June 8, 2012
Poetry and Entropy
It’s not often that the nuclear radiologist in me shows up on this blog, but Dr. Majmudar—reader of medical images created by measuring positron annihilations and differential tissue attenuation—would like […]
June 8, 2012
Short Takes: Cutting It Out, Keeping It In
Gangs of robots, social expectations, and charting syllogisms: if George Saunders, Lewis Carroll, and many others had written the much-maligned Twilight series. C. S. Lewis on “the thing” writers write […]
May 21, 2012
Taking back the sponge cake & other adventures
This post should come with a dateline: Seattle. This weekend I was lucky enough to go to my first reading at the legendary Elliott Bay Books. Four great poets—Zach Savich […]
April 25, 2012
Performing justice
Last week I was one of many Americans who unwittingly clicked through to the “new” Bank of America website and was, for a moment, completely taken in. “Dear Fellow American,” […]
April 18, 2012
Literature and home
This past weekend I had the great pleasure of attending the 12th annual Juniper Literary Festival at UMass Amherst. A homecoming of sorts, since I received an MFA from UMass […]
March 18, 2012
Short Takes: Points of Origin (and Departure)
Mets reliever Miguel Batista has published a book of poetry and a crime novel, and a third book is in process—and his nickname is “el poeta.” Bibliophile? Now you have […]
March 9, 2012
David Grossman: Why? Who Died?
Today I’m re-posting this piece by Israeli writer David Grossman (discovered via)—an introductory note by the translator, Sol Salbe, appears in italics below. Last Friday Haaretz did something unusual: it […]
March 6, 2012
The Lost Art of Finding Fairytales
From the beginning of “The Turnip Princess,” one of 500 fairytales collected by the historian Franz Xaver von Schönwerth in the 1800s and which, until now, had been locked away […]
February 25, 2012
Translation and money laundering
A friend just sent me a link to this excellent interview at the Loggernaut reading series (dateless, it seems, and also timeless?) with Ammiel Alcalay—author, most recently, of “neither wit […]
February 23, 2012
And Another Thing:
My favorite word in the English language (at least for today) is and. I’ve realized it’s the basis of my metaphysics—many Gods and one Brahman—as well as of my literary […]