The summer of 1976 was bicentennial summer, when the United States celebrated its 200th birthday. There were numerous festivities across the country, though the event that everyone seems to remember best is the gathering of tall ships in New York harbor on July 4th. I never understood why that was such a big deal, but given […]
One day in the spring of 2001, while I was in my office in the English Department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, a fax arrived from a stranger. It was a single piece of paper with a newspaper article photocopied in the center and, along one margin, a handwritten note. The sender stated only that […]
In May, 2017, I received an email message from two researchers in Europe, classical philologists who were planning an international conference on the “practice of the progymnasmata,” to be held in Paris in January, 2018. “We would be very pleased,” they wrote, “if you would join us for this conference.” Although the topic – an […]
For Carmen and Izzy. I met Nani in the fall of 1985 at an Ethiopian restaurant in Washington, DC. She came with my friends James and Carole. She was slight in stature but striking in appearance: dressed in black, with medium-length dark hair, cut in a slant across her face, and dark, expressive eyes. Sitting […]
For all his devotion to higher education, the road my grandfather took to the bachelor’s degree was long and winding. As I wrote in Part One of this post, he had only a ninth grade education when, in 1917, at the age of 20, he enlisted in the U.S. Navy during World War I and spent […]
When my grandfather, Russell W. Wallis, died in Richmond, Virginia, on March 27, 1985, at the age of 88, I was 23 years old and living in Washington, DC, just two hours away. It was the closest I ever lived to him. I moved to DC in January of that year and struggled at first to find work. […]
The Holyoke Range is a modest line of mountains, 9.5 miles long and 2.5 miles wide, that runs east-west through the towns of Hadley, South Hadley, Amherst, Granby, and Belchertown in western Massachusetts. Although its tallest peak is only 1,106 feet above sea level, the range appears taller because it rises so abruptly from the […]
For more than forty years now, my family has vacationed in a small cabin in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina, near the tiny village of Laurel Springs. We built the cabin in the early 1970s, though we began visiting the area long before that. My father first came with my mother and sister in […]
The Raleigh, North Carolina, of my childhood and youth was a constantly growing, ceaselessly expanding boom town. Every day, it seemed, some new shopping mall, office complex, or housing development opened; every week, a new road or highway was cut through the landscape; every year, the population swelled, and the town’s borders reached further out […]
The back-to-back traffic accidents, on Feb. 3 and Feb. 4, involving pedestrians and motor vehicles on the campus of the University of Massachusetts Amherst reminded me once again how vulnerable walkers and bicycle riders are in our automobile-obsessed culture, even in a place specifically designed to be separate and protected from that culture. When people imagine […]
In August, 2006, when I moved to Massachusetts from Wisconsin to take a job at the state university in Amherst, I signed a year’s lease on half a duplex in Northampton, across the Connecticut River and about eight miles from my new office. Although I probably could have found a place closer to campus, I […]
Perhaps the most memorable character in Tune In, the first volume of Mark Lewisohn’s projected three-volume biography of The Beatles, is not a person at all but a place – Liverpool, England. Given the fascinating personalities involved here, that says a lot. But the fact is: funny, drunk, dirty, old Liverpool permeates every aspect of […]
City of Rhetoric 