“I don’t want to do this anymore.” “What, eat lunch?” Stan took another bite of his chicken salad sandwich. It was supposedly “organic” and was tasteless. He looked at the label on the wrapper: “Safflower mayonnaise”. No wonder. Chicken salad was no good without real mayonnaise. “No, practice law. I’m worn out with it –… Read More
Come to Jesus Moment
I wrote this account of my personal Come to Jesus moment some years ago. I used it when I had to give an account of my spiritual life in EfM, though more and more I think it is the whole of my spiritual life. I still feel the same, but I am having a hard… Read More
Killing the Last Chicken in the Yard
Dedicated to we few, we crazy few, we band of poets For the first five years of the 1970s I was an inhabitant of two worlds: suburban Mountain Brook, Alabama (one of the richest cities per capita in the country) and Southside, in downtown Birmingham, the “arty” part of town where there were record stores… Read More
The Mattress Show
Some years ago I had a studio in the old Cobb Lane building on Southside in downtown Birmingham, Alabama, up on the third floor. I had been there for two years and would have stayed longer but one day I came up all those stairs and opened the door to my studio and there was… Read More
Being a Realist
February 1 – oops, it’s February 2 I thought I had gone to bed so I could be rested for work tomorrow (“work” being finishing a watercolour of a blue bearded Iris), but I have to take tamoxifen every night because of a bout with breast cancer two and a half years ago and if… Read More
Supernatural
I wish I could say I was reading something complex and perhaps in French but instead I am reading Collected Ghost Stories by M.R. James. I love ghost stories and am always in search of a new one – but it is neglected genre, probably because it is hard to write. My favorites are The… Read More
Cruelty and Faith
Reading For the Time Being by Annie Dillard. The book explores the far reaches of cruelty and of faith, from the Chinese Emperor Qin, Pol Pot of Cambodia and Stalin in Russia to the Jesuit priest Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, a man of profound faith and also an anthropologist who discovered Peking Man. Dillard spends… Read More
Old Masters Redux
I am working on the pastiches of old master paintings with modern technology intruding. Reading Carly Simon’s autobiography – Boys in the Trees – nearing the end. So much of the book devoted to sex, you would think there is no other thing to do in life. Our beings being divided, as we are, among… Read More
Re-reading
Re-reading Anna Quindlen’s Still Life with Bread Crumbs, a novel about an artist moving on in age who moves out from the city to save money and finds her “real” life there. That rings all kinds of bells with me. Her artist is a photographer named Rebecca Winter. In this scene, Rebecca ponders why she… Read More