Anecdotal Evidence

Dr. Johnson in The Adventurer on August 28, 1753 : “. . . I shall, therefore, venture to inculcate to my ingenious contemporaries, the ne...

Weeds I can’t name crowd the front garden, adding to the lushness of our greenery. In Houston, if you’re not picky, gardens grow themselves,...

Here’s a book I haven’t read in some sixty years: Antony van Leeuwenhoek and His ‘Little Animals’ by Clifford Dobell, published in 1932 by H...

Like the rest of us, poets often favor certain times of the year. They return to a season or month they find thematically or emotionally ric...

I think we both sensed it might be our final conversation. We talked about the Cleveland we knew as kids – the main library downtown on Supe...

In 1950, the poet J.V. Cunningham translated from the French a work by the seventeenth-century Jansenist Pierre Nicole, “An Essay on True an...

“But to politicks and literature there must be an end.”   Leave it to Dr. Johnson to remind us of the vanity of our wishes. Human striving...

The poet W.S. Di Piero introduces Montaigne without mentioning his name: “‘Essay’ has embedded in it ‘assay,’ ‘weighing,’ ‘testing,’ ‘proof...

A reader expresses surprise at my admission that I once read William Gibson’s Neuromancer . “I thought you hated science fiction,” he write...

When we think of ferocious predators among animals we likely think of sharks and grizzly bears, big creatures with teeth. But I remember as ...

At the center of the screen is an acute triangle with a rounded bottom. Its shape resembles the pattern left by wipers on a dirty windshield...

Rare is the poet who can simultaneously think and sing. C.H. Sisson once quoted the French critic Charles Maurras saying, “Reason may convi...

Regardless of her putative subject, Stevie Smith always seems to get around to death. That sounds like a prescription for adolescent morbidi...

We’ve had a damp spring and summer in Houston – thirty-nine inches of rain since the start of the year. No major storms but frequent brief s...