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Becoming Southern

July 31, 2026
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Am I Southern? I have lived in the American South for most of my life. I am comfortable with most of the culture and folkways of the region. Both my marriages have been to Southern women and this is the place I choose to live. But I was not born here. Worse, I came from New Jersey. 

If there is anything more un-Southern than Bergen County, just off the George Washington Bridge, I would be hard pressed to name it. Even the wilds of Afghanistan has more in common with life in the South than I had growing up. That sense of tribal identity — of living in the hardscrabble land, of having kinship with the soil, the bona fides of regional identity — that is more Southern than life along the Turnpike. I don’t remember anyone I grew up with pounding their chests with pride saying “I’m from New Jersey.” No one cared. My family didn’t go back five generations there.  

It is true that the South has changed, become more cosmopolitan. Not everyone’s a farmer growing tobacco or sorghum. Interstate migration has diluted the percentage of homegrown folk, and cities such as Atlanta or Houston have radically altered the demographics. Even the accent and vocabulary have begun evening out. 

Yet, there is still that sense of Southernness. It may be less clannish than it used to be, but it is still layered in to the psyche of anyone who grew up here. 

I first arrived in 1966, entering college in central North Carolina. There was then still a strong backlash — even a mainstream backlash — against the Civil Rights movement. Jesse Helms spewed his racist venom on the radio waves, and was soon elected to the U.S. Senate. His campaign, against Democrat Nick Galifianakis, preyed on bigotry and that suspicious foreign-sounding name: “Vote for Jesse; he’s one of us.” The Klan was still in business. If schools were legally desegregated, most communities still had a Black side of town. 

No one now takes a second notice of a Black family sitting at the Red Lobster. I’m not claiming racism is over; it is not. But the norms have shifted. Black newscasters on TV or a Black state trooper are hardly noted. 

One thing I noticed as soon as I got here: There is and was a countervailing sense of manners that didn’t play out in the same way back in New Jersey. Some of it struck me as odd, initially, and even worse, some seemed absolutely hypocritical. I didn’t understand. 

I remember a perfect example of how this works in the South, and why I have come to understand the brilliance of it. Many years ago, my wife’s teenage cousins (“cousin” is a loosely-defined concept in the South) had bought some new tires for their car. When one of the tires had a blow-out, their father, a Yankee transplant from Massachusetts, drove to the tire-store and screamed at the man there, “You goddamn kid killer! Someone coulda died! — why’d you sell those rotten tires?” He demanded an apology and satisfaction. All he accomplished was to raise the hackles of the tire salesman. Ineffective strategy. Made sense in Boston, but not in North Carolina. Luckily, cooler heads intervened. 

Their Southern-born mom intervened and had a long conversation with the salesman, after first apologizing for her husband. “You have some really nice tires here.” “Thank you ma’am. We try.” “I know. But sometimes something slips through, and I know you would never, ever want to let that happen.” “Well, no, ma’am.” “I’m afraid, I don’t know why, but one of the new tires my daughter bought had a little blow-out. Brand-new, you understand.” “I’m very sorry to hear that.” “Well, I’d hate to inconvenience you, but I know you would want to make things right.” “Of course, ma’am.” I believe there was also a bit of discussion about the salesman’s son, who went to the same high school as the girls, and probably a bit, too, about whose aunt had known whose aunt and a recipe for a good coconut cake. Things resolved amicably and no one was further accused of anything nefarious. 

This is a culture, after all, where the gravest insult comes in the form of “Bless your heart.” 

  I know full well that since I wasn’t born here, I can never truly be Southern. And I also have been reminded constantly by my wives that I’m a Yankee. Even if they haven’t held it against me, the fact is always there. I grew up with bagels and saurkraut, not with biscuits and slaw. 

My ex-wife asks if it even matters if I’m Southern or not. Why should I care? “There’s no court you have to prove it to,” she says. “Yes there is,” I say. “There’s in-laws.”

As the years slid by, I have become increasingly acculturated, so that I now lift four fingers off the steering wheel in salute of drivers headed the other way. I talk slower than I used to (part of that, I admit, is age). I am no longer surprised by ham hocks in my beans (which, of course, I now call “pintos”), and I find myself saying “sir” and “ma’am” in a way that would have made my New Jersey relatives look at me like I was an alien. Up there, it was closer to “Hey, Mack…” 

I would say the transformation is roughly 80 percent complete. I still love pickled herring in sour cream, bagels with a schmear, and cannot yet bring myself to accept the local pizza. I have been ruined by the New Jersey version, perfection in every aspect. 

And when I open a tin of King Oscar kippers for a sandwich, Anne will call from the other room, “What is that stink?” And I cannot get used to sweet tea. Curls my tongue. I take mine unsweetened. 

I love Eastern North Carolina barbecue and hushpuppies. And I now understand that the dried-out Shake’n’Bake chicken I had growing up (more wood plank than comestible) has absolutely nothing to do with fried chicken. I grant your fried chicken balances my pizza. 

It has taken me longer to accept boiled greens, but I have gotten there. I had spinach growing up, but collards stewed with sidemeat until it turned to something akin to road tar — well, that took a little longer. And, to be fair, even most Southerners now let their turnip greens keep a resemblance to its original form as plant life. I now am able to add them to my plate sprinkled with some vinegar. 

One one side of the ledger, I’ve now fired rifles and pistols recreationally; I wait for pedestrians crossing the road in front of me (that was a hard one for me: where I came from efficiency was the rule — who could get out of the way faster, and it was usually the car); I automatically walk on the traffic side of the sidewalk when with my wife; I make small talk with the checkout staff at the grocery store (and I now call it a grocery store instead of a supermarket). 

On the other side of the ledger, I’m told I talk too fast; I have no interest in college football; I don’t listen to country music, and Anne tells me “you’re still unsound on black-eyed peas.” On my first trip to the barber, making small talk, he asked which church I attend. “I’m not a believer,” was the nicest way I could answer, and the subject changed. 

If there is something that draws a line I cannot cross, it is probably Robert E. Lee. My late wife, Carole, kept a portrait of Bobby Lee in the china cupboard. I was never allowed to say nary a  word ’gainst his sainthood, and in converse, she would bring the hammer of heaven down upon my head if I ever said anything temperate about Wm. Tecumseh Sherman. “Villain!!!” 

My vocabulary has shifted, too. Southern expressions fall out of my mouth without my even being aware of them. I say “Y’all” unconsciously, and even “all y’all.” I am fixin’ to do something. “Cattywampus” and “plumb” — as in “plumb outa Crisco” — I hardly note as I say them. “Reckon” is now in my regular speech, as is “poke,” as in where I lodge my vittles when I haul’em from the grocery store. I have been known to call my jeans “britches,” and my suspenders “galluses.” But that is more mountain talk than just Southern.

I asked Anne how I’ve changed over the years. “You’re not as obnoxious as you used to be,” she says. 

I have been well trained by a series of serious-minded women, among them wives, girlfriends and mothers-in-law. With an emphasis for the last on “law.” I know my place.

Having second thoughts

July 25, 2026
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I heard Allen Ginsberg say one of the stupidest things I’ve ever heard. He had come to town to talk about a work he had collaborated on with Philip Glass, Hydrogen Jukebox. It was a powerful piece, which I first heard live, performed in Tucson. 

I have always loved Ginsberg’s poetry, from the first, when I read Howl in that tiny, squarish paperback published by City Lights Books. It is one of the great poems of the 20th century. I eventually collected his later books, including Kaddish, Planet News, Reality Sandwiches, although it was clear that not all his writing was up to the level of Howl. He was a very spotty writer, and the older he got, the less interesting the spots. 

He sat on the stage that evening, in Scottsdale, talking about his work and making a case for his then-motto: “First thought, best thought.” How the version an idea comes to you spontaneously will always be better than it will be if you fuss over it and refashion it. Revision always dilutes the inspiration, he said. “First thought, best thought.

As a writer myself, my first best thought was: “Bullshit.” The man has deluded himself with his own bunkum. Most writers will tell you, honestly, that the first draft is always improved by reshaping, clarifying, expansion or excision. Writing is rewriting. 

That doesn’t mean that the initial idea is worthless, but it needs refining, and especially, it needs to have the really dumb parts taken out. 

The proof of this comes from Ginsberg himself, to be seen in Harper Perennial’s 50th anniversary edition of Howl, the original draft facsimile. His best poem, considered such by almost anyone’s account, was heavily reworked and refined, honed to a sparkle. 

First thought: “I saw the best mind angel-headed hipsters damned./ What consciousness in oblivion, Joan?” Written in August, 1955. A week later, in the original draft of Howl, it became: “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving mystical naked,/ who dragged themselves through the angry streets at dawn looking for a negro fix,/who poverty and tatters and fantastic minds sat up all night in lofts contemplating jazz”

Doesn’t have quite the inevitable ring and resonance of the published version: “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,/ dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix,/ Angel-headed hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection/ to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night” 

That’s quite an upgrade, from “poverty and tatters” and “fantastic minds” to “starry dynamo in the machinery of night.” Prose to poetry. 

