Of Dullards, Whales, Frustrations, and Shirts Like Fetters
What of those who have never once thought it their duty to amuse their readers?
From the Trinity Capital
Beyond the purple velvet drapes, the skeins of billowed gossamer, my hotel window looks down on the back gates of Trinity College. Up three floors and pierced by a late October sun, the room has been done up like a swinger’s pad, with leopard print and leather, with mirrors and conic shaded lights in orbit about the dark mass of the pillowed bed.
Handing Higher Ed to the Cripples: On John Williams’s “Stoner”
If there’s one thing we have in higher education today it’s a superfluity of bluster.
Norman Maclean and the Question of Craft
"Fear and pity are made out of grammar,” he writes, and in this most particular grammatical unit he finds the fabric of tragedy itself.
Vonnegut Laid(?) to Rest
Burned-Over District, NY---I’m reading Charles J. Shields’s absorbing new biography of Kurt Vonnegut, And So It Goes, and while its morose subject deservedly never...
My Kind of General
The great '60s-'70s R&B singer General Johnson has died. The pacific General wrote the antiwar and pro-home anthem "Bring the Boys Home"
Elmer Kelton, RIP
BURNED--OVER DISTRICT, NY---Elmer Kelton, the superb Texas novelist, died Saturday. In 2006 I visited Mr. Kelton in his San Angelo home; herewith, via the...
Poetry and the Common Language
This piece was originally posted at the University Bookman. Check out their site for other similar articles!
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If there is one principle which is nearly...
Playing With Turtles
Spring Arbor, MI
(Editor's note: Like any real front porch, FPR seeks to be a place where children are valued and welcome. Much of what...
The Flaw in Jefferson’s Idea of Ward Republics
Thomas Jefferson’s agrarianism has long been vulnerable to attack by unsympathetic critics. Given that Jefferson ultimately banks on virtue rather than folly, this is...