March 16, 2011
Lessons from the Quake: Giving Up Illusions
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...
Lagniappe
January 14, 2011
Violence in the Desert, Violence in Our Hearts
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...
August 12, 2010
Madame Bovary: Desire, Grace, God
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...
August 9, 2010
What I Saw In California
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...
August 4, 2010
Greetings from the Sunflower State
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...
July 28, 2010
Giving Care I
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...
July 26, 2010
On the efficacy of prayer
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...
July 14, 2010
Taking Care II
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...
June 17, 2010
Taking Care
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...
April 23, 2010
Letter from Marseille
I think of the vision that Mrs. Shiflett has toward the end of a Flannery O’Connor story, in which she sees all the peoples of the world blended and mixed as one, heading toward heaven in a riotous pack of shouting, writhing, unkempt cripples and...