Region & Place 428
Going Home
The South, repatriated ex-slave Ned Douglass lectured his Louisiana neighbors in Ernest J. Gaines’s novel The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, is “yours because your people’s bones lays in it;…
Preserving Local Culture
Last Sunday I sat on the church porch, smoked my pipe and listened as some of our musicians played their guitars and mandolins. One of the songs we sang…
Requiem for the Chapel on the Farm
They say that funerals are for the living, which of course they are. The deceased, now lifeless, causes us to reflect upon their life as well as our own which…
California Splitter
These days I care more about the results of local sporting events than I do national or out-of-state elections, but I was pleased that Golden Staters put Jerry Brown back…
Theses on Unions, Wisconsin, and Other Things
[Cross-posted to In Medias Res] Wichita, KS So last night, the Republicans in the Wisconsin state senate passed the bill which Governor Scott Walker has made the cornerstone of his…
The Signs You Don’t See
Those who benefit most from collective bargaining limits in Wisconsin can’t speak as loudly as those who oppose such legislation.
Politics Reformed
A review of a fine book by Glenn Moots which opens the door to rethinking about America theologically.
Agriculture vs. Agribusiness
A visit to a CAFO makes it clear that to have sustainable agriculture, you have to make sustainable the lives and livelihoods of the people who do the work.
Title-town
The Green Bay Packers – like America itself - are a study in ironies: the smallest city owning a franchise in the largest professional sport, a non-profit corporation in one…
انه الاقتصاد، غبي
Here are two scenarios: one leads through democratic enlightenment to peace and prosperity, and the other through intractable economic problems to war and disintegration.
Pure football?
Is there any difference now between college ball and the NFL?
Locavoracity
What is the point of eating local? Are we actually feeding something besides our own ego and gluttony?
Why Not King of France, Kentucky?
Not even suburban planners have come up with names like Archduke Ferdinand Estates or King of England Place.
Son, Take a Good Look Around
Batavia's Tom Gahr on bummin' with his Dad.
The Statute of Limitations has Passed
They never quite got it when they asked me if I was “going home for Christmas” and I replied, “I live at home.”
Cabrini Dreams
“You go two blocks one way, you're in public housing. You go two blocks the other way, you're at Banana Republic."
Memories: Montana Ranch
It was the kind of responsibility that forces a kid to grow up.
The Fighting Bobs
But then Dylan is 69, and old enough to remember when the people of his place looked askance at empire. There were giants in the earth in those days.
End of the Culture Wars?
Ross Douthat suggests that the culture wars have moved to a different battlefield. I dissent.
On the Porch with Bye, Bye, Miss American Empire
I value a writer who makes me read with a dictionary. Godspeed the man with a memory.
A Gift from the Grievous Angel
Gram Parsons, Southern hippie aristocrat Byrd progenitor of “Cosmic American Music” who spent too much tyme eight miles high, expressed his Christian faith in a number of tunes, none lovelier…
American Graffiti
Where this latest tourist among the rustics goes wrong is in not crediting the stay-at-homes with the capacity to dream, and in not noticing that some of those who “got…
The Ode Familiar
A call for your favorite poems of place.
Kingsley Amis (!) On the Priesthood
Then it’s a bit up to you to be jolly crusty and jolly full of hell-fire and sin and damnation.