I'm a great fan of Oliver Sacks, both his writing and his image.He's soon publishing a memoir covering his early adult years in California and New York, which were apparently pretty exciting times, and about which he's already written a bit in Hallucinations. On the Move: A Life, due out in June, sounds thoroughly cool.


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I lost my senses of taste and smell in 1989 because of a concussion and skull fracture. They eventually came back to some extent, but they're not quite the same. I still have to summon up the smells of fresh-cut grass and approaching rain in my memory, for example. A couple of weeks ago, I read Molly Birnbaum's book about how the same thing had ( Read more... )

On Monday nights this semester, I'm teaching a class that I reach by taking a couple of buses, one that ends a few blocks from my old apartment in Swissvale, and another that begins there and takes me to my school's satellite campus at a strip mall. As I waited for the second bus yesterday, I had an extended, sporadic encounter with a young fellow ( Read more... )