Solana We’ve returned to rural Ohio, to Scio, for a brief period. The twins were born here, and it’s been pleasant for me to revisit those days. I feel a pang at the instability of our lives – that the memories of awaiting the birth of my first child(ren) do not adhere to the place where […]
Tag Archives: America
Back in Rural Ohio
17-Oct-19Miami Beach.
04-Jan-13Miami Beach is technically a separate city from Miami, and in certain respects – amazingly – it is its equal or even superior in urban vitality. It occupies a broad barrier island in Biscayne Bay, as long and perhaps five or six times wider than the Rockaway Peninsula of New York. The area was opened […]
America, Obama, and D.W. Griffiths.
15-Dec-12Driving back from campaigning in Ohio, I passed by an intriguing sign. It said, “America or Obama: You Can’t Have Both.” Now it seemed to me we have had both for four years now; and that America was about the same it was when he took office. Having both had proven easy enough, in fact. […]
Yucca, Arizona.
24-Mar-12Along I-40 I had to pull off to the side of the road to get a glimpse of a plant. I was fairly sure it was Yucca brevifolia, a Joshua Tree. It is a signature plant of the Mojave Desert, and is as far as I know naturally absent from the Sonoran Desert area around […]
The Usual, Symbolic Beginning.
19-Mar-12Driving out of Tucson on the Ajo highway last night, I received a call from a friend in the middle of nowhere, about ten miles outside Why, Arizona. I pulled over to the side of the road to take the call. The phone’s records indicate that I had been talking to him for eleven minutes […]
The Humor and Relevance of Twain.
26-Mar-11Of the odd things which George Orwell says about Mark Twain, to me the most remarkable is this: Mark Twain aimed at being something more than a chronicler of the Mississippi and the Gold Rush. In his own day he was famous all over the world as a humorist and comic lecturer. In New York, […]
The Effect of Nature on the Mind.
30-Oct-13buy Gabapentin 300mg uk Andrew Sullivan quotes a University Bookman piece which quotes a lecture by Santayana on the effect that nature as – or can have, if we let it in – on the American mind. When you are in nature: Everywhere is beauty and nowhere permanence, everywhere an incipient harmony, nowhere an intention, nor a responsibility, nor […]