Now that they weren’t moving with the car the world seemed to slow down. The sky grew wider. A fragrant breeze soughed across the grass, and the ground as far as eye could see blazed with wildflowers. Mallow, dogbane, sensitive briar, coneflower, fringed salt cedar like pink bursts of feathered gauze—on and on they rolled […]

thirtymilesout: “Nowhere, not even at sea, does a man feel more lonely than when riding over the far-reaching, seemingly never-ending plains; and after a man has lived a little while on or near them, their very vastness and loneliness and their melancholy monotony have a strong fascination for him” Theodore “T.R.” Roosevelt

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 […]