A Forum for Diary Entries, Essays, Observations, Poetry, News, and Reviews
July 10th, 2023
Central Park’s bold rock outctops of Manhattan Mica schist have a smoothness and sheen caused by their scouring by passage of glacial ice over 20,000 years ago. The prominence these rock outcrops in Frederick Law Olmsted’s and Calvert Vaux’s 1857 design for Central Park is an incomparable feat of nature-based landscape architecture for the purpose of aesthetic appreciation, physical enjoyment, and structural support for constructions dedicated to recreation, events, and in one case, long-term occupation. READ MORE >
February 15th, 2023
For arm-chair travelers in a time of restricted opportunities to foreign countries, a travel diary can provide a great vicarious vacation. Here you may relive with me a day-by-day account of my wedding trip to Venice in 1984 with my new husband Ted, and subsequent return on our first anniversary one year later. This was something more than a trip of a lifetime since Venice is not only a place of the heart for newly espoused lovers but also a great treasure house for art- and architecture-lovers that beckons you to visit again and again. Please climb now into my memory-laden gondola and follow my recaptured itinerary for an unforgettable experience of the glories of La Serenissima. READ MORE >
January 16th, 2023
In memory I feel the key I am holding in my right hand turn the lock as my left hand presses down on the handle that opens the front door. Now stand with me in the entry vestibule as I tell you about the history of the farmhouse I owned for fifty-four years in the hamlet of Wainscott within the Township of East Hampton on the South Fork of Long Island. We will then go back outside and take an illustrated tour of the garden that I created during my fifty-four years of ownership of this property. READ MORE >
December 2nd, 2022
You don’t often read a novel where the setting is historically familiar to you personally while the plot provides an education on a difficult contemporary subject – in this case, the Opioid Crisis in Appalachia. Barbara Kingsolver’s new book is a tour de force that, far from being an example of the novel as polemic, is a deep and sympathetic dive into the underbelly of a seriously troubled specific place that happens to be a significant piece of my ancestral heritage, the facts of which are here woven into my review of Demon Copperhead. READ MORE >
November 11th, 2022
Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18 Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer’s Day? and Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Sonnet 43 How Do I Love Thee, are both paeans addressed to a beloved figure. Formally they share the same fourteen iambic pentameter line structure that is fundamental to the sonnet. They differ, however, in that each has its own prescribed rhyming scheme, Shakespeare’s being unique to him and Browning’s modeled of that of the Italian poet Petrarch, who is best known for his Canzoniere (c. 1351–53), a sonnet sequence in praise of a woman he calls Laura. This journal posting is an analysis of the sonnet as a form of poetic expression within the parameters of each of these formats. It concludes with a sonnet written by me in the Petrarchan mode. READ MORE >
October 30th, 2022
Name your pick of the best children’s book ever written, and you might say Alice in Wonderland or Stuart Little by E. B. White. No one will argue with you about either in terms of 1) its immortality as a literary classic and 2) its timeless appeal to readers irrespective of their chronological age. In my ongoing housecleaning campaign this past week I found on a dusty bookshelf another book that strikes both of these chords: The Wind in the Willows. READ MORE >
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