Hello everyone. This is Oliver/Jack. I'm sure most of you are aware, but my father, Lance/David passed away suddenly on Thursday of natural causes. It was a total shock to everyone. We are coping as best we can. There is a link to his go fund me below. A service will be live streamed on Wednesday at 11:00 am EST. There will also be a recording posted. A link to the stream will be posted to his twitter. After the service I will post the recording as well as a final roundup of tributes and such. Thank you all, Here... Continue reading

Sunday night, April 18, 2021. A writer trying hard to be one person. Scott Fitzgerald in Hollywood, detail from a caricature by Barry Blitt, in the New Yorker. November 2009. It was my first inkling Wylie was a writer. And while I like writers---because if you ask a writer anything you usually get an answer---still it belittled him in my eyes. Writers aren't people exactly, or, if they’re any good, they’re a whole lot of people trying so hard to be one person. It’s like actors, who try so pathetically not to look in mirrors, who lean backward trying---only to... Continue reading

Originally placed on display, Thursday, November 5, 2020. Copied from the original, Thursday morning, April 15, 2021. A life drawing class full of female art students or, as Henry James might have seen it, ruthless young businesswomen in the making: Detail from “In the Studio” by Marie Bashkirtseff, 1881. Dnipro State Art Museum, Dnipro, Ukraine. Via Wikipedia. Today is the novelist Henry James’ birthday. He’d have been 178 years old. There are some who would say that’s how long it takes to read one of his novels. There are some, as, indeed, James himself might rejoin, who should, as it... Continue reading

Posted Wednesday night, April 14, 2021. Color photograph of Saturn taken from the Hubble Space Telescope. NASA and the European Space Agency, via the Hubble Newsletter. This is how Carl Niebur, a program scientist at NASA headquarters in Washington, D.C., began his career as a space traveler: Niebur knew long journeys, having taken one of his own to the nation’s capital from Breese, Illinois (Pop. 3,000), all cow pastures and corn fields. It was as idyllic a place as you might find on the Earth planet, and Breese was the big town in his part of the windy prairie state.... Continue reading

Posted Sunday morning, April 11, 2021. The flowers of most common Magnolia trees are pale and without scent for an evolutionary reason. Magnolias evolved millions of years before bees and butterflies and had to rely on beetles for pollination, and beetles aren’t interested in color or scent. Magnolia tree in blossom, via Wikipedia. Today’s Sunday sermon is by the late and lamented Oliver Sacks, physician, neurologist, writer, and, he wouldn’t have thought incidentally, atheist who, when dying of liver cancer, in terrible pain but still joyfully at work as a writer, didn’t have to resist a deathbed conversion because he... Continue reading

Posted Wednesday morning, April 7, 2021. A view from the beach at Halibut State Park in Rockport, Massachusetts, Sunday afternoon around two, April 4th, 2021. Copyright Thomas Levenson. Posted here by permission. Just when I’m beginning to resign myself to the probability that thanks to the debilitations and declining competencies of creeping old age I won’t ever get to look out at the open ocean again, author, historian, science journalist, and, as he puts it, sometime documentary filmmaker---films he's worked on have won awards, including a Peabody and a local Emmy---and longtime online confederate Tom Leverson posted this photo looking... Continue reading

Stone originally rolled away from the notebooks, Easter Sunday morning, April 21, 2019. Resurrected, Easter Sunday morning, April 4, 2021. Detail from “The Holy Women at Christ’s Tomb” by Annabile Carracci. 1590s. The Hermitage, via Wikipedia. From the Department of In Search of Lost Time. Easter Sunday, April 21, 2019: Happy Easter. Shh. We’re at mass. Father Bob’s leading us through a rousing recitation of the renewal of our baptismal vows. “Do you reject Satan?” he asks at the top of his voice while smiling broadly, knowing we will. “We do!” we shout back with great good cheer. “And all... Continue reading

Triumphal entry from the notebooks, Palm Sunday, April 14, 2019. Posted on Good Friday, April 10, 2020. Unstuck in time, Palm Sunday, March 28, 2021. From the opening credits scene in the 1972 movie adaptation of Kurt Vonnegut’s “Slaughterhouse Five. Posted this one on Palm Sunday last year. I’m posting it again today because it’s Palm Sunday, but as the Tralfamadorians would say, I have always posted it and I always will post it. Seen from their point of view, this blog is one long post stretching back to September 2004 and forward from there to now and however many... Continue reading

