inbox
good thing my old iowa email address works. i just got this today from the uiowa press:
George Saunders, this year's judge, said, “Kevin Moffett is a writer who has the very rare gift of true kindheartedness. Again and again in
Permanent Visitors, he surprises and gratifies the reader with the intensity and patience of his gaze—his ability to find the complicated, the funny, the human, the dazzling, in the stuff of everyday life. The best stories in this book remind us of the real and only purpose of fiction: to recalibrate the heart.”
more info available at
powells or
kevin's website. someone should do an interview with him for us.
on the road
one last hoorah before school starts (teaching english 101 at a local community college). figured i'd get one last trip in before summer '06 expires. i went with my gentleman friend from portland down to l.a. and back, stopping in san francisco, chico, and crater lake, oregon.
strange brush fire at night. in the middle, oregon does kind off look like iowa, but i never noticed before.
the water in the deepest lake in america is really this blue. someone explained the science to me, but i didn't get it.
all these gorgeous vistas make me think of religious postcards.
Mac Battery Recall
Hey folks--
thought I'd send a heads-up about this (there was also a recent Dell recall!).
Mac issues recall of some batteriesThis is awesomely inconvenient... sigh. On a happier note, Blogger now allows you to sign in with a Gmail account, and has a linking button for Mac users. S'about time.
Hope all are well.
F.X. O'Toole and Kevin Costner
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1220503,00.html
Are book reviewers ever going to get tired of writing opening sentences like this one? No? Oh well. (Sorry it's not a live link...)
Field of Dreams is going to be screened in Dyersville, Iowa, on August 11th. Kevin Costner is going to be there and he's going to play a free concert with his band. Sometimes I wish I still lived in Iowa... and then I hear that Kevin Costner has a band.
How is everyone?
Regards,
The Cats
Perhaps you have heard of the famous Hemingway cats. Famous because they are polydactyl. Famous because over fifty of them still roam Hemingway's Key West home, all of them descendants of the originals and all of them named after Hollywood stars and all of them buried creatively in the side yard when the time comes. Famous because Hemingway was famous.
The Hemingway cats are also maybe a little terrifying. They are not restricted to any one portion of the property (now a museum) which means that they are all over everything. And if you've ever walked into what you assumed was an empty room featuring a few booky relics to discover twenty or so animals languishing in the heat, you know what I mean. You notice one, and then you notice another, and then you see that you're surrounded. "This isn't how I thought it would be," you think. Of course, you did smell the cats before you entered. You had fair warning. And the tour guide has a lot to say about them. And you can buy tiny airplane-booze bottled Hemingway cat nip in the gift shop.
In any case, if you desire ardently to see the Hemingway cats in the Hemingway home, you'd better do it soon. The USDA is threatening to
shut them down. Because you need a license to be an "exhibitor of cats," possibly one of the world's most terrifying professions.
