This post has nothing to do with the topics I usually write about. It's just that I started rereading Tom Jones by Henry Fielding, published in 1749, which I read when I was a college sophomore. It's one of those things old English majors, especially after they become English teachers, sometimes do. A few weeks ago, in a moment of boredom, I was thumbing through my free Kindle books, found Tom Jones and started looking it over, thinking I'd spend about 15 minutes there, then move on. Now I'm more than halfway through and enjoying it immensely. Very funny, very witty (Funny and witty aren't necessarily the same thing, by the way. As Alexander Pope once wrote: "True Wit is Nature to advantage dress'd/What oft was thought, but ne'er so well express'd." [Old English teachers never die, they just lose their class, or something like that]).

For those who haven't read the book or seen the marvelous 1963 film starring a then-beautiful Albert Finney and an even more beautiful Susannah York, it's the story of a high-spirited-yet-moral young man who falls into no end of difficulties. And at one point, Tom offends the old Squire Western whose daughter he is in love with, at which time the country squire, a rough-hewn man who loves nothing more than drinking and hunting, says to Tom,

“I wull have satisfaction o’ thee,” answered the squire: “so doff thy clothes. At unt half a man, and I’ll lick thee as well as wast ever licked in thy life.”

The fight doesn't take place, but the squire keeps yelling at Tom. Until I read this passage, I was sure the phrases, "I'm gonna kick your ass!" and "Kiss my ass!" were reasonably modern, along with the term, "Ass kisser." Apparently not. Listen to Fielding describing, rather delicately (this is 17th century England, after all, not Chaucer's 14th century England), the phrases he says one often hears "among the lower orders of the English gentry."

"[Squire Western] then bespattered the youth with abundance of that language which passes between country gentlemen who embrace opposite sides of the question; with frequent applications to him to salute that part which is generally introduced into all controversies that arise among the lower orders of the English gentry at horse-races, cock-matches, and other public places. Allusions to this part are likewise often made for the sake of the jest. And here, I believe, the wit is generally misunderstood. In reality, it lies in desiring another to kiss your a — for having just before threatened to kick his; for I have observed very accurately, that no one ever desires you to kick that which belongs to himself, nor offers to kiss this part in another."

April 3rd, 2016 from Zona Politics with Jim Nintzel on Vimeo.

On this week's episode of Zona Politics with Jim Nintzel: We speak with UA professor Stephen Buchmann, the author of The Reason for Flowers; Dot Kret of the January 8 Memorial Foundation about the plans for a memorial to commemorate the mass shooting at Gabby Giffords' Congress on Your Corner; and UA physicists Mike Shupe and Shufang Su, who talk about their work with the Large Hadron Collider.

The show airs at 8 a.m. Sunday on the CW Tucson, Channel 8 on Cox and Comcast and Channel 58 on DirecTV, Dish and broadcast. You can also hear it at 5 p.m. Sunday on community radio KXCI, 91.3 FM. Or watch it online above.

Here's a rush transcript of the show:

(Nintzel) Hello, everyone. I'm Tucson Weekly's senior writer Jim Nintzel and we're here to talk Zona Politics. Today, we're back to talking about books. My first guest is Stephen Buchmann, a U of A professor and author of nearly a dozen books. The most recent, The Reason for Flowers, is just out in paperback. Steve, welcome to Zona Politics.

(Buchmann) Hi, Jim. It's great to be here.

(Nintzel) You know, this book The Reason for Flowers, it's really a celebration of flowers and the role they play in nature. Why do you find flowers so fascinating?

(Buchmann) The bottom line, I think, is, I like to think that if flowers didn't exist, if they hadn't come on the scene over a hundred million years ago, that maybe humans wouldn't be here. So I think of our distant common relatives as seeing flowers as the harbinger of fruits and food that would soon come next, so they noticed I think this has a lot to do with our innate preference for flowers, and the fact that since they do turn into fruits and seeds, they end up feeding the world.

Patagonia writer Jim Harrison died Saturday, March 26. The New York Times remembers the author's many appetites:

At bottom, Mr. Harrison was not so much like Hemingway as he was like something out of Hemingway. Or, more accurately, something out of Rabelais — a mustachioed, barrel-chested bear of a man whose unapologetic immoderation encompassed a dazzling repertory:

There was the eating. Mr. Harrison once faced down 144 oysters, just to see if he could finish them. (He could.)

