Writers & Poets 232

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"

"Fear and pity are made out of grammar,” he writes, and in this most particular grammatical unit he finds the fabric of tragedy itself.

So how did we get to a situation where the “freedom of markets” has come to mean “servility” and corporate control?

Raise a glass of dandelion wine to the dreamy kid from Waukegan, Illinois, who today becomes a nonagenarian. Herewith my appreciation of Bradbury from a while back: https://www.frontporchrepublic.com/2009/06/ray-bradbury-of-illinois/

Civilization rests upon the sacred. Thus it is as grimly appropriate that the first atom bomb test was sacrilegiously codenamed “Trinity” – as in *the* Trinity – as it is…

Economics has become a totalizing system claiming the power to explain all things. It is as much a religious system—by another name—as is Berry's Great Economy.

Keeping alive a print vehicle for independent, thoughtful conservatism depends on us.

Nathaniel Hawthorne's "The Birthmark" provides a springboard for reflecting on the problems of scientism, especially the temptation to self-deification and, what Eric Voegelin terms, modern Gnosticism.

Or, "Can you hear me in the back? Why don't we all move in a little closer..." My latest column in the absolutely essential American Conservative: http://www.amconmag.com/blog/the-loneliness-of-the-long-dissonant-reader/.

Look around and you’ll see that the seeds planted by the New Left have not all fallen on hard ground. I think maybe they’re ready to flower.

For Chesterton the birds of nature were always singing about the rightness of things and so softly correcting modern man’s unnatural despair of the created order and his egregious confidence…

No one was barred from the conversation back when there was a conversation. No dispatch ever read, “Wingnut Henry David Thoreau today issued a manifesto from his compound near Walden…

The general continued to pay for the upkeep of the LSU tiger in an airconditioned cage. The amount of money involved was almost precisely the same as the subsidy for…

Beautifully and substantially-made books suggest something that deserve to be pored over at length, just as one lingers with friends after a wonderful meal.

Your body’s yours, just as this poem is mine: to make, destroy—a tenancy of will, for every citizen and concubine.

Besides, the harshest criticisms of any place come from those who truly love and belong to it.

It seemed a good time to get out and leave the classroom to idiots who couldn’t learn and didn’t know better, and imbeciles who couldn’t teach and should have known…

It turns out locally-produced food is not only good for the body, but the spirit - especially the human capacity to intuit the sanctity of the world.

I just completed Nicholas Carr's excellent book, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains, and--because that's the sort of person I am--I couldn't resist writing a review-essay…

If Lasch couldn't express a way for leftists and localists to speak the same language, perhaps no one can.

"Would that thou couldst last for aye, Merry, ever merry May" --William D. Gallagher Well, it can't. But herewith my May column from The American Conservative on a contumacious patriot of…

Mr. Wendell Berry of Kentucky will be in the Greater D.C. area this week, appearing at the Arlington Central Library Auditorium on Tuesday, May 4 at 7 p.m. Come early!

On the threshold between two unchosen ways of life - one of commitments, the other of choices. Both give rise to discontents, but ours today makes them a way of…

In 2007, we bought a house and moved to Greenville, North Carolina. Here, I recall the first rough day of home ownership, topped off by John Wayne and cold wine.