Coincidences are happy flukes, I say, maybe rarely signs of a higher significance. My Beloved, true to our tomayto-tomahto nature, calls nearly all of them synchronicities. It was over the weekend when MB had a cartoon light bulb flash over her head: We need a cell-phone tower in the yard, collect rent and escape the […]
We’ve had a finch feeder — the kind with slits for tiny niger seed — in the yard for years, and, until Saturday, the thistle (what niger had been called) was so rarely sampled that it grew mold. To prevent another violation of the Washington County Health Department restaurant regs (Section 8H, fly-by, not Section […]
Review: An Evening with Bobby McFerrin, Chick Corea and Jack DeJohnette, Sunday 13 April 2008, Walton Arts Center, Fayetteville As admirable as jazz critics like Gary Giddins and Nat Hentoff are, even they couldn’t describe last night’s evening of “free jazz” adequately. It’d be like explaining a joke, ruins it. I won’t try, but surely […]
Here are three articles claiming with scant evidence that women are fiction and men non-fiction. The earliest comes from the March 24, 2008, edition of The New Yorker, which started out as possibly a look at where the two literatures overlap in either memoir or false memoir. But near the end it dives into a […]
This tale is in honor of Robert Benchley, on account of the day. For those of you who don’t know much about him, Benchley’s nickname in his Hollywood days was Dick Cheney. Copyright 2008 Ben S. Pollock DATELINE MIRTHOLOGY — Saturday I rushed into the yard for some early spring gardening. My neighbor had been […]
Things are tough all over so what am I doing, about to criticize non-profits I favor? The endeavors — literature, fine art, serious music — are the sorts of things that keep me rooted here, but some of their staff members could use some free advice, for what it’s worth. 1. The literary bimonthly Oxford […]