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Pushing Rope (Free subscription) | 26/08/2008
Meanwhile, in the radiation filled fields of Rocky Flats Arsenal, just outside of Denver, Colorado, The Ghost of Herman Melville is paying a visit to Billy "Bud" Wilson, an unemployed insurance adjuster... Ah, Billy, I remember hitchhiking up Highway 287 with Jack Kerouac and a bottle of Bushmills whiskey. Stole pies off of windowsills in Lafayette...and that coal miner's daughter, Have Mercy Miss...
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The Aristocrats (Free subscription) | 26/08/2008
Meanwhile, in the radiation filled fields of Rocky Flats Arsenal, just outside of Denver, Colorado, The Ghost of Herman Melville is paying a visit to Billy "Bud" Wilson, an unemployed insurance adjuster... Ah, Billy, I remember hitchhiking up Highway 287 with Jack Kerouac and a bottle of Bushmills whiskey. Stole pies off of windowsills in Lafayette...and that coal miner's daughter, Have Mercy Miss...
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Bookninja (Free subscription) | 25/08/2008
Or girth, depending on how you look at it. Book titles are getting longer. Stories are getting shorter. Soon they will pass each other in a bizarre literary Möbius strip. Think of what would have happened to George Orwell’s snappy title. 1984: One Man’s Discovery that Big Brother is Indeed Big but Hardly Fraternal and that [...]
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The Telegraph India (Free subscription) | 23/08/2008
The American Centre imported The Whale, by the Concrete
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Quillblog (Free subscription) | 22/08/2008
Herman Melville was for them; Raymond Chandler was against. Donald Barthelme thought they were “ugly as a tick on a dog’s belly.” His contemporary, Kurt Vonnegut, called them “transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing.” Yet another commentator, grammar enthusiast James Kilpatrick, attacks them as “girly,” “odious,” and “the most pusillanimous, sissified, utterly useless mark of punctuation...
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Eater (Free subscription) | 22/08/2008
This is the latest edition of Who Goes There? a regular feature in which Lost City's Brooks of Sheffield cracks the doors on mysteriously enduring Gotham restaurants—unsung, curious neighborhood mainstays with the dusty, forgotten, determined look—to learn secrets of longevity...
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Idle Musings (Free subscription) | 20/08/2008
I had some friends over last weekend and a few had never seen my library, where I have around 750 books. Most were stunned that (1) I had so many books that take up an entire room and (2) That I even read anything at all that isn’t online. As we started to talk about [...]
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Explore : Augusten Burroughs, Authors, Culture, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gabriel García Márquez, Gore Vidal, Harper Lee, J. D. Salinger, Jack London, John Steinbeck, Kurt Vonnegut, Ray Bradbury, Stephen King, Susanna Tamaro, Tom Clancy
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The Ohoopee Letter News (Free subscription) | 19/08/2008
Sentences like this one make Melville one of the most beloved of assigned high school readings: "And the thews of Billy were hardly compatible with that sort of sensitive spiritual organization which in some cases instinctively conveys to ignorant innocence an admonition of the proximity of the malign." -- Billy Budd My school begins tomorrow. I am teaching US history, AP US history and American literature....
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The mental_floss Blogs (Free subscription) | 19/08/2008
While romping about Nantucket’s fields and beaches, I stumbled into a little history. Nantucket was originally inhabited by the Wampanoag tribe until the English settled down in the mid 1600s. Among the founding families of Nantucket were the Macy’s of Macy’s, the Folgers of Folgers Coffee, and the Starbuck’s of …Starbucks? But the Starbuck’s company [...]
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atHome Top Story (Free subscription) | 18/08/2008
In Wonderful Town (now playing at the Shaw Festival), sassy Ruth Sherwood explains Herman Melville's Moby Dick to someone at a dud cocktail party by saying, "It's about this whale."
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My Small Boat (Free subscription) | 12/08/2008
There are some enterprises in which a careful disorderliness is the true method.
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So Quoted (Free subscription) | 06/08/2008
Wherein I'm probably serious about this Just picked up a copy of The Replacements: All Over But the Shouting: An Oral History , by Jim Walsh. Almost brought home a biography of Pol Pot or one on Herman Melville. I opened the Melville to a random page and read how the following passage was a description of a circle jerk (from the chapter "A Squeeze of the Hand"): Squeeze! squeeze! squeeze! all the...
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Telstar Logistics (Free subscription) | 28/07/2008
Last week there was a parade of tall ships in San Francisco. More than 30 sail-powered vessels participated in the show, but by far the most spectacular of the bunch was the USCG Eagle, a steel-hulled, three-mast ship that used...
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Geek News Central (Free subscription) | 28/07/2008
I kinda knew this was going to happen. I pondered doing something on twitter myself, but also knew it was going to be a big undertaking. -- I am doing this post 140 characters at a time. I am separating...
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Living the Scientific Life (Scienti (Free subscription) | 15/07/2008
Of all the preposterous assumptions of humanity, nothing exceeds the criticisms made of the habits of the poor by the well-housed, well-warmed, and well-fed. ~ Herman Melville How do you define poverty? Do you think it is the lack of nutritious food, clean clothing, reasonable housing and adequate health care? Did you know that the federal poverty level is determined on the basis of a 1955 government...
