December 2018
-
And this time I really mean it. (But I'm going to continue the blog; more on that in a moment.) It's always funny to see someone make a decision, then change his mind, then change it back again. Those who have been reading this blog for a long time know that the Sunday Night Journal…
-
THE HOUSE OF CHRISTMAS There fared a mother driven forthOut of an inn to roam;In the place where she was homelessAll men are at home.The crazy stable close at hand,With shaking timber and shifting sand,Grew a stronger thing to abide and standThan the square stones of Rome. For men are homesick in their homes,And strangers…
-
It must be close to twenty years ago that I wrote a science-fiction story in which Christmas had been replaced by "Holiday." (That wasn't a major part of the story, just a passing remark by a character.) I thought it was clever at the time, but it soon became an interesting and personal reiteration of…
-
MIAMI WOODS (excerpt) Sage monitors of youth are wont to sayThe eye grows early dim to nature’s charms,And commerce with the world soon dulls the earTo heavenliest sounds. It may be so; but I,Whose feet were on the hills from earliest life,And in the vales, and by the flashing brooks,Have not so found it: —deeper…
-
I have to report that I'm not enthusiastic about Phillip K. Dick's The Man in the High Castle. On the basis of this and the one other PKD novel I've read, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, I guess I'm not enthusiastic about his work in general. In both cases, however, I read the book after having…
-
THE WISH Well then! I now do plainly see This busy world and I shall ne'er agree. The very honey of all earthly joy Does of all meats the soonest cloy ; And they, methinks, deserve my pity Who for it can endure the stings, The crowd and buzz and murmurings, …
-
I have long been under the impression that All the King's Men is about a populist demagogue similar to Huey Long. Having read the book at last, I don't think that's quite right. It's closer than saying that Macbeth is about Duncan, but it's off the mark in that general direction. All the King's Men does indeed…
-
CORRUPTION SURE, it was so. Man in those early days Was not all stone and earth:He shin’d a little, and by those weak rays Had some glimpse of his birth.He saw heaven o’er his head, and knew from whence 5 He came, condemnèd, thither;And, as first love draws strongest, so from hence His mind sure…
-
I find that I'm unable to stick with the intention of only reading one book at a time, so I try to limit myself to two, one fiction and one non-fiction. But I've just broken that, too, by starting Phillip K. Dick's The Man in the High Castle before finishing Robert Penn Warren's All the King's Men.…
Light On Dark Water 