A Poet Finds His Past Is Just Where He Left It: "The Business of Fancydancing," the directorial debut of the novelist and screenwriter Sherman Alexie, is an often affecting, low-budget melodrama that is occasionally sabotaged by its economy of means: the image quality is sometimes so poor that it's like watching the pixel breakup on digital cable. But although the film is initially clumsy and a little hard to follow, Mr. Alexie takes his time in setting his characters in play, and the visual clunkiness becomes secondary to the eloquent emotional desolation."

Theoretical Grrrl: "Kathy Acker was a novelist with little interest in making up a story. She always said that she plagiarized, but she messed with whatever she pirated. She rewrote Shakespeare, Dickens, and Cervantes. Her Don Quixote needs an abortion. Her Romeo believes only in nothingness."

Design Really Matters: "If you look at what really makes the difference for consumers online, you'll learn credibility is what matters. The Net has a big credibility and trust problem. According to Consumer Internet Barometer, consumers' trust in the Internet has been decreasing. It was never too hot in the first place. Over the past year, the trust measurement never topped 30 percent of users. Surprisingly, there's a big gap between trust and satisfaction. Measures for the latter have hovered steadily around 40 percent."

Isabel Allende: "Let's first begin by defining 'Magical Realism'. Magical Realism is a genre that combines realitiy and surreality onto the same plane. Many people confuse this genre with Science Fiction so let me give you a quick example that highlights the difference between the two: 'She ascended to heaven'. That's science fiction because the phenomenon of a person rising to heaven is entirely extraordinary. 'She ascended to heaven wrapped a flickering flame of silk sheets'. Now that's magical realism because the silk sheets offer a mysterious explanation as to why and how this woman is floating to heaven. With such vivid imagery and tangible reality, what WAS extraordinary now seems to be much more plausible, although the explanation for it is illogical and strange. Magical realism, therefore, is a perfect device for expressing a reality that is rich and complex. Personally, however, I don't like how critics came up with this term because I believe that magical occurences in everyday life is not so implausible so to assign a special term for is is quite discouraging."

Gina Ochsner is the Oregon Book Awards winner: "'I was gonna be a high school teacher,' she said. 'I got the certificate in English. Then I went to a high school and discovered how much time and work was involved. So I thought I'd go and live a little life first.' That's what appears to be typical Ochsner - a wry sense of humor tempered with rare insight. Her humor, in fact, is spontaneous, infectious, often disarming. Sometimes, you wonder if she's serious. Ochsner has heroes among writers, especially the practitioners of magical realism. Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Isabel Allende, Salman Rushdie, Umberto Eco and Ursula K. Le Guin. "

How Computer Nerds Describe God: "The founding editor of Wired magazine explains his mission to talk about faith using the vocabulary and logic of science."

Ken Layne: "Looks like we may soon be facing a national tequila shortage. Bush twins turn 21."

Childhood's Necessary Things: "An inexhaustive list of things no childhood should be without."

Easy Credit and Hard Times Bring a Flood of Foreclosures: "Sixty-eight percent of all American families own homes, the most ever and a sizeable increase from 64 percent a decade ago. But in another aftershock of the bingeing 1990's, merchants of the dream have become its morticians. More mortgages than ever are being foreclosed, and more homes repossessed."

Why Gabriel Garcia Marquez would never get a job with PBS--and other truths of nonfiction film: "I think most people who go to see a documentary expect to see a TV documentary, with talking heads and archival footage--a PBS-type thing. As a result, we as documentary filmmakers feel this pressure not only to make it obvious what we think about our subjects, but to try to prove something definitive through the process of creating the film. Put it this way: Gabriel Garcia Marquez would never get a job with PBS."