Tag Archives: books

A Great Little Intro to the Life of James Baldwin

Posted on March 5, 2014 by

___________ James Baldwin was born in August of 1924, so if he were still alive (he died at the age of 63 in 1987), he would have turned 90 this year. And I love this quote of his from chapter … Continue reading →

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Read

Posted on August 19, 2013 by

At The Daily Beast, academics and writers were asked to name “one book that [college] students shouldn’t escape campus without having read.” MIT professor and Pulitzer Prize winner, Junot Diaz, picked Toni Morrison’s Beloved because it “stabs straight at the heart … Continue reading →

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An Interview with Charles Hood

Posted on May 19, 2013 by

__________ Poet and photographer Charles Hood’s most recent book, South x South, based on a trip he made to Antarctica in 2011, has just been published by Ohio University Press (2013). Jordan Davis, poetry editor of The Nation, writes the … Continue reading →

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Books from Underground

Posted on March 14, 2013 by
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Increasing Knowledge Does Not Increase The Peace

Posted on February 25, 2013 by

That, at any rate, is John Gray’s thesis, and he has a new book out. In a recent interview at The Spectator, he had this to say: [K]nowledge can never eradicate the conflicts of the human world, or produce harmony where … Continue reading →

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Camille Paglia on the New Atheism and Contemporary Humanism

Posted on October 10, 2012 by

In an interview posted at Salon today, Camille Paglia lets loose on godless chic, arguing that it has poisoned contemporary film and art: People in the humanities have sunk into this shallow, snobby, liberal style of stereotyping religious believers as … Continue reading →

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What’s the Central Question in Nietzsche?

Posted on September 24, 2012 by

In interview with David Wolf, Nietzsche scholar Brian Leiter offers his view: [I]f there’s a central question in Nietzsche it’s the one he takes over from Schopenhauer – namely, how is it possible to justify life in the face of … Continue reading →

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Louis CK Does a Close Reading of the Story of Abraham and Isaac

Posted on August 30, 2012 by
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Philip Roth On The Novel Verses The Screen

Posted on May 24, 2012 by
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Free Books at AVC: My Quixotic Quest to Give Away Free Books Around My College

Posted on December 8, 2011 by

In a bit of pushback against the demise of the bookstore, I had the following thought: If it’s generally not a good business model to sell dead tree books out of physical storefronts anymore, why can’t colleges at least recreate … Continue reading →

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Barnes and Noble Used to Be a Bookstore

Posted on October 30, 2011 by

And the fact that it’s not anymore suggests (at least to me) that the franchise is dying. Just last night, for example, I went into my nearby Barnes and Noble in northern Los Angeles County and had a look around. While … Continue reading →

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Catnip for Poetry Readers: T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” Gets an iPad App That Breaks New Ground

Posted on June 20, 2011 by

The iPad app for T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” is $13.95, which is a bit pricey as apps go, but what a bargain for poetry lovers! I downloaded it yesterday and started to play with it. The app really represents the … Continue reading →

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A Sign of the Times

Posted on May 17, 2011 by

It’s not just car factories that are disappearing from Michigan. Property owners in Troy appear indifferent to keeping their library open. Ironically, Troy’s official motto is “The City of Tomorrow, Today.” I guess libraries are relics of the past. Note the 1970s architectural style of … Continue reading →

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Chris Hedges the Prophet on Print Culture Turning to Image Culture

Posted on March 17, 2011 by

Former New York Times war correspondent, Chris Hedges, has, over the past couple of years, taken on the mantle of a secular prophet—an emperor has no clothes truthteller—writing scathing (and I think powerful) books and essays documenting the messes that we find ourselves … Continue reading →

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The Thorny Problem of Defining What a Book Is (It’s Not as Easy as You Might Think)

Posted on March 12, 2011 by

I like this definition of a book (which I found in a Times Literary Supplement essay): I. A. Richards called the book “a machine to think with” . . . Notice that the definition has the two elements that Aristotle … Continue reading →

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Google Books App for iPad

Posted on December 7, 2010 by

Free books by the millions? I haven’t downloaded the app for my iPad yet, but this looks really seductive. I wonder what the catch is: Here’s the link: books.google.com/ebooks And I looked up Thoreau’s Walden. It reads pretty nice: http://books.google.com/ebooks?id=yiQ3AAAAIAAJ&printsec=frontcover&output=reader

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Spectres of Reality or the Reality of Spectres?

Posted on October 31, 2010 by

Shane McCorristine’s new book on ghosts titled Spectres of the Self: Thinking about Ghosts and Ghost-Seeing in England, 1750-1920  (Cambridge 2010) receives a good review from Jonathan Barnes in The Times of London: What interests McCorristine about these alleged outbreaks of the paranormal is … Continue reading →

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A Great Quote on Theory Sludge

Posted on May 13, 2010 by

This quote comes from Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, writing in the New York Times Book Review recently: The study of literature as an art form, of its techniques for delighting and instructing, has been replaced by an amalgam of bad epistemology … Continue reading →

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Thought for the Day

Posted on May 8, 2010 by

Dogs can’t read books, which is sad. But wouldn’t it be more sad if dogs could read books, but didn’t? Below is an image of the remains of the Library of Celsus in Ephesus, which was completed circa 135 CE. It could hold 12,000 … Continue reading →

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Two lives, no books

Posted on May 2, 2010 by

This post comes from a brief exchange that I overheard, at a garage sale, yesterday morning. A man and a woman, both looking to be in their forties, paused at the same moment and gazed down into a box of books that was for … Continue reading →

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