I dislike the term flash in the pan because if what looks like gold for a second happens to flash in someone’s pan I’m content to admire it that one time. If the sun glorifies green bottle glass I’m content that it’s not emerald. I like mica schist and fool’s gold as much as [...]
Read More...I live in a house surrounded by its weed yards. Each spring I look forward to the happy dandelions so despised by the many. I even like the myriad puff balls they turn into. Periodically the farmer who cuts our grass rakes the thatch and spreads lime, but I use no chemicals or fertilizer.
Something is [...]
It’s always the ones we overlook who are changing the world in concert with angels. It’s the ones who want our attention for it we should distrust.
If we want men with fire in the belly who never flip-flop, we’ll get what we deserve, and we’ll deserve it in poverty, ill health and miserable dupedom.
A leader [...]
Writers are like gardeners. There are the profusionists and the minimalists. T.S. Eliot famously enjoined poetry to purify the language of the tribe. He in poetry and Ernest Hemingway in fiction certainly took up the challenge. The popularization of haiku, like the introduction of Japanese gardening, advanced their cause.
Poets have another, not antithetical task: [...]
This is the key to the figures in this famous painting, The Declaration of Independence, by John Trumbull.
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The relatedness of things has always fascinated me, perhaps because where others collect objects I collect images. When my wife, Marilyn, and I lived in Arlington, Virginia, some of the recent immigrants who worked in our [...]
This is far too specialized country for me to explore, but I would like to suggest that it might be worth exploring. We in the West are inheritors of the Greek ideal of physical beauty. But Middle Eastern thought is haunted by the idea of veiled beauty. We in the West are inheritors of [...]
Read More...Every spring a grand obsession to suppress the lowly dandelion berserks Americans. I’ve never understood it. I love dandelions, their indomitable sauciness. Perhaps Americans are offended by them in the way they might be by flecks of dandruff on a black canvas by Robert Motherwell. Perhaps dandelions offend the purist in them. To [...]
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