Typesetting machines, courtesy Printhusiast, CC 4.0 Some technologies seem to be more aggressive than others in changing their times. Automatic transmissions, for instance, are ubiquitous but fairly inconsequential; they did not significantly change the experience of driving, and I can still choose to drive a stick if I…
Photo by John Griswold Yesterday was national Independent Bookstore Day, which the Boston Globe says was first “put on by the Southern California Independent Booksellers Association” in 2014. I did not know there was such a promotional event until it was over, but anything that helps preserve…
Screenshot from Dumas’ show, YouTube Cooking shows are a busman’s holiday for me, given I have always done the cooking in the family. Over the decades one of my recreations has been watching Jacques, Julia, the Two Fat Ladies, Keith Floyd, and others, including Bourdain, who…
Lewis Hine, child coal miners, West Virginia, 1908. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, Records of the National Child Labor Committee One of my grandfather’s first jobs was child coal miner, family lore says. My other grandfather, also born in the 1880s, would have labored on the…
A ghostly smelting plant in ‘Mariupolis,’ distributed by Twenty Twenty Vision films Mantas Kvedaravicius, a Lithuanian documentary filmmaker, was killed by Russians this week as he tried to leave Mariupol in southern Ukraine. He is best known for the film Mariupolis, which was nominated for prizes…
‘A Sniper’s War’ follows a Serbian national nicknamed Deki, who went to eastern Ukraine in 2014 and served three years as a top sniper with Russian-backed separatist troops. He has killed so many Ukrainians that he cannot keep count and, besides, says he feels nothing about their deaths.
Still from ‘Thy Kingdom Come,’ produced by Beyond the Trees. Artists can be up to many things, but I have always been drawn to those who bear witness. “Poetry begins with listening,” says poet Sean Singer. In this role the artist is a sort of Quan…
Creative writing programs in universities often host visiting writers and poets for public readings, student manuscript consultations, and class visits. As an undergraduate I organized the visit of Gwendolyn Brooks (and her husband, Henry Blakely, Jr., who demanded to know what poetry I, a mere proser, was working on). As…
Photo by John Griswold Maybe you have had a cat like our Abbey—everything on her terms, selective in her affections, so distant she seemed half-wild, but firmly part of the family. We adopted her and her “brother” at the same time, when our sons were little. We found…
Everybody and everything around us are hurtling through time together, so we often experience a relative stillness as we age, just as we stretch and yawn hurtling through space at 872,000 miles per hour. If you ever wondered why Great Uncle Gus fails to register the…