“Who does Robert Olen Butler think he is?” I was trying to explain to a young man why you always, always carry a writing notebook and a pen, so I showed him this genuine, overhead-in-the-hallways, can’t-make-this-stuff-up line I had jotted down minutes earlier, and no, I’m not telling you who said it — not here […]
Today I am taking a writing day, as a way to help my writing soul and displace me from the omnipresent Now. I have too many writing tasks to work on in the next fourteen hours, and that’s a wonderful problem to contemplate! But I had this link roundup written, so here you go. As […]
I wonder if years from now I will be more taken with where I saw Milk — in a weary, mostly empty theater in Tallahassee, sitting amid a small clutch of Southern gays and liberals (going at least by their Birkenstocks and hybrid cars) — than that I saw it at all. Milk is a […]
“Turns out there’s a lot of interlinks in our financial system” — George Bush on CNN. Is this man president? Of the United States? Of America? Now the Old Fart will take office, keel over… and we’ll have Little Miss “I can see RUSSIA from my HOUSE!” near the Red Phone. Be Afraid! Register and […]
Tallahassee Farmer’s Market Originally uploaded by freerangelibrarian The market up at Timberlane doesn’t look like much, if you’re accustomed to “farmer’s markets” with masseurs and string quartets — folding tables and veggies, no oompah bands — but at least a handful of farmers are there year-round. It takes some dedication to go to the farmer’s […]
I’m not really driving a hybrid (not that I would object if Santa put a forest-green Prius in my stocking this year); I still have my 1993 Honda Civic, which gets a respectable mileage for its 4-mile commute to my office. So the title of this post is a metaphor for how I’m approaching Lent […]
I try not to think about this too often, but at times it’s depressing to contemplate that a capital city with two universities can be home to a “Gourmet Guide” — really, next to what you can find on Chowhound, the only local guide to dining in Tallahassee — with a rating system that makes […]
I wasn’t in the mood for Thistle and Shamrock on my drive home from a Sunday afternoon writing siege at Panera’s (a little Celtic music goes an extremely long way for me), and I really wanted to finish listening to the latest On the Media show I had downloaded to my iPod, so I rummaged […]
At first, when I couldn’t find a post I had made on Chowhound yesterday morning before I left for work, I chalked it up to my own sloppy surfing. I have been acutely focused on Friday’s talk, as many people from MPOW are coming, which I am finding very stressful to the point of frazzlement […]
I just finished a major draft of the first soup-to-nuts literary essay I have written since spring 2006, when I was crankin’ ’em out for MFA workshop homework assignments. (The essay, about local food, was on request, for an anthology.) Yay me! I hope it doesn’t suck, or at least that any sucking can be […]