April 2008
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“I don’t really think there is any specific achievement of mine regarding poetry that I could pick out and be proud of. I’ve done a lot of things. But that’s the thing about poetry, and the spread of poetry throughout the country. So many people are writing so many things. Poetry awakens us to everything that surrounds us.”
by
Wendy Anderson
"I was living in Cambridge, MA, and there was all this wildness around me in this supposedly civilized place. I just read a great book by John Hanson Mitchell, a natural history of Boston (The Paradise of All These Parts). It talks about the fishers coming back and the coyotes coming back and the wild turkeys, and just how much nature is infringing and impinging on the city. This summer I kayaked the length of the Charles (River) and it’s so exciting to see the herons coming back to the Charles, to see man’s plans undermined."
by
Sarah Burke
Come with Elizabeth Hess into a surreal world that features chimpanzees who smoke hash pipes; professors who use cattle prods to control the apes they research; a mad scientist who sends chimpanzee after chimpanzee to be raised in human homes in America’s heartland; and the mad professor’s graduate student who earns a Ph.D. for a hands-on (literally) study of female chimpanzee orgasm. Split between Columbia University in New York and the University of Oklahoma in Norman, this world’s central character is Nim Chimpsky: The Chimp Who Would be Human, and make no mistake, its tale is not a comedy, but a tragedy.
by
Barbara J. King
These lines, says McLeod, will stop the “incessant cacophony of thoughts, memories and associations” in your head for a second. Then you’ll probably say, “Huh?” But that moment of emptiness is what the Heart Sutra is pointing at. For me, I didn’t have a “Huh?” moment when I read the lines. It was more of a “So?” moment. The rest of the Sutra definitely elicits some serious confusion, though.
by
Elizabeth Bachner
The author of the much-touted memoir, Love and Consequences, about a foster child who escaped gang life in South Central Los Angeles, Margaret Seltzer (who wrote under the pseudonym Margaret Jones), turned out to be a white woman who grew up in wealthy Sherman Oaks (the part where “Desperate Housewives” is filmed). While so much of this story is noteworthy in the post-James Frey era, one glaring but less-examined aspect of this story is her participation in a longstanding literary genre: white writers pretending to be Native American.
by
Marie Myung-Ok Lee
"It's probably not all Graydon Carter's fault, but he's a fun one to blame. Having decided he was an environmentalist after all, Carter deftly combined the world's favourite eco-hero and an indecently cute baby polar bear in an Annie Liebowitz shot cover for Vanity Fair's latest wheeze, the annual Green Issue. And so, with a little help from Leonardo DiCaprio, Knut went stratospheric. With a new found love for polar bears the, to quote George W Bush, "global warming folks" had their image. Since then polar bears have been perching perilously on ever decreasing chunks of ice – a sign of a world heating up and hearts melting."
by
Graeme Allister
when forced to choose between two versions of John Adams' life, which are people more likely to choose: the 700 page biography, or the 7-part miniseries starring Hollywood actors? Let's face it -- these days, more and more people are leaning towards the latter option. It's easy to overreact and say that this is a sign of cultural apocalypse, and at least for books, it's not an absurd assumption. But let us consider the counterpoint. What do those who choose the miniseries over the book gain? Are they perhaps just more with the times, choosing a vibrantly evolving medium over a stagnant one?
by
Liz Miller
As I drew near, I noticed another Picabia, a pocket-sized, soft cover booklet, and took in the orange shirt with white flowers. Jesus-Christ rastaquouere. I would latter find out it means “carpetbagger” as I devoured the egomaniacal words: “Don’t work, don’t love, don’t read, think of me; I’ve found the new laugh that gives me a free pass. There is nothing to understand, live for your pleasure, there is nothing, nothing, nothing other than the value you give yourself to everything.”
by
Len Bracken