Of the few famous people we’ve counted as friends (none of whom behaved famously), Jack certainly was one––recipient of the French Legion...

Where this may go, god knows. I feel, on the topic of mystery or mythology of any sort, quite lost at the moment––in a maze. On one hand,...

Three excerpts, no, four, from the week past. Then we’ll talk about them. I’ve made you coffee. 1 Becoming human is an art. (Patti Smith)...

Musée des Beaux-Arts About suffering they were never wrong, The Old Masters: how well they understood Its human position; how it takes...

Love comes quietly, finally, drops about me, on me in the old ways. What did I know thinking myself able to go alone all the way. (Robert...

I am writing, like most folks on my street, a novel. Mine is for my cats. In one vein of the novel, a young Uruguayan novelist, living in...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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

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

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...

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...