which the browsing we do on computers is as phone sex compared to sex.”– Michael Gruber
Passenger Pigeons # 2
P { margin-bottom: 0.08in; } I ended last with: So, where were the pigeons? They were always inhabitants of the deciduous forest, eating nuts and berries. It seems impossible for the pigeon to have existed in anything like the numbers it eventually attained. And a passenger pigeon without its niche and numbers is nothing more …