Owlspotting

Have you taken a course — or a discussion session — with someone whose English was incomprehensible? Say Kenny of South Park? If you have and the experience was traumatic, the New York Times is there for you. An article on Saturday (Unclear on American Campus: What the Foreign Teacher Said) says the education of […]

Rock Adio, originally uploaded by owlspotting. This sticker was on a trash can at the corner of Nassau and Manhattan. Maybe it should have said: “Rock, Adio!” Adio = a potential permanent goodbye in Romanian. See more of Brooklyn here

Let me return to my comments about musical condescension and musicitas. A friend who read my post directed me to Pitchfork’s official review of Clap Your Hands and Say Yeah. It was a predictable read that says less about the music than about the indie-rock climate the record is being reviewed in. “There’s something really […]

I read “Prague,” Arthur Phillips’ debut novel, with rare pleasure (thanks Elle). In the year before reading “Prague,” pressured by graduate school work, I had drifted into non-fiction. Phillips’ book reminded me of the pleasure of reading stories where the mind can create as many scenarios as it wishes. Plus, the book had a post-communism […]

The car’s door bounced in and out on the woman’s thin right arm a few times before she was able to push herself on the crowded train. I was being squeezed from both sides and caged in from above by some broken down old people, a punk rock Indian girl and a college-aged couple locked […]

This is a post about Brooklyn and Manhattan. To come… Update (more than a year later): This blog started with a post that was never written. How amusing.