Just warming up to this conversation of literature, exploring story and song with artists at MIC/A (Maryland Inst., College of Art) and singing often and performing occasionally, including a couple of reunions that Matt Toll drove from 8 to 2AM and (that was when Obama came in) quitting nicotine at last and learning squash and trying to keep up with Russell (a freshman at UVM) and a bit more about how to:

find that Bflat minor in "Lay Lady Lay" AND Josh Ritter's "Kathleen" and even jump to the B section of Al Green's Take Me to the River.

show some gratefulness that Melissa's stuck with me through many fetes and a little too much intemperance

Was that a red-light camera?

Drive, without too much grief, and now, with 11th-hour exemplariness, our freshwoman volleyball- playing fashionista, MaryLouise, wherever she indicates: dances, matches, parties, even the MALL ( but I won't go in)

stack the woodpile a little more neatly, chopping just a little smaller now,

And today, back from the Smith College booksale in Baltimore, I delight in cataloging Edward Lear's Owl and the Pussycat, in French (LE HIBOU ET LA POUSSIQUETTE) and … here's what I got to write as I sang… Lucky me… Very good cloth hardcover, in fair, edgeworn, clipped pictorial dustjacket. Except for a small gift inscription at half-title, No reader's or remainder or ex-library marks. First ed. first printing 1961. Delightfully illustrated throughout by B. CLOONEY. In French, with glossary for those who know Lear's English version. Runcible spoon, alas, has had to be rendered "une cuillere peu commune"... but it rhymes and it scans."

Books I've Read in Trees

Books I’ve read in trees. The place I like to read best.

David Foster Wallace is the sometimes precious, always precise, spot-on Joyce of our age.

I think David Foster Wallace's essays in CONSIDER THE LOBSTER (whose best essay, “Authority and American Usage,” arises from this Harper's article:

http://instruct.westvalley.edu/lafave/DFW_present_tense.html

and "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again" are really important, especially "E Unam Pluribus" [stet]

For the mathematico-philosophical: DFW's "Everything and More: A Compact History of Infinity"

I’ve shied away (so far) from teaching Wallace’s INFINITE JEST (1996), whose weight is fun at 1,079 pages. I relish DFW's stuff, footnotes and all.

And I just finished Mark Crispin Miller's BOXED IN on film and TV culture--and since it was published around '93 we / you might recall some of the subject matter.

Turned my TV off since then but Miller finds that’s a bad idea.


Devil in the White City, which blends some fine historical fiction about the Chicago World's Fair with alternate chapters showing America's own Dr. Holmes (stet) and his Ripperish
> methods, on a larger American scale.

This spring at MICA I’m teaching American Ugly: Lit 431 (Brown, 222) Thursdays, 9-11:45

Don Delillo, White Noise

Toni Morrison, Sula

Jeffrey Eugenides, The Virgin Suicides
Short story: Eugenides:
http://www.newyorker.com/printables/fiction/051010fi_fiction

Chuck Palahniuk, Invisible Monsters



David Foster Wallace,
Brief Interviews with Hideous Men
Broom of the System


Lorrie Moore, Self-Help and other Stories
Annie Proulx, POSTCARDS 1841155012

Marisha Pessl, Special Topics in Calamity Physics the website amazes; the similes mostly off, like “elephants on ice.”

David Eggers, What is the WHAT?


http://nedsparrowbooks.com/
All the Bookish BEST,

Professor Ned Sparrow

ned@nedsparrowbooks.com