by Jamie Chavez | Jan 16, 2016 | Miscellany
You’ve heard me say this before: I grew up in a home filled with books and magazines, music and musical instruments. I have known from my youth that exposure to this made a huge difference in my intellectual life. (That I cared about having an intellectual life at all...
by Jamie Chavez | Jan 4, 2016 | Miscellany
You may have noticed I’ve been offering less original writing these last six months. On Thursdays you’ve been getting extracts, gleaned from my own reading on the writing craft. I transcribe them myself. This was spurred by my very busy year (personally and...
by Jamie Chavez | Nov 30, 2015 | Books You Might Like, Miscellany
My parents always had a huge built-in bookcase wherever they lived (my father built them). They were primarily filled with the novels my mother had accumulated in her youth and all sorts of books my folks acquired as a young married couple, including museum exhibition...
by Jamie Chavez | Nov 26, 2015 | Miscellany
I’ve been blogging for more than five years now. Today seemed like a good day to repeat an article I ran on my first Thanksgiving … Most of us labor in obscurity of one type or another. Let’s face it, that star-maker machinery has moved on its rattle-trap tracks right...
by Jamie Chavez | Nov 21, 2015 | Miscellany, The Arts & Media
I’ve written about the relative virtues of paper books and e-readers, and have worked out how each works best for me. But I’m still interested in the research. In this article from the Financial Times, writer Julian Baggini asks, “Which do our brains prefer? Research...
by Jamie Chavez | Sep 26, 2015 | Miscellany
I’ve experienced my share of online confrontation, some of it mean, some of it downright nasty. And I’ve commented on those experiences too (“Two Kinds of People,” “Prescriptivist or Descriptivist,” and “Haters, Gotta Love ’Em”). This old world is full of blamers,...
