I tried to imagine what I would do if I was suddenly alone, since I do not have the experience to dock this boat in a falling tide among 80-foot yachts tight in their slips. If it was the apocalypse I could figure the range based on fuel in the tanks and choose where to ground it. The boat did not cost me anything, and after all it would be the apocalypse.
The bigger the venture, the more the universe messes with you.
A friend texted recently to say he had bought a new yacht. He asked if I would like to help him transit it from Fort Pierce, Florida, to his home port in Maryland, a trip of about a thousand miles up the East Coast. “I can probably do that,” I said, spilling my coffee.
I never met or shared a stage with Kinky Friedman, but we were label mates in the 1990s along with none other than Charles Manson, who had more news obituaries (in 2017) than just about anybody, but was still, of course, a profoundly unenviable man.
What I have been wondering—as I have for years—is why Dems cannot seem to counter crude schoolyard putdowns and the verbose, word-cloud attack called the Gish Gallop.
Everybody wanted a piece of Sister Wilhelmina. Not a relic; those days are over. But they wanted to touch her, know her, maybe leave with a CD of the sisters’ music or a copy of the biography that was hastily whipped up. Even people who held religion at arm’s length read the national news stories, hungry for awe. And who does not need a miracle?
Macoupin County, Illinois, which holds Virden and Mt. Olive, has other important labor sites. But Mother Jones’s grave and two-story granite monument on the outskirts of Mt. Olive might be seen to mark a split in the soul of working-class America that is still evident in our nation’s division.
Amul Thapar, a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit and the son of Indian immigrants, wants to show that Clarence Thomas is not alone in his views or somehow a fluke, a mistake, or an aberration as a minority jurist. In other words, Thapar wants to make clear that Thomas’s relationship with the American community of color is not defined solely by the people who hate him.
The Eagles of Heart Mountain is an impressive study of the concentration camps that imprisoned over one hundred thousand Japanese Americans during World War II. This is by no means the only history of the Japanese concentration camps, but it is unique in its focus on the Heart Mountain facility of Wyoming and its emphasis on the role of football in providing some joy and self-expression for some of those imprisoned.
For an image of death, Joanna Karpowicz’s Anubis is a figure of calm, even stability; of seeing and listening; of endurance. He has power. As someone said of Chekhov’s narrative voice, it is as if he watches human life with great sympathy from somewhere very far away.