Books
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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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“A thousand years makes economics silly and a work of art endures for ever, but it is very difficult to do and now it is not fashionable.”― Ernest Hemingway, Green Hills of Africa There remain hundreds of books on my reading “to do” list, yet sometimes I find myself re-reading an old favorite. With poetry this is Read more
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Happy Friday! Here is a quote by Virginia Woolf to carry into your weekend. There is a sentence in Dr. Johnson’s Life of Gray which might well be written up in all those rooms, too humble to be called libraries, yet full of books, where the pursuit of reading is carried on by private people. Read more
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Like London, Dublin is one of those cities that seems to be filled with literary history. Turn a corner and there you are at some building that some writer once lived in. I was not looking for Sheridan Le Fanu shrines in May of 2020 but by luck just stumbled across this one. It is Read more
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I must confess that I have become an indiscriminate reader as I have grown older. Early in my reading life, during my teens and 20s, I read exclusively what is commonly referred to as “Literary Fiction” (admittedly a snobbish and parochial term). At some point though that changed. Now, I read whatever fiction catches my Read more
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Today is post number 100 here at ClimbingSky. Since re-starting ClimbingSky, I have missed posting only once. And that was by accident. I actually had a post for that day and had scheduled it in advance to publish. But somehow, I had set it to publish in 2025 and not 2024. Oh well. As we Read more
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On July 23rd, 1991, Cincinnati Reds pitcher Rob Dibble, who was just back from a three-game suspension, was ejected for throwing at, and hitting, Chicago Cubs baserunner Doug Dascenzo in an 8-5 Reds loss. The model professional ballplayer is even-tempered and steady. In other words, kind of boring. Think Mike Trout, Derek Jeter, and Aaron Judge. Great Read more
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As I bike, and as Sue and I take urban hikes in Minneapolis and St. Paul and other towns, we often come across Little Libraries. I always take a look at what is offered and usually take a picture or two. If the books are not interesting the library itself often is. I once played Read more
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Marianne Moore throwing out the first pitch 1968 Marianne Moore was a voracious reader. This encyclopedic nature of hers is at the heart of why she is a difficult poet. She brings more to a poem than any other poet I can think of and hence asks more of her readers than any other poet. Read more
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