T. S. Eliot is one of those love-him-or-hate-him guys. I’ll have a special place in my heart for The Four Quartets thanks to a wonderful junior-year seminar…hopefully you like him too. O dark dark dark. They all go into the dark, The vacant interstellar spaces, the vacant into the vacant, The captains, merchant bankers, eminent [...]

Just kidding. He’s still in prison. (Huh? Catch up here.) But a commenter pointed me toward this recent video of Attila in prison speaking with author Julian Rubinstein. (Chris on viewing the video: “This guy is all over the place! I think we share a brain type.”) So other than the fact that I’m apparently [...]

I am 10 years old. I love airplanes and cats. I like playing on the computer, riding my bike and playing with my friends. I am homeschooled. I live with my nice mom, cool step-dad, my very annoying little sister, and my freaky but very cute cats. I am going to write about everything in [...]

I just finished Water for Elephants last week. This is the New York Times bestseller, the one that looks like it should have an “Oprah’s Book Club” ribbon printed on the front. In short, the kind of book I try to stay away from. (So I’m a book snob. Sue me.) Yet on a whim [...]

I’m on a Billy Collins kick lately, so here’s an excerpt of one of my favorite Collins poems : First, her tippet made of tulle, easily lifted off her shoulders and laid on the back of a wooden chair. And her bonnet, the bow undone with a light forward pull. Then the long white dress, [...]

New York Magazine links to a Cleveland Scene piece about trying to track down the elusive Bill Watterson, the Calvin and Hobbes creator who virtually disappeared from public life after retiring from his comic strip. Also included is a biography of Watterson. I for one never knew all this about him. I knew the guy [...]

I recently finished Dave Eggers’ first novel, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. This book messed with my mind. He makes such a big deal in the (very elaborate, gimmicky) preface about how true the book is, that I was inclined to believe none of it. Then, at the end of the paperback edition, there’s [...]

Apparently it’s US Airways Magazine, the inflight mag for the airline of the same name, whose June 2007 issue brags it contains Vonnegut’s last interview. Four times. Even though they did mention it four times, the bragging wasn’t as tacky as it could have been; I suppose if you’re a magazine and you did happen [...]

Here’s a column on GoErie.com that riffs off an earlier blog post I made: Language to survive its purists The English language has been destroyed. That’s what language purists would want us to believe, anyway. And for a while, I was with them. Again, registration required.

A coworker pointed me in the direction of this Houston Chronicle piece about LOLcats. Yes, for real. It’s hard to be a twenty-something, cutting-edge Internet hipster and read about cutting-edge hip things written by People Who Just Don’t Get It, but Dwight Silverman is not one of those people. I remember when my sister and [...]