• Fiction - History - Music

    Brilliant Songs #53: Leoš Janáček’s
    “The Madonna of Frýdek”

    February 22, 2025 - By 

    The assaults, the responses, the anguish, the questions, the cruelty, the concern, the reprisals, the relentless tsunami of invective and resultant anxiety. The anger and exhaustion, which is largely the intent. The despair which creeps in quietly underneath, simmering… And still, with Maya Angelou, we must rise. But not today. Not this moment. We must protect ourselves, too, by tending regularly to our zones of joy. Today, beauty, for beauty’s sake. (And our own.) Though with a loop back into history near the end. *** *** Leoš Janáček (pronounced “Lowsh Yun-ahh-check”) was a Czech classical composer who made abundant use…

  • Poetry - Politics/Culture

    “Homo Politicus,” With No Place to Hide:
    Poet Wislawa Szymborska’s
    “Children of Our Age”

    February 15, 2025 - By 

    My original template for this blog did not include the “Politics/Culture” category you see off to the right of your screen, where the site’s archives stretch back to 2012. At the time, I fancied Traversing as a kind of haven from the hurly burly world of politics, a place where sometimes weighty, sometimes light-hearted issues of how to live in, reflect on and understand the world could be discussed under a multi-hued blanket of the arts, religion, psychology and philosophy. Another six months on, I was nearing the end of a post on songs by the folkies John Stewart and…

  • Politics/Culture

    What Do Musk and Trump—Or You and I on Our Barstools—Know About USAID?

    February 9, 2025 - By 

    I spent my working life in three different fields—four years each in special education and basketball coaching, then some 35 years in the communications field split between journalism and PR/advertising. My special ed knowledge is no doubt dated since I haven’t really kept up with the field, my basketball knowledge is a bit dated but still highly functional, and my communications work quite current since I remain a close follower of matters related to the absorption and conveyance of words and ideas. One thing I’ve noticed repeatedly over that now long span is that whenever someone with no direct experience…

  • Fiction - History

    On Standing Tall: Claire Keegan’s
    “Small Things Like These”

    January 31, 2025 - By 

    “So many things had a way of looking finer, when they were not so close,” muses coal merchant Bill Furlong, the protagonist in Claire Keegan’s finely sculpted 2021 novella, “Small Things Like These.” Furlong had been admiring the river that passes through his small Irish town, but upon approaching it, finds himself wondering “which he rathered: the sight of town or its reflection on the water.” (Side note right off the top: “…he rathered…” Please don’t ever listen to anyone who suggests language, “mere” words, aren’t beautiful and endlessly pliable things.) The same basic questions—distanced or closeup? gauzy appearance or…

  • General Nonfiction - Politics/Culture

    A Manifesto for Justice: “Limitarianism: The Case Against Extreme Wealth”

    January 26, 2025 - By 

    In these not-much-United States, we live, by any statistical measure one applies, in a new Gilded Age. Not since the age of the robber barons and the current president’s favorite predecessor, William McKinley, has the gap been so yawning between the upper and lower wealth strata of our society, not to mention the gap between the developed and undeveloped economies around the world. The data are most everywhere one cares to look, a bare fraction of which we will touch on in this post. The common fact binding them together is that the rich keep getting richer at an accelerating…