ClimbingSky

Why Baseball, Books, and the Grateful Dead matter

  • AI & Me

    I have been using the AI feature that comes with WordPress lately to create many of the “illustrations” that come with my blog post. Including the one that is here. I am not sure how I feel about it. The convenience is great. The results erratic (as in the picture below). Yet I struggle with… Read more

  • FRIDAY FOOD FOR THOUGHT: Thoreau

    If I wished to see a mountain or other scenery under the most favorable auspices, I would go to it in foul weather so as to be there when it cleared up. We are then in the most suitable mood, and nature is most fresh and inspiring. There is no serenity so fair as that… Read more

  • POETRY REVIEW: “How to Be a Poet” by Wendell Berry

      Wendell Berry is a writer and an activist. He has written novels, short-stories, essays, and books of non-fiction on subjects as varied as farming, economics, politics, and Christianity. Yet in the end, he is a lyric poet. I have certainly not read all of his prose work, but enough to suggest that it is… Read more

  • SHORT STORY REVIEW: “XINGU” BY EDITH WHARTON

    Mrs. Ballinger is one of the ladies who pursue Culture in bands, as though it were dangerous to meet alone. To this end she had founded the Lunch Club, an association composed of herself and several other indomitable huntresses of erudition. (cf. Wharton, Edith. Xingu.) I continue to balance out my reading of Noir, Hardboiled,… Read more

  • BOOK REVIEW: Tales from Ovid by Ted Hughes

    At first blush, the marriage between Ovid, that most latin of poets, and Ted Hughes would seem as unlikely a match as any you could imagine. Not in ability, of course, but in language and temperament. Hughes as a poet has always seemed to me one of the most earthy, physical, and Anglo-Saxon of all… Read more

  • Hardboiled Can of Coffee

    “Feel like breakfast?” he asked. “I could do things to a can of black coffee,” Steve admitted. “All right. But you’ll have to gulp it. Judge Denvir is waiting to get a crack at you, and the longer you keep him waiting, the tougher it’ll be for you.” (Hammett, Dashiell. Nightmare Town: Stories) Read more

  • BOOK REVIEW: “The Best Western Stories of Lewis B. Patten”

    The Best Western Stories of Lewis B. Patten is a collection of Patten’s short stories edited by Bill Prozini and Martin Greenberg. It is part of a set of “Best Western Stories” they did in the 1980s. I have also owned and read their The Best Western Stories of Frank Bonham. I know they did at… Read more

  • FRIDAY FOOD FOR THOUGHT: Bill Simmons on Kevin Garnett

    Well, five basketball stars in the past sixty years have been famous for either failing miserably in the clutch or lacking the ability to rise to the occasion: Wilt, Hayes, Malone, Ewing and Garnett. All five were famous for their fall-away/turnaround jumpers and took heat because their fall-aways pulled them out of rebounding position. If… Read more

  • POETRY REVIEW: “After Long Silence” by Jane Hirshfield

    Silence is where poetry is born. I have long wondered if my preference for books and poetry is based in part on the fact that I was born with hearing defect and something called Central Auditory Processing Disorder. A number of surgeries and hospital stays when I was young, fixed the hearing defect. The Central… Read more

  • BOOK REVIEW: .44 by H.A. DeRosso

    If you grow up in the West and and do not like westerns, it is the same as if you grew up in Belgium and do not like beer. At the very least, you have proven yourself to be someone who cannot be trusted. The status that westerns have in American culture is much diminished… Read more