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 a good opportunity to memorize some poems. I’m not getting any younger, and my graduate work is fading farther and farther into the past, and although I am grateful for my day job at the Big Corporation, it’s not creative work at all. I had this…
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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 my twenties when I was trying to figure out how to be a writer, trying to figure out how to build what Anna Wulf describes as a “free” life. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to be a wife and a mother, but I didn’t want…
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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 deeply admire (and one on whom I had a serious crush for any number of years — but alas, he went and got married again), gets a pile of money, and with any luck will sell a bunch of copies of the book. But since the…
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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 a big fan of A Wrinkle in Time. As a kid, I had a horror of stories where things turned into other things — Alice in Wonderland, for example. Perhaps it’s because I had the kind of life where 180s were all too common, where people…
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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 presume Found an interesting piece over at Ethicurean on the sort of small meat processers that we depend on around here. I’m planning to buy a lamb this fall from my dog groomer, and without Sheep Mountain Processing, I’d be sunk. Check out Postcards from Cowboyland …
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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 short stories. (Why didn’t I study with this woman when I was at the U of I all those years ago? Why, oh why, did I get Rocco Fumento instead?) Meanwhile, I’m currently mesmerized by Thompson’s recent collection: Throw Like a Girl
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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 hope that the friendship will continue, and that perhaps there might be some game coming our way in the fall, but alas, it looks like I’m going to have a little more time to catch up on my reading, and my blogging, in the near future.…
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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 elastic waist. Now, I’m by no means a seamstress, but even I can sew a skirt with two seams, an elastic waist, and a hem. So here’s the deal — I’m short. I’m not skinny. And I like clothes that don’t look like what everyone else…
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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 was a department enamored of the (genuinely interesting) ideas of Baudrillard, Foucault, Derrida et al, ideas which in Baudrillard’s case included the argument that reality has disappeared altogether, leaving us with only simulation and hyperreality. While I never did buy into the essentialist cast of these…
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Gee, when you make it easier for women to have kids without giving up all their independence, financial security, and career trajectory, they have more children. Here’s the money quote: Curiously, Europe’s lowest birthrates are seen in countries, mostly Catholic, where the old idea that the man is the breadwinner and the woman is the child-raiser holds strong. Portugal, Spain, Italy and Greece have among the lowest fertility rates in Western Europe. Meanwhile, countries that support high numbers of working women, like Finland, Norway and Denmark, have among the highest birthrates. How did what’s been called “the fertility paradox” come…