There was the drinking. One fine summer, he personally tested 38 varieties of Côtes du Rhône. (“It was like a small wine festival. Just me, really,” he told The Washington Post afterward.)

There was the drugging, in his Hollywood period, when he wrote the screenplays for films including “Revenge” (1990), starring Kevin Costner and based on Mr. Harrison’s novella of that name.

There was the hobnobbing with his spate of famous friends, including Jack Nicholson, John Huston, Bill Murray and Jimmy Buffett.

All these ingredients were titanically encapsulated in a dinner Mr. Harrison once shared with Orson Welles, which involved, he wrote, “a half-pound of beluga with a bottle of Stolichnaya, a salmon in sorrel sauce, sweetbreads en croûte, a miniature leg of lamb (the whole thing) with five wines, desserts, cheeses, ports” and a chaser of cocaine.

But constructing Mr. Harrison merely as a rough-and-ready man of appetite — a perennial conceit of profile writers, and one he did relatively little to dispel — ignores the deep intellectualism of the writer and his work. In conversation, he could range easily and without affectation over Freud, Kierkegaard, Stravinsky, Zen Buddhism, Greek oral epic and ballet.

Tucsonans inspired by last weekend's Festival of Books, listen up: Pima Community College is hosting a creative writing weekend this Friday evening, Saturday and Sunday. 

From the press release: 

What differentiates the impulse to write poetry from the impulse to write prose? Can that seed go either way?

These questions and other innovative ways of thinking about poetry, fiction, the essay and more will be explored during Pima Community College’s spring 2016 Creative Writing Weekend Workshop on poetry writing led by writer and editor Aisha Sabatini Sloan. We will look at literary models that hover – deliriously – between fiction, poetry and the essay.

The event will take place at Downtown Campus (1255 N. Stone Avenue, room AH 140) March 25-27. 

The workshop beings on Friday at 6 p.m. with a two hour session, and continues on Saturday and Sunday from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. 

Pima students can enroll in the course (Writing 298T2, CRN 22557) as they do with regular classes. Non-students must fill out the college admission form before enrolling in the two-credit course. The cost of this three-day workshop is $177 for Arizona residents.

Visit PCC's website for more information. 

In case you didn't make it to the Tucson Festival of Books yesterday—or you decided to attend a different panel—CSPAN has posted the panel author and featuring longtime Tucson Weekly contributor Margaret Regan (The Death of Josseline, Detained and Deported), Luis Alberto Urrea (The Devil's Highway, The Hummingbird's Daughter) and attorney Theresa Duncan (who represents The Guantanamo Diary author Mohamedou Ould Slahi).

I was lucky enough to moderate the panel, which examined the human cost of the U.S. border policy and the decision to keep detainees locked up in Guantanamo without trial—or even charges, in the case of Slahi.

You can watch the whole thing here.

Regan did an open-phones segment with callers from across America that you can watch here.

It's March in Tucson, and while that means spring has sprung, the Tucson Festival of Books has also. The annual Festival will take over the UA campus this Saturday, March 11 and Sunday, March 12 and features more than 200 events, according to my calculations. I'm a journalist, so don't take that number for gospel, but trust me—the Festival hosts a lot of readings, discussions, panels, and petting zoos, among other things. 
Hitting up every single ones of these is pretty exhausting, so if you're not looking to really delve into all the Festival has to offer, but still want to stop by for a taste, be sure to check out these five events. 

Mari laid it out in this week's Editor's Note, but in case you missed that, here's a day-by-day guide to where you can run into TW folks at this weekend's Tucson Festival of Books: 

Saturday

• Arts contributor and former editor, Margaret Regan will be on the panel Women Journalists on the Border moderated by UA School of Journalism's Celeste Gonzalez de Bustamante. Social and Behavioral Sciences Tent, Saturday, March 12, 11:30 a.m.-12:30 p.m.
  
  
• Editor Mari Herreras will be at the Politics of Poetry: Social Activism with a Fine Point Pen panel, Saturday, March 12 at 1 p.m., Pima County Public Library/Nuestras Raíces/Presentation Stage with Odilia Galván Rodríguez and Enrique Garcia Naranjo, and moderated by Tucson Poet Logan Phillips.
  
  
• Mari Herreras will moderate Bordertown and Other One-sided Arguments with Chicano author and illustrator Lalo Alcaraz, Pima County Public Library/Nuestras Raíces/Presentation Stage, Saturday, March 12, 4-5 p.m. 
  

