BOUNTIFUL WORLD 02/16/2012
HARRY'S CAR I think something broke. Thirty-some public appearances last fall during my tour for The Windward Shore was difficult in many ways for this closet introvert. Wonderful in just as many ways -- university students! new friends! OLD friends! But exhausting. So exhausting that when I got home in December all I wanted to do was burrow in among my loved ones for the holidays, then pull the plugs on all electronic devices, shut the drapes, and create new work. Which I've been doing ever since. And which explains why these page have languished. As working writer it's difficult for me to share my work before it's finished, a process that typically takes many weeks or months (or years) and numerous drafts. Blogging as most people seem to do it is unnatural to me -- it's sharing a first or second draft -- and for some reason I've been unable so far to just write as if I were writing letters to friends. I'm working on that. In the meantime, to help avoid further long silences, I've decided to now and then unearth previously published stories, essays, and miscellany and post them here. Readers have written over the years asking where they can find some of these pieces, and since most were published only in print magazines and journals, some of which are no longer in business, posting them here will be their first appearance in electronic media. First up is a story that appeared in 1996, I think, in American Way Magazine, the in-flight magazine of American Airlines. For years American Way was a bold, lively, and thoughtful magazine that published some of our best popular and literary authors. They were a weekly, like The New Yorker, and best of all, published short fiction and paid handsomely for it. The editors liked my stories and published two in short order and had accepted a third. Then there was a coup. A new executive editor took the helm and promptly announced that they would cease publishing fiction. Sigh. My wife, Gail, says this is her favorite of all my published work. Harry’s Car: A Fable Harry was forty-five years old and had never kissed a woman. He didn’t have time. He spent every spare hour and most of his money on his car, a 1968 Cutlass convertible that he had driven less than 500 miles in the last twenty-five years, mostly within a two-block radius of his home. Harry’s car burned high-octane gasoline at the rate of four gallons to the mile and required an oil change every two weeks whether it was driven or not. Its twin eight-barrel carburetors were fitted with platinum butterfly valves and precision flicker-pins tooled to tolerances of one-thousandth of an inch. Every fifty miles the carburetors had to be removed, torn down, soaked in a bath of refined whale oil, and meticulously rebuilt using a set of watchmaker’s tools Harry had purchased on the black market in Switzerland and smuggled home sewn in the lining of his coat. Once or twice a month Harry dressed in tight jeans and leather jacket, hung a fine gold chain around his neck, combed his hair back with Brylcreem, put on his Ray-Bans, and took his car on a test drive around the block. He always listened carefully to the engine and was especially attentive to how the early-warning suspension moderators behaved during rabbit starts. Even when nothing went wrong on those trips, they cost Harry more than he earned in wages and benefits during an eight-hour shift at the plant. But the money never mattered to him. Harry lived alone in the loft of the garage behind Mr. Byron Pinnacle’s house. He had lived there since the day he graduated from high school and left home to begin work at the Amana plant assembling microwave ovens. Every morning he walked to work, punched the time clock, poured himself a cup of coffee, went to his station, sat on his stool, and manipulated the five or six muscles in his right hand and forearm required to perform the same unvarying task until the shift horn blew at 4:30. He punched out and walked home and the rest of the day he worked on his car. At 11 p.m. he took a long soak in a bathtub filled with Universal Hand Solvent, put his tools to bed in stainless-steel trays and double-locked them in a vault, secured the garage doors, activated the burglar alarm, and climbed the stairs to the loft and slept. Over the years, Harry had modified his car in many ways. For example, he had installed air-scoop inhalation vents, hurricane thrust-control extension sprockets, and a hyperbalanced supergradual leveling device. He had added a fluted mercury-induction flame accelerator, and covered both sets of fenderside exhaust flumes with sodium-resistant chrome belly plates. On the advice of a German engineer with whom he corresponded by email, he had recently installed a Belgian crystal gas tank to eliminate the possibility of dissolved heavy metals in his fuel. But that was just for starters. Here are some other ways that Harry had modified his car: 1. He painted it tangerine Day-Glo so bright that when he drove it on sunny days the glare sometimes knocked pedestrians from their feet. 2. He altered the original Klimate-Kontrol system so that it created a zone of ideal weather conditions for hundreds of feet in every direction. 