The Gospel of Goodlands
Maybe we’re all searching for good news these days, whether consciously or not, but I thought this was so good on so many levels that I wanted to, well, just vote “yes,” I guess,...
Writing and Responding
Braiding Sweetgrass (2015) is a book about the contemporary relationship between plants and people. More specifically, it is about the conflict and potential reconciliation between a botanical, scientific, written understanding of plants, and the orally transmitted...
Trolls
Wikipedia defines an Internet troll as slang for “a person who starts flame wars or intentionally upsets people on the Internet by posting inflammatory and digressive, extraneous, or off-topic messages in an online community.”...
Learning to Listen
I’ve set myself a long, slow project: learning to listen to music. There’s a low rumble of piano lessons in the distant background (from age 6), lessons focussed on the solo literature and good music, which is to...
More listening
I’ve been carrying on with my music project. It’s been full of surprises — what I’d call a success, in other words. I think I am learning to listen. What began as a systematic, linear move...
The Cabbagehead
Years ago, I studied the work of a photomontage artist called John Heartfield. “Heartfield” is the adopted name of Helmut Herzfeld (1891-1968), a German adamantly opposed to the rising Nazi party in the 1920s...
