books

Well this is serendipitous — Poetry Magazine has an interview with Gary Snyder, by Alan Williamson! When I was at Davis, Gary taught a course about Zen in classical Chinese and Japanese poetry. Basically, he came in once a week and gave us a Dharma talk, then we looked at the poems. Alan also...
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The Dog Walk Sutra of a couple of weeks ago came out of my little project to finally memorize the Heart Sutra, and to dedicate at least a part of my morning dog walks to reciting it. Because that was such a success, I decided that maybe the morning dog walks might also be...
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What a surprise — I know she’s been shortlisted forever, but it never occurred to me that they’d actually give it to her — but then again, the Nobel committee seems to like decidedly odd writers — and Lessing is certainly odd. I can’t overstate how important The Golden Notebook was to me in...
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They’ve made a movie of Ron Hansen’s brilliant novel, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford — and it’s reviewed in today’s New York Times. It’s a brilliant novel, and so, I have mixed feelings about the movie version. On the one hand, it’s great that Ron Hansen, a novelist I...
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You’ve probably seen by now that Madeleine L’Engle has died. Despite having been the kind of kid who could walk between classes with my nose in a book and never bump into anyone (I also became very quick at taking tests because we were free to read after we were done), I was never...
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Since I seem to have lost the day to a series of lighting fixtures I put up (don’t even ask about the screw with the stripped threads, and the hacksaw, and the swearing …), here’s some Friday Links to keep everyone entertained: Had lunch today with another Livingston Blogger: Go check out Livingston, I...
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Sandra Gilbert reviews the marvelous new Hermione Lee biography of Edith Wharton (Don’t even get me started on the many many ways that Edith Wharton outshines Henry James — just go read the Custom of the Country. Do it now.) Bookslut interviews Thomas Mallon Ron Hogan at Beatrice asks Jean Thompson about her favorite...
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… to console themselves after a breakup, and some women buy the complete Tales of Chekhov. Because Katherine asked in the comments below, and because he’s been a semi-regular character here on LivingSmall, it seems only fair to mention that the Mighty Hunter will not be making such regular appearances in the future. We...
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I made two skirts today and I made them without patterns! I used this great book — I hate patterns. I hate the tissue paper. I hate the fussiness of the directions. But I’ve also gotten very tired of spending fifty or sixty bucks on skirts that seem to have two seams and an...
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Jean Baudrillard has died in Paris at age 79. I went off to the University of Utah with a running start on Place Last Seen, a novel in which I wanted to explore, among other things, what happens when we come up against the undeniable reality of the physical world. What I encountered there...
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