Do I think Ginsberg was a hypocrite for his espoused faith of “first thought, best thought”? I think less hypocrite and more that he was drinking his own Kool-Aid. He and his fellow writers — the Beat writers — became fascinated with Buddhism and stories of Zen spontaneity, of Haiku masters whipping up an instant 17 syllables of enigmatic profundity. Most likely, these tales of Basho and Buson are legends and myths, conjured years later. I rather imagine them counting syllables on their fingertips and honing the verse in their minds before committing them to their mouths. Careful craftsmanship. 

The Beat version of Buddhism, and the accouterments of Chinese and Japanese culture are a fantasy. In a way, it might be hinted, this was the Beat version of what Edward Said called “orientalism,” and the hypnotic attraction of exoticism. 

I remember visiting the Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colo., to visit an old college buddy, who had joined the group. As we wandered through the campus, we passed a classroom, where Ginsberg was teaching. The students were chanting, along with the poet, a monotonous phrase in Tibetan — “Om mani padme hung” — over and over, so the noise coming through the open door sounded more like the insect buzz of a summer evening. 

This was part of the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, which Ginsberg had co-founded. And I have no doubt that chanting the mantra may have helped some students focus their minds. I practice a form of meditation, myself, although I don’t call it that — mostly I call it sitting on the back patio looking at the trees and clouds and trying to think no thoughts at all. So, I am not making fun of them. I don’t doubt their sincerity. But I do worry that importing portions of an exotic culture, without having grown up immersed in it, may be charged with being a version of cultural tourism. Yellow robes do not a Buddhist make. 

But Ginsberg has enriched our trove of poetry. In addition to Howl, there is Kaddish (especially moving in the audio version with the poet reciting his own words), and shorter poems such as Kral Majales. You learn to separate the wheat from the chaff. 

I reread Howl periodically. It gives me great pleasure, the way certain poems do, for me, such as Wordsworth’s “Intimations Ode,” Whitman’s Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking, Arnold’s Dover Beach, Conrad Aiken’s Tetélestai, or Dylan Thomas’ Fern Hill. Poems that dig deep and remain buried in the psyche. They refresh my sense of language and of being alive. 

It is also true, as with Ginsberg, that a good portion of Wordsworth is banal and prosaic, a boatload of Whitman is blather, most of Arnold’s poetry is forgettable, and, let’s face it, Aiken doesn’t make most anthologies of the best American verse. But each has been capable of magic, and I read these poems over and over, the way you listen to favorite tunes.

In his best work, Ginsberg fussed and reworked and licked the bear-whelp into something infinitely quotable and meaningful. If he had stuck to his first thought, no one would still be reading it. 

Naming names

July 15, 2026
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When Wolfgang Mozart was three, he was already picking out notes on a keyboard. His father recognized the potential earnings potential and trotted young Wolfie around as a prodigy, showing off to wealthy patrons for their gratuities. I’m no Mozart, and my talent was of an infinitely smaller order, but I remember when I was three and my father showed me off, too. 

At that tender age, I had learned to recognize all the cars that passed on the street in front of our house in Teaneck, N.J. I would sit on the front stoop and call out names as they drove by. That would have been in 1951, and the cars were quite distinct. There were Packards and DeSotos; there were Mercuries and Studebakers — each with their characteristic shapes, grills, ornaments and sizes. 

DeSoto

It was only a few years since the war ended, and many older cars remained on the road, like the LaSalles or the pre-war Fords. Our next door neighbor even had a car with a rumble seat. (They were comically called “mother-in-law seats,” although I can’t believe many could had clambered up to get in.)

1939 Plymouth with rumble seat

At three, I knew the Pontiac had three chrome stripes on its hood; the Buick had its portholes; the Ford had its bullet-grill; the Hudson seemed as broad as the river I thought it was named for. Many station wagons had wood paneling. I had them all down pat. 

1950 Ford station wagon

And on July 4 that year, when I was three-and-a-half years old, the family drove down the hill to watch the fireworks over the Hackensack River. There was a crowd gathered. The gravel parking lot was full, with people lining the banks of the river to catch the display. I sat on the hood of Dad’s black 1950 Chevrolet and not much liking the noise. Two of my uncles were there, too, with their families. And Dad decided to show me off. And so, with uncles in tow, and a few of their friends, too, we trooped up and down the lot with me announcing the names of every car we passed, all to the astonishment of the grown-ups. Hudsons, Studebakers, Packards, to say nothing of the Fords, Oldsmobiles, Buicks, and Nashes. I felt so proud showing off. I don’t know if Dad actually took wagers or not, but he clearly enjoyed bragging on his son. 

1950 Frazer

Through the 1960s, cars designs remained distinct, especially with the absurdly growing tail fins — or the Edsel, described as “a Ford sucking a lemon.” The also grew to be great barges of the road, rolling with wobbly suspensions (which you can’t help notice on old TV reruns when those leviathans turn corners). But cars have since been growing more generic. 

1950 Buick Special Deluxe Jumbo

Oddly, as I became a teenager, when most of my buddies were swooning over 400 horsepower behemoths and zero-to-sixty ratings, I had no real interest in car culture. I have always loved driving, but never much cared which car I was driving in. But something of that original car-naming from my preschool days survived. 

1950 Nash Airflyte

As I grew up and went to school, the habit of learning and naming classes of things continued. In the third grade, it was dinosaurs; in fourth grade, it was whales; fifth grade brought ships. On it went. Later, with birdwatching, or the naming of wildflowers. Most recently, I compiled a list of the names of British comedians I recognized on sight; it had 127 names on it. I guess you never get over it. It’s a form of acquisition, and all adds to the trove of knowledge and experience. A hunger for knowing. 

1950 Pontiac Chieftan

There is a streak that mainly boys seem have: learning and naming. I don’t remember schoolgirls having anything like the habit. Maybe they did and I just didn’t notice. To boys at that age, between the ages of maybe five and the advent of puberty, girls are, if not the enemy, at least utterly foreign. 

1949 Packard 23 Series club sedan

Many boys never outgrow this naming quirk. Often a concern with regalia properly sorted. When I was an art critic in Phoenix, the museum had an annual show of Cowboy Art, with lots of paintings of shoot-em-ups, horse wrangling; cow-punching and war parties. All kinds of Western movie tropes, but with the serious, almost solemn belief in “historical accuracy.” No one would picture a Montana cowboy riding the kind of saddle popular in Texas, or show a sheriff holding a gun in 1882 that wasn’t manufactured until 1893. They could be quite persnickety about such things. Women’s hair-dos, though, not so much care in that, but then, women didn’t much figure in their mythologies. When I wrote a review that made fun of such things, I wound up being hanged in effigy in a cartoon in Western Horseman magazine. 

1950 Ford Custom Club coupe

All this came back to me the other day as I sat at a red light and noticed the flood of cross traffic. I could see vehicle after vehicle pour across the intersection with monotonous sameness. There is no way I could tell anymore a Honda from a Kia.  

Three seemed to be only three kinds of vehicles, each sharing a sameness with others in its class: First, the SUVs, bigger than they need to be — the bullies of the highway; second, the small sedans — they used to be derided as “European jogging shoes” — that are faceless as store mannequins; and finally, the pickup trucks. This last may be more prominent in the South, where I live, but the cars crossing in front of me seemed about equally divided into these three. The only punctuation in this repetitive tune was the public transit bus. 

The only way to discover the difference was if you could see the logo on the trunk. What was once the personalities of their manufacturers have become mere brand names, no more different than yogurt brands or actual jogging shoes. 

1957 Nash Rambler Metropolitan

How different from when I was three or four and naming the cars (with a certain amount of joy in their esthetics, and pride in my ability to name them). They were very distinct designs. “We had faces then,” as Gloria Swanson says in Sunset Boulevard. (actually, I looked it up and misremembered. She actually said, “We didn’t need dialog; we had faces.” But same thing, right?) Car manufacturers used their special designs to sell the cars and create identity. Hence the broad Packard and the Studebaker, with its pooched “mouth.”  

1950 Studebaker Commander

I don’t know why there is such a paucity of interesting design among cars. When I was little, they really did have faces.

Around the block a few times

July 11, 2026
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I’m now 78 and I’ve done a few things in my life. Probably most people have. Things they can list that few others have managed. Places visited; people who have impacted their lives; adventures to recount to grandchildren. 

And so I think back to recount my own experiences, those particular to my own past. Maybe others have similar lists. This is mine. 

