Dreamers Rise

I have no idea whether this wooden sculpture of a saxophone-playing bear, spotted while I was driving along a back road in Maine, is intende...

Harry Mathews, summarizing the medical theories of the "philosopher-dentist" R. King Dri: The human body, richest of nature’s fr...

For a commonplace book, notes on hotel rooms and the solitary travelers who visit them, sometimes only in the mind. Image: Joseph Cornell, U...

It's hard enough for me to wrap my head around the idea that a record I first listened to when I was in my twenties is now fifty years o...

The traditional ballad heard here is at least three hundred years old but doesn't seem to have run out of steam. This lovely, fairly rec...

My father's namesake in a photo taken in September 1897, when he would have been about six. According to the inscription on the back, pa...

I have no idea whether Defoe read Dante, but there is a possible echo of the Inferno in a 1706 pamphlet devoted to the question of the prop...

Since it's in Lithuania there's virtually no chance that I will ever visit it, but it cheers me no end to know that there is now an ...

The poet Donald Hall was born and raised in suburban Connecticut, but he spent many of his summers at his maternal grandparents' farm in...

Cortázar's short story "Carta a una señorita en París" (Letter to a Young Lady in Paris) is narrated by a man who has a peculi...

When I was growing up there was a commercial artist in our neighborhood named Gordon Johnson, whose specialty was paintings for advertising ...

John Brewer, describing a night at the Royal Drury Lane Theatre in 1769: During the hour before the curtain rose the theatre was filled by w...

Henry David Thoreau: I spend a considerable portion of my time observing the habits of the wild animals, my brute neighbors. By their vario...

Something for me to look forward to: this Spanish translation of a book by the Italian writer Leonardo Piccione. The publisher's descri...

We're lying in bed and there's a rap on the window glass. I get up and open the window. A middle-aged couple are standing on the sid...

Two hundred pages into my second attempt to read Middlemarch I've thrown in the towel. I went into it with high hopes, having recently ...

We're in the process of completing our second relocation of the year, having most recently moved from temporary digs in Portsmouth NH to...

Sarah Orne Jewett was known for her portrayals of the lives of the farmers and fisher-folk of her native state, but she wrote at least one s...

Brad Fox, paraphrasing William Beebe's "final, disorganized notes on marine subjects," here describing the fate of shipwrec...

Here's a little object lesson in the compartmentalization of modern life. One afternoon we went out for a drive and as we headed to our ...