Taught by Prof. Gorman Beauchamp, University of Michigan, Fall 1995

• The Republic, Plato
• Utopia, More
• "Of the Cannibals", Montaigne
• Gulliver's Travels, Swift
• Looking Backward, Bellamy

Yesterday evening I went to Brickbat Books (1.3 miles each way) for a book signing for Touch and Go: The Complete Hardcore Punk Zine ’79-’83 and Why Be Something That You're Not: Detroit Hardcore 1979-1985. I got there a few minutes late and the author was just standing around chit-chatting and drinking beer. I guess reading a selection from a zine ( Read more... )

Jim Colondo was an excellent fellow who seemed to genuinely like his creative writing students, in spite of the fact that I think he disliked his job. Photography was his passion, not bureaucracy, not discipline, not politicking--but at the time I don't think any of us really saw that because he was too busy doing a fine job. He was a thoughtful ( Read more... )

I read Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers recently. In chapter 8, "Rice Paddies and Math Tests" he describes how much faster, simpler, and easier it is to work with Chinese numbers than numbers in other languages, such as English. His argument is fairly compelling, and it makes you wonder: why haven't we adopted the superior system globally?

well_lahdidah immediately ( Read more... )

OK, now I've actually read Joshua Henkin's new novel, Matrimony. I'm not going to write a review, at least at the moment, but here are some initial thoughts:

- Oh, no! It starts out with 2 students in a college creative writing class. When I was editor of White Crow (maybe I am still the editor?), one of my rules was to toss out any poem that was ( Read more... )

A couple weeks ago I did a double-take as I passed who I thought to be one of my college creative writing instructors, Josh Henkin. He did a double-take too, as he passed who he thought to be one of his former students. We stopped and said hi and said we'd try to get lunch sometime. How funny to run into him on the street, in Philadelphia, so many ( Read more... )

While klubkoko2 and I were stuck in the airport for about 4 hours yesterday, I noticed that there is a revised edition of Freakonomics: Freakonomics [Revised and Expanded]: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything. As you may recall, I took issue with the authors citing a well-known urban legend as fact (see LemonjelloI immediately flipped ( Read more... )

Are you still in search of a xmas present for an avid reader?

Stanford University is offering a subscription, in 12 weekly installments, of Sherlock Holmes stories, as they originally appeared in The Strand Magazinehttp://sherlockholmes.stanford.edu/Read more... )

I recently read a short story by R.V. Cassill (perhaps best known as the editor of The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction) called "The Winchester Papers ( Read more... )

I finally finished John Updike's Rabbit, Run. I'd picked up a copy at klubkoko2's aunt's house a while back, and I finally finished it last night. It's a very famous book that spawned several sequels, so I thought I should find out what all the fuss is about. Here's the line that convinced me to keep reading:

The space of six feet or so that each double ( Read more... )