3. He installed a studio-modulated tape player and a Thunderhead amplifier that pushed 180,000 watts through eight flush-mounted speakers, two per door, each equipped with double tweeters and woofers, gold-leaf tremor plates, and electrostatic outside-noise eliminators. 4. He replaced the factory standard headlights with 40,000-candle-power radon vacuum lamps, backed them up with emergency lightning-bolt packs, and lined the underbody with hundreds of parti-colored twinkle lights. 5. He tore out the old drivetrain and replaced it with a six-on-the-floor standard transmission with a hidden seventh-gear emergency overdrive option and a heavy-duty twelve-knuckle chromium-enhanced drive shaft that had originally turned the reactor cooling fan on a Polaris submarine. 6. He installed a 133-megahertz Pentium diagnostic computer in the trunk and programmed it to identify mechanical problems seven to ten days before they developed. Summer Saturdays when the neighborhood children were out playing stickball in the street and launching gunpowder rockets that exploded high in the air with dainty pops then drifted back to earth beneath parachutes the size of silk hankies, Harry would roll his car with the top down into the alley and give it a sun bath and chamois wipe. Neighbors came running from blocks around and badgered him to start the engine. Sometimes he turned it over for a thunderous five seconds, but more often he entertained the crowd by inserting an eight-track tape of Grand Funk Railroad into the sound system and turning the volume so high that all the leaves were stripped from the maples in the alley and entire flocks of starlings were exterminated as they flew overhead. On holidays and other special occasions, Harry would swab some lucky boy or girl with lint-free cotton rags and let the child slide behind the wheel and push a few buttons and maybe set free a single piercing note on the musical air horn. Then he would shoo everyone away, vacuum and spritz-wash the car inside and out, and roll it back to its safe berth in the garage. If Harry was having a very good day and was in a talkative mood and the car was running smoothly and no critical parts were giving him concern, people could ask him questions. If they asked, he would demonstrate how the coolant-injection filters worked, run the ragtop up and down, show them the delicate reeds in the air horn and describe how each was made from the syrinx of a male bluebird. If they asked about the river of parts and tools that arrived at his garage every day via UPS, FedEx, and special courier he explained that they came from suppliers so specialized that they might sell nothing but the chrome-plated heater-fan knobs of Plymouth Furies or the tiny ball that screwed on the tip of the antenna of a 1970 Chevy Bel Air or the metric-conversion wrench that fit the single nut securing the side mirror of a 1966 Audi station wagon. It was a good life. An abundant life. And while Harry did not require admiration, he would have admitted, had he been asked, that sharing his car with the people who gathered in the alley behind the garage was the high-point of his week. One June Saturday when birds were singing their heads off and the sky was so blue that it seemed about to shatter and shower the city with fragments of turquoise, Harry pushed his car into the alley and stood beside it in a circle of attentive children. He turned the music up until starlings rained around them, each iridescent black body falling to the ground with a sad thud. It was an endless summer day, a start-of-vacation kind of day, with time stretching ahead like loose coils of rope, and Harry was in such an expansive mood that he cranked up the music and started the engine both, a rare double treat. But as the engine idled, in the silence between tape tracks, he heard a strange gentle flutter, a faint gargle of disorder in the vicinity of the carbide overhead-cam lifters, and immediately shut down both the engine and the music and burrowed beneath the hood with a socket set and a micrometer and started disassembling. While Harry worked, a kid who had been there many other Saturdays, a boy, twelvish, freckled and cow-licked, with a narrow, solemn face and a baseball hat on backward, leaned in among the silent spectators and studied the hand-built hubcaps with their sculpted chrome gargoyles and the platinum air-scoop vents protruding from the fenders like the half-folded wings of a dragon about to take flight. The boy had made his mark in the neighborhood by speaking constantly in alternating cockney, Scottish, Irish, and Australian accents, going around all the time saying things like, “’Av you seen me kangaroo, mate?” and “Ah, there’s a wee bit of Ireland in the air,” and “Mum? Would ya lance me boil, Mum?” Now he watched Harry laboring under the hood with grease to his elbows and his hair hanging in his face, a ratchet in one hand and the other hand jammed beneath the tension dispenser on his camshaft, and maybe the boy was a little jealous of the attention Harry was receiving or