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Another Appetite

There’s a cool, shady corner in the kitchen. That’s where I raise a simple crop that’s not dependent on sparse rain clouds or my depleted compost pile. Sprouts: lentils and alfalfa are best. Mung beans are pretty good, soy beans, too.

Poetry: From The Factory

Poetry, like all the arts, has taken a turn toward the diffuse since World War 2. By diffuse, I mean the opposite of the exactness that went into the work of the masters, the pointedness of a strong sensibility.

She Would Have Been A Taxi Dancer, But He Couldn’t Hail A Cab

Book Review

Manning demonstrates a rather considerable talent for manipulating vocabulary and for wringing every ounce of nuance possible from a word or phrase.

Br(e)ak(e)s

You Eat It

Is there a right way to eat? Is there a wrong way to write about it? I’ll take the second question first. I’ve got an apple in one hand, a pen in the other, and my mouth is moving as fast as my mind. Is this as bad as talking with your mouth full, or is it the boldest kind of personal journalism?

Another Appetite

Little Rebecca has inherited her mother’s desire to explore foreign places. She can sit in the car happily singing, sleeping or just watching the world go by for ten hours as long as she is moving on to new people and places. Some morning she’ll run to the car demanding to “go, go, go someplace.”

Housing

From The Bottom Up

Contemporary builders have a set procedure for doing business. It may prove expedient and trustworthy to some and expensive and cumbersome to others. Generally it reflects the way in which we run our society in a caste system: white collar – blue collar.

Eat Your Heart Out

My friend, Arnold, is having a fight with the stewardess. “I will make you into salami!” he is screaming. I’m making believe I don’t know Arnold. I bury my face in a magazine, “Modern Maturity,” a few seats back from his. We are flying Astral Coach to Venus.

Little Soapy And Big Jim

We’re sailin up the Limpopo River from Fool’s Tide to Pope’s Eye. In some places we can reach out and touch the dried old balls of priests hanging from the trees way out over the river.

The Wanderer

I was walking with a friend a few nights ago, sharing tales of lusty, high adventure drawn from a mid-winter’s odyssey to Boston, when Joe offered a remarkable insight: “You know, it’s the settled man who keeps the wanderer on the road.”