I met with Red Hen Press managing editor Kate Gale a few weeks ago, at the tail end of her stint speaking to Stonecoast MFA students here in Maine.

I am moving in the middle of August, downsizing from a sizeable two-bedroom apartment I shared with another human and two cats to a small one-bedroom that will be just for me and the felines. As a result, I have to streamline my possessions, and the hardest part of this challenge will be purging some of my “literary clutter,” i.e. the books that I’ve collected and mostly refused to get rid of over the years — whether or not I enjoyed reading them (if I even read them at all). Given my space constraints, I’m going to have to be ruthless.

Many articles and web sites have taken note recently of the proliferation of literary tattoos, and the blogs that love them.

(Here's one of my personal faves:)

Now, I've discovered another group of intellectuals who like to wear their academic discipline as a sleeve (or at least on the small of their back, or on their bicep) -- scientists.

In 2004, my Phoenix colleague Mike Miliard wrote a great piece about Massachusetts native Nick Flynn, and Flynn's memoir: Another Bullshit Night in Suck City (WW Norton, 2004). Flynn's first full-length play, Alice Invents A Little Game and Alice Always Wins was published by Faber & Faber this month, and I had the chance to read it over the weekend.

Warning: Don't peruse Burned By Love if you're going through a breakup. I guarantee it'll make you feel worse.

When I first stumbled across it a few weeks ago, there were only a handful of entries. Today, the promotional site, set up to help publicize Andrew Davidson's debut novel, The Gargoyle (Random House, 2008), has 45 confessionals and counting.

“Sister, how bad does a situation have to be before a woman will strike out, not in defence, but because something is, as you say, worth fighting for?”

The heroine of Sarah Hall’s 2007 novel, Daughters of the North, is known only as Sister. She, like Hall’s prose, is raw, brave, and surprising, both to herself and to the reader.

In today's Portland Phoenix, I have a short piece about Ken Gloss, proprietor of the Brattle Book Shop in Downtown Crossing, who'll be in Portland next week. Unfortunately, he tells me my signed first edition of David Sedaris' Dress Your Family In Corduroy and Denim is worth peanuts.

Good story though.

You know you're a huge nerd when news of George Eliot's Middlemarch being made into a movie (by a competent director) makes you shiver with excitement. Holy crap! So awesome. Except if they get Keira Knightley to play Dorothea, which would break my heart. Sorry, Keira, I do buy you as smart and spunky, but there's something missing -- a sense of refinement, perhaps? or maybe quietly yearning self-awareness? -- in your characterization of nineteenth century female heroines.

You know you're a huge nerd when news of George Eliot's Middlemarch being made into a movie (by a competent director) makes you shiver with excitement. Holy crap! So awesome. Except if they get Keira Knightley to play Dorothea, which would break my heart. Sorry, Keira, I do buy you as smart and spunky, but there's something missing -- a sense of refinement, perhaps? or maybe quietly yearning self-awareness? -- in your characterization of nineteenth century female heroines.