Find the nut graf

For those who're interested, here's my piece in the 5/2 Seattle Times Sunday magazine: A wooden boat's beauty lies in its reflection of nature.

Worthwhile website

If you're like me, and I suspect you are, you have far too much to read rather than not enough; and you're automatically wary whenever anyone suggests a great website or another magazine you should check out. Still: I've found a great website for you to check out.

The Chronicle of Higher Education's Arts & Letters Daily is an unbelievably wide-ranging smorgasbord of new articles and essays for thinking readers—sort of a modern Reader's Digest for educated and curious people. The pieces have been published in literary magazines, popular magazines, and newspapers from all the world's English-speaking countries. There's also a constellation of blog links (left-hand column) that the editors have found to be worthwhile.

This is like browsing the periodicals room of a really good library. Only trouble is—three hours later you come up for air and wonder where the time went.

A Word a day

As I mentioned in class, I find the "A Word a Day" e-mail subscription extremely useful and entertaining. Today's word was "obdurate," a fine word meaning "stubborn" or "resistant." I wondered if I'd ever used it in print. A quick keyword scan of my hard disk showed that I had—in a history of the Navajo Long Walk published in 2004. Time to dust it off for new deployment.

You can learn about "A Word a Day" and subscribe for free at http://wordsmith.org/awad/. Highly recommended.

Charles Bowden's new book

Charles Bowden has a new book out this week, "Murder City," a harrowing but literary expedition into the drug violence of Ciudad Juarez, Mexico. There was an interesting interview with him on NPR this morning, which you can read or listen to here.

Sorry to just drop back in from out of nowhere, but I could not resist sharing this article about a hard edit on someone's writing and how important that is -- even at the highest levels, or, maybe especially at the highest levels.

Good luck to all of you. See you at the certificate ceremony.

John B. Saul

Good reading assignments

For your assigned reading enjoyment over the break, three pieces to help inspire your thinking about your upcoming "thing" piece. One of the three isn't in your Touchstone anthology, but is here for free in The New Yorker online archives: Candid Camera: The Cult of Leica.

The other two are in your anthology: "The Date" and "Consider the Lobster."

Please remember to think about your "thing" topic and bring a proposal to class March 30. We'll read and workshop the proposals during that class.

Enjoy the break: read plenty, get outside, and reef the main at 15 knots.

The new shape of book tours

We will be talking more about writing books in the next several classes—and, necessarily, the business of publishing and selling them. Here's a fascinating story from the Los Angeles Times about the new shape of authors' book tours