Late Sunday Reading
clicks
Michael Kruse (in the Houston Chronicle of all places): LAGRANGE, Ga.— Michael Bishop, whose son was a German instructor at Virginia Tech, sat one morning last month in a classroom at LaGrange College, ready to read one of his stories to his students in Creative Writing 3308.
"This was Jamie's idea," he told them.
Jamie Bishop left behind on his computer 10 notes. Michael Bishop, an award-winning science fiction writer, saw them and saw stories. At first he wanted to honor his son by finishing what the son could not. It was a way to keep a connection, and to cope.
Dan Barry: In a place that no longer belongs where it has always been, there rises from wood-slat pens the farewell lows and bellows of cold, wet cows. So long, so long, they call out to the oblivious human bustle. The stockyards of South St. Paul say goodbye.
The cattle adieu has been years in the planning, but now it is time. No longer can the end be forestalled by milk-and-meat memories of 122 years; by the boast that these trampled grounds once constituted the largest stockyards in the world; by the vital daily ritual of muck-flecked yardmen coaxing muck-flecked cows into the sales barn, where the auctioneer’s sweet serenade only hardens those bovine expressions of uh-oh.
Hank Stuever: Inside the 200-foot-tall atrium of the new Gaylord National hotel, there's a soft, ever-present roar -- a gentle non-noise made by carefully conditioned air, gurgling streams and the tappity-tickety of luggage being pulled across marble. It is the sound of Aerosmith ballads, piped in from speakers in planters and speakers hung somewhere above.
There is a lot of "above" to be had in the Gaylord National, the newly opened, $800 million resort and convention center built so ridonkulously large that it makes you think of those Bruce McCall cartoons in the New Yorker. You crane your neck and take it in, reaching for sunglasses and wondering what the Windex bill must run. Heaven is a place on E arth, you hum along with the plants. It is glorious and mesmerizing and bright white, a specific heaven meant to attract a specific and spendy market:
The People of the Atrium.