I first saw Audubon Road in the spring of 2012. That May, I took my bike out of the kitchen, where it had leaned against a wall since the previous fall, and began riding daily. That wasn’t unusual: I had biked with some frequency since moving to Northampton in 2006; but my riding had always […]
Here’s a completely pointless movie I made from video shot for my last blog post but never used. It’s a minute and a half of bike riding in Hampshire County, Massachusetts, with a banjo soundtrack. Enjoy!
Our nation’s love affair with the car continues to wane. As the New York Times reported recently, “Americans are buying fewer cars, driving less and getting fewer licenses as each year goes by.” This decrease in “automobility” is especially striking for young Americans, who are clearly less smitten with the car than their parents were […]
Last Wednesday afternoon, while driving home from campus, I heard a story on National Public Radio about New York City’s ongoing effort to re-plant its storm-damaged beaches with native grasses. It turns out that seeds from those grasses have been painstakingly preserved at the city’s Greenbelt Native Plant Center on Staten Island, and those seeds […]
I came to Middlebury, Vermont, last week on family business. I like to think I would have explored, and documented, any place where I was staying for nine days, especially if it was late spring in the northern hemisphere. And I’m sure I would have brought my bicycle, even if it was not a traditionally […]
In late 1864, a twenty-one year old Henry James spent four months in Northampton, Massachusetts, taking the “water cure” at the Round Hill Hotel off Elm Street. Having grown up in New York City, Cambridge (Massachusetts), and Newport (Rhode Island), and schooled in Europe, he must have found the city provincial, even vulgar. According to […]
The launch last Monday of New York City’s much-anticipated bike-sharing program, the largest in the nation, set off a flurry of writing about biking in that city. What most impressed me about the pieces, though, was not their number; it was the wide variety of media, modes, and styles used. From the point of view […]
The old way of writing, at least in terms of U.S. schooling, was ALL text. The new way often looks like ALL image. What I want to do as a teacher is join the two, so that students learn to make genuinely multimedia compositions, ones in which they can practice the full intellectual and expressive […]
Here’s a short movie, exported from Keynote, about teaching writing with maps. My goal was to collect examples of the kinds of maps that my students might create or use in their own writing about place. Let me know what you think! (There’s no audio on this one; as a couple of you have already […]
In April, I took several day-long bicycle trips from a cabin in Laurel Springs, North Carolina, both north and south on the Blue Ridge Parkway. The furthest I went south was to the Northwest Trading Post in Glendale Springs, NC, on April 13, 2013. The cabin is about 0.8 mile from the Parkway (milepost 246), […]
The skies were bright blue and the sun blazing, but there was a steady breeze off the water – at times you almost felt you needed a sweater. We walked on the boardwalk in Asbury Park and Ocean Grove, lay on the sand until someone told us we needed a pass, drank coffee in an […]
Yesterday we toured the 9/11 Memorial in lower Manhattan. The crowds were immense – with endless, snaking lines, a constant babel of tongues, and the uncomfortable press of flesh while we waited to enter. And yet once inside, the crowds suddenly thinned, and you found yourself among trees and water and marble, with space to […]
City of Rhetoric 