Dreamers Rise

Miscellaneous sightings from June wanderings. From top: self-portrait with kodama ; white morph of pink lady's-slipper ; trailside sh...

Over the past few weeks we've been in the midst of major preparations for an upcoming relocation, but a few days ago I realized that I h...

It's morning Nobody's up but the crows Memphis Minnie and Joe McCoy are singing "Can I Do It For You?" as if they were...

A lovely and curious turn of phrase with a story behind it almost slipped my notice when I was re-reading Rafi Zabor's novel The Bear Co...

Songwriter Peter Case has a new record just out from Sunset Blvd Records . Entitled Doctor Moan , it's his first album of original songs...

Dard Hunter: Legend has it that Emperor Wu (A.D. 1368-98 ) tried to procure a suitable paper for the printing of money and to this end con...

In an era of computer animation wizardry it's nice to see older technologies like stop-motion animation being reinvigorated and put to u...

"Sometime in March last, a gentleman who lives in Portsmouth N. H., being on a visit to Boston, was induced by a friend of this city, t...

The writer and publisher Alastair Brotchie has died, according to social media announcements by the Atlas Press , of which he was the propri...

One summer evening about twenty years ago I left work at rush hour and joined a line of backed-up traffic using the on-ramp to merge onto th...

The Memphis Jug Band was a shifting collection of African-American musicians that recorded some 70 or 80 sides of music between 1927 and 193...

Because nothing says "Christmas" like owls on velocipedes.

Phoebe Hearst didn't care for her son's taste in women. Throughout his adult life, the media magnate William Randolph Hearst had a t...

First Second Books in the US has released the first authorized English-language translation of Hayao Miyazaki's 1983 full-color manga S...

My favorite Booth cartoon, this one didn't appear in the New Yorker but in the business section of the New York Times , accompanying an...

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 ...