• Poetry

    Poetry potpourri

    Anyone else hear this story on NPR this morning? It discusses the state of poets and poetry in a suffering economy, and includes a link to its Planet Money blog, where readers have…

  • Picture Books

    Whitefoot

    Whitefoot: A Story from the Center of the World is Wendell Berry’s first foray into children’s books. Davis TeSelle’s wonderfully delicate and detailed illustrations in black and white enhance the tale. Judging from…

  • Essays

    Stray thoughts on war and pacifism

    I wanted to gather a few comments from thinkers I respect, and see what comparisons emerge. First, Wendell Berry. Here’s a brief excerpt from “The Failure of War“: What could be more absurd,…

  • Essays

    The Way of Ignorance

    In order to arrive at what you do not know You must go by a way which is the way of ignorance. (T.S. Eliot, “East Coker”) So reads the passage from which Wendell…

  • Novels

    The Memory of Old Jack

    Andy is aware as always that he approaches a past much older than his own, that he cannot remember. But it is a past that, listening to Old Jack’s and his grandparents’ talk,…

  • Fiction,  On Reading

    Narnia and Other Matters

    My Netflix this week is the BBC version of Dickens’s Bleak House. The juxtaposition of that with my reading these days–Falling Man (my first DeLillo novel), and The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe,…