Occasionally I use this blog as a platform to plug the efforts of the rest of my family to convert the rest of the world to the joys of StikAx system. I won’t recap what this neat little gadget actually does, because a London-based animator has produced a very slick movie that will do a […]

From a profile of Haruki Murakami*:”He follows a strict regimen. Going to bed around 9 p.m. – he never dreams, he said – he wakes up without an alarm clock around 4 a.m. He immediately turns on his Macintosh and writes until 11 a.m., producing every day 4,000 characters, or the equivalent of two to […]

From the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award site:”The winner was announced by the Lord Mayor of Dublin, Councillor Michael Conaghan in City Hall, Dublin on Wednesday 15th June.In their comments on the novel the judges said “The Known World begins with the death, at the age of 31, of Henry Townsend, a black farmer in […]

Bloodaxe Books were kind enough to send me a copy of J.H. Prynne’s massive Poems, which weighs in at 590 pages and covers work spanning from 1968 up to 2004.A fellow of Gonville & Caius (that’s pronounced Keys riff-raff) College, Prynne is a somewhat controversial figure, I gather, in that vanishingly small circle of people […]

I’ve just been listening to Damon Albarn on the radio (listen here) criticize the lineup at the Live8 concerts for being “Anglo-Saxon”: far too white and middle-class. Of course, Albarn, who has somehow transcended the limitations of his own skin pigmentation and social-economic status, will be staging his own, far cooler event: “Flight 5056.” This […]

I’m still pondering the possible implications of a report from a group of researchers from the University of Utah (see here and here) that suggests that the high intelligence of Ashkenazi Jews may be connected to their history of persecution.Crudely stated, the premise goes something like this: European Jews’ exclusion from the ranks of the […]

Here’s an olla podrida of links to book-related articles–gleaned from many man-hours of meticulous surfing–which I thought were worth sharing:Starting on a note of unrelenting gravitas, we have Fintan O’Toole’s appreciation of John Banville’s latest novel, The Sea, in Prospect. There may not be a lot of yucks in O’Toole’s writing but he’s still one […]

There’s an excellent essay in the New York Times by the esteemed Milton critic and putative model for Morris Zapp in some of David Lodge’s novels, Stanley Fish. Fish lays out his idiosyncratic approach to teaching:”On the first day of my freshman writing class I give the students this assignment: You will be divided into […]

My recent (relatively) stellar performance in posting every day came to an end this week as the small matter of work got in the way. As well as trying to maintain a trickle of income coming in from mundane sources (the mortgage’s thirst is never slaked), I’m tricking around trying to get a blog tool […]