I’ve been charged by a bear, for instance. How many people can say that? I was hiking the Appalachian Trail in Smoky Mountain National Park with a few friends. By late afternoon, we reached a lean-to shelter and I walked out onto the path with my camera, when a black bear — maybe two or three years old — crossed the trail about 30 feet from me, spotted me, didn’t like what he saw and turned and charged at me. He was no more than five feet away when he veered off to my right and chugged off into the woods. I was stupid enough that while he came at me, instead of running back to the shelter, I took photos, so at least now, I have the evidence. If it’s a tad fuzzy, I’m sure you can understand. 

Certainly the bear makes my list. But I tried remembering other things that would make the list of things peculiar to my life, that few people are unlikely to have shared.

Almost no one now crosses the Atlantic on an ocean liner. I did, in 1966 aboard the MS Oslofjord from New York to Norway, when I accompanied my grandmother to the Old Country where she was born. I was a high-school student at the time, and I remember standing on the ship’s deck watching the Orkney Island lights at midnight, bright points on the black horizon as we sailed past. 

There’s a lot of travel in my past. I’ve crossed the U.S. twice by train. Once when I moved from North Carolina to Seattle, taking the Southern Crescent from Greensboro to New York, the Twentieth Century Limited from NY to Chicago and the Empire Builder from Chicago to Seattle. 

The Southern Crescent

I recall the dreamlike lights of Toledo factories as we passed after midnight; the 10-below zero air when I stretched my legs at the station in Minneapolis; the vast empty spaces between farmhouses in South Dakota; and the track-side elk watching the train pass by near Yakima, Wash. 

The second time was more luxurious: Working for the Phoenix newspaper, I was assigned to write a story about the then newly-launched Sunset Limited route from LA to Miami that passed through Phoenix, bringing the first rail service to the city in decades. 

The paper flew me to Los Angeles where I boarded, and flew me back from Miami when finished. In between, I had a sleeper compartment and ate my meals in the dining car, which Amtrak had fitted out initially with a first-class galley and real chefs. That didn’t last long after my trip, before cost-cutting turned steak into saran-wrapped bologna sandwiches. 

Mississippi at Cairo, Ill. 

One of my beats at the newspaper was as a travel writer and I got to choose many of my subjects. I have driven the length of the Mississippi River from its source at Lake Itasca in Minnesota to its end in the Gulf of Mexico. So, I’m one of the few people who have ever visited Cairo, Ill., which is a largely deserted town, at the tip of the state where the Ohio River pairs with the grandfather of all American waters. 

I have also driven the Pacific Coast Highway from Tijuana, Mexico to Vancouver, British Columbia. And as part of that trip, I got to stop off at Point Roberts, that tiny exclave of the U.S. that can only be reached overland by driving through parts of Canada. Virtually nobody visits there, because there is nothing to be seen or done, and the only reason to go there is to be able to say you had done so. 

Back before the wilder parts of the road were closed to traffic, I drove the length of Mulholland Drive and Highway, across the crest of the Santa Monica Mountains, from its beginning at the Hollywood Freeway over Cahuenga Pass, past all the film stars’ extravagant homes into the brushland wilderness, with its dirt roads, and finally down to the Pacific Coast Highway at Leo Carillo State Beach, some 55 miles later. 

I pitched a story to my editor about the Hundredth Meridian that traditionally divided the East of the country from the West — the line that separated the land that got more than 20 inches of rain per year, from that which got under that amount. I drove from Laredo, Texas to the Canadian border, writing stories the whole way. And when I got back, I conspired with a page designer to take over an entire Sunday travel section with my pieces — all without telling my editor. “If you had told me, I would never have permitted it,” she said. “But I’m glad you did it. I looks great.” Easier to ask forgiveness than permission.

Clearing storm, Mont St. Michel

I have been many places in my life. I’ve been to Mont Saint-Michel in France, that island abbey on the coast of Normandy, where the tides come in at such a speed that anyone walking on the mud flats at low tide is in danger of drowning. I’ve been to see the Bayeux Tapestry in its current home. I’ve listened to the organist at Notre Dame de Paris play a recital of Messiaen. 

Two views of gargoyle rainspout at Chartres Cathedral

I’ve climbed to the top of Chartres Cathedral, where I could look down at the gargoyle rainwater drains and see their channels and spouts. For that matter, I’ve visited most of the major gothic churches of northern France. 

I stood at night on the banks of the Rhine River in Dusseldorf, German, where the composer Robert Schumann had lived and written his deeply romantic Rhenish Symphony. The rushing current of the mile-wide river, catching moonlight in its waves, seemed the essence and power of  nature. 

Cape of Good Hope, South Africa

I had always had an interest in the remote and isolated places in the world, and I got to visit the Cape of Good Hope in South Africa, which is as remote and isolated as you can pretty much get. While in that country, I also got to taste grilled mopane worms. Few Americans have managed that, or would care to. 

I’ve been to Hudson Bay in Canada, to Percé Rock on the Gaspe Peninsula, to Glacier Bay in Alaska, to the Yukon, and to the Cape Verde Islands (although that one hardly counts, since it was a layover on the flight to Africa; I didn’t get to see much; bragging rights only). 

I have been to all 48 contiguous states many times. I used to say “I’ve been everywhere, man, I’ve been everywhere.” And indeed, I can bore my wife when watching some film on TV and I recognize locations I’ve been. “I’ve been there,” I say. She gives me the side-eye. 

I’ve canoed with alligators in the Okefenokee Swamp. Driven through Death Valley in July in a car with no air-conditioning — nearly collapsed from dehydration and had to drink a full gallon of water to revive.  

Zabriskie Point, Death Valley, Calif. 

I have driven the length of the Blue Ridge Parkway I don’t know how many times, and the continuing Skyline Drive, also. There are notable roads, often over mountain peaks, such as the Going-to-the-Sun Road in Montana’s Glacier National Park, the Beartooth Highway from Montana into Wyoming (we drove in the summer, but it still snowed in flurries), the Tioga Road over the Sierra Nevada. Or the roads in the East like the Kancamagus Highway in New Hampshire, the Natchez Trace from Mississippi to Tennessee, and the Colonial Parkway that runs from Jamestown to Yorktown in Virginia. Many more with no special names.

Richard Avedon

I took photographer Richard Avedon out to lunch at my favorite  Salvadoran restaurant in Phoenix. I interviewed Duke Ellington’s son, Mercer, when he brought the band to play in Phoenix. I talked to him only about his own music (sure that he was tired of repeating all the chestnuts about his old man), and at the concert, he dedicated a performance of his  Blue Serge to me, saying the band hadn’t played it in 20 years, but they brought it out and spiffied it up just for me. I knew Frederick Sommer, the reclusive Surrealist photographer who lived in Prescott, Ariz., and visited his home several times, where we talked about things that would have made no sense to anyone listening in. 

I’ve fired guns a few times over the years, once when I was training to be a security guard (a low point in my career), and several times at black-powder gatherings. My wife had a flintlock carbine that I had the pleasure of firing. A lot of smoke and a loud, brusque “whoosh” rather than a cracking “bang,” and a .50 caliber ball blew out the barrel at the target. 

Yes, that’s me, ca. 1981

I worked at the zoo in Seattle, and most days, when the place closed for the public, I would accompany the bear keeper to the back alleys behind the exhibits and feed leftover food-stand hot dogs to the grizzly bears. We were behind the enclosure, about 20 feet above the bears. They would stand up, open their maws and we would toss the franks down their gullets. No swallowing, just straight down the chute to the stomach. 

Behind them was the back entrance to the tiger cage, with a small barred door to get in when the keeper needed to clean up. When a tiger came to the door, I saw what felt like the most enormous thing I had ever seen, its giant head, bigger than my imagination could hold, and when he “purred” the ground shook. I would rank that the single most impressive thing I’ve ever encountered. 

That zookeeper was my friend, and he once commented to me about the crowds, “You see all those kids, don’tcha just want to run them all over?” 

There were many more zoo stories, but most are not suitable for family reading. But more animals: I once had a six-foot boa constrictor wrapped around my neck. I visited the grave of Hopalong Cassidy’s horse, Topper, at the Los Angeles Pet Memorial Park in Calabasas, where you can also find Rudolph Valentino’s dog, Kaber, Petey, the ring-eyed dog from the “Our Gang” comedies, and Tarzan’s chimp Cheetah (real name Jiggs). 

I might also mention driving to Maine in 1963 to see the total eclipse of the sun, or having crossed the equator twice, and in Africa, seeing the Southern Cross and the constellation Orion in the night sky standing on his head, with his sword pointing straight up. 

Which reminds me of the night camping in the Outer Banks of North Carolina with my friend Sandro, and discovering that someone had forgotten to close and lock the door to the Hatteras lighthouse, and so we snuck in, climbed to the top, heard the roar, and watched the black surf below us catch the light. 

