The Destiny of Us Fenton Johnson / April 2011 Oyez, oyez! Rise and hail! Bush wren, emu, crake and rail, Moa, parakeet, and chat, Puffleg, chiffchaff, after that An aged passenger is sat. With the dodo, twelve’s complete, Ivory bill may take his seat In jurisprudent black. In the docket, insolent, Man and...
The following ran as an opinion essay in the Los Angeles Times of 16 March 2011: http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-johnson-earthquake-20110316,0,2960695.story...
12 January 2011 -- Tucson, Arizona The mainstream consensus is that Jared Loughner was deranged, and the Tucson tragedy, however regrettable, is just another of those things that happen in a crowded, complicated, difficult world. What comes to mind: the Cuyahoga River of Ohio, at one...
Even in loquacious, verbose English -- elegantly performed in my audio version by Simon Vance, in a translation by Eleanor Marx-Aveling -- the precision of Gustave Flaubert’s French comes through. We are all searchers and Emma Bovary is the distillation of our longing. She marries...
8/9/10, a nice sequential date. From Salt Lake City I cross the vast high sagebrush-dotted desert of Nevada, with the only variant in 400 miles a roadkill ruffed grouse. As I approach California thunderheads mass over the high Sierra. I pass through Reno and, after 2000-plus...
The great inclined plain of Kansas is very impressive. The fields are emerald green as if it's spring, until near Salina I arrive at amber waves of grain that are being harvested, with combines moving back and forth, back and forth, cutting the black earth's...
Some years back I came to a point where I had lived long enough and known enough summers and loss that I became a better looker -- I began to pay more attention. I’m a teacher and I’d like to think such matters can be...
Three days hence I leave my childhood home, having spent June and July caretaking my mother. I will miss much and many about this place, but what comes first to mind is the loud, cheerful, omnipresent song of the Carolina wren bobbledy-bobbledy-bobbledy-bob (http://www.allaboutbirds.org/guide/Carolina_Wren/sounds). I grew up...
Regarding Flatulence in Gnats When I arrived from my cross-country drive, my mother -- always proud of her hearing -- was nearly deaf. But I read the symptoms not as progressive deafness but as wax buildup in the ears. Her hearing had been fine until a...
All my fifty-something friends give me a thumbs-up, but I notice they’re not following suit: I’ve bailed on my glittering city life and even my life as a scholar in the desert heat and am instead camped out for the summer at my mother’s...