So, yesterday was the official kick-off of the Keep Portland Weird festival here in Paris, which meant that I had a reading/screening in the...
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Hicok's observations are sometimes banal, sometimes arresting, and always poetic. As a seeming repository for all the things I have read and now do not remember properly, I'm impressed with the staying power of his words, which spring to mind intermittently. "My faith-based initiative" is the best-- "Is this how you want me to pray, Lord, what if everything / we do is love, every horrible thing we do is love, / and the tiny gestures of notes beside the phone, / and blowing on soup, what if there are no distinctions, / and we, who are nothing but the impulse to distinguish, / to cut one thing from another, are wrong,..." It's one book I cared enough to actually purchase recently.
This is the most page-turning-est non-fiction book I've ever read. I would never claim to have a strong interest in whaling, but Dolin makes the history of such in America so very compelling. It's a great read, although I was somewhat chagrined to find myself accidentally spoiled on the ending of Moby Dick, which I still plan to read someday...
In the afterlife, you'll wish you had read more books like this one. I was intrigued after hearing the first story from this collection on RadioLab, and it doesn't disappoint! Not quite poetry, not quite sci-fi, and all brilliance, each incarnation of the afterlife that Eagleman imagines left me wishing only that there were more. It's so, so good.
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seenorimagined has commented on (3) products.
This Clumsy Living (Pitt Poetry) by Bob Hicok
seenorimagined, September 30, 2011
Hicok's observations are sometimes banal, sometimes arresting, and always poetic. As a seeming repository for all the things I have read and now do not remember properly, I'm impressed with the staying power of his words, which spring to mind intermittently. "My faith-based initiative" is the best-- "Is this how you want me to pray, Lord, what if everything / we do is love, every horrible thing we do is love, / and the tiny gestures of notes beside the phone, / and blowing on soup, what if there are no distinctions, / and we, who are nothing but the impulse to distinguish, / to cut one thing from another, are wrong,..." It's one book I cared enough to actually purchase recently.Leviathan: The History of Whaling in America by Eric Jay Dolin
seenorimagined, May 13, 2011
This is the most page-turning-est non-fiction book I've ever read. I would never claim to have a strong interest in whaling, but Dolin makes the history of such in America so very compelling. It's a great read, although I was somewhat chagrined to find myself accidentally spoiled on the ending of Moby Dick, which I still plan to read someday...Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives (Vintage) by David Eagleman
seenorimagined, February 14, 2011
In the afterlife, you'll wish you had read more books like this one. I was intrigued after hearing the first story from this collection on RadioLab, and it doesn't disappoint! Not quite poetry, not quite sci-fi, and all brilliance, each incarnation of the afterlife that Eagleman imagines left me wishing only that there were more. It's so, so good.