The Year of Fog gets a mention today in the Knoxville News-Sentinel. Book reviewer Ina Hughes contemplates the nature of images in Pulitzer Prize-winning scientist Douglas Hofstadter’s book I Am a Strange Loop, now out in paperback from Basic Books. Hughes calls I Am A Strange Loop “a fascinating, lay-friendly book about the workings [...]
I found this photograph by J. Wilson while doing an internet search for JFG Coffee Company–a major olfactory memory from my days in Knoxville, TN, in the early nineties. The unsigned drawing, which appears on a yet-to-be-renovated building off Market Square in Knoxville’s Old City, takes graffiti art to a new level. .
What is [...]
Through the Alabama Writers’ Forum newsletter, I just discovered a great blog called Eating Alabama.
Yesterday at the Gustafer Yellowgold syphony performance in San Francisco, inspired music man Morgan Taylor (you gotta see the show if it’s in your town) joked about how all the kids in San Francisco probably count “quinoa noodles and soy protein [...]
Check out the latest in the land of Nutcracker Buck–”You and me and these five random cubes/Laughing off our asses while our lives go down the tubes.” Wade has this to say about the song: “The song is kind of a white trash love song and a prayer to the Yahtzee gods that a marriage [...]
Kevin and I went to see Steve Forbert last night at Freight and Salvage in Berkeley to celebrate Kevin’s birthday. The first time Kevin gave me a Steve Forbert song on a mixed tape–Fayetteville, Arkanasas, circa 1994, “Romeo’s Tune”–I was in my early twenties, fresh out of Alabama by way of Knoxville, and I couldn’t [...]
Not too long ago, I watched Fahrenheit 451, which is based, of course, on Ray Bradbury’s novel of the same name. In the film, the duty of firemen is not to put out fires, but rather to start them. Specifically, they are charged with setting fire to books. Fahrenheit 451 is the temperature at which [...]
The No One You Know launch last night at Books Inc. Opera Plaza was fabulous fun. We went through 20 bottles of wine in about half an hour, which is always a good sign. Ben Fong-Torres put together this video clip. (If you’re wondering what Ben Fong-Torres has to do with No One You Know, [...]
Reba McMellon exposes the not-so-subtle practice of “gift jabbing” in this article for The Mississippi Press.
The exercise: Have you ever been gift jabbed? Have you ever done it yourself? Write about a gift you received that came with its own undercurrent of ill-will.
While you’re in the Christmas mood, check out this catchy video from [...]
Today I came across a poem by an old friend, JoLee Passerini, in the Crab Orchard Review. Back when I knew her, almost twenty years ago at the University of Alabama, she was JoLee Gibbons. We worked on the Marrs Field Journal together. That was when we all were getting our first tastes of literary [...]
At five p.m. on December 16, my mother called me into her study. I waited until she said my name twice, so I didn’t appear too eager.
There is something quietly heartbreaking in these words, spoken by the narrator of Vendela Vida’s lovely second novel, Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name. Some years before the [...]
