Uncentered

There’s a great quote about communism, and I think Betrand Russell said it, and I think it runs like this: “First read a Dostoyevsky novel; then ask yourself how the people in it should be governed.”  Thanks to a mother who spoke Russian, I read all those crazy, elaborate, and psychologically penetrating nineteenth-century Russian novels [...]

Stroll around the grounds

Should they be lucky enough to get there, everyone must address midlife.  Rodger’s midlife was enormously complicated by being obliged to care for a dying parent.  But most of our midlives are already complicated to begin with.  You have spent twenty or twenty-five adult years constructing, maintaining, and polishing an ego, often wrapped up in [...]

Continental Drift

The north by northwest passage of Matt Asprey, and his nod to Hemingway in the quote about displaced writing ["maybe away from Paris I could write about Paris as in Paris I could write about Michigan"] reminds me that when writing for others, we benefit from distance from…ourselves. It is not only the act of [...]

October

George Inness, October (1886), Los Angeles County Museum of Art. I sat on the shady side of the backyard, tugging a Camel filter, listening to the powder blue thunderstorm booming on the other side of the mountains, and reading some Greek lyric poetry. Time comes when the simple expertise demanded of lighting and inhaling a [...]

Dear abandoned Jack

I think Rodger has a better Internet connection these days and I hope he is taking a carefully measured amount of rest.  While I continue to tapdance here–and dancing is a joy, so tapdancing is a joy with noise–I’ll confess a recent enthusiasm for…Kerouac poems. A few months ago I was in Skylight Books–a bookstore [...]