In a just world, North Dakota’s Tim Murphy would be not just the Poet Laureate of his beautiful Siberian state, our truest North; he would be the Poet Laureate of the USA. Good (but lesser) honored real poets, like Dana Gioia, know and say this,.. But like any cradle Catholic, even one lapsed or “relapsed”, …
Month: March 2016
Petroglyphs– and an eagle– in Chalfant Valley
And some comparable rock art from other places. It wasn’t all disasters on our trip.Jackson took us to the most remarkable petroglyph site I have seen since Tamgaly, north of Almaty in Kazakhstan, and quite different in subjects and execution. This sampling should give you an idea.. Jackson gives it scale. Many of …
Old Mama
She’s not much to look at, some cross between livestock guardian dog breeds. Born on the range to working guardians, she’s lived all her 10+ years of life there, migrating with the flocks from the sagebrush-covered low country in winter, to the high country of the Wind River Mountains as the flocks move for summer …
In need of correction…
From a recent Guardian, as reported in the PLF blog. These children can’t be serious– I have see better reporting by high school students in rural New Mexico… A review of David Astor: A Life in Print, a biography of the former editor of the Observer, contained a number of errors (20 February, page 7, …
George
Tomorrow my favorite brother-in-law George goes under the knife for his cancer. He has responded very well to the chemo and radiation; one of his tumors has disappeared, and the other has shrunk. He’s done so well that they made the operation earlier rather than later, and they give him very good prospects for total …
Found Book
Once or twice, like any person who buys and occasionally sells books, I have found a book on my shelves that I did not know I had. But only once have I found a really valuable one that I had no recollection of buying, and still don’t. It happened about two “book culls” past, when …
Random Doggage
Jutta’s dancing dogs, Nhubia the tazi and Taalai the taigan, are back..
Astonishing Paintings
From Jim Moore: astonishing paintings of Passenger pigeons in a strange thirties style, maybe even cooler than Ford’s, below.. More tomorrow.
Charles Schwartz RIP
Bruce Haak emailed me last night that my old friend Charles Schwartz had died, from a fast-acting brain tumor. I hadn’t even known he was sick. Charlie was a great falconer, and a perfectionist. He ended up flying passage Gyrfalcons and Sage grouse, in the high deserts of Idaho; this high-end grouse hawking is still …
I’m back
I hope you didn’t think I would announce the impending 4000th post and then quit on you! I am just coming back from an extraordinarily hard couple of weeks, starting when I tried, rather arbitrarily, to quit one of my PD drugs without checking in with my neurologist. She might have advised me that it …