World is crazier and more of it than we think, Incorrigibly plural. I peel and portion A tangerine and spit the pips and feel The drunken...

Lynne has a fountain pen, perhaps the loveliest pen in the world. An esoteric detail, except that it was purchased on a rainy day on a st...

Craft is like ’god’––how, even vaguely, can you say what it is? Like Bluegrass music, it can travel from front-porch knitting to museum a...

Still Life: Table, by Juan Gris, is as perplexing an artwork now as it was when it was made in 1914. I am sitting, long ago, in the teens...

Minimum. I take it from the bookshelf with the hallowed circumspection I’d devote to touching a Torah. From cover to cover of this thick,...

I was delighted to get some pushback on the last piece. Maybe I stated things poorly. I have nothing at all against politics as a wide ne...

As a preacher’s kid, I’m asked . . . was I surprised? By the Jesus flags, by the senators, after the bloodshed they incurred, praying tog...

“Fabulous things, #stars”, writes Louis #Glück in her best book, #Averno. After an atrocious week and the vaseline amnesia of Lindsay Gra...

Belief. I am fascinated by it and by all those ways our #beliefs make us colorful, crazy, literary figures in the novel of our own life. ...

Lynne may ask me what I’m saying. The question still surprises me. Wholly without my knowing it, my lips are silently shaping words that ...

#Tolstoy’s second greatest novel, Anna Karenina, might have been called, in the vein of War and Peace, #City and #Country. While Anna’s u...

I’m sure it’s being written now, an in-depth look at fantasy over these recent anguished months, from bedtime stories to dance undertaken...

In the almost liturgically serene film, #Upstream, a camera attached to a drone follows the River Dee in Scotland to its remote and snowy...

What am I reading now, in this rotting suffix to an election? I am reading about chairs, those neutral, pragmatic, extravagant forms that...

Make-believe. Did I even need to be told? But mom . . . go on. The talking wolf. The tallest tree in the world where a small girl lived i...

Happy birthday to a dear friend; happy birthday to anyone with a birthday this month. Please take a minute or two (after reading), and go...

#Tolstoy is hot right now, in part because we have the time to read his ten-gallon books; and also because his later non-fictional books ...

Adieu to a thoughtful reader of this blog, #Ripp #Smith, a close friend of Lynne and myself, so kind, so wise, an exuberantly antic man, ...

In the second season of the marvelous Fellini-esque #Young Pope series, the third, John #Malkovich pope, ascending after the megalo-imper...

What a story! The #Medusa sails from France toward Senegal, along with three other frigates, carrying the rudimentary population of a new...