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Just like that he laughed. “You’re a cocky little punk.” “You’re the first guy who ever called me little, friend.” He laughed again. “Come on inside and have some coffee and keep your language where it belongs. I got all kinds of visitors today.” (cf. Spillane, Mickey. The Mike Hammer Collection, Volume II.) Read more
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In 1978 when this song first came out, I was a 18-year-old kid already wrestling with how to reconcile the teachings of Jesus with the churchy people I knew and the way our whole society was structured. 47 years later… nothing has changed. Listening to this today, in the shadow of Christian Nationalism and MAGA,… Read more
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The state of the country, considering how poets go to Nature, how they use her for their images and their contrasts even when they do not describe her directly, is a matter of some importance. Her cultivation or her savagery influences the poet far more profoundly than for the prose writer. (cf. Virginia Woolf. The… Read more
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“Throwback Thursdays” at ClimbingSky feature posts I wrote over 15 years for various blogs. This was first posted on June 24, 2011. As a literary and film art form, the Western’s time has passed. And yet… there remains a small number of dedicated western fans who remain loyal to this most American of all art… Read more
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This past winter besides reading short stories and mysteries, I re-read Thoreau with an eye to arriving this spring in a different place: poetically, philosophically, and ontologically. Ontology is a word I hear seldom in my work-a-day world (read that never), where once it was such a prevalent word in all my worlds: work, academic, and reading.… Read more
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As a very amateur bird watcher living in the North Country, the surest sign of spring for me is the return of Red Wing blackbirds. Their trill-trilling from marshy areas is a song without compare. Here is a poem by Wordsworth about spring and birds and so much more. Enjoy! Lines Written in Early… Read more
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There they were, everyone with a coffee cup, lined up at the urn. Because I took my time with the smoke I had to join the end of the line, and it was a good thing I did. It gave me time enough to get the pitch. Everybody had been watching me covertly anyway, saying… Read more
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Spring has made its way to the North Country and the baseball season starts in less than 2 weeks. Everything is right with the world. Each morning I open the sports page of the StarTribune hoping to read about spring training. Inevitably there is more coverage of the Minnesota Vikings and the NFL. Don’t get… Read more
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“In normal life we hardly realize how much more we receive than we give, and life cannot be rich without such gratitude. It is so easy to overestimate the importance of our own achievements compared with what we owe to the help of others.” (cf. Bonhoeffer, Dietrich. Letters and Papers from Prison.) Read more
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“Throwback Thursdays” at ClimbingSky feature posts I wrote over 15 years for various blogs. This was first posted on July 21, 2016. I first read Langston Hughes’s “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” in 1981 when I was living in Chicago. It was part of a volume of Hughes’s poetry that I bought in a used… Read more
