Can You Diagram That Sentence?
“I really do not know that anything has ever been more exciting than diagramming sentences,” announced the formidable Gertrude Stein, though her own sentences would defy the art.
Arts & Letters
Kinky Friedman, Charles Manson and Fruit of the Tune Records Are Dead
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.
Anubis Lives, Thanks to Joanna Karpowicz
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.
A Princess Was the First Professional Writer?
Enheduanna, a Sumerian princess, is believed by many to be the earliest named writer in world history. What man would have compared his creative process to childbirth? What man could have written what might be the first #MeToo account of sexual exploitation?
Damn the Torpedoes, We Have Bigger Problems
Symonds’s book “The US Navy: A Concise History“ surprises, as it is also a history of technology and its political effects, showing, for example, how shifts from sail to coal to oil to nuclear power each affected our national capabilities and global ambitions in ways no one foresaw.
Roses in an Alley
Was my cheerful trespass neighborly, an act of communal solidarity, or a brazen crime? Our jurisprudence gauges severity by dollar value, but what is the worth of a half-dead rose in an alley?
Jim Henson: Idea Man a Moving Tribute to a Unique Artist
We have gotten used to retrospectives showing terrible behaviors and scandals, but there is little of that here, other than a marriage troubled by absence, and the implication that Henson was so driven that he may have worked himself to death at 53, a loss for us all.
Shakespeare’s Sisters Speak Up
In Shakespeare’s Sisters: How Women Wrote the Renaissance, Ramie Targoff points out that when Virginia Woolf wrote A Room of One’s Own, “she knew almost nothing about the powerful literary works a small group of women had written—and in many cases, published—around the time of Shakespeare.”
To See, or Not to See
Michael Eastman wants to walk around my little Southern Illinois town with his camera. A photographer whose work is in museums, who has shot the world’s extremes of beauty and decay, wants to walk around Waterloo, Illinois, and shoot? What the hell do I show him?
Playing in the Wedding Band
The fact remained that we were Matthew’s college band, and when he wanted his college band to play his wedding, his wedding band was us.