“In such a world of conflict, a world of victims and executioners, it is the job of thinking people, not to be on the side of the executioners.”- Camus
When did you last share time with a friend, a long, varied conversation, one where you slipped between topics as if they were perfectly honed and fitted dovetail joints in a handcrafted table, and at the end of the hour or so together, it stood there between both of you, sturdy, elegant, shining? A friendship is a kind of perfect comfort shared between imperfections – friends are not blind to […]
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Annie Dillard has died. her best book, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek changed my life. I read it for the first time for a graduate course at Montana State University in the summer of 1977. I was 23. For six weeks a class of 12 read and wrote and talked and spent 3 straight weeks in the Beartooth Wilderness hiking and climbing. That class changed my life. I had never been to the West. I […]
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The name of Pierre Damas Bel has all but vanished from the news. Our degraded era’s 24-hour multiple screen scrolling and stimulation has seen to that, and the hourly cruelty and encompassing ugliness of this Administration has eroded our ability to keep track of its victims. He was 20 years old when he stepped in front of a tractor trailer on Interstate 70. Do you remember 20? Even if […]
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Called upon to choose, I would argue that the 5 great American novels of the late 20th Century are Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon (1973), Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy (1985), Beloved by Toni Morrison (1987), Libra by Don Delillo (1988), and American Pastoral by Philip Roth (1997). There may be better American novels out there that were published between 1945 and 2000. One cannot read everything, but I’ll rest with these books as the ones that tell […]
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