Tuesday, April 17, 2012

Spring Break Medley

On Spring Break I enjoined encountering all sorts of ideas through hither and thither reading.

My wife bought me the selected poems of Larry Levis, of which a few were familiar and devestatingly poignant, like "Childhood Ideogram". I also caught the rebroadcast of an interview on FreshAir with poet Marie Howe whose poem "What the Living Do" I had recently read in the new edition of the Norton Anthology of 20th Century American Poetry. Wonderful. And you will notice that I have added a playlist to the sidebar of this blog of Taylor Mali speaking his poems as they are meant to be spoken.

The cover article in the NYT Magazine about Robert Caro provided a great window into the working process of this legendary historian whose 4th volume on Lyndon Johnson is about to be published. Having read The Power Broker, at last, a few years ago, I hope to make the time to read at least one volume of his work on Johnson.

 A Tweet led me to a sobering article by Nicholas Kristoff with the lead line, "For every soldier killed on the battlefield this year, about 25 veterans are dying by their own hands." I have also enjoyed following Tweets of my favorite programmer as he discovers, learns, and creates his way to making a Ground Track Generator that visualizes satellite orbits, and his subsequent leap to creating a Twitter bot (@WheresThatSat) that responds to the the mention of satellites with their current coordinates/orbit.


I also read in the Times about a new guide book to The Metropolitam Museum of Art. I looks like something good for our collection and it reminded me of a book that we currently have, How to Read a Modern Painting... which I think I will take home to read!

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