“My breakfast over, I paid a visit to Professor Jameson and proposed to him to give an account of the habits of the Turkey Buzzard instead of the Wild Turkey. He appeared anxious to have either.”
-John James Audubon in his London journal (mid 1820s)
I finished the last book I carried [...]
dateline willow lake - Kum ‘N Go is gone, replaced (in name sign only) by Super X. In my South Dakota hometown the once “Ye Olde … Whatever” signs have been replaced by vintage-script “Whatever . . . Shoppe” ones. And I forget how delightful it is to name the surrounding towns: Letcher, Loomis, [...]
“I stare at the gleaming black surface, at the red soil beneath my feet, at the dry eucalyptus leaves, curled into the shapes of letters as if they had been shaken from a tray of type.”
- Cees Nooteboom, Lost Paradise
This is a story without pictures. [...]
Books come in all shapes and sizes and perform all sorts of functions, in addition to acting as containment vessel for reading “matter.” And almost anything can function as bathroom reading. Where else memorize your credit card numbers? Now, it turns out, almost everything is worth the paper it’s printed on.
Japanese horrorist Koji Suzuki has [...]
“This ‘Arth.”
-Natty Bumppo
This is a made-up life in all meridians. Made up of dirt, moved by water and air, refined in fire, per ignem. Scattered about, and everything’s comin’ up roses.
In the print edition of Times Literary Supplement (May 1, 2009), Kelly Grovier writes about Cy Twombly’s paintings currently on display at Gagosian’s Gallery in [...]
“Anthologies of contemporary poetry, like new cars, run the risk of being obsolete within a couple years. My hope is that this one will have the lasting power of a Volkswagen at least.”
-A. Poulin, Jr., Contemporary American Poetry (1971)
As anthologies go, the monstrous Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three: The University of California Book of [...]
“I am ruminating,” said Mr. Pickwick, “on the strange mutability of human affairs.”
- Charles Dickens
Death is secondary to the reality of absence engrained in me as a child, I’ve come [...]
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. There are two plots, it is said: Someone Goes On A Trip and Stranger Comes To Town. That’s one plot, actually, with two points of view. Stranger must go on trip from some other town in order to come to ours.
Why then so many stories? Subplot and [...]
“He had learned to step to the side of the day.”
Thomas Pynchon, Against the Day
“And I’m pretending that it’s paradise”
Van Morrison, “Golden autumn Day”
This was back before “back in my day” turned into “back in the day” (which, according to Nathan Bierma, occurred in the mid-90s); that is, before our personal nostalgia had to be [...]
“I’m mumbling mumbling
And I can’t remember the last thing that ran
straight through my head”
Van Morrison, “Ballerina”
Every Monday, new music lightens our dreary drive to Eugene and back. New releases come Tuesday so there’s a week’s delay and anticipation that figures into the mix, too. Yesterday it was “Sweet Thing,” the fourth song on Van Morrison’s [...]