Stunning jack-o-lanterns on Flickr. My particular favorites are Cthulhu Pumpkin and Zombie Pumpkin. I'm also liking the recurring pumpkin cannibalism theme. (And then there are the jack-o-lanterns for Obama.) Creepy story recommendations from About Last Night, here, here, and here. Speaking of stories, a perennial favorite: the ghost stories of M.R. James. His Ghost Stories […]
I've just started reading Maps & Legends, Michael Chabon's collection of essays on reading and writing. Not only does he write about Philip Pullman, M.R. James, and Ben Katchor—any and all of which topics would have predisposed me to like the book—but he also won me over completely with the introductory essay, which introduces a […]
Last year, a colleague who shares many of my tastes in TV and movies (and who reads this blog; hi, Anne!) asked me if I'd ever heard of a Canadian TV series called Slings & Arrows. I hadn't, but now that I have a Netflix subscription, I've finally gotten around to watching it, and it's […]
Yesterday was a day off work for me, so I took the bus to Niantic, a smaller town a few miles to the southeast. Niantic has a beach and a boardwalk, which I didn't get a chance to visit this time, and (the big draw, for me) a rambling secondhand bookstore called the Book Barn, […]
Hooray for the Connecticut Supreme Court! As you can probably imagine, I'm feeling pretty good about being in Connecticut right now. I hope this state doesn't become ground zero for Proposition 8: The East Coast Sequel. If it does, I may have to reawaken my long-dormant activist side.* I've been mostly resisting the impulse to […]
The other night, wanting something to read, I asked my Twitter friends if they could recommend any poems they liked. One of them suggested Conrad Aiken's "Morning Song of Senlin," which I'd never read before but was very glad to have pointed out to me. At the end of the first stanza I was stopped […]
I had my camera with me yesterday, and the light was so irresistible as I walked home that I kept stopping to take pictures. There's a little cluster of milkweed growing near my shortcut off campus, and the seeds have started coming loose. Some of the trees are turning red. This one seems to be […]
I somehow missed Stephen Greenblatt’s guest appearance on The Colbert Report. But thanks to the magic of the internet, one can still watch it: I particularly like the Richard III moment at the end. (Via Riba Rambles.)
It's hard to describe how I've been feeling lately without using words like "apocalyptic," or at the very least "gloom" and "doom" in some combination. It's not just the economic meltdown, or the particular brand of craziness that the election brings to the mix. It's something more generalized. It was startling today, for instance, to […]
The return of the pastoral
By Amanda on October 14th, 2008
Interesting: Michael Pollan, in Sunday's New York Times, writes an open letter to the next president about the need for a complete overhaul of our farming and food system. (It's long, but it's well worth reading.) There's a petition for an organic farm to be planted on the South Lawn of the White House (a […]