John Diamond-Nigh7 days ago3 minFlatWorld 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...
John Diamond-NighFeb 202 minInventing nostalgiaLynne 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...
John Diamond-NighFeb 132 minAmerican craftCraft 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...
John Diamond-NighFeb 62 minTrue or falseStill 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...
John Diamond-NighJan 302 minPure griefMinimum. I take it from the bookshelf with the hallowed circumspection I’d devote to touching a Torah. From cover to cover of this thick,...
John Diamond-NighJan 232 minKentucky rainI 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...
John Diamond-NighJan 162 minWorld #pluralAs a preacher’s kid, I’m asked . . . was I surprised? By the Jesus flags, by the senators, after the bloodshed they incurred, praying tog...
John Diamond-NighJan 92 minFabulous things“Fabulous things, #stars”, writes Louis #Glück in her best book, #Averno. After an atrocious week and the vaseline amnesia of Lindsay Gra...
John Diamond-NighJan 22 minAn uplands of best beliefBelief. 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. ...
John Diamond-NighDec 26, 20203 min'I give you my #word'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 ...
John Diamond-NighDec 19, 20202 minSalt lick: can #progressive #art ever be rural?#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...
John Diamond-NighDec 12, 20203 min#Goya's #monstersI’m sure it’s being written now, an in-depth look at fantasy over these recent anguished months, from bedtime stories to dance undertaken...
John Diamond-NighDec 5, 20203 min#UpstreamIn the almost liturgically serene film, #Upstream, a camera attached to a drone follows the River Dee in Scotland to its remote and snowy...
John Diamond-NighNov 28, 20203 minSex and faith in old BeirutWhat am I reading now, in this rotting suffix to an election? I am reading about chairs, those neutral, pragmatic, extravagant forms that...
John Diamond-NighNov 21, 20203 minReading past tyrannyMake-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...
John Diamond-NighJul 11, 20202 minHappy Birthday––improvisedHappy birthday to a dear friend; happy birthday to anyone with a birthday this month. Please take a minute or two (after reading), and go...
John Diamond-NighJul 4, 20203 minA #red-hatted (mystery) woman#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 ...
John Diamond-NighJun 27, 20203 min#Coherence, #disappearance and #soulAdieu to a thoughtful reader of this blog, #Ripp #Smith, a close friend of Lynne and myself, so kind, so wise, an exuberantly antic man, ...
John Diamond-NighJun 20, 20203 minHitch and the PMIn the second season of the marvelous Fellini-esque #Young Pope series, the third, John #Malkovich pope, ascending after the megalo-imper...
John Diamond-NighJun 13, 20203 minNot quite what you think of as #'rafting'What a story! The #Medusa sails from France toward Senegal, along with three other frigates, carrying the rudimentary population of a new...