Posted Friday night, March 26, 2021. Portrait of two gamblers. One does it for the company. The other does it to be left alone. Both are addicted to hope: Charlie and Bill at the track (Elliot Gould and George Segal, second and third from the left) in Robert Altman's "California Split". 1974. You know George Segal’s gone, right? Died Tuesday, the 23rd. Eighty-seven. One of my favorite actors. Going by the outpouring of emotion on Twitter, he was one of everybody’s favorite actors. The people who worked with him at any point in his long career in the movies and... Continue reading

Mined from the notebooks, Friday morning, March 19, 2021. Posted Thursday morning, March 25. When the red red robin came bob bob bobbin along four years ago: 21 degrees, 17 mph winds, snow, but today’s the day the robins have picked to move back into our bushes. The view outside the window of the Mannionville Ranch House, March 11, 2017. They’re back. A little behind schedule. And not making their usual show about it. Our robins---the ones who spend the early weeks of spring in the holly bushes outside our living room window, before their time share is up and... Continue reading

Posted Wednesday morning, March 24, 2021. The poet John Ashbery in New York City, 1971. Photo by Gerard Malanga, via LitHub. Another case of one thing leading to another: a few weeks ago my pal and favorite living American poet Steve Kuusisto wrote, poetically but factually, about rutabagas. At about the same time I happened to find my old signed copy of John Ashbery’s book of poems “The Double Dream of Spring”, which I acquired---book and signature---when Ashbery came to read at Iowa sometime while I was at the Workshop between 1983 and 1985. It---the book with the signature had... Continue reading

Posted Thursday, March 4, 2021. The Pappalardo below is Bob Pappalardo, a planetary scientist who is the central figure in “The Mission”, David W. Brown’s account of the twenty-year quest to send a space probe to explore Jupiter’s ocean moon Europa: When Pappalardo was a child, astronauts worked and played on the moon. It was just normal, a thing people did, like work in a factory, bank, or bakery. They set up seismometers. They collected rocks. They explored this strange new world and encountered mystifying phenomena: spots of orange dirt on its plaster landscape, jarring flashes of light when they... Continue reading

Posted March 4, 2021. An iconic Carl Sagan Moment: Sagan juggling with the solar system in an episode of "Cosmos" First Mr Spock, then Professor Sagan. Following up on the previous post, Bob Pappalardo’s education as a planetary scientist continued: ...During high school, Bob worked at Vanderbilt Planetarium in Centerport, Long Island, not far from his house. A few years later at Cornell University in Ithaca, he found the field of planetary science the way everyone else in the wider discipline did: through a Carl Sagan Moment. Upon enrolling, Bob had intended to take up the ancient art of astronomy,... Continue reading

Posted Thursday, March 11, 2021. Look at all that cancellation! Children’s section of the Barnes & Noble in Newburgh, New York, around three this afternoon. I was kind of disappointed to see they didn’t put a little mask on the Cat and the Hat---or is that Little Cat A, or Little Cat B, or C, or D, or E, F, G...? Continue reading

Posted Saturday morning, March 19, 2021. Saorise Ronan as Jo March in a scene from Greta Gerwig's adaptation of Louisa May Alcott's "Little Women". Today’s Morning Song is a morning dirge. Woke up early the other morning thinking about Greta Gewig’s adaptation of “Little Women''---deliberately. I was trying to cheer myself up and muster the mental energy to face the day. This isn’t a response to the political situation. I’ve never let that get to me to the point where I can’t think about anything else but my outrage and anger. By never I mean since I was a kid.... Continue reading

Adapted from the Twitter feed, Saturday, June 6, 2020. Originally posted Tuesday, June 16, 2020. Replayed Friday night, March 19, 2021. New York Yankees great Yogi Berra at bat in a spring training game in Florida sometime in the 1950s. Berra is most famous as one of the best major league catchers of all-time. But he was a terrific hitter too, with a lifetime batting average of .285, 358 home runs, 2150 hits, and 1430 runs batted in. He was a pretty solid outfielder as well, when his knees needed a rest. And he was underappreciated as a manager. In... Continue reading

