Jasper Merian, a protagonist of Calvin Baker’s Dominion, worries over choosing names. Given his tendency to utter pronouncements like “I would have named my own house Colonus… But I thought by now they surely must have heard of that place. I called it Stonehouses instead, in hopes it might keep them off us awhile,” you might even say he’s superstitious . . .
TEV points to a compendium of Clive James links, courtesy of James himself, and recommends As of This Writing.
You have five minutes to kill yourself — with common office supplies — in advance of a staff meeting. (Many thanks, Jessa.)
A.M. Homes’ January 2005 New Yorker essay on meeting her biological parents for the first time while in her early thirties is a fine piece of writing — absurd, disturbing, and adamantly unsentimental. In a waiting room, as she watches her father turn in paperwork for the blood test she’s agreed to undergo, she notices “that his butt looks familiar; . . .
Chris Lehmann’s D.C. Observer column debuts this week with “The Pleasurers of the President,” a scathing attack on the “louche pundit hubris” of the D.C. press corps following the U.S. attorney firings. While “dogged investigators at online journalism outlets such as Talking Points Memo’s TPMmuckraker.com have done great work documenting the D.O.J.’s thuggish management of its appointed corps of attorneys,” . . .