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fiddle: toy: manipulate manually or in one's mind or imagination.

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I have just started reading In the Country of Country: People and Places in American Music, a series of travelogues and biographies about the people and places that originate and sustain "authentic" country music ( Read more... )

Because I am now reading Alain de Botton's How Proust Can Change Your Life: Not a Novel, I have decided to begin Proust's Remembrance of Things Past.

It's reputed lingering in details and botomless curiosity draws me.

Anyone read it?


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I slept in today, rolled over and over in the bed. It's been raining steady and firm, utterly gray, outside all day today. I liked the weak light my lamp cast in my bedroom.

After I got out of my shower, all I wanted to do was crawl back into my bed, listen to the rain, doze off, read favorite books from my childhood like The Grey King, and ( Read more... )

I am working on putting together a display of Gothic fiction this morning. I went to wikipedia, since they are so often good at putting together useful bibliographies and other lists and links.

While there, I ran across a strange coupling. In the "see also" section, right underneath "Southern Gothic" there was this: Southern Ontario GothicThis ( Read more... )

I am supposed to be participating on a panel discussion very soon about non-fiction readers' advisory. I will cover very popular, humanities-related non-fiction genres. I am currently reading a couple of personal essay collections. I just finished Barbara Kingsolver's Small Wonder and am now a third of the way through David Sedaris' Dress Your ( Read more... )

Since lately I've been drawn imaginatively to Asheville, I decided this morning that I'd pick up and look at Thomas Wolfe's Look Homeward Angel, a book famous -- I guess -- for not being read anymore. (I haven't.) This -- from the first page -- astounded me, though:

Each of us is all the sums he has not counted: subtract us into nakedness and ( Read more... )

About ten years ago, I used to subscribe to several magazines.  I used to love coming home and finding one in the mail.  I'd settle in, put my few busy-nesses behind me, make coffee or tea, settle into a chair under lamp or window, and dive into what the editors threw at me for an hour or so.

I miss it.  And am considering subscribing again.  Here ( Read more... )

On the flight back from Portland, I was reading more of Michael Schmidt's Lives of the Poets. In the section on Charles Olson I found this passage, which made me snort out loud on the plane:

At his[Olson's]funeral in 1970 Allen Ginsberg was of course present, chanting his Kaddish and getting in the way; carelessly (is it legend or fact?) stepping ( Read more... )