Ian Crouch asks why more Americans don’t win the Nobel Prize for Literature. (The last one to do so was Toni Morrison in 1993, an award I remember especially clearly because a) I had only recently started reading her and b) I was struck by the fact of an African-American woman writer being so recognized.)Continue reading “The Never-Ending Angst Over the Nobel Prize In Literature”
Monthly Archives: October 2013
The White Rim Overlook in Canyonlands National Park
Last August, my wife and I visited the Canyonlands National Park in Utah. We had driven to Moab the day before and put ourselves up in a small motel on its outskirts. A day’s hiking in Canyonlands lay ahead; we planned to spend in it the park’s elevated northern Islands in the Sky section, takingContinue reading “The White Rim Overlook in Canyonlands National Park”
Dawn Powell on ‘Writers of Consequence’
Dawn Powell‘s A Time To Be Born is chock-a-block with wonderfully acerbic observations: on life, love, politics–you know, the usual stuff–but for my money, most memorably, in these brief passages, on journalism, writers, and writing itself: Every morning Miss Bemel turned in a complete digest of the dinner conversations or chance comments of important officialsContinue reading “Dawn Powell on ‘Writers of Consequence’”
The Peculiar Allure of Blog Search Terms
Like most blogging platforms WordPress provides statistics on blog views: unique visitors, referring pages, and most interestingly search terms that bring viewers here. The following, for instance, are yesterday’s entries for this blog: a municipal report what is the narrator’s attitude toward the south failure of kindness www american horror story season 3 walking deadContinue reading “The Peculiar Allure of Blog Search Terms”
Lech Majewski’s The Mill and The Cross: A Beautiful Moving Tableaux
The Mill and the Cross, Lech Majewski‘s 2011 film, like Pieter Bruegel the Elder‘s The Procession to Calvary, the painting that inspires it, is beautiful to look at. It might be hard to know what to make of it in a conventional movie-viewing sense, but the cavalcade of gorgeous images that it parades before ourContinue reading “Lech Majewski’s The Mill and The Cross: A Beautiful Moving Tableaux”
The US Government Shutdown: Party Like It’s 1995
America awoke this morning to find its government shut down, thanks to Congress’ failure to pass a funding bill. Eight hundred thousand federal workers–including my wife, a staff attorney at the National Labor Relations Board–will be furloughed today. (My wife will go in for the first four hours to carry out an orderly shutdown ofContinue reading “The US Government Shutdown: Party Like It’s 1995”
Samir Chopra 