• Odds & Ends - Photography

    The Solace of Rainbows

    November 30, 2018 - By 

    Don’t know about you, but I feel myself wearying of being in the dark thrall of a mad man. (Making that two words was intentional—he’s just angry, and thus engenders none of the empathy and understanding due someone who may be mentally ill.) Knocked off balance by such brazen amorality and conniving, I have joined millions of others in groping toward a prudent response, but no amount or vehemence of thought or critique seems to suffice. Resist, yes, a solemn duty, but ultimately, it will likely be less outsiders’ resistance and more his self-immolation that will be the defining moment of this—and…

  • Music

    Brilliant Songs #5: Brandy Clark’s “What’ll Keep Me Out Of Heaven”

    November 16, 2018 - By 

    Ran into Brandy Clark last night. Well, not on the sidewalk or at the grocery, but on the Internet, as I was thinking and listening hard to a bunch of songs by Loretta Lynn. Then something or other happened in that way the world of links works, and suddenly, here was this youngish (43) singer-songwriter hailing from rural Washington, saying hello via the dozen songs from her 2013 debut album, “12 Stories.” Talk about an unbidden fall harvest. These are tales of flesh-and-blood people, mostly working-class, often plain beyond imagining, but no less engaged in the struggle to get some type…

  • Politics/Culture

    Mid-Term Musing: The Coarsening of the American Mind

    November 8, 2018 - By 

    Thirty-one years ago, the late political philosopher and cultural critic Allan Bloom wrote a book that his publishers expected would sell a paltry few copies to university types. Instead, it went on, in an improbable pre-Internet version of “going viral,” to occupy a high perch on best-seller lists for four months. (And generate heated discussion among the intelligentsia for years after that.) Its title: “The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today’s Students.” In it, Bloom, a classicist who was admitted to the University of Chicago at age 15 and graduated three years…

  • Odds & Ends - Personal Reflections

    My Desperate, Careening Near-Fall, In Eight Steps

    November 2, 2018 - By 

    I   The Bump The front of my shoe into the root-raised sidewalk, in the early morning dark, immediate forced lurch and lean, gravity at play, my body a sudden projectile. II  The Stutter Left foot down hard, short and choppy, seeking a base, body and brain electric, woke, as they were not the barest moment ago. III The Thrash Alarm, surely going down, hard, fast and sprawling, on concrete, drive it, drive it!, right quad fully engaged, firing with everything it has, a millisecond’s wobble, oh no! push push, hang in, oh Lord, a severe rise in the sidewalk…