Or the time I climbed Roden Crater in Arizona with artist James Turrell, who was reshaping the extinct volcano to make an earthwork piece of art from the mountain. We were standing at the top as the sun set. “People talk of nightfall,” he said to me. “But they should call it nightrise, like sunrise.” Because, he pointed out, the night doesn’t descend, but rises, as a mass of dark sky climbs from the horizon in the east up into the sky, eating away the dusk. You can actually see the borderline as it rises, until all is dissolved in the general night. It is a startling effect that we don’t notice, because our horizons are generally blocked by trees or buildings. The phenomenon is a stunning revelation. I have looked for it — and seen it — many times since then. We walked down the mountain in the gathering dark. 

Anti-Ism-ism

June 30, 2026
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I have always avoided writing about politics in this blog. In fact, I wrote, many years ago, that I believed that “politics answers no question worth asking.” It cannot provide meaning in life; it cannot answer the big questions. It can attempt to ameliorate the problems it has itself caused, by trying to fix its mistakes, although every repair just causes newer problems. It can reduce suffering, although, in practice, it more often causes it. You nail a patch over a hole causing a leak in the boat, but the nails just cause more holes.

But the big issues of life are not addressed by politics, and especially not by party politics. Yet, we are stuck with it. We work within the system we have inherited, or sometimes, we attempt to overturn that system and build something better. The report card on those attempts is rather dismal. 

I have no faith in any system; every system is a simplification of the infinite complexity of what we assume to be reality. And worst of all, anything with an “ism” at the end of it. It will ignore much in order to make sense of the fraction that is left. While granting there will always be a system of one sort or another to organize the practical relations among peoples, no system encompasses the whole of experience. It is a scribbled shorthand. 

I am an old man now, but once was a young man committed to justice and reform. I came of age during the Vietnam War and spent angry hours protesting that war. I attended a Quaker college and became a convinced pacifist in the 1960s. Now, I am less sure of myself; more willing to accept that I don’t have answers. But that only leads me to believe no one else does, either. 

Meaning in life comes from many things. I find it in art, literature, music, but more importantly, in relationships, family, grandchildren. I find it in kindness and in helping others when I can. Being useful. I realize that others also find it in faith, or belonging to a group. We each have our ways. 

Our son, Lars, came for a visit, driving up from Austin, Texas, for a few days. We had intense conversations deep into the night, which only underlined the difference in generations that divides us. At 55, Lars remains a kind of embittered idealist, who imagines a better world, while ol’ stick-in-the-mud me just remembers the lines from Yeats, “And when they know what old books tell/ And that no better can be had,/ Know why an old man should be mad.” An attitude Lars ascribes to Boomer complacency. 

He talks of anarcho-syndicalism. As he explained his version of it, it  sounded to me very like Brook Farm. I remember how that went. I am suspicious of any kind of utopianism. 

I had my green days of idealism, too, when I thought my generation was going to fix all the problems that our elders had created. We were going to end war, end racism, end sexism and a glorious new age would be born. Everything that has transpired since then knocks the wind out of me, and I now have more modest hopes — not that we will perfect the world, but that a certain boring normality will descend, with all its faults, imprecisions and piecemeal improvements. 

While Lars believes in radical action, with perhaps rolling heads, I remind him that all the idealism of Robespierre left rather a horrifying lot of rolling heads — including his own — and if they got rid of a monarch, they merely wound up with Napoleon. Know why an old man should be mad. 

My generation’s idealism, after all, did help end the Vietnam war — without stopping recurrence in Iraq and now Iran — incrementally reduced racism — certainly not enough, but a smidgeon and even that now being lost — and it was women of my age who shouldered their way into chipping out  bits of patriarchal misogyny. Again, with a frightening recent recidivism. 

But I have to admit that a certain Boomer exhaustion may well contribute to what looks to the young as complacency. We leave the trenches to those who still have the energy and the working knees. 

We failed, our fathers’ generation failed before us, our children’s generation is already failing, and whoever takes over next can only fail in turn. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t keep trying, but should maintain a certain humility about what is actually possible. Hence my desire for something more normal than the current insanity, bigotry, and incompetence. And my fear that nothing better can be had. 

Hybrid car

June 21, 2026
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I am a centaur. Well, not technically — but I know what it feels like to be one. Sorta. 

A centaur is a familiar mythological creature, half man, half horse — although more like one-third man with two arms, and two-thirds horse with four legs (although there is a second version that is half man, with two arms and two human legs in the front, and the rear half of a horse abutted  to the backside). In either case, with six appendages, the beast might well be classified as an insect. 

Mythology is well populated with the hybrid offspring of human and animal, from the Minotaur through the sphinxes and down to the half-man, half goat satyrs. They all seem to be metaphors for the animal side of human nature. 

Like most Greek myths, there are multiple versions of the story, but in the most common form, Ixion lusted after Hera (Zeus’s wife), so the Big Guy formed a false image of Hera from a cloud, named Nephele, and Ixion had his way with the cloud, which subsequently gave birth to a son, named Kentauros (Κένταυρος or Centaurus), who, in turn mated with the Magnesian mares of Thessaly, who then engendered the race of horse-men called Centauridae, or centaurs. In his anger at Ixion (remember Ixion?Several generations back?) Zeus struck him with a thunderbolt and bound him to a burning, spinning wheel that careened through the heavens forever. The wheel is central here. 

Hence, the centaurs are the grandchildren of wheel-bound Ixion, which brings us  back to me as a centaur. It is often thought that the idea of the centaur was evolved from first seeing men riding horses — who knew they could do that? The man and horse must be the same being. Merger of Homo and Equus into a single being, one mind, one corpus. 

We don’t much ride horses anymore, at least not on city streets. We drive cars. And it is possible to merge with the machine just as it was thought to merge with beast. When I drive, the car and I become a single being. I am not just a person getting into a car, strapping on a seatbelt, plugging in an ignition key and revving up the engine. I become one with my automobile. It has been this way for me since I first got my driver license. 

As a sidenote, I have tried riding a horse. Did not go well. It was a docile animal, but it turns out that the round belly of the horse and the desire of my knees to remain straight conflicted painfully. Knees bend front to back, horses pull them sideways. The wrenching pain was somatic dissonance. I got back in my car. 

I’ve been a car person ever since I was two or three years old. We had a black 1950 Chevrolet, and in those years before children’s car seats, I rode in the back, standing on the seat so I could look out the window. I loved riding and watching the New Jersey scenery go by. 

My younger brother, on the other hand, has always had a different response to car travel. I rode with my nose pressed to the glass so I wouldn’t miss anything. He said that car travel, for him, was much like an elevator ride. You got in, waited till you got to your destination, and the door opened and you got out. Basically, it was lost time. 

From my earliest years, I was hooked on driving and riding in cars, but I never transferred that interest to the cars, themselves. 

When I became a teenager, cars were important to all the boys I knew. They swore by Motor Trend magazine, and looked forward each fall to the unveiling of the latest model cars, with their tail fins and chrome trim. Which new car could go from zero to sixty the fastest. In contrast, I didn’t much worry about racing through city streets. Zero to sixty was a meaningless metric. For me, they were a means of going. 

My first car was a powder-blue 1960 Ford Falcon station wagon, which had a mattress in the back and loosey-goosey steering, which led to my first car wreck. The second car was a red Chevy, twice the size of the Ford. For some reason, we kept a bunch of plastic grapes hanging in the rear side-window, and so we named the vehicle, Vanessa Redgrape. (The naming of cars, at a certain age, seems important. They all had names. My friend, Hank, had a green VW beetle he called Gigi, or “G.G.” for “Green Gonad.”)

I also owned a succession of Veedubs, which I loved, in part because I could always repair them with just a hammer and a screwdriver. They were simple. Cars have gotten so much more sophisticated technically, so that now, mechanics generally effect engine repair not by fixing, but by replacing. It was the age, back then, of hippies and Whole Earth Catalogs, and I pined to own a VW Minibus, and eventually I found one I could afford, and it promptly broke down on the way home from the car lot. I couldn’t afford to fix it. 

Many of us have had dogs we treasured, but they eventually die on us, and we sometimes find a replacement, but usually keep in our hearts the ones we loved most. Like the Navy blue Ford Falcon passed on to me when I was down on my luck by my friends Alexander and Mary Lou. It was falling apart, with no heater, no windshield wipers, and a rusted hole in the floor under the brake pedal that let me watch the asphalt pass by below my feet. It was the car I drove up the Blue Ridge to meet the woman who became my wife. It was snowing that day, and I had to drive with my window rolled down and my head stuck out like a locomotive engineer (or a happy dog) because I couldn’t see anything out the windshield. I loved that sorry car. 

Mostly, since then, I have had modest cars with generic names, various Datsuns, Hondas, or Toyotas. Although one very particular exception was the Chevy Citation that came into the family when I married Carole. Citations had a reputation as a break-down special. They were badly designed. But for some glitch in the universe, her car was the opposite of a lemon. Never had a whisper of a problem with it and drove it past 200,000 miles, then gave it to my brother, who continued with it for some time. 

