RSS Feeds

Hello all--

I signed up for RSS feeds for trendwatchers, NYT Book Review, the Washington Post book Review, About Literature Contemporary (which isn't so hot so far) and Doo3y's House of Cheese (which is one of our fellow OCLS'ers blogs. Once I get through everyone's blogs, I'll probably RSS feed some others that I want to keep up to date on.

Also, I didn't find Grokker useful. For my first search where I used by fairly obscure fiction author which I often use to testdrive search engines, it returned 0 results. For my second search I used more of a general topic, and while I found the map interesting, as I tried to click on one thing and then another, it wouldn't let me connect to the suggested sites. I don't know if that may be more a function of how I have pop-ups set or what. But, nevertheless, in the instant gratification world in which we live, I wouldn't use it in lieu of sites I have success searching.

Along the writing front, my wife and I did an exercise from this book called 3 AM Epiphany which was written by the director of the creative writing program at the University of Denver. He studied with Donald Barthelme who is one of my favorite authors. The exercise was to describe home (really, more about space and where we spend our time so it could be a room in a house, or a cubicle, or a car, whatever). The exercises have word limits so I explored the living room in my mother's house in Houston and how it had changed (or had not changed) in the two decades since growing up there.

I would like to do the Adventures activity, but we'll see how I can manage my work the rest of the week.

Oh! And I'm reading John Barth for the first time. Wow, it's awesome. A little excerpt from the foreword of Lost in the Funhouse...."You can hold a short story in your hand, like a lyric poem; see it whole; examine the function of individual sentences, even individual words...."