All good dates are alike; all bad dates are bad in their own way. …more

Conversation Hearts

Two Words. Infinite Meanings. True Love. Missed Connections. 50% Divorce. First Date. Happy Nights. Sad Days. Star Crossed. Wedded Bliss. Bad Breakup. Holding Hands. Making Out. Great Sex. Poly Love. …more

Making a Pie  (Instructions for Pie and Life)

1.  The act of reading poetry is a fine thing to incorporate.    Begin, say, with Cornelius Eady’s “Gratitude” and take it from there. …more

You can see the architecture of things in winter.

Structures glisten. Naked trees drip with clear popsicles. We find ourselves alone with ourselves. Everyone else has gone away to someplace warmer/better/more fun or else they are tucked indoors. Even when you live in a relatively warm place, winter still haunts. …more

Van Gogh … beauty that breaks your heart.

Vincent painting images that he had to view through the bars of the asylum.  Vincent eating his paints. …more

Revelry. A raw expression of joy. Delight. It’s loud, laughing, possibly bawdy, frequently boozy. …more

There are picnics where people discuss how long the potato salad can be out in the heat and there are picnics where people discuss Wittgenstein. At Wittgenstein picnics, the people are drinking red wine.

White wine is a kiss; red wine is sex. You can imagine Simone de Beauvoir with red wine in her Paris apartment. Red wine is paired in your mind with people in love, depressed creatures, women in vintage slips, men who write poetry and couples drinking “three-buck chuck.” …more

Maudlin:  a feeling we don’t so much encounter as create.  A sad place with funereal bits and a ladle of self-pity. Darker than Fitzgerald’s dark night of the soul, it is a place far past despair. …more

Great writers wound us.

Their words cut into our bodies; their ideas become notions of ourselves. Cue Joan Didion. She stitches sentences through your brain. You emerge exhausted and charged — agreeing, disagreeing and questioning. Reading Didion invites a conjuring of her. …more

Revolution begins with devotion to a moral vision and a belief that egregious wrongs must be made right.  In this way all revolutions are a revolution within. These days, there is both revolution in the air and a fear that not enough of us are outraged. …more

Chicago.

Sometimes it gets overlooked as a great city as we tend to focus our energies on considering the coasts and leave the interior as a great blur in our minds. …more

Pastoral. For a long time we’ve thought of that simply as pastures, poetry about streams and paintings of lush, lime green grass. Cows. Works by Virgil. A certain longing for the countryside. Shepherds. Hills rather than towns.

Yes all of that is pastoral, but the notion runs deeper. …more