• Fiction

    The Magnificent Light of Anthony Doerr’s “All the Light We Cannot See”

    January 31, 2021 - By 

    The fog and devastation of war, and the blindness (both literal and figurative) of humans forced to grope along through its bombed out buildings, tank-rutted roads, and even deeper moral quandaries. The weight and stench of occupation, of others in complete control of whatever they want to be in control of in your life—including your opportunity to continue living it. The hollow feeling in the pit of your stomach when experiencing this humiliation, this sin against your sovereignty, day upon dispiriting day. The heroisms and cowardices and cruelties, both small and large, of those caught up in war’s maelstrom, forced to come to…

  • Music

    Brilliant Songs #19: The Kruger Brothers’ “Watches the Clouds Roll By”

    January 24, 2021 - By 

    Ahhhh, clouds! Angels are supposed to flit around on them, sometimes they form into lions or letters of the alphabet, they’ve been known to get in our way (necessitating that we look at them from both sides now). Clouds can appear mysterious, rhapsodic, wispy, shy, imposing, explosive, angry, lush, but whatever their form and mood at any given moment, what they’re best at is getting us to look up and behold the heavens—where the Kruger Brothers, Switzerland and North Carolina’s Favorite Sons, seem to compose all their music. The title alone of our latest “Brilliant Song” gets us in a…

  • Politics/Culture

    Words As Balm: The Joe Biden Inauguration

    January 20, 2021 - By 

    Listening today to the words Joe Biden spoke (excerpted in italic sections below), how surpassingly important they were, how important the words we speak always are, I was thrown back on the paradoxical notion that nothing exemplifies that truth more than the often cutting and cruel words of the now departed president, slinking off to Florida without so much as a public nod or acknowledgement of the person whose soaring rhetoric at the lectern mere hours later stood as a repudiation-by-example of the finally departed one, and as a kind of down payment on the immense investment it will require…

  • Politics/Culture

    Ten Reasons Why Impeachment Was Necessary…And Conviction Even More So

    January 16, 2021 - By 

    I  know, I know—it’s a mess, any way we try to slice it. Just days to go, on his way out the door, it will let him play the martyr, further inflame his base, perhaps hamper the new president’s crucial first weeks, shouldn’t we focus on “healing” now? Thought about those, bought a few of them for a time, tossed & turned about them in sleep that seems to have come in half-hour slices the past 10 days, and have come out, in a slight spin on a then newly elected congressmember’s indelicate, admittedly inappropriate but nevertheless delicious phrase from…

  • Poetry - Politics/Culture

    Taking America’s Measure:
    Walt Whitman’s “Years of the Modern”

    January 13, 2021 - By 

    On this unprecedented day marked by a second impeachment of a sitting president, I could not bring myself to watch or listen much to the all-too-predictable denunciations and defenses of a man with blood on his hands, a man whose dark and chaotic presidency should long since have turned the stomachs of every person concerned with the fate of America. In times of national tremor such as we are experiencing now, it can sometimes help to pull back and employ a wider angle lens on history, on nation building, and on the relationship of the individual to society. In other…