Hear This: Keith Ablow on “Be Happy, Dammit!”

Periodically, I will drop by the studio where my friend Karen Salmansohn tapes her satellite radio show, “Be Happy, Dammit!,” to join in on conversations with authors that I’ve thought she and her listeners would find interesting. Last week, we did a half-hour interview with Dr. Keith Ablow about his new book, Living the Truth. You can download MP3s of the first half and the second half of the interviews from the Lime website, along with several other great interviews that Karen’s done with other experts in personal transformation. I have a lot of fun doing these segments, although I’m still working on becoming truly comfortable behind the microphone, and I’m looking forward to doing more of these segments every Friday in July.

27 June 2007 | interviews |

Les Murray, “The Test”

How good is their best?
And how good is their rest?
The first is a question to be asked of an artist.
Both are the questions to be asked of a culture.

From The Biplane Houses. This recent collection from “Australia’s leading poet” was recently reviewed in the New Yorker, where Dan Chiasson, while describing the poet as a self-created “cartoon hick in an overplayed idiom,” went on to say that “the thrill of reading Murray is seeing how the heart that feels will catch up with the eye that sees.” Les Murray’s website has an assortment of poems from the new collection.

24 June 2007 | poetry |