More on: Essays

ACROSS THE HIGHWAY are a Taco Bell, a Comfort Inn, and a free-standing building that houses a Chinese buffet. A Case tractor company is nearby, and what looks to be an old service station, deserted, with orange-and-tan panels on the garage door and wild grass sprouting through the asphalt. Somewhat disconcerting is an abandoned Wal-Mart, a…

LATE AT NIGHT I walk the streets of my hometown, my hands stuffed deep in the pockets of my leather jacket to ward off the winter chill, and dream of superstardom. By this time I figured I’d have written the great American novel, worked on the Hollywood screenplay, and consulted with DeNiro and Streep on how…

IT STARTED with a phone call. “Sweet D, I’m coming to California. I want to interview you for my new book.” Nobody ever called me “Sweet” except my Davidson College roommate, John Marks. Evidently he was on the prowl, in search of his next story. I was intrigued. “Why me?” I asked him. “Because you…

DESIGN IS ubiquitous. Design in its graphic manifestations is, well, frankly overwhelming. Streams of printed ephemera constantly assault us, from cherished journals, to the slumping pile of unread newspapers shoved behind an easy chair in the corner, to the blur of billboards, fliers, bulletins, and posters cluttering our horizon. The democracy of digital invention compounds…

AFTER A LONG CITY bus ride traversing the outskirts of Rome, including a few transfers and a bit of walking, I arrived just in time to hear the churchyard gate clang shut. This was no simple clicking of a latch, but a resounding, ringing crash—not the kind of sound that left any doubt as to whether…

IT’S 103 DEGREES in Lincoln, Nebraska, and my mother is sitting at the kitchen table, twisting the elastic steel band of my father’s big watch around her wrist. She is paging through a book as massive as the New York telephone directory. It contains all of Shakespeare’s plays. The letters are the size of midges,…

Black Cross, New Mexico, 1929 (Georgia O’Keeffe)   Twin of the one in my mind, this cross is uneven—blooms like the trunk of a heavy woman, its underside bright as sunset, and under it, O’Keeffe’s hills—like looking at two miles of gray elephants, she said once—a sort of bed where no cross lies down. The…

A HALF CENTURY AGO I was standing in a skid row bar wondering what role I was playing. The bar was called, almost mockingly, the Ritz, and we were making a film, but the role I pondered wasn’t an acting part, and it was more than a question of what function I had at the moment.…

Already, like a disciplined scholar, I piece fragments together, past conjecture, Establishing true sequences of pain; For so it is proper to find value In a bleak skill, as in the thing restored: The long-lost words of choice and valediction. ————————————-— Geoffrey Hill, “The Songbook of Sebastian Arrurruz, I” Oxford University has a new Professor…

I DECIDED that if I was going to read the Hebrew Bible, I was going to read the whole thing. Every word of it. No skipping over or skimming the genealogies, the instructions for building the temple, or the details of animal sacrifice. I bopped through the intricate plots of Genesis and Exodus, my rule…