I’m seeing the American Book Review’s list of the greatest fictional first lines linked everywhere (it keeps popping up in my del.icio.us inbox and all over the blogosphere). I suppose 1 and 2 were the inevitable choices for the 1 and 2 spots. But I was happiest to see numbers 30, 37, 79, 82, 87, […]
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Amanda
In my current stack of things to read / finish reading / start reading / dip into and sample: Jonathan Rose’s The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes, an excerpt from which I came across and blogged about last year; Cole Swensen’s new book of poems, The Book of a Hundred Hands (any poet […]
By now you probably know that if he were still around, he’d be 250 today. In the midst of the barrage of tributes, it occurred to me that Mozart and I go way back; I saw my first Mozart opera* twenty (yea, verily, twenty) years ago. So I thought I’d write a retrospective of the […]
I half-remembered this poem several weeks ago, during a wind-storm so loud that at first I couldn’t even identify the sound when I stepped out of my front door. I looked it up, and it’s been rattling around my head ever since. I had forgotten the startling lines "Blade-light, luminous black and emerald, / Flexing […]
I’m not going to post much about the UCLA alumni group that’s paying students to report on their "radical" professors, because I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again. If you’re going to insist that a professor talking about politics in the classroom is enough to "brainwash" and "indoctrinate" students, then what you’re really […]
Via Sarah of Prima la musica, poi le parole comes an irresistible meme: nominate four currently living, breathing people likely to produce interesting and stageable libretti, and four books which could be re-worked into, again, interesting and stageable libretti. As I commented over at Sarah’s blog, I have a hard time coming up with anything […]
RIP, Birgit Nilsson. Go read Sarah’s roundup of tributes, and listen to La Cieca’s tribute podcasts over at Parterre Box. Another project for 2006: get over my Wagnerphobia so I can listen to her Isolde and Brunnhilde. (Fellow operaphiles in your 20s and 30s, do you, too, sometimes feel like you were born several decades […]
This was the last week before the spring semester gets underway, and I spent most of it wrapping up a big web-design project I’ve been working on intermittently for the last year. It’s for an undergraduate class that’s been in the works for some time. I’m doing some librarian outreach work with the students in […]
Link du jour: Language Is A Virus, a compendium of poem-generating (and prose-generating) games. Found via the sidebar at Say Something Wonderful. I’ve been having trouble starting any new writing projects of late, and I can already see myself trying many of these experiments. For instance, these, from Bernadette Mayer’s 82 Writing Experiments: 30. Structure […]
I’ve been memed! (Ta, wolfangel.) Four jobs you’ve had in your life: cat-sitter, editorial assistant, lecturer, clerical underling in hospital chem lab Four movies you could watch over and over: The Company, My Beautiful Laundrette, Le Rayon Vert, Singin’ in the Rain Four places you’ve lived: Baltimore, Santa Monica, Florence, Philadelphia Four TV shows you […]