I don’t think next year will be so different from this year.
Which after all was not so different from the one before.
But I think you can be different from last year and I can.
Which after all may be true for you as it was also for me.
Pieta
Recent
Sadie! Sadie!
Hadda dream that Zadie Smith asked me to babysit two kittens. She and her husband, an older Jewish man, had somewhere to go. He was
Tolkien’s Errantry
‘Errantry’ JRR Tolkien Commercially found in Adventures of Tom Bombadil Image: detail, Pauline Baynes’ illustration, for above [Where did JKR hear the buzz of Dumbledore …
No It Won’t
I don’t think that quotation means what we think it means. Beauty will not save the world and anyway Dostoevsky didn’t say it and anyways
Take Up Do
In my mid-20s — half an age (mine) and still nearly nil on maturity ago — I noticed a thing that at the time was
Random
All Hat No Cattle
The men I respected most when I wrote about the golf business — and being the golf business they were mostly men — were course
Lapsed Pray-er
When I pray in the morning I often lapse into The Jesus Prayer. The link notes the Eastern Orthodox connection and its basic form —
On the Rock
I often vow not to hope, and always break that vow. And the next thing I’m supposed to say is that finally my hopes are
Metered Sins
Poetry’s a sneaky bastard. All the time sidling up to one on false pretenses — ‘It’s just the one’ … ‘We won’t intrude’ — and
Related
Cursing With God
More battle scenes please Once teaching a high school American Literature class — and let me tell you, once is enough —a student he says, “I
Bread
“We’re sorry,” said the man, pointing. “We ain’t much here.” The woman, they guessed his wife by the way she puttered around, doing many small
The American Poet
In evangellyfish circles there used to be a joke thus — Let us now turn to Malachi, the Italian prophet. The joke works if you
I’ve Said Too Much
There’s a danger of saying too much. There’s always that. I wrote previously and succinctly about stories. Here’s a longer exploration I’ve been working on, off and on,