In that car, Carole and I began our many peregrinating years. She was a teacher, and I was also, and so, we had our summers free. In 1981, we put 10,000 miles on the Citation as we drove across the U.S., up and down and back and forth. 

Each year after that, we chose a region and explored it in depth; by the third summer we had visited all 48 contiguous states, and most multiple times. 

When we lived in Phoenix, I’d drive a hundred miles south to watch an opera in Tucson and drive home the same night. I could not tote up the number of miles I’ve sat behind the wheel over my life, but I’m sure I could have gotten to the moon and back, if there had been motels along the way. 

And even now, when I am old and falling apart at the seems, so that even walking is a chore, with knees that need a serious relining, I have no trouble getting in the car and driving. I am most comfortable behind the wheel.

And it is because I have become a centaur. In a car, I am the ghost in the machine. We merge to become one single entity — a car-centaur. I extend my sense of self from bumper to bumper. Proprioception is the sense we have of our bodies and their shape and location in the world. I can feel where my feet end, where the top of my head is. I can twiddle my thumbs with my eyes closed. I have a clear sense of where my body extends. 

In the driver’s seat, that sense expands to encompass a larger whole: The car is as much a part of me as my knees or my fingertips. We have  become mechano-organic. My foot on the clutch and my hand on the gearshift is like breathing, natural and fluid. 

Byzantine gold cup; Indian Kinnara; Russian Polkan

Each culture and every epoch has its hybrid mythiforms, and there are horse-men from the Hindu Kinnara written about in the Mahabharata to the Russian Polkan and the troubadour centaurs of the Byzantine Middle Ages. It seems natural that we should adopt the modern in-car-nation. 

Baseball rant

May 18, 2026
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I am going to start this with a stipulation: I have never accepted the designated hitter. There, it’s out before I go on. 

I am a baseball watcher. I began in the early 1950s, when Vin Scully was a rookie announcer for the Brooklyn Dodgers. The Ol’ Redhead — Red Barber — was still in the booth before he defected to the hated Bronx enemy. I can still name the lineup for the team back then: Duke Snider, Carl Furillo, Gil Hodges, Junior Gilliam, Pee Wee Reese, Jackie Robinson, Roy Campanella, Billy Cox; and pitchers Johnny Podres, Preacher Roe, Carl Erskine, Clem Labine. 

I was watching them on TV before I even went to kindergarten. So, yes, I am a codger now, and perhaps my take on the game can be discounted due to my fundamental inability to recognize the need to change a perfect game into something else. 

But what I notice is a game that used to be the perfect embodiment of talent playing against the odds of the universe stacked against it, being turned into a pantomime of a video game. The original was about humans and nature. No time limits. Every physical measurement at the perfect distance to make even the simplest ground-ball play a matter of microseconds: safe or out. Every ballpark a different shape and dimension. Sunlight, grass, dirt, wood, horsehide, fallibility. 

But now, a culture of regularity, precision and digital evidence have crept in. The game is asked to speed up, not bore us, not last too long, and the judgment of individuals is being required to measure up to computerized accuracy. This is, as far as I’m concerned, not baseball. 

The trend to “update” the game for modern tastes risks losing its soul: slow, deliberate, played out not in nine innings, but over an entire season, through streaks and dry spells, through injuries and yips.

Let’s start with the ballpark itself. The new ones no longer care where the sun shines. 

Once upon a time, ballparks were built so that the third-base foul line ran roughly north-south. That put north over the left-field wall, and as a result, put the afternoon sun where it could do the least harm. 

Fenway Park, Boston

This is why a left-handed pitcher is called a “southpaw.” His hurling arm hangs to the south slope of the mound. 

When Chase Field (then Bank One Ballpark) opened in 1998, however, it was designed so that its north-south axis runs directly from home plate through the pitcher’s mound and over the center-field fence, mathematically bisecting the angle of the foul lines. Any lefty the Diamonbacks fielded turned into an “eastpaw.” 

Chase Field, Phoenix

This may seem like a small deal to you, but it marks a major shift in our cultural inheritance. 

The majority of Americans used to live either on farms or in cities. Either way, they faced each day the essentials of life, milking cows or keeping warm in apartments. Our grandparents had a direct relationship with reality. Little came between them and the natural world. But today’s families are often suburban and don’t do anything with the land except mow it. 

And as for today’s children: What they know of the world comes to them edited, photographed, glitzed up and transformed. And they would rather see something on TV than in the flesh. Indeed, to many of our children, it isn’t real unless it appears on TV. We live increasingly in a secondhand world. 

The ballparks reflect this shift. When Fenway Park was built in 1912 in Boston, or Comiskey Park in Chicago in 1910, they were jimmied into existing city blocks. The idiosyncrasies that make them so beloved are capitulations to reality. 

But they still aligned to the cosmos. Their builders were aware of the path of the sun, the changes of seasons and the place of the ballparks in the landscape that surrounded them. It is why, even though the game grew up in the cities, we think of baseball as a pastoral game. 

But our once-analog world has gone digital: Now, instead of being aligned with the heavens, our ballparks are increasingly lined to an arbitrary “grid.” The experience of living on a planet has nothing to do with it. Ideas about things replace the things themselves, and those ideas are arbitrary: They have no reference but to themselves. The connections are sundered. The world is pulled apart into “bits” and they can be set next to each other in any calculated fashion. 

The change began in earnest in the 1960s. During that era, a spate of “cookie-cutter” stadiums were built — concrete doughnuts, like Busch Stadium in St. Louis, Three-Rivers Stadium in Pittsburgh, Veterans Stadium in Philadelphia, and, what is probably the ugliest ballpark in history, Shea Stadium in New York. 

Most sat in suburbia, their diamonds oriented every which way, the rotating hubs of a parking lot wheel that ate up space like a shopping mall — and not coincidentally, often replaced dwindling farmland.

One of the last of these to be built — the “new” Comiskey Park in Chicago — was probably the most perverse. Built as a mirror image of the old park, the third base line now faces east. Talk about bad mojo! Our culture was confused, and so were our ballparks. 

We, as a culture, are losing touch with the world we inhabit. It isn’t just Chase Field: Coors Field in Denver and the Skydome in Toronto are all oriented straight north-south. But the grid is a poor substitute for the ecliptic. It is arbitrary, and therefore inimical to life. 

I remember once flying at night into Providence, R.I. The plane swung low on its final approach and the thousand burning lights of the city were spread out in the grid one expects of modern cities. But interspersed among the streets were city parks, each with its ball field. From the air, you could see them, scores of them across the city, all aligned the same way. Despite the regularity of the streets, they were all turned the same way like a field of sunflowers with their heads bobbing, face-in to the sun. Those fields took their ultimate command not from the city planner, but from nature. 

This same phenomenon can be seen in the old photographs of Yankee Stadium and the Polo Grounds. Separated by the Harlem River and surrounded by a chaos of roads, they lined up like twin observatories watching the same stars, their allegiance to something larger. That something larger is the key. 

For we all want to know our lives have value, that we belong to something bigger than our own tiny egos. It is the larger context that gives our lives meaning. 

Baseball is inherently human. Which is why I hate all the new rules being experimented with in recent years. The trend to “update” the game for modern tastes risks losing its soul: slow, deliberate, played out not in nine innings, but over an entire season, through streaks and dry spells, through injuries and yips.

I hate the changes. I hate them all. (Or almost all. I don’t really have a gripe about the pitch clock. I don’t like any clock in the ball field, but the game had gotten rather slow, with pitchers taking forever on the mound, wiping down the ball and picking up the rosin bag, causing one sportswriter to question whether they think they are being paid by the hour, and worse for the batter, who kept stepping out of the box after every pitch and readjusting his batting gloves. Throw the damn ball!) 

But shortening games by putting a free base runner on second to start the 10th inning in a tie game? Blasphemy. Part of the metaphysics of baseball is its embrace of eternity — that the game could theoretically go on for infinite innings. (The longest pro game happened in 1981 between the Pawtucket Red Sox and the Rochester Red Wings and lasted for 33 innings over two days. In the major leagues, the longest was 26 innings, in 1920 between Brooklyn and Boston and ended in a 1-1 tie when the game was called for darkness. There have been a handful of games longer than 20 innings.) This is as unacceptable as the designated hitter. 

I have a list of all the rules changes since 1950 and it prints out at 38 pages. Most of them are minor: clarifications or fixing typos. Some seem oddly fussy. In 2013, Amended Rule 1.15(a) declared the legal colors for fielders’ mitts must be no lighter that the current 14-Series of the  PANTONE® color set. (Pantone being a proprietary color naming system used in by variety of industries to insure color consistency in branding, logos and packaging). So, no white leather gloves.  

