"I love sentences like I love good food."-Holly Phillips

Holly Phillips, The Burning Girl, Prime Books, 2006.
A novel told in elegant prose and strong images. At the beginning of the book the protagonist is released from a hospital, missing the memories of the last six years of her life, with a disease of bleeding and fevers, and synesthetic ( Read more... )

I predicted a probable Democratic win in 2006, but I scarcely dared hope for such a comprehensive one. I'm still stunned--reason said radical authoritarianism was losing credibility, but all around me there were people who believed and I doubted. And now reason is silent; we are finally at the turning point I saw long ago, where we begin to choose ( Read more... )

The political news is, as I imagine my readers know, horrible. So what to write? Obviously some short CD reviews! These were what I found at Everyday Music, over a period of a few weeks; I've had this journal entry half-finished for a while, and decided to finally push this entry out, before it loses all relevance to my life.
Flutar: Dreams of ( Read more... )

It's one of the things that I wasn't taught in college. Architects are fond of saying they create spaces, and in a certain sense--the sense that architectural spaces have identity and, when completed are new places with which people establish relationships--this is true. But every space we create is in a place where there was once something else. ( Read more... )

Here

James K. Galbraith, here. It does not look good.

Since gf won't write about this, I will. The current tie ("empate") in the Mexican presidential election bodes ill. There's a "conservative" candidate, Felipe Calderón, a former Mexican Secretary of Energy, probably supported by the Bush administration (some accounts say actual support has already been given) and a moderate socialist ("liberal", in ( Read more... )

Here. Good grief.

The state climatologist doesn't believe in global climate change, but he does believe in data... According to the Oregon Climate Service's forecast for this fall and winter, "1995, the best overall match with this year (2005), had an abundance of extreme events: floods in November and February; ice storms in December and February; extreme wind ( Read more... )

After a long day, job-hunting & this-and-that, I'm falling down tired. But here's a message coming to you from gf's house, where I am no living (gulp!) And here's the an interesting piece of news--Current TV (Flash site) launches on Monday: We're rethinking the way TV is produced, programmed, and presented, so it actually makes sense to an ( Read more... )