I was awake at six this morning and at my polling place by just after seven. I'd been anticipating long lines, but things were only starting to get busy at that hour, and I was in and out in about ten minutes. (But apparently, something like 43% of eligible voters in New London had voted […]
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Amanda
[It's not just NaNoWriMo this month, it's also NaBloPoMo. While I suspect I won't manage to post something here every day, I do feel the urge to stretch my writing muscles a bit. Amazing what a bit of peer pressure can do. So here's a quick post, part of my effort to write more.] I […]
Now that faculty outreach and collection development for English and American literature are officially part of my job description, I've been making an effort to stay more up-to-date with the field. I'm scanning a much bigger field than I used to when I was a grad student in English, though, and I have fewer hours […]
Stunning jack-o-lanterns on Flickr. My particular favorites are Cthulhu Pumpkin and Zombie Pumpkin. I'm also liking the recurring pumpkin cannibalism theme. (And then there are the jack-o-lanterns for Obama.) Creepy story recommendations from About Last Night, here, here, and here. Speaking of stories, a perennial favorite: the ghost stories of M.R. James. His Ghost Stories […]
I've just started reading Maps & Legends, Michael Chabon's collection of essays on reading and writing. Not only does he write about Philip Pullman, M.R. James, and Ben Katchor—any and all of which topics would have predisposed me to like the book—but he also won me over completely with the introductory essay, which introduces a […]
Last year, a colleague who shares many of my tastes in TV and movies (and who reads this blog; hi, Anne!) asked me if I'd ever heard of a Canadian TV series called Slings & Arrows. I hadn't, but now that I have a Netflix subscription, I've finally gotten around to watching it, and it's […]
Yesterday was a day off work for me, so I took the bus to Niantic, a smaller town a few miles to the southeast. Niantic has a beach and a boardwalk, which I didn't get a chance to visit this time, and (the big draw, for me) a rambling secondhand bookstore called the Book Barn, […]
Hooray for the Connecticut Supreme Court! As you can probably imagine, I'm feeling pretty good about being in Connecticut right now. I hope this state doesn't become ground zero for Proposition 8: The East Coast Sequel. If it does, I may have to reawaken my long-dormant activist side.* I've been mostly resisting the impulse to […]
The other night, wanting something to read, I asked my Twitter friends if they could recommend any poems they liked. One of them suggested Conrad Aiken's "Morning Song of Senlin," which I'd never read before but was very glad to have pointed out to me. At the end of the first stanza I was stopped […]
The return of the pastoral
By Amanda on October 14th, 2008
Interesting: Michael Pollan, in Sunday's New York Times, writes an open letter to the next president about the need for a complete overhaul of our farming and food system. (It's long, but it's well worth reading.) There's a petition for an organic farm to be planted on the South Lawn of the White House (a […]