Rushdie, Salman. The Enchantress of Florence. New York: Random House, 2008. “Wherever goodness lay, it did not lie in ritual, unthinking obeisance before a deity but rather, perhaps, in the slow clumsy, error-strewn working out of an individual or collective path.” Strangers wearing long leather coats. Mughal kings reigning over an exotic court. Imaginary idealized …
Category Archives: Reading Journal
Jorgy: A LibraryThing Early Review
Lester, Jean. Jorgy: The Life of Native Alaskan Bush Pilot and Airline Captain Holger “Jorgy” Jorgensen._ Ester, AK: Ester Republic Press, 2007. $25 In the late 60′s my grandfather purchased an 8mm film camera complete with light bar. It was a hand-wound model that would only capture a minute or two of action before needing …
Some shameless plugs
Good friend Ken Morefield recently had an interesting essay on mentors and judging posted at The Matthew’s Project. Apart from his main point, he makes wonderful sense of a shared teaching experience we had. In other news, while I don’t really think that I can be called a mentor, a former student of mine–Michial Farmer–has …
Forthcoming Rush
For the past couple years, we’ve been members of LibraryThing, a great online tool for cataloging your books. (In case you’re curious, we claim to have 1952 books in our library.) A recent feature added to the site is the opportunity to be a Library Thing Early Reviewer: you get the opportunity to acquire new …
2007 Favorite Media
Living out on the edge of nowhere, we don’t really get much in the way of film that isn’t mainstream, so in addition to missing many of the great films everyone’s talking about, I don’t see many films either. Therefore, my list of 2007 favorites isn’t limited to films of 2007, nor is it limited …
The Danger of Thinking You Believe
On the floor, holding his wounded arm, the mayor looked up. “Put down your gun. You’re hurting yourself. You’ve never believed, and now that you think you believe, you hurt people because of it.” –Ray Bradbury, “The Man,” 1948 “The Man” is one of those classic sci-fi stories that does what sci-fi ought to do: …
PLEASE, oh PLEASE
Don’t talk to me the least little bit about the final installment of Monsieur Harry Potter. Being somewhat snobbish on the issue, I’ve ordered mine from the UK, so I probably won’t receive it until next week, but then I’m leaving for the Glen. And Sherry and I like to read them together aloud. Until …
Running Dark
It’s Spring Break! Woo and/or Hoo! In any case, don’t know what our connectivity is going to be for a bit, and I don’t have the time today to comment on all the things that are fighting for writing time. In short however: Finished Dante’s Hell and am scurrying on up Mt. Purgatory. Sayers intro …
Reading Dante: Hell, cantos xviii-xxx
Cantos xviii-xxx navigate through the second region of Nether Hell, the 8th Circle, wherein lie the malbowges. Down here in the middle reaches of heaven we move away from those whose sins are the result of uncontrolled nature and into the sins that are concsciously chosen. It is also in this circle that we see …
Reading Dante: Hell, cantos xii-xvii
After a veritable race through the first six Circles of Hell, Dante slows down to spend 6 cantos on the seventh circle of Hell, that one devoted to violence. However, as is the wont when we start categorizing things, we can never be satisfied with a single category for violence. Surely, we think, some violences …