maybe he was bored with the tranquility of the moment or maybe he was just being a kid, curious and careless and blurting whatever came into his head, but in a voice that sounded as loud as a mocking shout he said, “So, mate, why do you do this? I mean, what the ‘ell is the bloody point?” Everything stopped – hearts and clocks and all the birds in the sky. Even the earth itself stopped in its orbit. Harry looked at the boy. He looked at him as if he had spoken in the lost language of Atlantis or had barked like an extinct Caribbean monk seal, looked at him until the kid squirmed and fidgeted and swallowed repeatedly and finally edged away. Harry turned back to his engine, placed the socket over the head of a bolt that had vibrated a quarter-turn loose, and torqued on it until it was tight. He laid the ratchet aside and with the palm of hand caressed the exposed, gleaming interior of the cylinder head and ran his fingertips up and down the length of the camshaft. He inserted an index finger deep inside a rocker-arm chamber and withdrew a drop of oil as lucid and bright as honey and lifted it to the tip of his tongue and tasted it. In a voice that only those who stood very close could hear, Harry whispered the one word that made sense of it all: “Love.” 2 Comments BOUNTIFUL WORLD 09/25/2011
 Favorite Books Now and then I’m asked to list my favorite authors and books. The answer’s always tricky because the list is quite long and, besides, often changes. To narrow it down for the most recent request (five favorite books for the Horizon Books website) I went to my bookshelves looking for the books that I’ve most often re-read. Immediately it became clear that they share certain qualities. They’re big. They’re complex. They’re original and daring. They impart a seemingly limitless store of learning. They’re bursting with love of life and language. Perhaps most tellingly, although they are not all novels they are all outstanding examples of the quality by which Jane Smiley defines a great novel: one that gives the reader “the feeling of abundance.” (This from an interview with Smiley in The Boston Globe, September 15, 2005.) One surprise is that no books by women make the list. It turns out that favorite books and favorite authors are different categories. Authors I cherish for their humanity, the magnitude of their worldviews, their voices, their writerly gifts include Alice Munro, Margaret Atwood, Toni Morrison, Willa Cather, Eudora Welty, Virginia Woolf (and male authors such as Jim Harrison, Thomas McGuane, Don DeLillo, Michael Ondaatje, Nicholson Baker, Evan S. Connell, Jose Saramago). Their bodies of work are essential to me. I read everything they’ve published, but no single book makes my short-list of favorites. Here, then, are the books I most often return to. That I would wish to have with me if I were shipwrecked alone on an island. That I can’t imagine living without. (Oh, and I can’t make myself limit the list to five.) 1. Ulysses, James Joyce. Every reading is new. Surprises arrive on every page. And it is surely the wettest of the Great Books: “They are coming, waves. The whitemaned seahorses, champing, brightwindbridled…” 2. The Adventures of Augie March, Saul Bellow. My choice for the greatest American novel of the 20th century. Endlessly rewarding. 3. Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, James Agee. I love the heartbreaking elegies, the mad (and sometimes maddening) rushes of language, the razorsharp portraits of people, the lists and inventories, the jazzlike riffs of philosophy that lift us from heartbreak to hope. 4. Blood Meridian, Cormac McCarthy. Refuses to stay on shelves. Must be anchored to the earth with cables. 5. The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway. I sometimes think I’ll outgrow Hemingway. Hasn’t happened yet. Every time I read the stories my admiration deepens. 6. Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy. Creates not only the abundance feeling, but the feeling that you are inhabiting a whole world. Often I return to it just to savor the amazing hay-cutting scenes, where in losing himself in the work, Levin finds himself. 7. Moby-Dick, Herman Melville. The original Modernist novel, with natural history and fiction blended into a new genre entirely. 8. Walden, Henry David Thoreau. Who can resist the bold assertions, the wild rambles, the uninhibited proclamations of love for the earth? Even when wrong-headed and disingenuous, Henry was charming. My all-time favorite reading on snow days. Now it's your turn. Which books do you return to year after year? Which have most enriched your life? BOUNTIFUL WORLD 05/20/2011
