Towards the end he sailed into an extraordinary mildness, And anchored in his home and reached his wife And rode within the harbour of her hand, And went across each morning to an office As though his occupation were another island. Goodness existed: that was the new knowledge His terror had to blow itself quite […]

[spotify id=”spotify%3Auser%3A122351017%3Aplaylist%3A2HxldwrWmfZmUhzuqFaywh&view=coverart” width=”500″ height=”580″ /] A track by track comparison of Springsteen’s “Born in the U.S.A” and @lightningrodrec tribute album “Dead Man’s Town”.

deadmanstown: “There is something magical about youth and ‘Bobby Jean’ sings like a dirge reminding you that the kid you once saw in the mirror is gone, and he is not. It’s not closure that Springsteen’s plain words give you, but they seem to be pointing to an open ended grief – in some regard, […]

What is wanting [in Twain’s description of his brother Henry’s death in Life on the Mississippi], apparently, is the tragic imagination that, through communal form or ceremony, permits great loss to be recognized, suffered, and borne, and that makes possible some sort of consolation and renewal. What is wanting is the return to the beloved […]

For with us pity for others is the price we are anxious to pay for the privilege of our self-pity. Robert Penn Warren. World Enough and Time: A Romantic Novel. Random House, New York. 1950. Pg 7. One thought on this: pity is not compassion, but it seems similar.

In Martinique, I had visited rustic and neglected rum-distilleries where the equipment and the methods used had not changed since the eighteenth century. In Puerto Rico, on the other hand, in the factories of the company which enjoys a virtual monopoly over the whole of the sugar production, I was faced by a display of […]

Teaching, and Now, Retirement*

On May 31, I resigned my faculty position teaching English at a small high school. The school solely served at-risk students who had been removed from the home for various reasons; most of them had gotten in trouble with the law, but all of them came from extremely dysfunctional families. As, probably, do a great […]

Family History

When I was 16, my father and I were walking in from checking crops. Our home place was a half-section – a rectangle ½ mile wide by 1 mile long – so a walk to the middle could be accomplished inside the space of a conversation. On our way back to the house, my father […]

That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire and of the comfort of the Resurrection

That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire and of the comfort of the Resurrection By Gerard Manley Hopkins Cloud-puffball, torn tufts, tossed pillows | flaunt forth, then chevy on an air- Built thoroughfare: heaven-roysterers, in gay-gangs | they throng; they glitter in marches. Down roughcast, down dazzling whitewash, | wherever an elm arches, Shivelights and shadowtackle […]

Descending Theology: The Crucifixion

by Mary Karr To be crucified is first to lie down on a shaved tree, and then to have oafs stretch you out on a crossbar as if for flight, then thick spikes      fix you into place. Once the cross pops up and the pole stob sinks vertically in an earth hole perhaps at an awkward list, […]