Category: Uncategorized
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Telluride by the Sea
23 October 2023 On this Saturday, the grey first day of autumn, the last rose of summer blooms on my kitchen window sill and I am for the fifth straight day under the weather, still reacting to the RSV vaccination I got last Monday afternoon. I’ve not had a bad cold for so long I’d…
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Mills, Massage, and Madbury Day
12 September 2023 Reading Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead after Dickens’s David Copperfield is a déjà vu delight, though one can only hope Kingsolver’s epigraph borrowed from Dickens resonates for readers: “It’s in vain to recall the past, unless it works some influence upon the present.” The present rhyming with the past is right up my…
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Janus: Looking back, Looking Ahead
30 August 2023 The last humanities course I taught at UNH in the spring of 2020—which with the arrival of COVID at mid-semester unexpectedly became the last semester in my 43 years of teaching—was HUMA 513, an interdisciplinary introduction to the modern world. As the HUMA team prof covering the literary beat, I referred repeatedly…
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Thanks, Mr. Hanks
22 August 2023 Melissa Kirsch had a nice NYT piece last Saturday morning on “post-vacation clarity,” the fresh perspective one brings home from even a little time away from one’s accustomed place and routine. But I owe the fresh perspective I woke with that morning to Tom Hanks, or at least to the Tom Hanks…
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On Wisconsin, Part 2 4 August 2023
The drive west from Portage to Spring Green, Wisconsin takes about an hour and a quarter, and on Wednesday the 26th, the louring skies made the passing fields look preternaturally green. At noon I reached the Spring Valley Inn, first designed in the early 1990’s by the Taliesin and Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation as a…
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On Wisconsin, Part 1, 2 August 2023
I returned from my Wisconsin visit to family and friends very early last Sunday morning after a too-long layover in Orlando (consider the carbon footprint of getting from Milwaukee to Manchester NH via Orlando!) and a flight delayed by thunderstorms up and down the east coast. When I woke later that morning and parted the…
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Midsummer Revelations and Recommendations, 21 July 2023
Truly “summer’s lease hath all too short a date.” ** So, as July speeds by, I tap out a list of things I’ve really appreciated of late, hoping that you, Dear Readers, might also enjoy and/or find useful. CARPE DIEM! **Sonnet 18, by William Shakespeare. Worth memorizing.
Georgeann Murphy 