Why Books? Their pleasure to the eye, their spines on a shelf, their pages in a breeze, their heft, their balance in hand, their various fonts and paper stocks, their slick dust covers and earthy end-boards, the rustle of their pages in turning and the thump of closure – hell, their scent. As long as I can remember I’ve been bewitched by books. They’re among my most enduring passions. Whenever someone asks what I look for in a book, I’m always about half way to a quick answer, then pause. I’m not sure. Care I think. I want a book made by people who care how it looks and feels, who want it displayed proudly, who want it to last. And I want it to have been written by an author who cares enough to inquire and confirm, to buff and polish, who cares about the sounds of words and the shapes of sentences and the flow of a story. I look for ardor, curiosity, hunger. And intelligence, though I appreciate it best when it’s discreet – no Mensa bumperstickers, please. And seriousness of intent. And respect for the reader. And balance and wit and honesty (especially honesty). And more than anything, that singular and enigmatic quality called “voice.” All those things, plus something more. Something nameless. Something I don’t recognize until I’m far enough inside to forget that I’m reading and can lose myself in a world that seems somehow more bountiful even than my own. I want the universe compressed between covers. Not long ago I met a man who told me he has two passions: scuba diving and sky diving. I asked why such extremes of height and depth, and he promptly answered with a question of his own: “Why confine myself to the surface?” Good question. You could ask the same if you’re a sky watcher with a telescope to bring the distant near, or a biologist with a microscope to make the minuscule large. And you can ask the same if you’re a reader. Why limit ourselves only to what we ourselves can observe, consider, explore? Reading give us extra eyes for seeing and extra legs for walking. It’s sky-diving for the mind. If you’re a writer, you need to read. It’s kindling for the fire, a primer for the pump. On days when words come reluctantly, I can often jumpstart myself by reading. But I don’t read only as a writer. I read with the physical hunger of a glutton, the spiritual thirst of an ascetic. I read because I’m mortified by my ignorance. I read because we are condemned to solitude and language provides dependable lines of connection. I read because we are nearly blind, and books are a source of light. I read because life is a mystery too strange for words, yet books offer a promise of a hint of a clue as to how we might live best. There’s nothing gentle about a passion for books. They aren’t casual companions. We read then not for diversion, but for nourishment. Not to pass time, but to burn with a hotter fire in the time we are given. BOUNTIFUL WORLD 05/05/2011
Abundance: The DocumentaryMany days I would cheerfully trade my pen and paper for a state-of-the-art video camera. Cinema is so clearly the dominant artistic medium of our age that we who practice older arts often wonder if we’ve become irrelevant. Not yet! I shout, despite the seeping doubt -- and the tottering piles of draft and notes that threaten to bury this aging fool beneath an anachronistic mountain of rubble. Footage is what I need. And an editor in a cutting room. And a staff of energetic young people skilled at translating images into narrative. If I had such a staff I would direct them to follow, with a camera, the actions of a man taking inventory of his earthly possessions with a video camera of his own. This, I’m told, is a standard tactic for those who worry about collecting homeowner’s insurance in the event of fire, flood, storm, or burglary. The subject would walk from item to item, filming each and identifying it in a clear voice, thereby demonstrating the abundance of physical items in an American household, as part of my larger project of getting at the point of whatever I’m trying to get at. “Microwave, GE Spacemaker II,” he would say. “Food processor, KitchenAid, Model H236ST4.” Then a narrator informs us that, according to a 2005 study, the typical American family owns more possessions than did any Egyptian pharaoh. [CUT TO EGYPTIAN TOMB FILLED WITH TREASURES] But everyone knows that true abundance has nothing to do with what can be bought or measured or priced. It means a full life, love, the gifts we give and receive. It means recognizing that the world is inhabited by an inexhaustible number of things, each singular and actual, each a mystery and an astonishment, each in flux, with a history and a lineage of equally singular and astonishing links reaching back to the beginning of time and projecting forward to the end of it. Creation is not a set number of things, it is a continuous creation. It is a fountain. So now we cut to a dripping tropical forest where dignified avuncular biologist E.O. Wilson is on his knees identifying some of the hundreds of plants and animals living in a randomly chosen square meter of what he assures us is the most biologically diverse ecosystem on earth, with thousands of species that we know and thousands more yet to be discovered and named and, of course, tested for possible beneficial uses to mankind (this last inserted to placate the shrunken black hearts of lawmakers who value only what is quantifiable). Then, to suggest the fountainous cornucopia of life in all its forms we cut to: -- rows of open drawers in the American Museum of Natural History, each lined with hundreds of mummified neotropical songbirds, tagged and