It is only when we have the courage to face things exactly as they are, without any sort of self-deception or illusion, that a light will develop out of events by which the path to success may be recognized. –The I Ching or Book of Changes, Wilhelm Baynes edition, Princeton University Press LAST YEAR’S GIFT You are […]
Archives for June 2011
Poem: Difficult
In Africa, lion after lion fell before the Colonel’s artillery. Rhinos, hippos, antelopes, wildebeests, and all manner of game were struck down, helpless as Democrats. When a skeptical George Creel asked one of Theodore Roosevelt’s guides how the former President, “blind in one eye, and myopic in the other,” could hit any of the animals […]
A Nearly-Successful Attempt to Write the Perfect Role for Jacqueline Bisset—An Appreciation of “Mystery” Writer Ross Thomas
“Kissing her, Stallings decided, was like kissing your first older woman—the one with all the wicked experience. He then decided not to decide anything else and simply go along with whatever happened except that what happened was far from simple. Instead, it was intricate, a trifle wild, totally sensual and innovative even to Stallings who […]
Goodbye car, you served me well
Here I am sitting at the wheel chair lift at the rear of my 1993 Buick which died this month at State College PA and is, as I write, now a paperweight-like compressed object already sold by the wrecking car company that bought the car. The odometer reading at the car’s death was 160,084 miles. […]