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You hear so many bizarre conversations and comments on the bus anyway that writing about them would get tiresome, but I had to put this this one down for the record.

Some guy behind me starts talking to the stranger next to him by asking him what size his feet are. He has to repeat this a few times before the other man understands. Then he explains ( Read more... )

I’ve spent probably too long hopping around the web via Google searches on this, but you know how goofing around on the computer is. It all started when the story came out about the Yo Yo Ma inaugural performance being a recording. The article I read made passing reference to some music critics not liking the piece (its liveness notwithstanding). ( Read more... )

While visiting Phoenix last month, I was at the house of a friend with premium cable and thus had a chance to watch an episode of Dexter on Showtime. I'm so out of the loop on TV that I had never even heard of the show before. I enjoyed it enough that when I got back to Portland I started watching all the back episodes on streaming sites like ( Read more... )

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Recently I was playing around with a trial version of Mindjet's MindManager, which is billed as a help for "nonlinear thinking." Supposedly the novelist Richard Powers uses it to write his fiction. Several years ago I created a kind of flow chart or family tree of literary/intellectual connections in my personal history, so I decided as an easy ( Read more... )

Somehow I knew as soon as I saw the headline for David Foster Wallace's death, that it would be a suicide rather than an accident or aneurysm ( Read more... )

I can't remember if I've written about Morris Berman here before. I think I started a post, but it remained as a draft ( Read more... )

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