In 2007, the rules changed to allow an intentional walk with no pitches being thrown, with just a signal to the ump to award first base. Maybe it speeds up the game, minimally, but it also takes away an exciting possibility. The year before the new rule, Marlins star Miguel Cabrera was being thrown four balls. Rather than sit idly and watch pitches go by, he reached outside and swung at one, getting a hit and recording an RBI single. 

Cabrera isn’t the only player to turn the tides on an intentional walk. Detroit Tigers legend Ty Cobb once hit a two-run triple during an intentional walk attempt in 1907. More recently in 2016, Gary Sanchez hit a sacrifice fly on an intentional walk attempt against the Tampa Bay Rays.

The general run of important updates make the game less human and more like Fortnite. It was a game, and now is becoming a digital bureaucracy. 

I love the umpire, subject of hate and abuse, he is the final arbiter of each pitch and each out. Or was. The mistaken urge to make sure the call was “correct” has meant constant second-guessing the ump. “We have to make certain the call was correct.” Why? It is a game; a blown call is as much a part of the game as the misplayed bunt or the dropped fly ball. 

Don Denkinger calling Jorge Orta safe in the 1985 World Series. Rich Garcia not calling fan interference on Jeffrey Maier in the 1996 ALCS. Jim Joyce imperfectly calling Jason Donald safe in what would have been been the defining final out of Armando Galarraga’s otherwise perfect game in 2010. You can argue that these moments are more indelible as-is than if the calls had gone the other way.

And so, the video replay and the challenge. The influence of NFL football is the baneful influence, a sport where most of the TV time is given to video replays. The replay is as much part of football’s televised show as the original pass or off-tackle run. (I once timed a three-hour NFL game with a stopwatch, and the total time spent on the actual play, from ball snap to ref’s whistle each down, added up to only 15 minutes. The remaining two hours and 45 minutes is commentary, commercials and lots of endless replay and slo-mo.) There is something industrial, corporate and machine-like to football that is out of place in baseball. 

Which brings me to my chief gripe. The ABS challenge — automated balls and strikes calls. The strike zone has always been the custodial property of the home-plate umpire. Each ump was a bit different, and pitchers — and batters — knew that, and played accordingly. We watched Tommy Glavine stretch the strike zone further and further outside as a game went on, and umps gave him the call because of his consistency. Some umps had higher strike zones, others tended to call low pitches. But it was part of the game and the batters adjusted. That flexibility was an essential part of the game. 

But a pettifogging influence has taken over; a legalistic mindset that stops the natural flow of the game to bring tape measure and calipers to the rules. It gives batter, catcher or pitcher the chance to tap his cap and ask to overrule the ump. Balls barely edging the strike zone, or a quarter inch outside are caught by computer and used to prove the umpire human. 

The zone’s dimensions has been adjusted many times. In 1950, it was defined as running from armpits to the top of the knees. In 1963, It was changed to the top of the shoulders to the knees. In 1969, it reverted to armpit to knees; and in 1988, from middle point between the shoulders and the top of the uniform pants to the top of the knees. In 1996, it was stretched again to a point just below the kneecap. So, it has been a floating target, even beyond the umpire’s proclivities. 

But for the precision of the computerized strike zone, something more technocratic was needed, and so, in 2025 the zone was declared to be 53.5 percent of the batter’s height at the top and 27 percent at the bottom. To accommodate Jose Altuve at 5-feet-6 inches and Shohei Ohtani at 6-feet-4 inches, requires a strike zone that changes for every batter stepping to the plate. 

And so, ridiculous as this sounds, all position players in spring training camps had their heights measured standing up, without cleats by research technicians using biomechanical analysis. This information was loaded into the ABS computer database so that a different video box could be projected on home plate for each batter for the television broadcast. 

This could be quite confusing for pitchers, to say nothing of for umpires. 

“The hitter’s strike zone doesn’t change,” said Detroit right-hand pitcher Casey Mize. But, “I face nine different strike zones. The catcher sees nine different strike zones. The hitter just has his own.” 

And the strike zone no longer covers the entirety of home plate, but rather a microtome-thin slice across the middle, so that a sharp curve ball or slider that catches the front corner of the plate no longer counts as a strike, if challenged by the batter. 

We should remember that when we think to complain that the umpires are overturned and so must be poor umps. I’m surprised they are as consistent as they are. 

I still watch baseball almost every day, and I see things in each game that I’ve never see before. I just saw Shohei Ohtani hit a bouncer into the foul-pole net that almost turned into an inside-the-park home run, but then scored as a triple and a throwing error. The run counted anyway. I had never seen that happen before. 

Talent playing against the odds of the universe stacked against it. Human drama.

Fun with words

April 15, 2026
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The perpetual face-off between writers and editors can frustrate both sides. I remember well once at my newspaper when a copy editor questioned my use of the word “paradiddle.” It didn’t exist, he insisted. I had thought it a perfectly normal word; it is a kind of drum beat. He wanted me to change it. This was fairly unusual; copy editors are usually right, and have an almost preternatural sensitivity to words and usage. But I showed him my word in the dictionary and he was abashed. Paradiddle made it into print. 

But this became a kind of grudge I held (in a mild way — the copy desk saved my bacon many a time, so it was more a slight nettle than a grudge). And so, for the next six months, I got my own back by including in every story I wrote, a word I made up. To quote Captain Renault in Casablanca, “It is a little game we play.” 

These were not outrageous words. Some were onomatopoetic, like the Batman “Groink!” or “Shwak!” Others were neologisms derived from Latin or Greek, and therefore easy to parse. Others were verbs in noun clothing, or common words with new prefixes or suffixes. And for six months, not a single one of them was questioned by the copy desk. Perhaps they just thought if they didn’t poke at me, I would leave them alone. 

 Writers (and editors) live in a world of words. We have all been English majors, came to love language and have developed a word trove far in excess of that of the standard math major or the athlete. We have absorbed most words, including the shibboleth words of numbers or sports. Words B Us. 

This starts at a very early age. In second grade, when we were given vocabulary lists to memorize, I loved soaking them in. And when asked to write sentences using the new words, I tasked myself with using them all up in as few sentences as possible. When I could combine all 10 of them in a single sentence, it was the jackpot. It was a game and fun to play. 

Words are things and English majors like to move them around, rearrange them, misspell them, invent new malapropisms. The wordplay involves mondegreens, eggcorns, puns, spoonerisms and other fun ways to mangle the mother tongue. They are terms used for language mistakes, but what do you call them when you commit them on purpose?

I have been doing this for as long as I can remember, or, as I usually say, “marimba.” As my newspaper’s classical music critic, I frequently attended concerts by the “sympathy orchestra.” I used these terms so often, I had to be careful when speaking to more sober-minded audiences. 

I make “chilled grease” sandwiches, and oyster stew becomes “moister stew.” Lasagne becomes “la zagnee,” or “lazza gonya.” (Yes, I know this can become quite annoying.) 

In college, a friend had scribbled on the side of his refrigerator a shopping list: 

I have since embroidered that original list with a few extra items, including sesame kagels, cabbage-liver paste, and dishlicking washwood. 

I have since then always referred to my “Chopin Liszt” and I carry around a notebook in my back pocket for random notes, and my weekly Chopin Liszt, and often mess around with the items. 

Among these are: munchworms; scream cheese; switch cheese; mouse wash; shower kraut; permission cheese. Sour cream becomes “hour scream;” dill pickles turns into “pill dickles;” ginger ale becomes “Injure jail;” and toilet paper (i.e., loo roll) becomes “Lou Rawls.” In a nod to Homer Simpson, avocado becomes “avamocado.” 

Perhaps this keeps my list safe from prying eyes. Ground beef is “bound grief;” chicken legs is “lickin’ chegs;” and there are “corn flecks;” “tumble fish;” “ravilowly;” and “bisgetti sores.” 

All this just to amuse myself. It isn’t really to entertain the public, just my own list in my own back pocket when I grocery shopping. Shake the phonemes around and make surprising combinations. 

I imagine those with different talents play games in their own disciplines. There must be fun things to do with numbers — different ways of thinking about them. I have always insisted that one plus one equals three: There is the one thing, the other thing, and the two things together — three things. 

And historians can play with their counterfactuals. I imagine lawyers can work some fairly dirty jokes into their depositions. What is the Dirac Sea but some physicists having fun with quantum mechanics. 

The world would be a very dreary place with no play. Even for grown-ups. Especially for grown-ups. 

Henry David Thoreau

April 4, 2026
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Documentary producer Ken Burns has just released a 3-hour film on 19th-century author Henry David Thoreau, one of my heroes when I was a younger man and more easily caught by enthusiasms. 

With a bit of hesitation, I tuned in to watch it on PBS and was instantly disappointed. It was the Standard Authorized Version, with almost nothing new to say. It was the Thoreau you might get on a network morning chat show — all surface, all cliche. Its language is largely that of 21st century pop psychology, while Thoreau’s own words are saturated with 19th century Romanticism. 

