September 29, 2008 – 11:44 am
From TIME’s Censorship in Modern Times: “Since 1982, the American Library Association has sponsored Banned Books Week to pay tribute to free speech and open libraries. The tradition began as a nod to how far society has come since 1557, when Pope Paul IV first established The Index of Prohibited Books to protect Catholics from [...]
September 29, 2008 – 10:35 am
I want to write an annotation that argues with Annie Dillard’s theodicy, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. I want to argue with it because I think it says, with Leibniz, that despite the presence of evil, “this universe must be indeed better than every other possible universe” (Leibniz, 377), and that argument was parodied to [...]
You may have noticed from the sidebar that I’m “now reading” four different books:
Lolita, by Vladimir Nabokov;
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, by Annie Dillard;
Dhlagren, by Samuel R. Delaney;
and the His Dark Materials trilogy, by Phillip Pullman
Now, you may have said to yourself, “Hey Kyle, four books at one time? What the eff?”
First, let me say that [...]
From the Atlantic’s Is Google Making Us Stupid?: “Thanks to the ubiquity of text on the Internet, not to mention the popularity of text-messaging on cell phones, we may well be reading more today than we did in the 1970s or 1980s, when television was our medium of choice. But it’s a different kind of [...]
April 10, 2008 – 12:33 pm
Near the end of Bill McKibben’s Wandering Home: A Long Walk Across America’s Most Hopeful Landscape: Vermont’s Champlain Valley and New York’s Adirondacks, the author comes across “a truly giant white pine” (119) from which hangs this hand-lettered sign:
On this site in year 1845 this pine tree, a sapling of twelve years, was transplanted by [...]
October 25, 2007 – 11:33 am
Cormac McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic novel, The Road, is not a subtle book. The author’s vision is clear and his themes move slowly and obviously across the page like his two major characters walking the eponymous road. The characters are an unnamed man and his son, “the boy.” The world they inhabit has been destroyed by some [...]
September 10, 2007 – 12:03 pm
From NY Times article, Prisons Purging Books on Faith From Libraries: “Behind the walls of federal prisons nationwide, chaplains have been quietly carrying out a systematic purge of religious books and materials that were once available to prisoners in chapel libraries. The chaplains were directed by the Bureau of Prisons to clear the shelves of [...]
August 22, 2007 – 11:22 am
From Poll: 1 in 4 didn’t read book in past year: “One in four adults say they read no books at all in the past year, according to an Associated Press-Ipsos poll released Tuesday. Of those who did read, women and seniors were most avid, and religious works and popular fiction were the top choices.” [...]
March 23, 2007 – 11:26 am
This past winter here in Vermont has been about hibernating. After weeks of pining for snow in late fall and early winter, we finally got what we had coming, and man did we GET IT! I’d like to share with you some of the places I’ve went and people I’ve met while hibernating in my [...]
December 11, 2005 – 01:31 am
I am absolutely fascinated by endnotes. Footnotes too, of course. But endnotes even more so, I think. The footnote is a quick glance, but the endnote demands more physical performance. There is the turning of the pages. First the big chunk to get back to the endnotes in the first place, but also the little [...]
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