Greg Brown
I'm a student affairs professional working in the woods of northern Michigan. To put it plainly, I help high school kids learn all the life-lessons that they don't teach in class. (I also blog and stuff.)
Posts
I have never missed anything as much as I miss walking down these paths.
boop.
Northern Michigan may snow every day and it doesn’t melt for months, but it’s still the only genuinely-decent winters I’ve ever had. Everywhere else is windy and miserable and slushy and ugly by comparison. And here was where I had my most memorable one.
I’m not concerned about the very poor.
Books & Beer: Episode 1
The World According to Garp
(about 37 minutes)
Clarissa tries to convince Greg that The World According to Garp is a good novel, and that John Irving is a great author.
This is our first “real episode,” since episode 0 was recorded more as an experiment than anything. Please excuse my awkward attempted-segue from the last episode before we jump right into Garp.
If you have any ideas, suggestions, questions, books, etc. feel free to share them here or on twitter. We’ll settle down to a weekly/bi-weekly schedule here soon, but wanted to record this episode while the novel was fresh. I’m working on a podcast feed and proper archive, but for now you can use my earlier post about Episode 0.
Books mentioned
- The World According to Garp, A Widow for One Year, A Prayer for Owen Meany, and Until I Find You by John Irving
- The Years of Lyndon Johnson including Master of the Senate and Means of Ascent by Robert A. Caro
- Inside Apple by Adam Lashinsky
- The Road by Cormac McCarthy
Pages mentioned
Books & Beer: Episode 0
Fiction vs. Non-Fiction
I convinced Clarissa to do a books podcast with me, so we set up the microphones and talked for about 45 minutes about books! I promise the next ones will be shorter, because this one kind of veered into larger discussions of why I like non-fiction more than fiction. Also, I accidentally drop the f-bomb once or twice so be aware.
Next episode I’ll grill Clarissa with why she likes fiction, and we’ll try to read the same book so we can both talk about it. We’ll try to do them every two weeks or so.
(We used the same table for our microphones and beer, so those are the thumping sounds you hear occasionally. Oops! Also, maybe a jingle next time?)
Books Discussed, Mentioned, or Disparaged
- A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan
- Brief Interviews with Hideous Men by David Foster Wallace
- Franny and Zoey by JD Salinger
- The Known World by Edward P. Jones
- Elizabeth the Queen by Sally Bedell Smith
- The Years of Lyndon Johnson, including A Path to Power and Means of Ascent by Robert A. Caro
- Before the Storm and Nixonland by Rick Perlstein
- River of Shadows by Rebecca Solnit
So excited that Clarissa gave me the best belated birthday/Christmas present ever.
Last night I went to bed around 11 because I’m prematurely-old, early enough that I wasn’t awake to see Clarissa’s friend Jen visit to cheer her up. Judging from the clues left around our apartment, they:
- Drank two glasses of wine (may have happened later)
- Went to the store to buy some snacks
- Picked up a copy of US Weekly from the checkout line
- Entranced by the cover story on Katy Perry marriage, listened to “Teenage Dream” on my Spotify account while eating their snacks
Tufte: “This may well be the worst graphic ever to find its way into print.” The Visual Display of Quantitative Information
Crime is fascinating, and murder is the most fascinating crime. Every night, millions of Americans watch fictionalized accounts of the most violent act of all, followed by fictionalized attempts to discover, solve, and punish it. Here are some raw numbers to go with our intuitions and popular…
Also worth noting is that murders in the Law & Orders—before they started wrapping up—outnumbered actual murders in NYC for a while. The death of substantive local news-gathering, with the 10pm news turning into b-roll backing the police blotter, is another reason why the American public has dangerously unrealistic views of crime.
I’m wildly liberal enough that the suicide statistic he cites is actually the reason why I’m in favor of gun control, but that’s a land-mine of a topic for another day.
Rendering a squeaky toy unto Caesar, my brother’s dog. Happy holidays from the Brown household!
Best thing about Xmas is seeing Internet friends’ doggies. Here’s my brother’s. (Taken with instagram)
