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This website is a bit of a catch-all for me. It’s a commonplace book where I jot down quotations I like. It’s a place for posting photos. And it’s a digital file draw for writing of various sorts, some of it humorous.

If you’d like to learn a little about me, read my About page.

For a links to publications, read my Writing page.

And to give you a sense of my interests and whimsy, here’s a consideration of Denise Levertov’s poems about St. Thomas the Doubter, and here’s an improvisation I wrote blaming the last recession squarely on poets. (I like poets and poetry. Some of my best friends are poets, and I read and write about poetry a lot. This is simply a humorous sketch.)

Oh, and here’s a collection of recipes from Julia Child’s cookbook from her days in the OSS.

Comments? Drop me a line.

I’m enjoying Elif Shafak’s surreal novel “The Gaze,” which explores beauty, ugliness, and how we distance ourselves from those we’re ultimately connected to.

Wherever a person hurts, that’s where his heart beats. Keramet Mumi Keske Memis Efendi pressed his fingers to his eyes. To no avail. It didn’t stop. His heart beat in his eyes. And suddenly, the pieces were revited together. He found a way to unite women’s suffering with his own suffering. Because everything was dependent on everything else.

(The Gaze, translated by Brendan Freely, p. 43)

Our work in this life is to take care of one another and the planet we all live on. It’s that simple.

This blog is ostensibly about books, music, and coffee, and it occurs to me I’ve never written about coffee. So here’s a recommendation.

I usually start my day with a cup of a strong Italian roast from Port City Brewers. But for my second cup of coffee, which I usually drink midday, I’ve come to like Alma de la Tierra, an organic coffee from Peet’s. It’s silky with a hint of citrus.

Give it a try!

In my writing group the other night, we had 15 minutes to write something beginning with this line from Auden: “About suffering they were never wrong.” Here’s what I came up with.

About suffering they were never wrong.
They had scoped our pains with surveyor’s eye
And spanned a compass o’er travails long
That ran from dawn to lights that die.
All humanity’s woes and cares
Were catalogued as sundry snares.
There’s grief, there’s woe, there’s dark despair,
And lust and loss without compare.
And when the survey was mapped out neat
They took the chart and tacked it high
And aiming darts did then compete
To see which pains on souls should lie.
Thus the Fates do now compete
Leaving shears aside as dated,
So when you suffer, sore, complete,
Know your pain was struck, ill-fated.

(I can’t type this without wanted to revise it (e.g., do now contend), but that’s beyond the scope of a 15-minute exercise.)

We begin the new year in the corner of the last year. Our path to any door is blocked by yesterday’s mess—the dismaying newspapers, the chairs toppled in arguments or slumber, the bills scattered about the mail slot.

Another trip around the sun: Every revolution has its barricades, and these are ours.

Let’s overthrow what’s failed, and build a new order.