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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No learnings
A new website urges us to say lessons when we mean lessons, instead of saying learnings. Say no! to learnings is the site . . . George Orwell made a similar point in “Politics and the English Language” back in the day. Back in the day is a lazy way of saying in 1946. Orwell was…
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Guess Your Age and Weight
When I first encountered her in the narrow corridor leading to the rest rooms, Marsha offered to guess my age and weight. "Excuse me?" I couldn't tell what kind of an offer this was meant to be. "I can guess your age and weight," she said. "I'm good at it, I really am." "Why would…
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Relentless
I visited two cemeteries when I was in St. Louis. One, I knew, was the resting place of several family members, though I could not have made a full and accurate list. The other was a mystery to me during childhood — not far away, but cloaked from the road by a tall embankment and…
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Big city dilemma
I lived in Manhattan for a couple of months this spring, walking up and down Broadway and Riverside quite a bit, seeing what there was to see. This is my new regional public radio piece — read below or listen here. Sometimes it’s hard to know what’s best. I was visiting a big city for…
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Two ways to love one’s country
In the first of four wartime Letters to a German Friend, French author Albert Camus explains the difference between two kinds of love one's country. The German friend spoke this way: The greatness of my country is beyond price. Anything is good that contributes to its greatness. And in a world where everything has lost…
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Don’t count on the alienated
There being no reason that the people profoundly alienated and abandoned by the regime in place prior to Trump to become active citizens only for the purpose of restoring that regime as fully as possible, and There being no way to imagine — create the working terms for — a notably better version of that…
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Mocking bloggers
Journalists used to mock bloggers, yes, missing the heart of the matter, I think.
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Poster House
What images, words, and ideas will a society finally settle on for thinking about its problems and its hopes? What mix of reasoned discourse and propaganda will guide us? In the Poster House museum, those questions come brought right up into view.
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Trashing fifty industries
Let's guess that there are fifty important industries that Trump and his crew are quickly undermining, maybe even destroying here in the United States. One, for example, is higher education. American universities and colleges are a treasure. We know that tens of thousands of people come to the country each year to study, and that…
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Do you want to change your life?
As an English professor, I taught first-year writing courses for decades, but I liked to do a little math with my students each semester too. I'd ask the class, "How much does a credit hour of tuition cost you?" In recent years, if the class members had any doubt, I'd invite them to haul out…