Great Regulars: "I was looking after her one rainy Cambridge summer

when she was pushing 100," Ms. [Ruth] Padel said of her grandmother. "She had lost her short-term memory, but her long-term memory was very keen. She politely asked me what I was working on, which at the time was my Ph.D. thesis at Oxford, about images of emotion in Greek poetry. 'That's very interesting,' she said, and then started talking about Darwin's book about the expression of emotion in man and animals. Five minutes later she'd ask me again and she'd have a completely different association with Darwin. It was like talking to a highly intelligent drunken ghost. She talked a lot about Charles and Emma and how it gave them both such pain that his ideas were leading him away from belief, and I thought, 'My God, I'd like to write that story someday.' "

from Charles McGrath: The New York Times: Darwin's Descendant, on Origin of Poetry

~~~~~~~~~~~

One of the biggest growth areas in higher education these days is creative writing. In 1975, there were 52 degree-granting writing programs in American colleges and universities, and in 2004 there were more than 300. In his new book, "The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing," Mark McGurl, an associate professor of English at the University of California, Los Angeles, suggests that for this to happen in an era when American education has generally become more practical and vocational is not quite as odd as it seems.

from Charles McGrath: The New York Times: The Ponzi Workshop

~~~~~~~~~~~