`Matt Hart
Freesia. Copper or Wool. Copper has long had a traditional meaning of prosperity, good luck, and good fortune. Couples who celebrate their seventh wedding anniversary can indeed celebrate their good fortune in finding one another. The Old Testament has a passage (Proverbs 31) describing wives of noble character as women who select wool and spin yarns with eager hands.
Clea Simon reviews John Dufresne's No Regrets, Coyote, which "touches on issues of life, death, family, and the craziness of those living on the edge..."
In poetry, David Yezzi honors these “extraordinary creatures,” walking mysteries, and gives them a voice. In Robinson’s title essay, she writes: “It may be mere historical conditioning, but when I see a man or woman alone, he or she looks mysterious to me, which is only to say that for a moment I see another human being clearly.”
Esolen reminds us of Marilynne Robinson’s novel Gilead (2004) and her most recent book, the essay collection When I Was a Child I Read Books (2012), and of the vulgarization of higher education. He writes:
“Whenever we meet a human being, then, we meet that extraordinary creature who can think of time past and time to come, and times that never were. We meet one whose next thought rarely has to do with food or the act of sex but with shaking a bough of wet leaves to see the drops spatter and splash, or with a jest to cap the jest of a friend as they sit on a shady porch, or with one who walks down to the quiet graveyard to place a vase of flowers at her mother’s headstone, to stand awhile there, and say a prayer, and think of her while the cardinals whistle their love calls from the trees.”
From superhero movies to techy sitcoms to captains of industry, geeks have been running the show for years. But now that 'geek chic' is in the dictionary, and Topshop is selling 'dork' T-shirts, what is the future for nerd culture? how the outsiders won
Why, in the end, do we read memoir? What’s in it for us – these stories about someone else, these hundreds of pages of adversity and self-discovery, triumph and tarnish and gleam? The Signifying Life: In Praise of the Outward-Looking Memoir
Why have't I seen this before? Communist last supper
I believe that my observations have always led me to find that the so-called realist moves about the world with a closed mind, ringed as it were with concrete and cement, and that the so-called romantic is like an unfenced garden in and out of which truth can wander at will.
— Joseph Roth, born on this date in l894
