Reflecting yesterday afternoon on my morning post, “On the Coast Starlight,” in which I suggested thought, if we are to try to compare it to anything, seems more bird-like than the train of thought first found in Thomas Hobbes’s 1651 “Leviathan,” I thought, to force thought onto a track where ideas are coupled one after […]
We climbed aboard the Coast Starlight in Portland, bound for Los Angeles, 24 train-ride hours away, but we stopped unexpectedly somewhere up in the Cascades southeast of Eugene. Snow was falling. In those days, you could walk between the cars and open the top of the dutch door for some fresh air. The air was […]
He turns to an empty whiskey barrel, wondering if there is life on the red planet, or under the Venus cloud cover, or inside her granny panties. He reaches for his watering can, always a few drops to go, dribbles a few words of too late love. They sit across the bar from one another, […]
Perhaps symbols have some meaning after all; otherwise, why bother trying to erase them? But if the symbol is a mask for a truth, why can’t the truth speak for itself? We all have a particular picture of ourselves, seldom the same picture others have of us. This seems true even with intimate relationships, long […]
Writing for the New York Times Sunday edition for June 28, California veteran-reporter Shawn Hubler, reporting from Davis, California, on the ghost town effect Covid-19 is bringing to college towns across the country, and wandering around the abandoned town UC Davis keeps flush, notes, apparently sans irony: “Outside the closed theater, a lone busker stood […]
I’ll paddle out through sharks for you live on Desolation Row with you burn all my books for you if you’ll be my love I’ll walk the pirate’s plank for you smoke a cigarette or two join the National Guard for you if you’ll be my love I’ll sleep with deadly snakes for you crawl […]
Hey Joe, where you going all tangled up in blue? Gonna change my attitude, walk on down the avenue Fly away on a magic carpet ride down to Graceland. Goodbye, Joe Hey Joe, what kind of mood you in with that cat-like grin? I’m moving off the dark side of the moon Going over to […]
She shakes me out, she jiggles me down starts me dancing like a rodeo clown. Twist to the left, twist to the right never do we get too way up tight. She stays so near, she goes so far she ain’t no Facebook or Internet star. She’s seen over here, she’s been over there all […]
Two riders were approaching on hogs and wearing leather. “Let’s stop here,” said one to the other, “for a cool drinking beer.” They passed the time on songs that ofttimes rhymed. On the trail or in the big city. They parked the hogs in the gutter. At the bar the one he uttered,“What’s that you […]
In John Cage’s “Lecture on Nothing,” we find the following comment: “It is not irritating to be where one is. It is only irritating to think one would like to be somewhere else.” Likewise, we may find that when we are alone, we find ourselves wanting company, but when we are in company, we may […]
The biographer Deirdre Bair, Samuel Beckett’s first official biographer, has passed away, the Times reports: ‘His first words to her, she wrote in “Parisian Lives,” were, “So you are the one who is going to reveal me for the charlatan that I am.”’ Beckett may have hoped so. He certainly gave her that start, for […]
