Month: September 2023

  • Takeaways: Tuba Skinny

    Photo from tubaskinny.com Ever listen to heavy metal without the distortion on the guitars? No? Well, it’s an experience you will soon forget. How about ABBA for alto recorder to level-set your tastes? Maybe the Star Wars theme on bagpipes is more your style. Or, for you Queen fans, here’s a little Bohemian Rhapsody played…

  • Field Notes: Transplanting season

    The meaning of the word is clear. There’s a plant. It’s been planted. Then it needs to move to another location. It’s being “transplanted.” Simple. However, in practice, there’s another word that is more descriptive of the process: “Uprooted.” To be fair, I don’t take this lightly. I know, from practical experience, that the likelihood…

  • Commonplaces: Nothing more to take away

    My first experience in this notion of “perfection in design” came as a cast member for a production of a Bertolt Brecht play produced by a highly regarded American repertory theater in the 1970’s. The director was a rising star in the West End in London and well known for his Marxist-progressive sympathies. The costume…

  • Takeaways: Robert Earl Keen

    Macondo, Stonington, CT My introduction to Robert Earl Keen was his 1996 live album No. 2 Live Dinner A spirited performance of “Gringo Honeymoon,” a rowdy ballad tinged with melancholy performed before an appreciative audience hooked me. There’s always something special about hearing singer-songwriters performing their own work. The emotion is personal, the phrasing confident.…

  • Commonplaces: “Gradually and then suddenly”

    I first made note of this quote from Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises eight or ten years ago and I have noticed it cropping up on-line recently in different contexts. “How did you go bankrupt?” Bill asked. “Two ways,” Mike said. “Gradually and then suddenly.” This is a good example of Hemingway’s economy of speech…

  • Commonplaces

    I acquired journal #1 to jot down ideas for Kind of Plaid, my first novel. I commuted into Boston most weeks but also spent a good deal of time traveling from Boston on project business to places like Spokane and Cincinnati and Wausau, so I had plenty of time to let the “what if?” improvisation…

  • Now What?

    About a year ago I started work on another novel. As that work gained traction this blog was one of the things I simply set aside. We still made visits to both coasts to visit grandkids (and their parents), I still maintained and expanded landscaping operations, I served our little church as Deacon, and I…