These pieces were not written by the late British poet, Ken Smith (1938-2003), nor the other Ken Smiths who make bass guitars, study marine biology, sell cars, teach card counting, paint war scenes in oils, guide bear hunters in Idaho, teach forest management, study immunology, do war reporting, sell real estate, photograph nature, teach cryptology, provide legal counsel to the gay and lesbian community, realign the spines of athletes, listen for seismic faults in the Sierra Nevadas, operate a 4-axis milling machine, work for sustainable development in Alberta, play blackjack, or criticize Junk English. Nor were the pieces written by the Ken Smith who is “the Elvis Costello of Landscape Architecture” nor the one who serves in the Pennsylvania House of Representatives nor the one who hit a home run for the Atlanta Braves in 1983. I only wish.
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Will I turn into a shrewd animal?
In a 2013 Indiana University commencement address, a witty and irreverent David Brooks asked that question. He considered the fate of people who take all their values from the marketplace, filling their minds, he said, with a “mental materialism” that infects every aspect of their lives. Of that sort of materialism, he said: If it’s…
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Book, meet Blog. Blog, Book.
Reading the unfolding story of the Fargo outliner in its Docs pages, the part where the “post to WordPress” feature is unpacked, I notice this sentence: You can use the outliner to organize a library of posts you want to be able to access quickly. Now, to me, that sounds like the curtain in front…
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Outlines and learning
I am exploring specific uses for the new Fargo outliner. For example: –I have an annual report that is easier to complete in January when I always have a convenient note-taking tool available on the different computers I use. But now, having a single file, updated automatically, no matter which machine I use is, is…
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Bedrock values
Educators, politicians, diplomats, activists, business leaders, inventors, and all the rest of us, myself included– If your political or business or educational policy doesn’t align with these bedrock values, you are marching toward the dark side, and if you have influence or power, you are taking others there with you: People feel a need to…
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A defense of poetry in an age of spreadsheets
My new radio essay in which poetry spits on the asphalt in disgust and walks off… I remember talking once with a high-ranking person from one of our area’s universities. Her training was in psychology, the field devoted to understanding the human mind. Somehow the topic swung round to poetry, and she said, “I don’t know…
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For S. D.
Deep in the night, soap flakes and diamonds fall slowly past the porch light. One by one, the cars of adult children pull away from the nearby hospice house, and its windows one by one go dark. The lawns are blanketed and bare trees hold up fresh snow in all their branches.
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RSS in the Sunday comics
Chickens are feeding in the barnyard but one turns away from the usual tossed grain and focuses on a laptop. One farmer says to the other, “Heck if I know–for some reason she seems to prefer the RSS feed.” Parade Magazine, 3/24, not readily found on their website. Recent posts: Little message that matter (60 second…
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The power of the people
New Yorker editor David Remnick questions President Obama’s advice this week to the people of Israel: Perhaps the most Obamian, and strangely overlooked, moment in the speech came when he cast doubt on the powers of politicians. This is a constant theme. Obama talks frequently about how early civil-rights leaders came to Franklin Roosevelt, asking…
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Austen on the incompleteness of our knowledge
Seldom, very seldom, does complete truth belong to any human disclosure; seldom can it happen that something is not a little disguised or a little mistaken; but where, as in this case, though the conduct is mistaken, the feelings are not, it may not be very material. Mr. Knightley could not impute to Emma a…
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A local columnists club
A few days ago I posted this on Twitter: Couldn’t a paper give the best letter-to-the-editor writers monthly columns, trading wide readership for good free local content?@tjbland I included Terry Bland’s address there at the end because he’s the web editor of the South Bend Tribune, and I enjoyed conversations he held with readers a…