When Burns came out with his monumental series on the Civil War in 1990, it was groundbreaking and original. It was also a huge hit and deserved every accolade it received. He has directed and produced some epical series since then, but I’m afraid it has mostly been downhill from then. He has parodied himself and his once-innovative style, with its narrator, and its Hollywood celebrity voice-overs and vintage photographs lovingly caressed by the slowly moving camera. 

Walden Pond

And so, this series on Thoreau doesn’t offer much new or insightful. It does attempt to make the 19th century writer seem more 21st century than can convincingly be done — more social justice warrior and less tedious cataloguer of birds and ferns. To be fair, Thoreau was, in terms of his day, quite progressive, an abolitionist and environmentalist, and some of his writing has had tremendous social and political impact on the century that followed him. But the series gets the balance wrong, more in favor of things we value, and less so for the more Transcendentalist trends of his era. 

And it glosses over the fact, that in addition to being a great writer and social activist, he was also a world-class loon. He didn’t play well with other children, as they say. He liked his loneness, didn’t comfortably interact with others, and while he was a proto-environmentalist and a fervent abolitionist, he also maintained many prejudices of his age, including a romanticized view of Noble Savage Native Americans. His political views could line him up pretty well with current anti-tax Tea Party Republicans. Some have outright called him an anarchist. Recently, others have placed him on the Asperger spectrum. Others have questioned his sexuality, or lack of. At any rate, Henry Thoreau was not what is typically considered normal. If not a loon, at least a very odd duck. 

Emerson wrote of him, “He was bred to no profession. He never married; he lived alone; he never went to church; he never voted; he refused to pay a tax to the State; he ate no flesh, he drank no wine, he never knew the use of tobacco and, though a naturalist, he used neither trap nor gun. When asked at dinner what dish he preferred, he answered, ‘the nearest.’”

Walden, of course, chronicles his time spent in a cabin he built on the glacial lake of that name, where he lived for two years in an attempt to leave civilization behind and grow his own beans. Thoreau became the patron saint of environmentalism in the 1960s, and that despite the fact that in 1844, he personally destroyed a whole forest by, like Wilmer in The Maltese Falcon, “doubtless being careless with matches.”

Yes, he marched to the beat of a different drummer, but had little sense of rhythm. 

I have read most of what Thoreau wrote, including his 14-volume journals. I feel safe in saying there were four basic periods in his writing life. Early on, he was a student, and like many such, mimicked his models to the point of too often simply quoting them endlessly. He had a habit of gathering shorter piece he had composed and editing them together into longer, rather discursive pieces. 

Then came his journeyman period, where he had largely found his voice, but still had some problem making the whole cohere. This was the period of the book he wrote while at Walden Pond, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, which told the story of the boat trip he made with his brother, John, 10 years before. They sailed a dory down the Concord River and up the Merrimack, and attempted to climb Mount Katahdin in Maine, where he had a transcendental vision. After John died, Henry wrote the book as a memorial to his brother. 

Reproduction of the interior of Thoreau’s cabin

It is a wandering volume, mostly about the boat trip they took, but also about pretty much everything else the young writer could pack into it, still with lots of allusive quotes. Perhaps he was imitating Montaigne, whose work is likewise punctuated.

He had it published at his own expense, and when it failed to sell, he wound up with all the remaindered books delivered to his home. “I now have a library of nearly nine-hundred volumes,” he said, “over seven-hundred of which I wrote myself.”

The high point came with Walden or A Life in the Woods, which he began in his lakeside cabin and finished later on. It is one of the best written books I have ever read, if taken sentence by sentence. It is delicious to peruse. I fell in love with Thoreau’s prose style, with its biblical heft and Shakespearean metaphor.

“Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in. I drink at it; but while I drink I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is. Its thin current slides away, but eternity remains. I would drink deeper; fish in the sky, whose bottom is pebbly with stars.” How can you write better than that? You can’t.

Illustration of Heritage Club edition of “Walden” by Thomas Nason

His later books were cobbled together from magazine articles he had published. They are still a delight to read. The Maine Woods and Cape Cod — neither as sustained as Walden, but still solid writing. 

But as Thoreau got older, he began to lose the metaphorical fire that had made Walden so memorable. He became more concerned with collecting data, precise taxonomy and recording detailed observations. 

You can see these stylistic periods in the journals, which begin with lots of quotations, rise to metaphorical heights as the years progress, and then devolve into quotidian daily notations perhaps of scientific usefulness, but no longer designed for the pleasure of reading. 

He published a final travel book that demonstrates the kind of exhaustion Thoreau was facing. It was published in 1866, after his death and called A Yankee in Canada. It begins, “I fear that I have not got much to say about Canada, not having seen much; what I got by going to Canada was a cold.”

I have read it all, from A Week to Walden to Maine Woods to The Dispersion of Seeds, which is one of the first meaningful explications of plant succession. But not the poems. Gott im Himmel, not the poems. Thoreau wrote the most poetic of prose, but the most prosaic of poetry.

This he shares with his mentor. Thoreau lived for a while with Ralph Waldo Emerson, who was a celebrity and public intellectual who wrote reams. Emerson was more widely and systematically read and educated than Thoreau and he explained a good deal of German philosophy to the American public. Emerson was a better philosopher than Thoreau, but Thoreau was the better writer.

Both shared an aphoristic style, where individual sentences are hugely quotable. “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little  minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines,” Emerson wrote in Self Reliance.” And, “We are always getting ready to live, but never living.” 

(Compare with Thoreau in Walden, where he wanted “to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”)

Thoreau’s Cove, at Walden Pond

The difference between them is that Emerson strings these aphorisms one after the other like shunting boxcars bumping into each other. There is often little sense of continuity. You admire each sentence but they pile up rather than add up. Thoreau has the aphorisms, but also the talent, at his best, to make them flow together melodically. 

I first went to Concord and Walden Pond more than 50 years ago. I can not accurately recall the number of times I have made it back; they all blur together. I’ve been there in spring and in fall; I have had the place all to myself, and I have had visits I had to share with busloads of tourists; there were moments when I felt I was communing with the eternity that Thoreau found there, and moments that were bound by the clock — I had elsewhere to get to before dark.

But the climax of a visit is circumambulating the pond, i.e., walking the perimeter of the water, a distance of roughly a mile and a half. At the one end is the swimming-hole beach used by the residents of Concord, Mass., and at the far end are the railroad tracks of the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority’s Fitchburg Line commuter train.

Reproduction of Thoreau’s cabin

On the way, you pass the site of Thoreau’s cabin, marked by stones where the tiny building used to be (a modern replica can be see on the other side of the highway that passes the pond, at the parking lot; yes, there is now a parking lot.)

The pond is just another kettle lake in a landscape made by their number into Swiss cheese on the map of New England. But it has a resonance built into it because of its adoption by Thoreau, a resonance that is now felt by countless acolytes for whom Walden is, if not a holy book, then at least a baedeker for self-discovery.

I may have shorted Thoreau as a political thinker. His essay on Civil Disobedience has been especially influential on reformers, from Mohandas Gandhi to Martin Luther King Jr. And his scientific essays, written later in his career, have sometimes been well ahead of their time. 

But shifting the emphasis from the nature writings to the political and moral writings, as the TV series seems to do, equally distorts the life he is profiling. 

He became a prophet in the hippie 1960s, but that era was too louche to fully capture him. The informality of Whole Earth Catalog would have been foreign to the Harvard educated Thoreau, who read ancient Greek and quoted Aeschylus, and believed in “higher” thoughts and endeavors. He believed in a kind of intellectual hierarchy that our postmodern world mistrusts. 

“He was not easy, not ample, not urbane, not even kind; his enjoyment was hardly smiling, or the smile was not broad enough to be convincing,” wrote Robert Louis Stevenson. “So many negative superiorities begin to smack a little of the prig.”

We get very little flavor of the man, outside the comfortable mythos, from the TV series. Perhaps that is all the use we can get from him in an era of text messaging and Instagram when reading seems as antiquated as blacksmithing. 

Fall leaves reflected in Walden Pond

We should, no doubt, honor the work that has immediate practical value in the world, but what ultimately gives Henry Thoreau his immortality is the writing, the words. At his best, he was one of America’s greatest writers. I wish the TV series had more of that. 

The sea and the sublime

March 27, 2026
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Many years ago, when I was still teaching photography in Virginia, I visited an art show that bothered me. In the gallery were a series of large black-and-white seascape photographs by Hiroshi Sugimoto. Each was about 3-feet square and each was divided exactly in half by the horizon line. 

Sugimoto, who is exactly my age, is a Japanese architect and artist who created a project of making pictures of various seas, oceans and great lakes, at different times of year and different times of day and different weathers. But every one was the same size and with the top and bottom divided in half, sky and water. 

What bothered me, initially, was the featurelessness of the images. The seas were generally calm and the skies usually cloudless. 

