Dreamers Rise

According to the art historian Theodore E. Stebbins, the American painter Martin Johnson Heade (1819-1904) devoted more than 120 canvases to...

From A Marsh Island: It was a famous day for crows: from one field after another a flight of them took heavily to their wings, and, as if un...

Since I have no billion-dollar media empire to protect, and since hardly anyone listens to me anyway, I have no hesitation in endorsing Kam...

Gillian Welch: About a month ago, my eye was drawn to a book that has sat mostly unread on my shelf for some time, ‘The Book of Disquiet’ ...

For whatever reason I've been listening to Gillian Welch a lot the last few weeks, and as it turns out she has a new record that has jus...

The writer Lore Segal has died; the New York Times has an obituary . Two of Segal's novels have been on and off my to-read list for yea...

Description of Item: Cash register receipt, La Fabrique de Bagel de Montréal Origin and Date of Item (if known): Montreal, Canada, August 8...

"Paean" isn't exactly an everyday word, but it's amusing to find it being confused with an even more obscure word, one tha...

The development where we live now is a relatively new one, and there are patches of recently disturbed "vacant" ground dotted arou...

A young officer named Giovanni Drogo sets out on a journey to his first post in the temporary company of a colleague, and looks back over hi...

Perhaps someone should have given the Republican vice-presidential candidate a history lesson: Even a powerful park commissioner found the h...

The great Malian kora master Toumani Diabaté died last week at age 58; the Times obituary says the cause of death was kidney failure. I th...

This song appears on Peter Case's 1993 Vanguard album Peter Case Sings Like Hell, where it's the only track that isn't a cover....

A quick visit to a local book sale yielded two books, neither of which I had heard of, though the topics of both are of longstanding interes...

New Hampshire, Summer 2024.

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...