Posts by author
Brian Spears
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The Benefits of Tickling
Cabinet of Wonders takes an in-depth look at tickling as pain relief, and at the medical benefits it can provide. At my wedding, one of my groom’s vows was a promise to tickle my feet. This was only half-facetious: foot-tickling,…
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Brian’s Saturday Morning Links
Not enough sleep? Echoes of a faint hangover? Then it’s time for Saturday Morning Links. Dahlia Lithwick and Doug Kendall point out that conservative politicians who are upset about empathetic judges probably ought to stick a sock in it. Whether…
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Poetic Lives Online: Links by Brian Spears
It’s a somber weekend, for obvious reasons, but there’s a lot going on in the poetry world, and I’m here to give it to you. Derek Wolcott’s past rears its ugly head in the race for the Oxford professorship of…
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An Essay on Criticism–The Sequel
Normally I would save a link like this for my Poetic Lives Online column later tonight, but this deserves a story all its own. Geoff Nunberg of Language Log is talking about an odd book project: “The text of the…
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Rediscovering the Forgotten
The drive to digitize ancient manuscripts is growing quickly, and in the process, scholars are discovering works they never realized they had. The current technology is good enough that scholars can make sense of scrolls too delicate to be unrolled,…
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The Language of the Beard
As one who determined five years ago, after having shaved my beard off to remind myself what the natural contours of my face looked like, to never go without facial hair again, I’ve often wondered how others interpreted beards. Here’s…
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Craig Arnold: 1967-2009
Not all the details have been released yet, but the word from Japan is that poet Craig Arnold died after suffering a leg injury and falling from a cliff. From the article in the Salt Lake Tribune: “The only relief…
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Brian’s Saturday Morning Links
Has it been this way since the invention of the portrait? Does every generation look back at family pictures and wonder what the hell they were thinking? Overthinking It has some suggestions for doing prequels–not that Hollywood will listen. To…
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Poetic Lives Online: Links by Brian Spears
Congratulations to Carole Ann Duffy, Britain’s new Poet Laureate, and both the first woman and the first openly gay person to hold the position. Mayday Magazine hosts a roundtable on the need for the negative review in poetry. Joshua Corey…
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Obey the DeeJay
I hadn’t thought about it this way before, perhaps because I’m rarely in a dance club anymore, and when I was in them, I was generally too blitzed to pay that much attention to the orders I was receiving from…
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Telling Our Stories
One of the few compensations of growing up as a member of a restrictive, some might even say cultish, religion, is that if you manage to get free of it as an adult, you have great stories to tell. I…