At the time, in my class, I was trying to get ordinary students to make better pictures. Most of the students had no ambition to show in galleries, but rather had wanted to be able to make better family snapshots, or to improve as hobbyists and learn darkroom techniques. And so, I taught such normal things as making sure their images had a center of interest — a person or a dog, placed foreground against a background. If they wanted to make a landscape, to include some center of attention and not just make a dull grab-all of the scene. 

These were not “rules,” but ways to get beginners to improve. First steps, as it were.

And I taught the ubiquitous “rule of thirds,” in which you help the design of a photograph by placing things a third of the way from the bottom or top, or a third of the way in from the sides of the picture. Or, also, to place your horizon line a third of the way from the bottom or two-thirds up from the bottom. And never, ever, put your horizon through the center of the image. The center is the most boring and static place in the frame. 

(Of course, no accomplished photographer pays any attention to these notions, but I was helping beginners up their games and making their pictures marginally more interesting.) 

But here were Sugimoto’s seascapes, centered and otherwise featureless. It bothered me for a long time — enough so that decades later, I can remember that show, burned in my memory, when so many others that I went to in so many galleries, have faded into time and oblivion. 

I was aware that if the images stuck in my craw and couldn’t be dislodged, there must have been something to what Sugimoto was doing. I have thought long and hard on the subject. And I came to the conclusion that their very inexplicability, tied with the elemental themes of nature and the vast oceans, gave them their power. That, in fact, they were a projection of the sublime. 

The sublime is a subset of esthetics, a particular experience of the beautiful, set in distinction to what is attractive and pleasing, by showing what is immense, often frightening, and which gives the viewer a palpable sense of his own unimportance in a vast and radiant universe. 

“Among the Sierra Nevadas” Albert Bierstadt 1868

It was a popular theme in 19th century art, with landscapes of the mountains of the American wilderness, or, in England, of vast biblical scenes, or or battles or storms. You have Jacob Mallord William Turner painting disasters at sea, John Martin showing the apocalypse in giant canvases, Gustave Dore engraving images of Dante’s hell and Satan’s flight through chaos.

“Snow Storm at Sea” JMW Turner 1842

You have poets describing limitless scenes of the Alps or the Arctic. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein ends in such a scene, with a ship stranded in the Arctic ice and the monster choosing white oblivion over life. The ship’s captain writes in his log: “We are still surrounded by mountains of ice, still in imminent danger of being crushed in their conflict. The cold is excessive, and many of my unfortunate comrades have already found a grave amidst this scene of desolation.”

Nature could be pretty. It could be daffodils. But it could be overpowering, desolate, dangerous. As in Percy Shelley’s Mont Blanc: “In the wild woods, among the mountains lone,/ Where waterfalls around it leap for ever,/ Where woods and winds contend, and a vast river/ Over its rocks ceaselessly bursts and raves.”

“Chamonix: Mont Blanc and the Arve Valley from the Path to the Montenvers” JMW Turner 1802

Hardly a better example could be found than Sam Coleridge’s Kublai Khan: “But oh! that deep romantic chasm which slanted/ Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover!/ A savage place! as holy and enchanted/ As e’er beneath a waning moon was haunted/ By woman wailing for her demon-lover!”

In Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage: “Roll on, thou deep and dark blue Ocean — roll!”

It’s all over the place in English Romantic poetry — “Tyger Tyger, burning bright,/ In the forests of the night” or later, in the works of Americans such as Walt Whitman (“Out of the cradle endlessly rocking”) or Emily Dickenson. 

British poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge describes the sublime in his 1818 lecture on “European Literature” by recalling: “My whole being expands into the infinite; earth and air, nature and art, all swell up into eternity, and the only sensible expression left is, ‘that I am nothing!’ which concludes that his ultimate realization of the sublime was of his own human insignificance.” 

“Cotopaxi” Frederic Edwin Church 1862

Giving in to the infinite — or the emotional experience of it — can hit you whenever you are open to it. Not necessarily seeking it, but nevertheless open to it. Most often, we spend our lives closed, trying to make sense of the everyday things that take up most of our time. But there are moments when it all breaks in. These moments tend to stick in our psyches, to be brought back in memory to refresh our lives. 

In music, the sublime is found in Haydn’s depiction of Chaos at the beginning of his oratorio, The Creation. Or in the ecstatic chorus of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, the trumpets of apocalypse in Berlioz’s Requiem or the vastness of Mahler’s Symphony of a Thousand.

“Manfred on the Jungfrau” John Martin 1837

The problem with the Romantic vision of the sublime is that it can too easily devolve into kitsch. The sense of cosmic overload shrinks into a kind of religious sentimentality and you wind up with Charlton Heston and Cecil B. DeMille. Where you draw the line, personally, depends very much on your willingness to accept the underlying metaphor of the vastness and impenetrability of the universe. 

Any theme, including the sublime, can peter out in too-familiar tropes and cliches. And so, in the 20th century, artists and poets have needed to find new ways to explore the idea, without the hurling boulders and cataclysmic storms of the 19th century. The old ideas still persist, of course, in such things as the photographs of Ansel Adams. It came to a banal end in 1968 when Adams let his photos grace the cans of Hills Bros. coffee. 

But, for the most part, the sublime has quieted down for the past hundred years or so, with priority given to social and political themes, from Brecht to Basquiat. We have a suspicion of grandiosity. Two world wars made us modest. 

Nevertheless, that cosmic power is still out there, seducing and threatening us. The night sky, the city-flattening hurricane, the ever-retreating horizon, the glimpse over the edge of the Grand Canyon precipice. And, always, our awareness of the inevitable extinction of our personal consciousness. 

“Blue Poles” Jackson Pollock 1952

And some artists attempted to address this, but without the baggage of 19th century Romanticism. People like Barnett Newman with his huge blank colors, Jackson Pollock with his impenetrable scribbles, and Mark Rothko with his inscrutable floating squares. 

In fact, it was Rothko that first unlocked the Sugimoto seascapes for me. 

Rothko was another artist whose work initially I didn’t understand. Having only seen reproductions in books, I thought of his paintings as simply boxes of pleasing colors splashed on the canvas. 

“Blue and Gray” 1962” and “Ochre and Red on Red” 1954 Mark Rothko

All that changed when I got to see the actual work, hanging on museum walls, and I realized those colors actually floated — visually — above the canvas. The colors of ink in a book illustration couldn’t do that the way actual pigment on canvas did. The difference between seeing a picture of an airplane and the actual flying at 30,000 feet. 

And so, it hit me, Rothko’s quiet illuminations were the 20th century version of the sublime. I couldn’t explain the emotions they roused in me, but they were the sense of seeing the primordial meanings of life, something no words could convey. 

It was this same thing that nagged at me in Sugimoto’s photographs. The sky and sea were yin and yang, something primeval and immutable. 

“When you look up at outer space there’s the Moon and the Stars,” Sugimoto said. “But on the surface of the Earth, the farthest place people can see is an ocean horizon.”

Sugimoto also said that seascapes are pivotal in that they are a  scenery that we, in our modern world, still share with the ancients. Cities all look modern; even rural landscapes are crossed by interstates and power lines. But the ocean looks today the same as it did for Homer. 

(Only recently, I discovered that the Pace Gallery in London had mounted a joint exhibit of Rothko and Sugimoto in 2012, and had even published a book about it.)

When I lived in Virginia, all those decades ago, it was on the ocean and I would almost daily have the opportunity to look out over the waves and into the horizon. I saw the seascape in sun and under the wind-blown scud of a nor’easter. It changed every day, even hourly. There were times when the sky color and sea color were so matched that the actual horizon line vanished and what I saw was a great blankness. A void. An infinity of sameness without edge. That blankness was a key to the modern sublime. 

Currituck Sound, N.C.

Usually what I saw was just “the beach,” with its swimsuits and sunscreen. The everyday tends to crowd out — needs to crowd out — the eternal. After all, we have lives to live, jobs to get to, families to care for, and we cannot function if our adrenaline is always at the boil. But there were also times that I could look out at the water and air and realize that I was seeing the fundamental sense of existence. The quotidian keeps us functioning in society, but the sublime absorbs us into the universe. 

There is such a thing as an intense blankness. It is both frightening and beautiful. 

Alaska

And without consciously realizing it, those Sugimoto photos had buried their way into my psyche, and without consciously imitating his work, I had begun making my own photographs of that phantom horizon. I did so all around the world, like this one of the Indian Ocean from South Africa:

Or these from Alaska:

Or this coup de soleil on Puget Sound: 

Although I was not aware, when making these images, that Sugimoto was buried in them, I was aware that they were informed by the sublime, and specifically, from a 20th- and now 21st-century version of the concept. 

Finally, if I needed any confirmation that Sugimoto was striving for the sublime, I found it in this photo of the artist, posed to mimic the painter who was perhaps the poster-boy for 19th-century Romantic sublime, Caspar David Friedrich.