On an ordinary November afternoon I sit on a chair in my eye doctor’s dim exam room, chin in the camera-machine, straining not to blink against the stinging dilation drops leaking through my lashes. A white flash jolts straight to the back of my head. And then, there on the screen are photographs of my […]
Read moreEssentializing the animal: owls, war horses, and poetry.
Coming out of my office late this afternoon, I spotted a barred owl up in a tree outside the building, hunched against the trunk, squinching his eyes against the light and stoically standing off a pair of crows who were hassling him. I got concerned, especially when he was still there at dark a couple […]
Read moreYour native town, and the world.
“Learn from me, if not by my precepts, at least by my example, how dangerous is the acquirement of knowledge, and how much happier that man is who believes his native town to be the world, than he who aspires to become greater than his nature will allow.” – Victor Frankenstein to Robert Walton, Frankenstein; […]
Read moreThe humility wheel.
Pottery class, day three. Clay in hair. Clay in eyelashes. Clay on neck. Clay on shirt and jeans. Clay on sandals, tracked inadvertently across studio floor. Clay deep in cuticles. Hands and arms trembling when held out to examine clay deep in cuticles; I’m still trying for less muscular effort and better touch, but kneading, […]
Read moreSomebody made this: who?
This morning, I took my first-ever pottery class, in the spacious studio in our college’s arts center, with a generous colleague, George, and a large group of students, several of whom had been in my classes before. I’m here on sabbatical, I said, to learn, just like you are. And the relief of being among […]
Read moreA Cheapskate Romanticist abroad.
“Experience enlarges the space for the self to swim in.” – George Eliot, from a manuscript in “Writing Britain” at the British Library. A month of travel has left me with more than I can say, and more than I can put into words, even to myself, even as I’m settling into a fall sabbatical […]
Read moreThe earth’s thin skin.
This season of hesitant and lovely changes began with a scrim of ash that colors the skin underneath, that asks us to look and wait in the times of boredom and worry and anomie, because something more is coming. It always moves me at Lent, the sober lines of people moving from the altar back […]
Read moreWhitney Houston and the women-walls.
On Facebook and even email, this picture meets me at every turn, looming, vaguely Inquisitorial. You want to explain to us why you *need* birth control, young lady? Depressed by the image and its context — and by work and other First World Problems, despite even-more-stellar-than-usual moments of conversation with students — I turned to […]
Read moreBuon giorno, Signor Bianchi:, or, enchanting the world.
“If I had influence with the good fairy who is supposed to preside over the christening of all children I should ask that her gift to each child in the world be a sense of wonder so indestructible that it would last throughout life, as an unfailing antidote against the boredom and disenchantments of later […]
Read moreGardening in reality.
“A garden, you know, is a very usual refuge of a disappointed politician.” — Alexander Hamilton, 1802 (qtd. in NY Times, 9/15/11) As a society, we’ve got a reality problem. A know-nothing right-wing anarchism designed to starve government to death while enriching the anarchists’ own careers is being accorded a respectability and freedom of movement […]
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