June 10, 2016
First Person Plural: Part III (Muhammad Ali)
Throughout my last two posts, I’ve been thinking about strength (and complication) in numbers—the first person plural: “We.” In between those posts and this one, the news broke that boxer […]
June 8, 2016
What Life Is All About
Just finished Anthony Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly. Here are four things the sordid, elegant, contemplative, coke-infused pages of this wonderful book made me want to do: […]
June 6, 2016
The Data Mine of Rap
The Raplyzer is a computer program that automatically analyzes rhymes from rap lyrics and ranks rappers according to their Rhyme Factor. Created by Eric Malmi, a doctoral student in Computer […]
May 31, 2016
Closer Yet He Approaches Us
I’ve made it a habit, from time to time on this blog, to note Whitman’s birthday. The day has come round again; the great gray celebrant is 197 years old. […]
May 30, 2016
Peace is a Bus that Has No Destination
…for history has yet to start and there’s no geography and no other languages. And even better: the war has left its “r” behind and turned into love, so the […]
May 28, 2016
A Good Immunity is Everything
There might be only us In a room My love and I But that is fine What eyes are left for me Anyway what other eyes are left […]
May 24, 2016
Shroud, Telltale, Stern: Fantasies of Sailing
This summer, I’m going to learn how to sail. I’ve only taken one lesson in the past, on the water at Hueston Woods in Oxford, Ohio, in a little Sunfish, […]
May 16, 2016
What a Wicked Game
I have come a long way, to surrender my shadow To the shadow of a horse —James Wright, “Sitting in a small screenhouse on a summer morning” You finish this […]
May 16, 2016
The Books I Kept: Part One
When I was growing up in Rochester, NY, in the 1980s, you could drive to Monroe Avenue on the east side of the city and spend the afternoon wandering between […]
May 13, 2016
Aloha, Mother
Toni Morrison, in her essay “The Site of Memory,” writes: All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was. Writers are like […]
May 3, 2016
Palimpsest, Ohio
Out in Lockbourne, there is a house anchored in my memory. It was an old white farmhouse, set back from the road. Behind it sat an unused garage, a chicken […]
April 29, 2016
Zach Savich & Adam Clay: In Conversation
During March 2016, Zach Savich and Adam Clay (a former and current editor at the Kenyon Review, respectively) discussed their new books, The Orchard Green and Every Color (Omnidawn, 2016) and Stranger […]