Those in the Gulf South are realistic about hurricanes.Three days after Laura hit, cleanup is well underway. South Lake Charles.Groves of trees all over town are crushed.West Prien Lake Road.Tobacco Plus gas station, near the casinos.Vape shop, Ryan Street.Utility vehicles staged in supermarket lot near McNeese State University.Emmanuel Baptist Church, Common Street.Guardsman outside Calcasieu Parish Public Defender’s Office, downtown Lake Charles.Plinth that used to hold the Confederate statue on the courthouse lawn.Capital One Tower missing windows, downtown Lake Charles on the lakefront.Former Calcasieu National Bank building, downtown Lake Charles.
Nobody should want to run a business like the lighter factory, with its puny, per-unit profit scheme. No American company would even try to do what the Chinese do, by hyper-control of their people.
What could class mean now in America, where populists decry education as brainwashing, influencers look rich in things and lifestyles, and oligarchs spend their time pasting fool’s-gold to everything instead of governing for the benefit of the people?
I laughed and told my son that the singer reminded me of myself in high school—gawky, skinny, comic not handsome, watching everyone else but doing your own thing a little too enthusiastically.
One can, of course, judge a work of art on its own terms, carefully setting aside the life of its creator, with its cascading influences of love, pain, or situation. But for me, there is something rich and compelling about imagining what WashU Libraries just showed us: “James Merrill’s…
Nobody should want to run a business like the lighter factory, with its puny, per-unit profit scheme. No American company would even try to do what the Chinese do, by hyper-control of their people.
I have lived in the Midwest all my life, drooping and dragging my way through July and August, yet I never thought much about why. This summer, though, the gap between temperature and RealFeel is yawning wide. I am more miserable than ever, even when the actual temperature does…
By the time it was gone, the change was subtle but unmistakable: one corner left without its figure, one pedestal left bare. But to understand why that absence matters, it helps to understand who Kate Chopin was and the stories she wrote.
The ginger nut (and by association other cookies of its type, such as those made with black peppercorns) has an aggressive presence but offers scant sustenance. It is meant to aid digestion of other things, to have a warming effect in winter, to relieve boredom, and perhaps to remind us we are alive in the sometimes dry, husky business of life.