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This pond lily grew all night and broke the surface this morning.  I bought it at a nursery and submerged it in my fish pond, which I spent Saturday cleaning out and getting ready for the summer.  My previous pond lily didn’t make it through the winter.  All week I have watched this new one…

Last week my good friend Kurt posted a great piece on his blog about “Driverless Cars and Bodiless Brains” (http://resourceinsights.blogspot.com/2018/03/driverless-cars-and-bodiless-brains.html#more).  He is referring of course to the news that Uber’s prototype driverless vehicle just ran over and killed a pedestrian in Tempe, Arizona.  Kurt points out the folly of thinking that AI will be able…

This guy was sitting a row behind me at a recent performance by the student orchestras at the University of Minnesota (my daughter plays viola in one of them).  I sketched him for a good 15 minutes, during which he never once looked up from his phone.  Something about the intensity of his engrossment prompted…

Something the Minnesota musician Charlie Parr said about the nature of time has stuck in my mind: in an on-line interview he describes time as being like the curl of waste aluminum coming off of a lathe, an image he gets from watching a craftsman mill a resonator cone for a steel guitar.  Time isn’t…

    Apparently Netflix has decided to reboot the 1960’s series Lost in Space.  Coincidentally I have been watching the series on Hulu–something to do while washing dishes.  But since a side interest of mine is science fiction film, I’ve actually been doing a lot of thinking about the show and its place in American…

Two weeks ago I took a group of poetry students aboard a river boat for a morning’s excursion.  I had brought my guitar along, just on the off chance that it might prove useful.  About half-way through the trip one of my students picked it up and gave us an impromptu concert, mostly playing the…

  This quote is from Paul Gauguin–I wrote it down while visiting the “Gauguin: Artist as Alchemist” exhibit at the Art Institute of Chicago.  The exhibit displayed aspects of Gauguin which you usually don’t see–his work as a wood carver, print-maker and potter.  Beside many of his more famous paintings were objects he had chiseled…

I was just at the La Crosse Folk Festival in Wisconsin where my daughter and I participated in a song writing contest (we came in fourth, in case you are wondering).  I was reflecting, as I listened to a variety of compositions played on a sunny afternoon in a big circus tent, on the power…

Two curators in the cafe of the Gardiner Museum in Boston.  They are listening to a consulting conservator “mansplain” the process of preserving a Roman sarcophagus, part of the permanent collection of the museum.  The Gardener Museum is the former private residence of Isabella Stewart Gardener and it features a spectacular open courtyard in which…

The rough sketch below is of one of the totem poles in Great Hall of the Field Museum of Chicago.  It is considered an example of totemism, the belief that humans have kinship with the natural world.  As James Frazer put it, a totem “is an intimate relation which is supposed to exist between a…