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MediaBistro.com (Free subscription) | 11/10/2009
The Center for Fiction presented its fourth annual First Novel Prize to John Pipkin for Woodsburner , a retelling of an incident in the life of young Henry David Thoreau , at a private ceremony last night in New York City. The other nominees for the award were Philipp Meyer , Patrick Somerville , Paul Harding , and Yiyun Li . In some respects, the cocktail reception before the ceremonial dinner felt...
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Architechnophilia (Free subscription) | 11/09/2009
Dubai gets a retro makeover | how big a solar panel would you need to power everyone in the world? | a place for trace | Obama's Mayne man | banquet origami | don't roll your eyes; architects can learn alot by playing golf | video: Berlin's Federal Foreign Office | tallest prefab skyscraper | urban sensing The civilized man has the habits of the house. His house is his prison, in which he finds himself...
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This14U (Free subscription) | 11/09/2009
Nothing in education is so astonishing as the amount of ignorance it accumulates in the form of inert facts - Henry Adams . Education is not filling a bucket, but lighting a fire - William Yeats . The man who follows the crowd will usually get no further than the crowd. The man who walks alone is likely to find himself in places no one has ever been - Alan Ashley-Pitt . What is a weed? A weed is a...
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An Enchanted Cottage (Free subscription) | 10/29/2009
...in historic Concord, Massachusetts. A perfect place to visit on a crisp October afternoon. (click any photos to enlarge) (Am I the only one who sees irony in the "One Way" stone marker above?) Come along as we head up to Author's Ridge .... Here we are at the top of Author's Ridge, facing the Alcott family plot... ...where Amanda stopped at Louisa May Alcott's grave. The monument marking...
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Strangling My Muse (Free subscription) | 10/22/2009
“It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see.” –Henry David Thoreau “Everything in the universe has rhythm. Everything dances.” –Maya Angelou “Nobody cares if you can’t dance well. Just get up and dance.” –Martha Graham “Sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”...
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TYWKIWDBI (Free subscription) | 10/13/2009
Pictured above is the grave of Nathaniel Hawthorne. Other notable authors interred at Sleepy Hollow include Louisa May Alcott, Henry David Thoreau, and Ralph Waldo Emerson. Photo credit NYPL digital gallery . Via (exclamation mark) .
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One Poet's Notes (Free subscription) | 10/04/2009
An article in this weekend’s New York Times relates the experience of swimming in the waters of Walden Pond, and the online edition also offers a slideshow of photographs that display the pond and its swimmers. Reading the piece, I was reminded of Thoreau’s own marvelous, sometimes poetic, description of Walden Pond: The scenery of Walden is on a humble scale, and, though very beautiful,...
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BrontëBlog (Free subscription) | 10/03/2009
The 10 Essential Penguin Classics is a new initiative by Penguin US: Penguin Classics has compiled a list of the top ten essential Penguin Classics every person should read. Each of these ten great works—ranging from poetry to plays to novels and non-fiction—has lasted and enlightened audiences throughout the ages, and they all still have something relevant to say to readers. Look over...
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Small Branches Poetry (Free subscription) | 09/28/2009
Every so often, I'll be featuring a new poem, my thoughts on the work, and a conversation with the poet. I hope you'll enjoy and come back again for the next installation! *** This week's poem from: From the Inside Out: Sonnets By Brian Daldorph Woodley Press *** Fall He needs this cell. It was getting cold out there and he’d done all the drugs he could buy. It was either jail or die. Sometimes...
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Campaign for the American Reader (Free subscription) | 09/19/2009
Susan Cheever's bestselling books include five novels and the memoirs Note Found in a Bottle and Home Before Dark. Her work has been nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award and won the Boston Globe Winship Medal. She applied the "page 69 test" to her 2006 book, American Bloomsbury: Louisa May Alcott, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Henry David Thoreau...
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Anecdotal Evidence (Free subscription) | 09/13/2009
by Patrick Kurp Anecdotal Evidence What are the non-electronic precursors of book blogging? Essays, reviews, feuilletons, maxims, commonplace books, journals, letters, bull sessions, reveries, mental rambles. Some of us were born bloggers and waited for the technology to catch up. Posts are digital editions of words and thoughts that would otherwise evaporate, and the internet permits us to inflict...
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Litterbug (Free subscription) | 09/12/2009
A new sequence of mine has been published in the latest issue of Shadowtrain. It's called 'Driving Songs'. Click here to read it. This sequence is from a short (unpublished) collection called 'everyday songs', which also includes 'Kitchen Songs' and 'Reading Songs'. 'Driving Songs' contains quotes from the following texts: Thomas Paine, "Common Sense" Charles Darwin, "The Origin of Species"...
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Brit Lit Blogs (Free subscription) | 09/07/2009
“The Beats are dead and no one has stepped up.” 1) Let’s start with the name: who is Grievous Jones? Grievous Jones is an alter-ego. I am sure everyone has one. The you inside you, the lonely one, sad one, insane one, sometimes just bored one. I started thinking under the assumed name Grievous Jones when things in my own life were shutting me off from who I thought I was. He was...
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After Armageddon (Free subscription) | 08/01/2009
Paul Sullivan What does dropping out mean in the 21st century? Can we really exit society forever these days? Could we ever really? Or is it a question of seeking alternative lifestyles? We explore the past and present of an idea that never quite went out of fashion… A History Of An Idea It was at a New York press conference on September 19, 1966 that Dr. Timothy Leary uttered the immortal words:...
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