A Momentary Taste of Being

Dwight shares his experience reading Arrian and encourages up to take Reading Odyssey up on some future courses.

Salem Murder, and not the ones you think

The Wonders of Freelancing I know that as a freelancer I made more money 10-15 years ago than I make now.  But then I had to--with social security, city, state, and federal income taxes, I got to keep about 40% of what I made.  (Normally got a good amount back after all was said and done--but the penalties associated with underpayment in any quarter are draconian and I had a cautious accountant.) But this blogger certainly makes it sound like the life.

Vacation tips for the overconnected

I take the tirade/ranting from the last post and paste it into the magical engine and voila !: I write like Vladimir Nabokov I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software . Analyze your writing! Oh, I should have noted---via Scruffulans Hirsutus Were it not for the sublime synchronicity, I probably would not have posted this.  It is worth noting that the engine used returns reliably the same result on the same swath of prose (that is it is a fake front for a randomly generated engine).  (I ran this and each of five others nine times each in different orders through the engine and reliably got the same result for each post:  variously: James Joyce, H. P. Lovecraft, Raymond Chandler, Dan Brown, Vladimir (as above), and Stephen King.  Very, very amusing lunchtime pass-time.  The reason for this one is, most likely, the repeated use of Nabokov titles.  The others I haven't been able to figure out a reason for.

Today he talks about Costco and Shopping and neuroscience Out of context quotation fragment to get you going: . . . [W]e try to avoid anything that makes our insula excited.

Received a note from a fellow reader of Joyce who directed me toward his site.   If you're interested in Joyce (or baseball--interesting combination) you might want to check out the site.

MP is requesting knowledgeable people to read and critique his wonderful essay on Divine Simplicity. If you are better qualified than I am (meaning if you don't have Chesteron's lady's reaction to Divine Simplicity, or, in fact can tell a mauser rifle from a javelin) I am certain MP would welcome any constructive comments you may have that would help to improve the article.

From View from the Foothills this diptych map that shows you where you'd be if you dug through earth from where you live now.

The Millions tells us why prizes matter (or don't)

On Beauty--really And celebrating the many ways to be beautiful. 

To be found at Underbelly.

Frankly, I'm not yet a partisan.  I read the hubbub and the furor and I examine the work, and the two don't seem commensurate--but then it often takes time for a writer to grow on me.  Perhaps this book, which I have overlooked for a year or so might do it: Nazi Literature in the Americas.

Those who have been book blogging for some time already know of this, but Words without Borders is new, and welcome to me. And Between the Lines  found originally via Times Flow Stemmed

today Carl Sandburg.  You should definitely check out Fred's Place.

A neat insight (for those of us on this side of the pond) on mystery writer P. D. James and her interview technique. Well worth your time.

Hungry Like the Woolf revisits Yiyun Li's The Vagrants and comes up with a very different sense of the novel than I derived, but one that is both interesting and well supported by the text. The review really drives home some of the central, powerful themes of the book. My reading was a little different because I tend to downplay some of the more negative elements (the realism) because they strike me as so ordinary, so that the extraordinary--the small acts of mercy and kindness that made the days possible and bearable for some--took on a starker relief.  But that is how the reader collaborates with the text--always an interesting process filled with insights that others can learn from. One other complementary point I derived from the book is that the Totalatarian system in the book is a stand-in for fate, circumstances, what-have-you, for those of us who live outside of the system.  That is to say that what applies in this system applies in many ways to our own lives....

Why do you blog? And offers his own insights into the world of blogging.

Just in time for Christmas: here .

Constance Reader As Usual I Need More Shelves A Reader's Respite The Zen Leaf   (I was immediately attracted by the list of the potential rereads of 2010 and the presence on it of  As I Lay Dying, We (Yevegeny Zamayatin), and The Zoo Story (among others) What I look for in a blog:  panlecturemia--a rare disease that involves the inability to avoid reading any material that comes to hand--in absence of a book, cereal boxes, the nutrition labels on cans, old grocery store receipts, cancelled checks (if you are so primitive to have any), etc. OR an acute interest in an area of fiction that I have little knowledge of OR an interesting way of commenting on things I have absolutely no interest in. In short, in accord with my religious tenets--catholic reading.