Spring’s Arrival

A pair of sandhill cranes arrive for breakfast every morning, slowly striding across the green sweep of ground where we’ve fed the sheep flock the day before. They appear in the early dawn, and I step out the back door to quietly call out my wishes for a good morning. The cranes respond with their …

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“Mainstreaming” Falconry?

Of course, the biggest thing is Helen in Vogue and pieces on her in the New Yorker and interviews with her on NPR. The FUNNIEST was the New York Review of Books using her to advertise their edition of T. H. White’s The Goshawk (“the book that inspired Helen Macdonald, author of H is for …

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Caroline Gordon

The minor great (is that contradictory?) southern writers are always being revived, sometimes by friends of mine; their agrarian roots make them more appealing to me than old Yankees generally. A person descended from  Alpine peasants and mercenary Celtic soldiers can remember misty maritime coasts with nostalgia, but be impatient with the old cultural hegemony …

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Watches and London Bests

If you read newspapers or magazines with “good” demographics, you might be bemused or puzzled by the totally irrational number of advertisements for wristwatches. Odder still, NONE give you any prices, perhaps because the sticker shock will be unbelievable if you are not already informed. Suffice to say simply– five figures, getting to six pretty …

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Quote

“Books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain the potency of life in them to be as active as that soul whose progeny they are; nay, they do preserve as in a vial the purest efficacy and extraction of that living intellect that bred them.” Milton, Aeropagitica (HT Teddy Moritz)

Wanderers and Nomads

I keep coming back to the old Juluka song “Digging for some words” because of its uncanny evocation of the “wanderers and nomads” who erupt from time to time to menace and destroy the accumulated wisdom of more settled societies. They have come to the gates again and again, bearing different or no ideologies but …

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