Cops Beating UC Berkeley Students. In Video. Time to Judge The Quick and The Dead.

Dear CF,
I’m watching footage of the events of the UC Berkeley strike, which culminated in a student takeover of Wheeler Hall where I teach.
KTVU does a story on the strike, with footage of police beating students.
I don’t pretend to be 100% sympathetic to the students who took over Wheeler Hall. Movements are unruly, and things [...]

Read Full Post »

Irresistible

Read Full Post »

UC Berkeley Strike in Photos: Time-Lapse

Today, as part of the UC strike, a group of about 50 students took over Wheeler Hall on the UC Berkeley campus to protest the layoffs of 38 ASFCME workers and a 32% hike in undergraduate tuition.  The building is surrounded by police, which in turn are surrounded by protesters (UPDATE 7:20 p.m.: who are [...]

Read Full Post »

Thomas Kinkade, Artist

“Thomas Kinkade: Painter of Light” is the title of a real show. It is on my television right now. It features America’s favorite nostalgia-dauber, Thomas Kinkade, with an overgrown soulpatch that ate most of his chin. He wears a green button-down shirt and a black blazer. His hair is highlighted and slicked back.
A young woman [...]

Read Full Post »

American Writers

“There exists a great politesse around women’s poetry,” Courtney Queeney writes, “and to write critically is, in some ways, to betray one’s feminine self (the part that’s supposed to blink a lot and sigh into the shadows when the menfolk start talking politics at the dinner [...]

Read Full Post »

Great Pattern Changes

Read Full Post »

Daniel Alarcón Pirated My Life

Dear CF,
Just got back from hearing Daniel Alarcón—author of War by Candlelight (which I’ve read) and Lost City Radio (which I haven’t, for reasons that will become apparent)—talk about book piracy in Peru. You’ve seen the stands, you’ve read your Calvino: the subject is the fast cheap reproduction of original books and the readers and [...]

Read Full Post »

Why Don’t Fetuses Get Free Health Care?

It’s a curious feature of the Republican approach to reproduction that the fetus has the right to life but not to medical care*. The life belongs to the fetus, so the money required to bring that fetus to term—including the cost of the birth—should be calculated not as part of the “expense” of being a [...]

Read Full Post »

Why Women Don’t Make Top Ten Lists: Prose on Prose

Dear CF,
Laura Miller’s article on Publishers Weekly’s top ten list led me to Francine Prose’s article, “Scent of a Woman’s Ink,” which was published in Harper’s Magazine in 1998.  It’s not available to nonsubscribers but it’s a formidable piece and relevant still, though it’s equally interesting to think about the ways in which some things [...]

Read Full Post »

The Incarnation

A lizard, Carla Fran?!! Is this your novel’s spirit animal, your word made flesh? I confess I find the idea of him terribly nice, although I’m sure it’s less poetic to have large lizards actually in a space that’s shared by your feet.
I have no lizards in my house. Some respectable spiders, an ailing basil [...]

Read Full Post »