Archive for August, 2007

James Tata on Portland’s Powell’s Books

While I focus on things other than blogging this month, I’m running a series on independent bookstores. Below writer James Tata praises Powell’s Books of Portland, Oregon. It’s not too much of a stretch to say that I live in Portland because Powell’s Books is here. When I first visited Portland as a tourist in the early 90s, the Pearl . . .

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Happy weekend from the woman scorned

In this, the final installment of the Love Triangle Letters, my beloved Texan grandmother drafts a note to the other woman’s husband. It’s exceedingly polite, which she wasn’t always. “Regardless of what Christine has done I blame her no more than the man. I am a great believer in the ‘Single Standard,’” she begins. She urges him to take Christine . . .

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On the Road, by John Kerouac

Kerouac’s own “appealing commercial cover” sketch for On the Road identified him as John, not Jack. (Not only did he write and draw, he sang.)

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The Groucho letters

A new edition of Groucho Marx’s collected letters — to E.B. White and T.S. Eliot, among others — marks 30 years since his death.

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