September 25, 2006
Anecdotal Evidence
In my "Weekend Reading" post published Friday afternoon, I mentioned several new blogs that had been added to the right-hand column. Not long after, thanks to a link from Terry Teachout, I discovered Anecdotal Evidence. Written by Houston-based journalist Patrick Kurp, it is unfailingly sensible, literate, and attentive to unexpected convergences of thought. It is a “lit blog” only insofar as its subject is literature; it contains neither industry news nor, as far as I have read (the September and August archives), author interviews. It hews closer to primary texts, offering long passages from nineteenth- and twentieth-century fiction, poetry, and letters expounded upon simply (and occasionally anecdotally). Guy Davenport and Henry David Thoreau turn up regularly. Recent posts on the poet A.E. Housman, the act of taking photographs and the website Lost Films, William Gass, and Marianne Moore are especially worth reading.