Dreamers Rise

Over the years I've devoted several posts to the colorful early history of Manhattan's Water Street Mission, an institutio...

Thomas De Quincey: Of this at least, I feel assured, that there is no such thing as forgetting possible to the mind; a thousand accidents m...

If anyone in this country is still harboring illusions about the man in the White House and his core of thugs, it's about time they aske...

Today, entirely by accident, I learned of the existence of this bundle of eight chapbooks published in 2017 by the Center for Humanities at ...

Three masters, three obits. Just an average day in 2020. Rest in peace. Barry Lopez Phil Niekro Tony Rice

I came to this book by way of Coleridge and Wordsworth, both of whom are profiled, usefully if somewhat eccentrically, in its pages, but sta...

William Wordsworth: ... once in the stillness of a summer's noon, While I was seated in a rocky cave By the sea-side, perusing, so ...

Machado de Assis: In life, the watchful eye of public opinion, the conflict of interests, the struggle of greed against greed oblige a ...

A friendly note from one of the former members of this American-based Celtic music group from the 1970s and '80s has brought some unexpe...

Thomas De Quincey: Mr. Poole propounded the following question to me, which I mention because it furnished me with the first hint of a singu...

Richard Holmes: Coleridge continuously haunts De Quincey's pages, as a sort of battered Virgilian guide to the opium Inferno. Co...

There are few things in life I enjoy as much as acquiring books — maybe even moreso than reading them — but I've reached a point where d...

This isn't an easy moment for people who perform in front of an audience for a living, but musicians, actors, and the like still need to...

Today was a beautiful day and I'm not just thinking of the blue skies and unseasonably mild weather here in New York State. I'm a sk...

Arlo Guthrie's version of an early Bob Dylan composition feels like just what I need today. And the sands will roll Out a carp...

Saturday was the first day of early voting where I live. My wife and I have already voted by absentee ballot, but yesterday I happened to wa...

I found these two grave markers in an out-of-the-way spot a few minutes' walk from the more accessible family pet cemetery I ...

Charles Dickens: I had no thought that night — none, I am quite sure — of what was soon to happen to me. But I have always remembered sinc...

This ill-starred year grinds towards its end but still has ample time to accumulate additional misfortunes. My body remains on summer schedu...

One hundred days ago I set myself the task of reading The Decameron at the rate of precisely one tale a day, and this morning I finished i...