The Daily Sabbatical
Music, Books, and Assorted Maunderings

Though I now feel myself to be a southerner by little more than birth, I have to admit a tendency to seek out and relish southern writers with something approximating a search for kinship.  After his last book of short stories landed him on the shortlist for the Pen/Faulkner award and his novel Serena was one of the most lauded books of the year, I thought it time to check out the Appalachian poet and author, Ron Rash.  In the end I wasn't disappointed so much as underwhelmed. Serena is the story of the… Read More

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Somehow this story from the NYT tickled me.  For about a century, because of stop motion photography, it has been known that animals walk starting with the forward motion of their left hind leg, followed by left fore, then right hind, then right foreleg.  (I did not know this, and I have questions about starting on the left--do they always do that?  But nevermind.)  Turns out that in a large selection (around 50%) of cartoons, toys, artistic depictions, and even museum exhibits, the positioning of the legs is wrong.  While I don't blame the creator of Marmaduke, the Finnish… Read More

I recently read a story by Rick Bass in the 2008 Pushcart Prize anthology, my favorite book almost every year. I'd definitely heard of Bass--he's in the pantheon of America's short story writers--but till then I had never read him. It was a story about boys in Texas trying to turn a buck buying cattle, and I almost wept with laughter. I resolved to check this guy out, and though this story was from his new collection, The Lives of Rocks, anal retent that I am I had to start with his first book, The Watch, published… Read More

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Jacob Weisburg lists his top 25 Bushisms on Slate. My favorite of the moment: 15. "It's important for us to explain to our nation that life is important. It's not only life of babies, but it's life of children living in, you know, the dark dungeons of the Internet."—Arlington Heights, Ill., Oct. 24, 2000 Read More

Researchers have found that patients who played the computer game Tetris soon after a trauma suffered less emotional scarring as a result.  The Tetris patients were significantly less likely to experience flashbacks, for example, in the week following the traumatic event. No evidence, so far, that playing Grand Theft Auto… Read More

It’s time for a rant.

I am an avid downloader of music that I do not pay for. Only occasionally do I feel even a twinge of guilt about this. I felt such a twinge recently. So, good citizen that I am, I investigated the possibility of actually paying for downloaded music. I found, to my great chagrin, really, that there is… Read More