I know I usually only advertise releases for big-name authors–mainly because by the time I’ve read enough of an author’s work to be looking forward to the release, he/she is already big (I never was hip enough to be ahead of the curve)–but Philip Roth has a new one coming out this fall, another Nathan Zuckerman book. Seems like people either really like Roth or really dislike him. My colleagues in the English department are split, but for my money, the authority in his writing is hard to beat. For example, this sentence from early in American Pastoral: “The Swede’s younger brother was my classmate, Jerry Levov, a scrawny, small-headed, oddly overflexible boy built along the lines of a licorice stick, something of a mathematical wizard, and the January 1950 valedictorian.” This technique–cumulative sentences–can be quite effective in creating energy in prose. I’m reading I Married a Communist this week, which so far doesn’t have quite the same drive as American Pastoral, though it’s still a good read. Exit Ghost, due out in October and rumored to be Roth’s last Zuckerman novel, takes its name from a stage direction in Hamlet.

I’m teaching Rose this week to my creative writing students, and (don’t tell anyone) I’d never actually read the whole book, just a handful of poems. A friend recommended it, and what a marvelous book it turned out to be. He writes about poetic stuff that should be cliche–roses, the moon, rain, graves, his family–but he makes them fresh. An old poetry teacher of mine used to talk about the “soul” of a poem, and, for lack of a better word, that’s what these poems have. There’s a heart to them that you just can’t fake, and because of that heart, Lee earns the right to any image he wants. He risks cliche and sentimentality, and it pays off. Memorable lines from “Persimmons”: “Some things never leave a person: / scent of the hair of one you love / the texture of persimmons, / in your palm, the ripe weight.”

I was watching Modern Marvels on the History Channel and discovered that this actually exists.

Is it morally wrong to “steal” (borrow? piggyback on?) someone’s wireless internet system? Good article at the BBC here.

This essay from the September 2005 New Yorker is Christopher Buckley’s satirical entrance essay for college. It’s much better written than any actual eighteen-year-old’s essay would be, but he hits the highlights of the BS young people unwittingly dish out and that administrations love. Two highlights:

1) “I have a personal connection to the events of that day, for some years ago my uncle by marriage’s brother worked in one of the towers. He wasn’t working there on 9/11, but the fact that he had been in the building only years before brought the tragedy home to Muskelunge Township.

“It is for this reason that I have resolved to devote my life to bringing about harmony among the nations of the world, especially in those nations who appear to dislike us enough to fly planes into our skyscrapers. With better understanding comes, I believe, the desire not to fly planes into each other’s skyscrapers.”

2) “While Dad pretty much wiped out the money in the process of running over Mamma—she was in the house at the time—my grandparents say they can pay for my education, and even throw in a little “walking-around money” for the hardworking folks in the admissions department. Grandma says she will give up her heart and arthritis medications, and Grandpa says he will go back to work at the uranium mine in Utah despite the facts that he is eighty-two and legally blind.

“In this way, the college won’t have to give me scholarship money that could go to some even more disadvantaged applicant, assuming there is one.”