Sunday

• Mari Herreras will be at Poetry of Resistance: Voices for Social Justice, Sunday, 10-11 a.m., Student Union Kiva with Tucson writers Elena Díaz Bjorkquist, Andrea Hernandez Holm and Roberto Rodriguez. Moderated by poet Odilia Galván Rodríguez.
  
  
• In the Human Rights panel, Margaret Regan is joined by author Luis Alberto Urrea and attorney Teri Duncan. Student Union Gallagher Theater, Sunday, March 13, 10-11 a.m. Moderated by TW senior staff writer Jim Nintzel.
  
  
• In That's Border Life, She Said, Regan shares the stage with Kathryn Ferguson and Gayle Jandrey. Student Union Kachina, Sunday, March 13, 1-2 p.m. This forum will also be moderated by Jim Nintzel.
  

That's it! The rest of us will just be running around, enjoying the literary goodness. 

That's right, Potter fans! Your wish has been granted. We American muggles are finally getting some answers.

In anticipation of the new film trilogy from the wizarding world, author J.K. Rowling will be releasing four new stories about the history of magic in the new world. The series, called Magic in North America, will be released in installments starting tomorrow March 8 at 7 a.m. Tucson time and continuing every day until Friday, March 11, according to the announcement on Pottermore.com.

The first of the films, Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, will be released Nov. 18.

"Magic in North America will bring to light the history of this previously unexplored corner of the wizarding world in the run up to Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them. And you’ll want to get up to speed before the film comes around in November."

Check the interactive Harry Potter site, Pottermore, tomorrow for the first story.

March 6th, 2016 from Zona Politics with Jim Nintzel on Vimeo.

This week on Zona Politics with Jim Nintzel: We're previewing next weekend's Tucson Festival of Books! Novelists Jennifer Lee Carrell, G. Davies Jandrey and Elizabeth Evans visit the set, along the UA physics professor Elliott Cheu, who gives us the lowdown on the festival's Science City. 

Tune into Zona Politics at 8 a.m. Sunday on the CW Tucson, Channel 8 on Cox and Comcast and Channel 58 on DirecTV, Dish and broadcast. Our 5 p.m broadcast on KXCI will be preempted for a special program this Sunday, but you can also watch the show online here.

Here's a transcript of the show:

Hello, everyone. I'm Tucson Weekly senior writer Jim Nintzel, and we're here to talk Zona Politics. Today, we're taking a break from public affairs to talk about the Tucson Festival of Books, which will be taking place next weekend, March 12 and 13 on the UA campus. The festival, now in its eighth year, brings an estimated 130,000 book lovers to meet authors, learn about science and eat some great local food. Joining me to talk about the festival is Jennifer Lee Carrell, an organizer with the festival and an author in her own right of three novels. Jennifer, thanks for joining me here on Zona Politics.

(Carrell) Thanks for having me here.

(Nintzel) The eighth annual festival coming up. How big a deal has the festival become since its launch in 2009.

(Carrell) I think to everybody's surprise, it's now the fourth largest book event in the country. And it's something we're very excited about, and I think all of Tucson can justly be proud of. We have authors who really want to come now. We used to have to, you know, sort of go out and say, "Would you please come?" And now we've got publicists and authors asking to come. And it's just it's a really exciting time.

ZonaPol2-4-16Fin_1_1 from Zona Politics with Jim Nintzel on Vimeo.

On this week's episode of Zona Politics: UA professor of geosciences Joellen Russell talks about how climate change is affecting the world's oceans. Then we talk with two writers who will be appearing at this year's Festival of Books: Kathryn Ferguson, author of The Haunting of the Mexican Border, and Margaret Regan, author of Detained and Deported: Stories of Immigrant Families Under Fire. 

You can catch the show at 8 a.m. Sunday morning on the CW Tucson, Channel 8 on Cox and Comcast and Channel 58 on DirecTV, Dish and broadcast. You can hear it at 5 p.m. Sundays on KXCI, 91.3 FM. And you can watch it online here or at zonapolitics.com.

Here's a transcript of the show:

Hello, everyone. I'm Tucson Weekly senior writer Jim Nintzel and we're here to talk Zona Politics. Today, we're once again highlighting the UA College of Science spring lecture series on climate change. Joining us in the studio is Joellen Russell, a U. of A. associate professor of geosciences, who specializes in studying the impacts of climate change on the world's oceans. Dr. Russell, welcome to Zona Politics.

(Russell) Thanks for having me.

(Nintzel) So what got you interested in studying the oceans?