November 2024
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Whether Picnic at Hanging Rock is fact or fiction, my readers must decide for themselves. As the fateful picnic took place in the year nineteen hundred, and all the characters who appear in this book are long since dead, it hardly seems important. Lindsay, Joan. Picnic at Hanging Rock (Penguin Classics) (p. viii). Penguin Publishing Read more
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Osip Mandelstam is an artistic martyr, a saint of the imagination. No poet sacrificed as much for his art. No poet paid more dearly for believing in the power of language and beauty and the freedom of imagination. Exiled and incarcerated often in Soviet Russia for what he wrote, Mandelstam reminds us that words do matter. That one of Read more
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If you grew up in a rural area, you have seen how farmhouses come and go, but the dent left by cellars is permanent. There is something unbreakable in that hand-dug foundational gouge into the earth. Books are the cellars of civilization: when cultures crumble away, their books remain out of sheer stupid solidity. ~ Read more
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To be able to post something everyday here at ClimbingSky, I need to always have postings scheduled a couple of weeks ahead of time. And have a basic plan for 30 days ahead of time. My personal habit of writing daily helps. As well as sticking to things I have a lot of opinions about Read more
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In the summer of 1984, I drove a 1964 Galaxy 500 (Deluxe Sport Coupe) 1713 miles from Dillon, Montana to Saginaw, Michigan with only one companion – a beat-up paperback edition of Richard Brautigan’s Trout Fishing in America. The radio was original with the car. In eastern Montana and western North Dakota I could seldom pick Read more
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Today Americans go to the polls and again Democracy faces Lincoln’s famous question. Can our democracy or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, long endure. The choice we face today is clear. Please join with me in praying that a majority of our neighbors take up Lincoln’s spirit today. Hate, injustice, and untruth cannot Read more
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Here is a coffee cup I saw in a store in a small Minnesota town. I took a picture but didn’t purchase it. Some Mondays, I feel like I should have! Read more
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William Butler Yeats as a poet is unique. He grew greater as he aged. He was world famous as a poet in his early 20s, but wrote many of his best poems when he was in his 70s. For this reason, he has more great poems about middle age and old age than any other Read more
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There are books you read because of their plot and there are others you read for their tone and style. Far Bright Star by Robert Olmsted is the latter. Like All the Pretty Horses, by Cormac McCarthy, it is a story of beauty and violence and horses and Mexico. And like All the Pretty Horses (and Lonesome Dove, by Larry McMurtry), Read more
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The first book of Seamus Heaney’s I ever purchased was Sweeney Astray at a used bookstore in Dinkytown, Minneapolis. That was in October 1986. Since then I have purchased and read many, many other books of his poetry and prose. I treasure each and every one. By the time Heaney published Sweeny Astray in 1983, he had already written Read more
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