I feel foolish but not old. I started writing here, trying to lay out my morning thoughts, but poems by Theodore Roethke emerged. Our father started reading Roethke to me and my brother Pat in the early 1950s, before we were in school. Dad was studying at the Writer’s Workshop at the University of Iowa. …
Link — Gay Talese and Tom Wolfe Talk Donald Trump – Arts Intel “Flak Catchers” by François Busnel, based on interviews with Wolfe and Talese in 2017, published by Graydon Carter’s airmail.news. Uncredited photo accompanied airmail.news story online. Excerpts below. Note: This was written and published before the second-term Trump experience. I disagree with Talese’s …
My pressure cooker makes life easier when it comes to cooking beans, which of course I had to do today for my 75th birthday. I had a birthday lunch at The Range in Bernalillo earlier in the week, thanks to Lori and Mike, but there is something earthy about making beans at home on your …
Summer after summer, something draws me to reading about the Battle of the Little Bighorn. This year I am reading simultaneously about the battle of Mar-a-Lago. I was born in August 1949, so I don’t think it’s the just the stars that draw me to the Custer defeat and the fleeting Native victory of June …
“Newspaper work will not harm a young writer and could help him if he gets out of it in time.” Interview with George Plimpton, Paris Review, 1954.
I am 99 percent convinced now that there is not a novel in me, or at least that I am not capable of producing one. I’ve started enough of them to know that I quickly lose interest and, even if I could carry one through, know I probably would be embarrassed by the result. This …
Maybe it’s because sandhill cranes are starting to return north from our Middle Rio Grande Valley that I keep thinking of this Assiniboine story about the creation of seasons. I came across the story in an essay called Long Time Ago by the late James Welch. I liked his line, “It is remarkable how logical …
My mind seems like these two: Cowboy looking out the window in the morning and the Georgia O’Keeffe print hanging over my bed. Cowboy’s ears remind me of the Very Large Array, and I think he sees deep. O’Keeffe’s painting is far-seeing, too, its monoliths and movement called Road Past the View II.. Intent as …
Looking out the windows this windy morning, second cup of coffee on the stump beside me, thinking of friends and groceries and coronavirus. I remembered that March 18 was the date I stocked up for the COVID-19 quarantine, Cowboy food, too. I’ll need to make another trip soon. I was a thorough shopper on the …
dreamranch 