Dreamers Rise

I'm standing on a great plain with no trees or buildings in sight, and I notice a faint hum of engine noise. I look up. Airplanes or air...

This was not a dream, although it seemed a bit like one at the time. On a beautiful fall afternoon I drove a few miles to one of my favorite...

About twenty years ago or maybe a little more, my wife and I went to a small music club called the Towne Crier , which at that time was loca...

I enjoyed this seasonally appropriate 1960 Mexican film directed by Roberto Gavaldón, with cinematography by Gabriel Figueroa. Macario is b...

The grass may not always be greener, but with mushrooms it seems to be a different story. It's been a dreadful year for fungi-spotting ...

The narrator of this novel by the elusive writer who called himself B. Traven is one Gerard Gales, an American seaman who oversleeps while ...

I've been assigned to escort a famous poet to a public reading in Princeton, New Jersey. We are to meet in Grand Central Station before ...

It's been another unpredictable year in the squash patch. The acorn squash that I planted in the wake of last year's profusion of ...

Before the former child star Olivia Rorschach sets off on one of her frequent trips, she leaves instructions for her au pair, Jane Sutton, ...

When I first read this 1978 novel by Georges Perec in David Bellos's translation years ago I recall being entertained but also perhaps a...

Georges Perec: Sometimes Valène dreamt of cataclysms and tempests, of whirlwinds that would carry the whole house off like a wisp of straw...

In 1975 I took a course taught by a folklorist who had a parallel career as the producer of a number of commercial recordings of folk music....

Georges Perec: She’d have done better to sell up and go back to the farm where she’d been born. Rabbits and chickens, some tomato plants, ...

Things as I see them. There is no God. There is no Heaven, no Hell, no Devil. There are no angels or demons or ghosts. There are no miracl...

One to watch out for: a promised English-language translation of Gabriele Tergit's family saga Effingers, which was originally publishe...

The death of Kelly Joe Phelps on May 31st got me thinking about my favorite Kelly Joe song, so I've dug out and updated some notes I mad...

And it's funny that this comes out dark, it's not that bad There's still a sparkle of silver in my cavity that plays music in t...

Two forceful and anguished statements in the wake of yet another mass shooting indicate that the stereotypical image of the American profess...

Two days, two eastern box turtles. This mostly terrestrial chelonian, considered a "species of special concern," is widespread in...