Posted Thursday night, March 11, 2021. Look at all that cancellation! Children’s section of the Barnes & Noble in Newburgh, New York, around three this afternoon. I was kind of disappointed to see they didn’t put a little mask on the Cat and the Hat---or is that Little Cat A, or Little Cat B, or C, D, E, F, G...? Continue reading

Lifted from the album, Ash Wednesday, February 17, 2021. Temptation in Aisle 5. Temptation in Aisle 5. Lady Gaga inspired "Chromatica" Oreos on display at Hannaford’s Supermarket, Plattekill, New York, Ash Wednesday, February 17, 2021. Believe it or not, I resisted. I had to. As much as I wanted to turn my voice into a musical message of kindness, it’s Ash Wednesday, and I gave up cookies for Lent, more for reasons of health than for religious ones---my blood sugar has been way high for weeks. Not that hard a sacrifice though. I’m not that much of a fan of... Continue reading

Posted Thursday evening, March 4, 2021. First Mr Spock, then Professor Sagan. Following up on the previous post, Bob Pappalardo’s education as a planetary scientist continued: ...During high school, Bob worked at Vanderbilt Planetarium in Centerport, Long Island, not far from his house. A few years later at Cornell University in Ithaca, he found the field of planetary science the way everyone else in the wider discipline did: through a Carl Sagan Moment. Upon enrolling, Bob had intended to take up the ancient art of astronomy, but problem the first: there was no astronomy major proper at Cornell; the field... Continue reading

Posted Thursday morning, March 4, 2021. The Pappalardo below is Bob Pappalardo, a planetary scientist who is the central figure in “The Mission”, David W. Brown’s account of the twenty-year quest to send a space probe to explore Jupiter’s ocean moon Europa: When Pappalardo was a child, astronauts worked and played on the moon. It was just normal, a thing people did, like work in a factory, bank, or bakery. They set up seismometers. They collected rocks. They explored this strange new world and encountered mystifying phenomena: spots of orange dirt on its plaster landscape, jarring flashes of light when... Continue reading

Posted Wednesday morning, March 3, 2021. President-elect Abraham Lincoln saying farewell to his hometown of Springfield, Illinois from the rear platform of the train that would take him on the perilous journey to Washington, D.C. for his inauguration. February 11, 1861. Doesn’t matter how insightful, vividly descriptive, narratively compelling, thematically appealing, dramatically realistic in its portrayals of the characters who move in and out of the story, and in all other ways well-written it is, sometimes my favorite passages in a work of nonfiction turn out to be the more mundane, workaday, just-the-facts, ma’am, paragraphs that simply tell me something... Continue reading

Posted Sunday morning, February 28, 2021. Well, that mood didn’t last. Since the rest of the gang was sleeping in, which I took as their birthday present to me, giving me some extra time to myself and peace and quiet, I threw myself a private party, downing two mugs of Irish Breakfast tea instead of my usual solitary and purely medicinal mug of green tea. I was tempted to have a third, but, to steal a line from Niles Fraiser, I was feeling madcap, not hell-bent. The mug is lying, by the way. But you have to forgive it. It... Continue reading

Posted Sunday morning, February 28, 2021. Detail from a photo by John Vachon, “Front Porch, Sunday afternoon, Vincennes, Indiana”, 1941. Library of Congress, via Wikimedia Commons. It’s my birthday, and I’m in a mood... Able at last to stop And recall the days it took To get them here, they sit On the porch in rockers Letting the faded light Of afternoon carry them off. I see them moving back And forth over the dullness Of the past, covering ground They did not know was there, And ending up with nothing Save what might have been. And so they sit,... Continue reading

Posted Sunday morning, February 14, 2021. Detail from “Tea Time” by Jan Joseph Horemans II, painted sometime in the second half of the 18th Century. Royal Museum of Fine Arts, Antwerp. Via Wikipedia. I don’t know whether I’d have been a Patriot or a Tory if I’d been alive and living in Boston when the Tea Act was passed, but if I’d been a tea drinker on either side, I'd have found common cause with the smugglers. From “The British Are Coming: The War in America, Lexington to Princeton, 1775-1777” by Rick Atkinson: ...The Tea Act restructured the East India... Continue reading