In April, poet Gary Snyder visited the Twin Cities for a reading and was interviewed by local critic Chris Welsch. During the interview, Welsch said, "Poet Charles Simic recently wrote about what he called the ‘New American Pessimism," a sense that our big problems can’t be solved and that we’re unable to act together to address them. What’s your ( Read more... )

My youngest son and his bride (Scott and Rachael) were married last Saturday at the Gibbs Farm Museum, located near the Saint Paul campus of the University of Minnesota. On the grounds of the museum were a series of plaques giving the Dakota names of the various months of the year. I am reproducing them here.

January: "The Hard Moon"
February:  "The ( Read more... )

I am reading Alan Furst’s latest novel: Spies of the Balkans. It is set in a small fishing town in Greece in the 1940's, just before and then during the invasion by Nazi Germany. The main protagonist is a Greek police official. Part of the story concerns his dog, Melissa --- honeybee --- "...a big girl, eighty pounds, with a thick soft black-and- ( Read more... )

The following excerpts are from an essay by Anne Dillard entitled "Living Like Weasels."

The weasel lives in necessity and we live in choice, hating necessity and dying at last ignobly in its talons. I would like to live as I should, as the weasel lives as he should. And I suspect that for me the way is like the weasel’s: open to time and death ( Read more... )

The following is from an essay by surgeon Richard Selzer. The essay is titled "Lessons From the Art."

I stand by a bed where a young woman lies, her face postoperative, her mouth twisted in a palsy, clownish. A tiny twig of the facial nerve, the one to the muscles of her mouth, has been severed. She will be thus from now on. The surgeon has ( Read more... )

In an article arguing for conservation of wilderness areas, Aldo Leopold had the following to say:

[I]f in a city we had six vacant lots available to the youngsters of a certain neighborhood for playing ball, it might be "development" to build houses on the first, and the second, and the third, and the fourth, and even the fifth, but when we build ( Read more... )