Dreamers Rise

The great blue herons at the local pond I frequent tend to be skittish, flying off as soon as they see me coming down the path, but fo...

An interesting sign of something, though I'm not sure what: all of a sudden a large number of the musicians I listen to regularly or occ...

From 1839 to 1841 the American traveler John Lloyd Stephens and the British artist Frederick Catherwood traveled throughout Mexico and Centr...

These images by C. Renard are from a novel by the Belgian entomologist Ernest Candèze, which relates the adventures of a group of insects wh...

If you've ever twiddled the radio dial late at night when the ionosphere was in one of its capricious moods and the receiver was pullin...

Down valley a smoke haze Three days heat, after five days rain Pitch glows on the fir-cones Across rocks and meadows Swarms of new flies...

City Lights Books has announced the death of its co-founder, the writer, bookseller, and publisher Lawrence Ferlinghetti, after an asto...

I wish I were a cassowary Out on the plains of Timbuctoo. I'd kill and eat a missionary-- Head, arms, legs, and hymn-book too. ...

"Those who live in retirement, whose lives have fallen amid the seclusion of schools or of other walled-in and guarded dwellings, are l...

There's an intriguing recognition scene about 200 pages into Charlotte Brontë's final novel, Villette . The narrator, Lucy Snowe, is...

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...