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April 27, 2006

AP Literary Terms Glossary

AP Literary Terms Glossary

Silvertone 1482

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Silvertone Poetry

1482 Reviews on Harmony Central

1482 Schematic

Cool Garage Band Poem

April 25, 2006

Bruce Does Pete

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Springsteen Hears Voices
By Neil Strauss
Rolling Stone #999

April 24, 2006

Getting Hired

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GIG: Americans Talk About Their Jobs
By John Bowe

There's no one freelance writer John Bowe isn't comfortable interviewing. "I slept outdoors for three years while traveling around the world," he says proudly, "so there's no one who is too weird or unusual or unapproachable for me."

Bowe is nothing if not prolific. He has written articles, essays, interviews, and comedic pieces for Talk, The New York Times Magazine, New York magazine, Harper's Bazaar, POV, Bomb, Interior Design, and Blue. He is a frequent contributor to Word an online magazine The New York Times has called "a kind of hip, low-fi New Yorker magazine for a new generation." In between appearances on NPR's "This American Life," Bowe found time to cowrite the feature film, Basquiat and is currently at work on a screenplay about two cops in Minneapolis.

After getting back from his world tour, Bowe traveled across America to talk to people about their jobs for the recently released book, Gig, an expanded version of an ongoing series that began on Word. According to fellow writer Susan Faludi, Gig is "chockablock with compelling, vivid mini-memoirs."

April 21, 2006

Whatever - Eggers, Springsteen and exploding Coke

David Eggers' 826 network is growing - check out 826LA

Springsteen's new CD/DVD/Tour of Pete Seeger songs. Here's a track

This is cool - Mentos and Diet Coke

1491

1491.jpg When I went to high school, in the 1970s, I was taught that Indians came to the Americas across the Bering Strait about thirteen thousand years ago, that they lived for the most part in small, isolated groups, and that they had so little impact on their environment that even after millennia of habitation the continents remained mostly wilderness. Schools still impart the same ideas today. One way to summarize the views of people like Erickson and Balee would be to say that they regard this picture of Indian life as wrong in almost every aspect. Indians were here far longer than previously thought, these researchers believe, and in much greater numbers. And they were so successful at imposing their will on the landscape that in 1492 Columbus set foot in a hemisphere thoroughly marked by humankind.

- From 1492 By Charles C. Mann

April 20, 2006

On the Road and Howl

1957 NYTimes Review of Kerouac's On the Road
Hey Jack Kerouac: Why did sales of On the Road explode?
By Eliza Truitt
Howl: The Poem That Changed America
By Stephen Burt

April 18, 2006

2006 Pulitzer Prize Winners


By Mike Luckovich - 2006 Pulitzer Prize Winner for Cartooning

2006 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction awarded to March by Geraldine Brooks
2006 Pulitzer Prize Winners

April 16, 2006

Springsteen on Seeger

While Mr. Springsteen claims to have approached the material on "The Seeger Sessions" without a political agenda, he acknowledges that context can color things, and suggests that ideology is in the ear of the beholder. "What makes these songs vital, and catch fire now," he said, "is all the connections you're making, in your head, to this moment."
From Born to Strum
By WILL HERMES
NYTimes April 16, 2006

April 14, 2006

How to read, and perhaps enjoy, very new poetry

Close Calls with Nonsense - By STEPHEN BURT in The Believer

Egg corns

Egg corns
This site collects unusual spellings of a particular kind, which have come to be called eggcorns. Typical examples include free reign (instead of free rein) or hone in on (instead of home in on), and many more or less common reshapings of words and expressions: a word or part of a word is semantically reanalyzed, and the spelling reflects the new interpretation.

On Samuel Beckett

Beckett the Difficult, Beckett the Brash, Beckett the Prolific - New York Times

Beckett's Centenary

Lines for the Centenary of the Birth of Samuel Beckett
(1906-1989)

By PAUL MULDOON
NYTimes April 16, 2006

Only now do we see how each crossroads
was bound to throw up not only a cross
but a couple of gadabouts with goads,
a couple of gadabouts at a loss

as to why they were at the beck and call
of some old crock soaring above the culch
of a kitchen midden at evenfall,
of some old crock roaring across the gulch

as a hanged man roars out to a hanged man.
Now bucket nods to bucket of the span
of an ash yoke, or something of that ilk ...

Now one hanged man kicks at the end of his rope
in another little attack of hope.
Now a frog in one bucket thickens the milk.

April 12, 2006

To Dig and Plant, but Not in a Hurry

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Planting beans, corn and peas is a snap! No stooping - just push steel blade into ground and squeeze handles. Makes hole and drops adjustable number of seeds in one easy step.
From Lehman's Hardware

To Dig and Plant, but Not in a Hurry
By By BRENDAN I. KOERNER
NYTimes April 9, 2006

April 10, 2006

New York, New York

Cool shirts!

April 06, 2006

On writing . . .

From a 1960 essay by Loren Eisley, titled The Long Loneliness:

“Man without writing cannot long retain his history in his head. His intelligence permits him to grasp some kind of succession of generations; but without writing, the tale of the past rapidly degenerates into fumbling myth and fable. Man’s greatest epic, his four long battles with the advancing ice of the great continental glaciers, has vanished from human memory without a trace.”

“Writing, and later printing, is the product of our adaptable many-purposed hands. It is thus, through writing, with no increase in genetic, inborn capacity since the last ice advance, that modern man carries in his mind the intellectual triumphs of all his predecessors who were able to inscribe their thoughts for posterity.”

April 05, 2006

Trees By Mark Haddon

Trees

They stand in parks and graveyards and gardens.
Some of them are taller than department stores,
yet they do not draw attention to themselves.

You will be fitting a heated towel rail one day
and see, through the louvre window,
a shoal of olive-green fish changing direction
in the air that swims above the little gardens.

Or you will wake at your aunt's cottage,
your sleep broken by a coal train on the empty hill
as the oaks roar in the wind off the channel.

Your kindness to animals, your skill at the clarinet,
these are accidental things.
We lost this game a long way back.
Look at you. You're reading poetry.
Outside the spring air is thick
with the seeds of their children.

- Mark Haddon

April 04, 2006

Museum of Musical Instruments

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Woody Guthrie Exhibit and The Guitar as Art at the Museum of Musical Instruments

More about Woody Guthrie

On memoir

Top Ten Reasons: Why we'll always need a good story
Scott Russell Sanders

On Memoir, Truth and 'Writing Well' - NPR Interview with William Zinsser

Literary Memoirs

We the characters
By Laura Miller
NYTimes April 18, 2004

April 02, 2006

Khaled Hosseini

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Khaled Hosseini Cleveland Public Library
April 2nd 2pm

The Servant
NYTimes Book Review
By EDWARD HOWER August 3, 2003

Cento Collage-poem

A cento is a collage-poem composed of lines lifted from other sources —
often, though not always, from great poets of the past. In Latin the word cento
means ‘‘patchwork,’’ and the verse form resembles a quilt of discrete lines
stitched together to make a whole. The word cento is also Italian for ‘‘one hundred,’’
and some mosaic poems consist of exactly 100 lines culled by one poet
from the work of another to pay tribute to him or her.

From These Fragments I Have Sewn
By David Lehman
NYTimes Book Review April 2, 2006