And So It Goes …

Well, after nearly two years of broadcasting from Bat Country (aka Carny Town), it’s time to hang up the spurs and move on to another blog. Beginning now, you may find us at our new address, The Valley of the Ashes. Hope to see you there!

Heureux d’action de grâces de l’allée de Kerouac

(That’s me in the black baseball cap on the left, leaning against the wall in Jack Kerouac Alley, talking to my friend Mike. Click to enlarge. Oddly enough, this is one the first images that returned when I did a random Google search on Thanksgiving+Kerouac so odds are that this is from Thanksgiving 2006 in [...]

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 [...]

Ol’ ’55

Recently while looking for some info (cued by Rodger) on Georges Simenon, I encountered this interview in the Paris Review from Summer 1955. The interview stands by itself as a precious relic that may even today have transformational powers if you read the right hoodoo found within it.  For instance, Simenon says: That is why, [...]