<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?><rss version="0.92">
<channel>
	<title>David Matthews</title>
	<link>http://www.matthewsmanofletters.com</link>
	<description>Man of Letters</description>
	<lastBuildDate>Tue, 27 Jul 2010 18:01:09 +0000</lastBuildDate>
	<docs>http://backend.userland.com/rss092</docs>
	<language>en</language>
	<!-- generator="WordPress/3.0" -->

	<item>
		<title>finding delight</title>
		<description><![CDATA[This has not exactly gone well. Twenty-two modest essays posted in just over seven months, one in the past six weeks, more or less, and it is a reach to call some of them essays. I go at it, with pen and paper at my desk, with my journal in coffee shops, at the computer, [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://www.matthewsmanofletters.com/finding-delight-2/</link>
			</item>
	<item>
		<title>kicking back with a little Bud Lite Lime, Jindal, McChrystal, Hoover&#8230;</title>
		<description><![CDATA[Ah, out on the deck the geraniums are in glorious bloom, the peacocks are screeching with lust, and T-Bone is reloading to fire off a warning burst in the direction of the Fox 12 news chopper circling overhead. Time to crack open a case of Bud Lite Lime and check the pulse of the republic. [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://www.matthewsmanofletters.com/kicking-back-with-a-little-bud-lite-lime-jindal-mcchrystal-hoover/</link>
			</item>
	<item>
		<title>those hard-boiled young women</title>
		<description><![CDATA[Robert B. Parker (1932–2010) in his 1971 doctoral dissertation &#8220;The Violent Hero, Wilderness Hero, and the Urban Reality: A Study of the Private Eye in the Novels of Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and Ross Macdonald&#8221; placed the hard-boiled private detective in a romantic tradition dating back to James Fenimore Cooper&#8217;s Natty Bumppo, a tradition Parker  himself was [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://www.matthewsmanofletters.com/those-hard-boiled-young-women/</link>
			</item>
	<item>
		<title>The Impact of Crime and Punishment</title>
		<description><![CDATA[&#8220;Only Crime and Punishment was read during 1866, only it was spoken about by lovers of literature, who often complained about the stifling power of the novel and the painful impression it left, which caused people with strong nerves almost to become ill and forced those with weak ones to give up reading it altogether.&#8221; [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://www.matthewsmanofletters.com/the-impact-of-crime-and-punishment/</link>
			</item>
	<item>
		<title>leaving safety to the market</title>
		<description><![CDATA[From today&#8217;s Wall Street Journal (Ben Casselman and Guy Chazan, Disaster Plans Lacking at Deep Rigs): The Minerals Management Service, the government agency that oversees offshore drilling, in recent years moved away from requiring specific safety measures in offshore drilling and instead set broad performance goals that it was up to the industry to meet. [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://www.matthewsmanofletters.com/leaving-safety-to-the-market/</link>
			</item>
	<item>
		<title>Ladri di biciclette aka The Bicycle Thief or Bicycle Thieves</title>
		<description><![CDATA[The Bicycle Thief in a newly restored 35 mm print is into the second week of a run at Portland&#8217;s Hollywood Theatre. I saw this classic of Italian neorealism at least twice before last Sunday afternoon, but it had been many years and I forgot just how good it is. So it was I ventured to [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://www.matthewsmanofletters.com/ladri-di-biciclette-aka-the-bicycle-thief-or-bicycle-thieves/</link>
			</item>
	<item>
		<title>&#8217;tis the season when running is nothing but a pleasure once more</title>
		<description><![CDATA[Spring comes to Portland cool, damp, and incredibly lush. Alas, the names of trees, flowers, and plant life generally, like French vocabulary, have never stuck in my mind the way sports trivia does. For instance, off the top of my head, starting line-up for the 1964 UCLA national championship team coached by John Wooden: guards [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://www.matthewsmanofletters.com/tis-the-season-when-running-is-nothing-but-a-pleasure-once-more/</link>
			</item>
	<item>
		<title>Miranda</title>
		<description><![CDATA[The fuss about reading Miranda rights to terror suspects strikes me as, well, suspect. Are we to suppose that captured terrorists routinely sing like Pavarotti until read their rights, whereupon they are rendered mute? As if it would not have occurred to them not to cooperate with their captors until informed of the right to [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://www.matthewsmanofletters.com/miranda/</link>
			</item>
	<item>
		<title>&#8220;Can there be a great Artist without poetry?&#8221;</title>
		<description><![CDATA[How might I respond if a poet I respected, to whom I sent a sample of my work and solicited critical advice, opined that literature cannot be the business of my life and it ought not to be? Might I be prickly? Defensive? Crushed? Granted that hypotheticals can only be answered provisionally, it is a [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://www.matthewsmanofletters.com/can-there-be-a-great-artist-without-poetry/</link>
			</item>
	<item>
		<title>What do I think I am up to?</title>
		<description><![CDATA[I do not know what I am up to, other than, perhaps, my neck in foolish moves, dubious decisions, squandered promise. A cursory examination of the files reveals the dismaying but indisputable fact that my accomplishment as a poet has been at best modest dating back at least to 2003. Each year since has yielded [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://www.matthewsmanofletters.com/what-do-i-think-i-am-up-to/</link>
			</item>
</channel>
</rss>
