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 […]