…you have found the currently inactive Tumblr of journalist Zach Dundas. If you, for reasons of your own, would enjoy a “richer experience,” you might:
follow the Twitter feed @zachdundas
read the book, The Renegade Sportsman
or buy, browse, or subscribe to Portland Monthly Magazine, where your humble correspondent serves as an editor and writer.
In any case, thanks for visiting.
Apologies for the reign of silence here. The recent mini-hiatus is due, in part, to the fact that I will be moving most of my blogging activities, for at least the next three months, to a start-up site called True/Slant. T/S, which is just about to exit its so-called “alpha” phase for its “beta” phase, is a kind of super-group-blog that integrates some social-networking stuff and a few intriguing ideas about how to make journalism work as a business; check out this Wall Street Journal…
A new poll shows the Republican Party losing ground among married people, old people, white people, religious people and…even conservative people. They did not ask about hip-hop fandom, so there is as yet no accurate measure of GOP chairman Michael Steele’s work.
Here we think we’re all clever, reading Paul Krugman and whatnot, when it turns out that the man we should be reading is Seneca. Alain de Botton, in a knock-out FT piece, explains:
Seneca interpreted philosophy as a discipline to keep us calm against a backdrop of continuous danger. His consolation was of the stiffest, darkest sort: “You say: ‘I did not think it would happen.’ Do you think there is anything that will not happen, when you know that it is possible to happen, when you see…
Ten years ago today, I loaded all my worldly possessions—with the exception of an enormous 1960s-model television, which I left on the front porch of my apartment building—in the back a blue 1983 Honda Civic. Still recovering from an epic night of Missoula-style debauchery, I drove eight hours to Portland, pulled the Civic up on the sidewalk outside the Westfal Apartments. The Westfal, a 1910 building in an incongruous location not far from Portland State University, had two things going for…
A fine tribute to the ultimate gentleman-thief of Victorian crime fiction.
One could argue that perhaps Guardian writer Guy Grieve (what an enviable byline; I’d put that up there with “Armand Limnander”) took Thoreau’s Walden a bit too seriously, but his tale of dropping everything and leaving his family for deepest, darkest Alaska and the rigors of a hunter-gatherer lifestyle is compelling. How many writers could honestly say something like this?
Only after I had nearly starved to death did I eventually get the hang of it. I lived off beaver meat and travelled…
Hugo Chavez, the pleasingly plump president of Venezuela, apparently gave genius Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano a huge Amazon bump when he presented (rail-thin) Yanqui chieftan Barack Obama with Galeano’s “Open Veins of Latin America”.
Anything that’s good for Galeano is good for everyone, I figure, but I wonder why Chavez didn’t go with “Soccer in Sun and Shadow”?
If you are a writer, have ever written, know any writers, are married to/engaged to/divorced from a writer or have ever seen a book in a shop window, you should read AL Kennedy’s column on the Guardian books blog.
In self-promotional news, Good Magazine provides an anxious public with my piece on Britain’s so-called “Red Tory” movement, a variety of radical Conservatism that would be right at home at my weekly CSA pickup.
