My senior year in high school, we had a guest lecturer from the local community college, a poet who challenged us to write a poem about a journey we take every day. The idea was to find beauty in something that we take for granted, to notice things we hardly notice.
Well, lately, I’ve been driving […]

If anyone wanted to set up camp and stake out my house, the apartments across the street would prove a very useful vantage point. They can see me coming and going, without making themselves known. Of all my neighbors, I know these people the least, there are no faces I recall, as people come and […]

My sixth and final review for the The Armchair Traveler Reading Challenge takes us to the jungles of Paraguay. Lily Tuck brings us The News from Paraguay, during the late 1800s in a time of war and turmoil for this land-locked country in South America.
I always find it nice to have a map when I’m […]

Because this concept of mind control is not isolated to Orwell’s future London, I will continue my side tour of this continent. Let me share with you now some of my favorite looks at Big Brother in the US.
1) Big Brother

Perhaps it is part of the African American experience, part of the Jungian collective unconscious to relate to this concept of Big Brother, watching. Big Brother is known by another name

I love to look up phrases we use in our everyday language to figure out where they started. A lot of our idioms come from literature and story-telling traditions. There’s the popular phrase, “Catch 22,” that came from the book of the same name. And I always thought, “Don’t look a gift horse in the […]