Voice recognition

I dropped my cellphone in the toilet the other night. After I retrieved it, it flickered briefly and then sputtered to what seemed like a rather unsurprising death. The screen went black, and the keys oozed water when I pressed them. I popped the battery out later and spread the phone in front of a [...]

dreaming of Japanese

One of my favorite things about living in Japan was that I began to dream in Japanese.
I had studied Japanese for about six months before I left to live in Japan for part of my sophomore year in college. Once there, I threw myself into an intensive language program: With five other American students, I [...]

jumpstarted arm

I’m still having a lot of problems with tendinitis in my arm. I was a lot better, but over the past couple of days it got worse again, for a variety of reasons.
My physical therapist showed me a picture from an anatomy textbook today, and basically all of the tendons in my forearm are inflamed, [...]

Attempts to bark up the right tree

I’m having trouble settling in to write today. Or to work. Or to focus on just about anything. At the moment this has a lot to do with the fact that outside our house someone’s truck’s alarm is malfunctioning. It keeps going off, every five minutes or so, and when the truck’s owner tries to [...]

Favorite short story collections

Last year, there was a flurry of lists of favorite short stories. The other day Kate of Kate’s Book Blog listed her favorite short story collections, and I have been thinking of what mine might be ever since. Here’s what I came up with:
• The Interpreter of Maladies, Jhumpa Lahiri
• St. Lucy’s Home [...]

Everyone’s talking about it.

Apropos of nothing, I’ve noticed a lot of interesting and/or entertaining blogging about the New Yorker recently:
-New Yorker fiction 2003-2007: an analysis – “14 writers have accounted for 32% of the fiction in the magazine during that period.”
-How to read the New Yorker in 10 easy steps – an enjoyable essay that will make you [...]

Calling S.F. Bay Area writers

I got an email today about this call for applications:
SF-based arts nonprofits Kearny Street Workshop & Intersection for the Arts are seeking applications for a literary program for emerging writers: the 5th annual Intergenerational Writers Lab (IWL), scheduled to take place March 1 through July 16 2008. Twelve participants will be selected to participate [...]

How it’s going (See also, gloppy mudfest).

People keep asking me how my freelance life is going and frankly, I don’t know what to say.
It’s not, exactly. Going. It’s not that there’s not work to be had, or possibilities, or freedoms. It’s just that, well, it’s a couple of things. It’s my arm, which tolerates only brief computer sessions and requires exercises, [...]

All of my Googlegangers are from the 18th century.

There’s an interesting little rant on the Guardian’s book blog about “new” words, the faddish choices that dictionary publishers and other groups make when choosing words of the year, and those words’ staying power (or lack thereof) in literature. w00t.

powerless

Well, my power did go out, and it stayed out.
Which meant no Internet access. Which meant… I had to go outside in the storm. I’m so Internet dependent — all the phone numbers I needed to be able set up interviews were hopelessly inaccessible in my gmail and so I braved the rain and [...]