Ghulf Genes

I’m reading the novels of Tony Hillerman again, and after the lapse of two decades and counting, they are both fresh and yet familiar. Yet s...

Herewith some further notes on yesterday’s perhaps too-dense riff on Graves. Staring at the darkness before sleep rescued me last night, I w...

One of the strangest poets who lived while I was young was Robert Graves, known to some for the movies made of his Claudius novels, to some...

View Larger Map It’s time to say good-bye. The map you see here is a part of eastern Afghanistan, Kunar Province. The curving formation i...

Some of my best friends live in the nineteenth century—part time. Herewith a photograph from my oldest friend, Philip Marshall Cavanaugh. I ...

In the 1930s, 40s, when I stepped or, rather, crawled onto the scene in Europe (but it was then the same pretty much everywhere) appropriate...

We were sitting around talking. The subject was a news account I’d heard on BBC radio courtesy of our Public Radio very late at night, drivi...

While on the subject (see yesterday ’ s post  cum comments), I thought I’d point to a site all of us suffering from this debility ought to ...

An eave is the over-hanging portion of a typically slanting roof. The roof slants in order to carry water as quickly as possible away from t...

One of the odd surprises for my family coming to the United States (and here I mean my mother’s and my own very junior reactions—but later a...

Visiting us, thus Visiting Ghulf Genes —the famed Katie the Beagle!

Politics is the art of the possible—said Otto von Bismarck. The tragedy of the commons might be defined by saying: “It is present in every...

Once during my days in Washington, talking to a senior Congressional aide—we were walking together down a corridor in the Senate—I was expla...

February 14, 2002 For every time its own good rhyme For every sun its daily run My dearest valenthyme. Time overlays with its pale haz...

Whenever a revolution succeeds in toppling a regime—especially a notable and big one like the recent one in Egypt—I can’t help but think of ...

A roadway sign advertising something. I saw it driving back from the airport this morning, and what with the rising sun half blinding me, I ...

The other day we saw a 1997 movie, The Fifth Element , a vast brash sci-fi extravaganza. Later, looking up some names, I realized that the m...

If Cervantes had lived in modern times, soon after the resounding success of The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote de la Mancha , his publishe...

In winter...

Checking a neglected bookcase I came across a collection of short stories by Franz Werfel, in German, issued under the imprint of Fischer Bü...