Sans Serif

Careful what you write on wikipedia. Someone just might be reading it.

Remember that piece in Harper’s a few months back wherein Lynn Freed compares teaching creative writing to suffering in a gulag? Did it seem a bit over-the-top? From the mind of Mark Pritchard, author of Too Beautiful and Other Stories and How I Adore You, comes a hilarious spoof, The Secret Diary of a Prisoner [...]

Wondering what to do with your Monday night? Join me at San Francisco’s Edinburgh Castle Pub. Kate Braverman is hosting a new series billed as a “literary talk show,” and this is the second event in the series. We’ll sort of be talking about first novels, but with Kate at the helm, anything could happen. [...]

from AP: More than 150 nations agreed Saturday to launch formal talks on mandatory post-2012 reductions in greenhouse gases — talks that will exclude an unwilling United States. For its part the Bush administration, which rejects the emissions cutbacks of the current Kyoto Protocol, accepted only a watered-down proposal to enter an exploratory global “dialogue” [...]

Lauren Baratz Logsted here again, with talk of the mysterious Apache Woman
What Remains: A Memoir of Fate, Friendship and Love, Carole Radziwill. This book is a good companion piece to Joan Didion’s National Book Award winner, The Year of Magical Thinking. Ms. Radziwill is the wife of the late Anthony Radziwill, who died after a [...]

Clinton’s speaking at the U.N. conference in Montreal today on behalf of the Kyoto pact–you know, the global environmental treaty that he championed but that Bush promptly backed down from the moment he stepped into office.
The Bush administration says it prefers to deal with climate issues on a bilateral or regional basis, not through global [...]

I found something amusing on Amazon today. There’s a concordance for my story collection, The Girl in the Fall-Away Dress. The concordance lists the 100 most frequently used words in the book. They tend toward the masculine–ivan, jake, jimmy, john, sven. One thing is clear from this list: characters in the book, for better [...]

I and several other bloggers, including Dan Wickett of Emerging Writers Network, have been very critical of Robert Clark Young’s stink piece about Sewanee in the New York Press. But here’s a better source than I’ll ever be: Richard Bausch. In an email to the New York Press, Bausch states that he does not know [...]

No takers on litquiz 2? Here’s a hint: there’s a wind instrument in the title. While you’re musing on it, here’s a swank music blog, Freeway Jam, for the rocker in you. This one’s nice for all you worldly jazzophiles.

It was not as patriotic as baseball, but it seemed to make a lot more sense. Basketball consisted of throwing the large inflated ball through a metal hoop horizontally fastened to a wooden backboard hung vertically high above their heads. The team that threw the ball through the hoop more often was the team that [...]