April 2008
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Dr. Metablog, like all bloggers, is his own editor. With the new freedom comes a downside: lapses of coherence and flaws of grammar, along with the occasional typos and printos that an editor's eye would catch, now go uncaught. But independence is also beneficial. In my former incarnation, I was regularly disciplined by stern editors…
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We're still cleaning out and throwing away (as I reported a couple of days ago). Today I discovered, in amongst a small cache of books that I inherited from my father, a volume of poems called Earthbound. I'd never heard of the poet, Helene Mullins, but I traced her via a 2001 The New York Times…
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Your cat comes on silent haunches. It shits, polluting both arbor and garden with catty scat, and then goes home.
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I'm not a person who cares terribly about material objects. Some of the evidence: I've now written two hundred and fifty essaylets on this blague, and nary a one of them took as its subject a purchase or a possession. What I've read, what I've thought, where I've traveled, people I've known, yes; what I…
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I had never heard of the novelist Jon Hassler, who died last month. The obituaries took me by surprise: Minnesota's best artist, more significant than the Coen brothers, or Bob Dylan, or Garrison Keillor. Or Sinclair Lewis. How could I be so ignorant? Off I trotted to the library, where there was a nearly pristine…
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I know that I shall meet my fateSomewhere among the clouds above;Those that I fight I do not hate,Those that I guard I do not love;My country is Kiltartan Cross,My countrymen Kiltartan's poor,No likely end could bring them lossOr leave them happier than before.Nor law, nor duty bade me fight,Nor public men, nor cheering crowds,A…
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On two occasions this year the Williamsburg Bridge (from Manhattan to Brooklyn) has made a guest appearance in the plot of my life. In January, as faithful readers know, we set up shop in Manhattan. One day we strolled over the bridge from the Lower East Side to the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn. The bridge…
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Over there on the west side of Alameda, at the intersection of 9th and Santa Clara, plunked down right in the midst of an otherwise residential neighborhood, is a most intriguing commercial island. Once upon a time, I'm sure, it would have consisted of (let me guess) a hardware store, a mom-and-pop grocery, a haberdashery…
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Some months ago, I reported on Hosseini's very popular novel of Afghanistan, The Kite Runner. I thought it was a must-read-bad-book, that is, a book that is so informative and interesting that we should overlook its inferior construction and prose. I've now read another Afghan-American story and I have come to much the same opinion.…