• Personal Reflections - Politics/Culture

    Imagining Ukraine: A Meditation

    February 25, 2022 - By 

    No bombs fell in downtown Durham yesterday. No rockets slammed into City Hall or its police station. Most of us here, and I assume pretty much the same about you, went about our appointed tasks and pleasures, tending to jobs, walking dogs, meeting someone for coffee, picking up kids or grandkids from school, getting a hearty something out on the dinner table to feed body and soul. The basic stuff of life, which we often take for granted and then look back on as its best, most memorable and enduring pieces that we take to our graves with a gladdened…

  • Politics/Culture

    The Thinking Liberal’s Favorite Conservative: Farewell, P.J. O’Rourke

    February 18, 2022 - By 

    I’ve never quite cottoned to people who can’t bring themselves to insert a joke, a hint of irreverence, a witty aside or a slightly jaundiced observation into their writing or conversation. Oh, I can respect and work alongside and even benefit in one way or other from knowing them. They’re not bad people. But a severe humor deficit, a flattened, sparkless demeanor, as if a person has just emerged back up to ground level after a double shift in the coal mine and now has to walk three miles home in a steady drizzle, has always struck me as lacking too…

  • Painting & Sculpture - Poetry

    Thanks, But No Thanks: Lisel Mueller’s “Monet Refuses the Operation”

    February 13, 2022 - By 

    We’re not much given to ecstasies, visions or fantastical disruptions of form, light and sound in the workaday world. Observe the social conventions, show up in the conference room at the appointed hour, monitor your in-box, and don’t say anything stupid or offensive on social media from the confines of your cubicle. Keep that up for 40 or so years, let the IRA compound, then hunt for the perfect landing place—single-story, welcoming and with a woodsy name—to ensure your own version of domestic, senescent tranquility. And then there are artists, whose creations, in the words of 20th century French philosopher George…

  • Fiction - General Nonfiction

    Sophie’s Choice After Choice After Choice At Kabul Airport

    February 6, 2022 - By 

    William Styron’s 1979 novel “Sophie’s Choice” stands as an iconic description of a moral dilemma pushed to the furthest extreme of human cruelty and torment. A Nazi physician stands at a train station fronting massed and miserable Jews in 1943, directing some left, some right. Word has spread that one group is bound straight for the crematorium, while the other will be spared for the moment by going on to Auschwitz. Sophie is a Polish Catholic who has landed here for smuggling a ham for her ailing mother in violation of wartime rules reserving all meat for the military. As…