labeled, -- the halls of a Walmart, -- a crowded bazaar in Istanbul, -- a close-up of faces in a crowd (football game, rock concert, public hanging) -- and, in a series of quick cuts, a landfill teeming with garbage and gulls, a storage unit crammed with surplus furniture and other crap, the time-lapsed frenzy of a robotically-run automobile factory, the stomach contents of a shark laid out on a blanket (Frisbee, kangaroo skull, set of car keys, full bottle of Budweiser, shriveled human hand). All of this to make a point visually that is perhaps impossible to articulate verbally: That every moment of our lives we live within a roaring and sometimes overwhelming waterfall of phenomena [CUT TO NIAGARA] -- the unimaginable, flowing, spewing, drifting muchness of things in the universe and their apparently endless and endlessly various interactions with one another. All this raises a corollary to the contemplative philosopher’s question of why there is something in the universe instead of nothing. It is: why is there so much of it? [CUT TO STILL-SHOT OF THE PERIODIC TABLE OF ELEMENTS] [CUT TO LUMINOUS GASES VAULTING BALLETICALLY FROM THE SURFACE OF THE SUN] [CUT TO ARMY ANTS SWARMING ACROSS AN ANIMAL CORPSE; MOB RIOTING IN STREETS; TERRIBLE TSUNAMI SURGE; CATTLE STAMPEDING WITH MUCH DUST] [CUT TO TABLE OVERFLOWING WITH FEAST; AND CHILDREN LAUGHING IN GREATEST JOY] Meanwhile, the narrator says: “We want to eat the world. We hunger for the mad and rowdy physicality of existence. We are exuberant, ebullient, open-eyed, open-armed, open-mouthed, and flat-out ravenous for this mysterious, astounding, delicious, brutal, and bountiful thing we call life.” That would be my film. BOUNTIFUL WORLD 04/27/2011
Simplify, Simplify For years Gail and I have been trying to simplify our lives, but we haven’t made much headway. The effort always makes me think of Thoreau, who famously scolded us to “simplify, simplify,” then set to work weaving a deliciously intricate tapestry of a book. It’s as it should be. Books are like natural communities and human cultures: their complexity makes them strong. Those thousands of words in intricate and seemingly infinite arrangement magnify our view of the world and remind us that we're surrounded every moment by an unimaginable abundance of stars in the sky, of snowflakes and falling leaves, of swarms of insects, pollen, people, ideas. Of course we turn to the spare and elemental to give ourselves a rest, seeking quiet moments in nature and at home for the same reason the protagonist in Don DeLillo’s Cosmopolis reads poetry: “He liked spare poems sited minutely in white space, ranks of alphabetic strokes burnt into paper. Poems made him conscious of his breathing. A poem bared the moment to things he was not normally prepared to notice.” Those words thrill me every time I read them. The white space around the words is why I read poetry. And why I need to walk so often in woods, fields, along Lake Michigan, under the stars. But we are not simple creatures. Bare moments can’t hold us for long. Eventually most of us require more than white space and cloud spout; more than the twice-warming flames in a fireplace; more than the monkish austerity of a single room, a candle, and a few books. Henry’s enthusiasm is infectious -- “Think of our life in nature. Daily to be shown matter, to come into contact with it, rocks, trees, wind on our cheeks! The solid earth! the actual world! the common sense! Contact! Contact!” – but I suspect that his passion and the complexity of his mind and the boldness of his assertions interest us more than the simple life he espoused. It could be that the louder Thoreau crows in praise of simplicity, the more convincing becomes his argument against it. * Thanks to everyone who has written in recent weeks with comments and observations. I’ve been working long hours to put a new book to bed, so these postings will continue to be intermittent. The new book, by the way, is titled The Windward Shore, and is about a winter I spent living in other people’s houses, from a log cabin on Lake Superior to a 20-million-dollar mansion on Lake Michigan. During those months I took note of time, weather, waves, snow and ice, agates, birds, books, our place in nature, and much more. In a way, I guess, I was siting my life in white space and becoming conscious of my breathing. It’ll be out in September from the University of Michigan Press. BOUNTIFUL WORLD 04/18/2011
Just Curious We’re drowning in information but we don’t know diddly. For a few thousands years we’ve labored tirelessly to fill our libraries and databases with notions, theories, observations, opinions, wishes, dreams, passionate outcries, wild imaginings, shameful whining, obstinate dogma, and pointless babble -- but we still don’t know how we got on this rock or how we’re supposed to comport ourselves while we're here.  Spiral Galaxy, courtesy of NASA We don’t know the most fundamental things. Physicists are unable to explain why, for instance , galaxies continue to fly away from one another at an accelerating rate, in defiance of everything known of gravitational law – and of every other natural law. They decided it was caused by something they would call “dark energy.” But what is Dark Energy? Nobody knows. The laws of nature as we know them do not apply to it. [This according to an article in the June 3, 2008 edition of the New York Times -- read it here.] Nor do they apply to the weighty mystery of something they have named Dark Matter. Physicists know (but I don’t know how they know) that the weight of the universe is composed of 74 percent Dark Energy and a mere four percent of atoms. The remaining 22 percent? Well, that’s something else. Nobody knows what. They call it Dark Matter. A final example: nobody can explain why at some point early in the development of an embryo one cell divides from another and begins to develop into a brain. The biologist Lewis Thomas was obsessed with this mystery. “No one,” he wrote, “has the ghost of an idea how this works, and nothing else in my life can ever be so puzzling. If anyone does succeed in explaining it, within my lifetime, I will charter a skywriting airplane, maybe a whole fleet of them, and send them aloft to write one great exclamation point after another, around the whole sky, until all my money runs out.” It occurs to me that in a universe of unknowns the most admirable human quality is our urge to know. We can learn the names of things, study the works of great minds, gather insights into laws, systems, and connections that seem to hold things together, and with diligent application maybe see a little deeper into the mysteries of the universe. But it has to start with curiosity. And as anyone knows who remembers even a little what it was like to be a child, curiosity begins with wonder. Never before has it been so easy to satisfy curiosity. Are you curious to know which element is the most common in the universe? How many taste buds are on a tongue? The difference between bourbon and whisky? Ask Google. In a few seconds, like magic, you have the answer. So here’s the question of the day: Has instant access to information made us less curious or more? Tell me what you think. BOUNTIFUL WORLD 04/12/2011
More of the Harmoniously RandomHere’s the word-drunk philosopher and novelist William Gass, in one of my favorite quirky and hard-to-classify books, On Being Blue, his single-breathed triumphant aria in celebration of every blue thing under (and in) the sky: “There’s the blue skin of cold, contusion, sickness, fear… absent air, morbidity, the venereals, blue pox…gloom… “…whole schools of fish, clumps of trees, flocks of birds, bouquets of flowers: blue channel cats, the ash, beech, birch, bluegills, breams, and bass, Andalusian fowl, acaras, angels in decorative tanks, the bluebill, bluecap, and blue billy (a petrel of the southern seas), anemone, bindweed, bur, bell, mullet, salmon, trout, cod, daisy, and a blue leaved and flowered mountain plant called the blue beardtongue because of its conspicuous yellow-bearded sterile stamens.” And again: “The blue lucy is a healing plant. Blue john is skim milk. Blue backs are Confederate bills. Blue bellies are Yankee boys. Mercurial ointment, used for the destruction of parasites, is called blue butter, although that greenish-blue fungus we’ve seen cover bread is named blue-mold instead.” And: “Blue pencils, blue noses, blue movies, laws, blue legs and stockings, the language of birds, bees, and flowers as sung by longshoremen, that lead-like look the skin has when affected by cold, contusion, sickness, fear… the blue they say that diamonds have, deep holes in the ocean… afflictions of the spirit – dumps, mopes, Mondays – all that’s dismal – low-down gloomy music, Nova Scotians, cyanosis, hair rinse, bluing, bleach; the rare blue dahlia like that blue moon shrewd things happen only once in…” The brilliance of Gass’s catalog of blues, and the reason it is so pleasurable to read seems to be its ameliorative linking of apparently unrelated items. This is not the same as a random or purely miscellaneous listing of items, though it might aspire to give the impression of randomness.Those of us who find it appealing might find a similar appeal (as we've discussed before) in the artfully random arrangements of rocks in Japanese gardens. But there’s more. The things of the earth throw light into the shadows of our isolation. An ecology of matter is an existential gasp: alone and adrift in an indifferent universe, what hope is there? Making connections is our only hope and our only solace. THIS BOUNTIFUL WORLD 03/31/2011
Encyclopedias of Everything, Part 2 | AuthorJERRY DENNIS IS AT WORK ON AN EXCITING NEW BOOK ABOUT VARIETY IN NATURE AND HUMAN CULTURE. FOLLOW HIM AS HE EXPLORES AN ADVENTURE IN IDEAS. Archives
February 2012 MARCH 2011 Encyclopedias of Everything 2 Encyclopedias of Everything The Combinatory Agility of Words Inspired by Birds Virtuoso Performers Liquid Runs of Melody Harmonious Disarray Literary Feasts Armloads of the World The New Lyceum FEBRUARY 2011 The Naming of the Shrew The Human Pageant Eskimo Words for Snow Shakespeare's Birds Flocking Starlings Intro and Hooke's Micrographia
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