The Old Man and The Hawk
for Carrie

If he hadn’t been thirsty, the boy might have missed it. He saw it when he raised his canteen. It didn’t seem like much at first, he thought, just a black speck curling through the blue Utah sky. But he kept looking, curious. He squinted at the distant mystery, his thirst temporarily forgotten.

“Mr. Seth, is that a bird?”

The old man leaned against a stout but gnarled juniper, thumbs hooked in the shoulder straps of his worn canvas pack. He knew how and when to steal a few seconds’ rest as the minutes and the hours and the days and the life flowed by. He curled his arm around the juniper, letting his palm see and know the tree’s rough bark. He didn’t look up. He didn’t need to.

“It’s a hawk, son.”
Full Story »

It’s a totally new literary genre!

Well, sorta. You may have noticed that mobile is getting to be a really big deal, and you may have noticed that Them Danged Kids® are texting until their thumbs fall off. You probably didn’t realize, though, the magnitude of mobile and the SMS phenomenon. There are now over 3 billion mobile phones in the world and nearly all of them have SMS capability. Telephia estimates that revenue from premium SMS entertainment services in the US topped $1B last year. And the stuff that people are paying for - $5/month for a joke of the day (and Yo Mama joke of the day!), horoscopes, music reviews, health tips, sports, and on and on. It’s all a little hard for a guy like me to believe, but there it is. Full Story »

While spring may have only recently made its appearance in some parts of the country, here in the Sunny South it’s been springtime for several weeks already. The proliferation of blossoming dogwood, cherry, and redbud trees puts one in mind of poetry about spring. So let’s start with those most famous of lines about enchanted April, Chaucer’s opening to the Canterbury Tales:

Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote
The droghte of Marche hath percèd to the roote,
And bathèd every veyn in swich licoúr,
From which vertu engendred is the flour;
When Zephirus eek with his swete breeth
Enspirèd hath in every holte and heeth
The tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne
Hath in the Ram his halfe course yronne,
And smale fowles maken melodie,
That slepen al the nyght with open eye,
So pricketh hem natúre in hir coráges:—
Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimàges,
And palmeres for to seken straunge strondes,
To ferne halwes, kowthe in sondry landes;
And specially, from every shires ende
Of Engelond, to Caunturbury they wende,
The holy blisful martir for to seke,
That them hath holpen when that they were seeke. Full Story »

It’s around 9 a.m. May 1, 1994. My stepmother, Kathie, has spent the night at Forsyth Memorial Hospital with my father, Larry, who will die late this afternoon. Their next-door neighbor, Wayne, is driving her home so she can shower and maybe get an hour or two of sleep. She hasn’t slept much in the six weeks since Daddy was admitted to the hospital with massive liver failure. Wayne has been a constant and salving presence during his friend’s illness.

Ten miles, maybe, down Silas Creek Parkway, through the south side of Winston-Salem, then on out Highway 109’s low, pine-strewn roll of hills to where Gumtree Road cuts across, demarcating the northern boundary of Wallburg, NC. This is where Daddy and Kathie live, and it’s where I grew up. These are the cultural outlands of the sprawling new metropolitan South. Our neighborhood straddles the Davidson and Forsyth County lines, and stands too far out into the country to be properly called suburban. But it’s also way too close to Winston to be considered rural. In some senses it’s a border town, possessing neither the urban sophistication of the city nor the kind of “agrarian virtue” my college Politics professor liked to attribute to country living. Antebellum mystique is dead elsewhere, and it never happened here. Full Story »

Final part in a series.

How appropriate that a publication whose launch was dominated by photography of the technological wonder of the day should end its run with an equally impressive tribute to mankind’s latest technological accomplishment. As noted earlier, LIFE’s final issue was released a scant three weeks after Apollo 17, NASA’s last trip to the moon, and in the magazine’s concluding essays it found a fitting kinship with that mission.

Both LIFE and the Apollo program remained physically strong to the last – many regard Apollo 17 as the most successful of all the moon landings (12/29/72), and while LIFE was awash in red ink, its failures arguably related more to mismanagement than to substantive textual issues (in 1969 the magazine had reached an all-time circulation high of 8.5 million) (van Zuilen). Both were, in the end, overcome by financial difficulties and a lack of institutional will to carry on. Full Story »

I used to work with a HAL 9000. Back when I was at US West in the late ’90s we had a voice system into which we would record the day’s company news so that employees without Internet access could dial in and keep up with the latest events. As with any such system there was a dial-in sequence, buttons that had to be pressed in a certain order, etc.

One day, as I was working through the first stage of the sequence, our phone system apparently achieved sentience. For reasons that I still can’t explain, a decade later, and that nobody at the time had any clue about, the machine sort of … intuited what I was about to do. It performed an action or two that, put simply, it could not do. Full Story »

Part four in a series.

The terrible specter of nuclear annihilation was now clear in the American mind, a condition that LIFE acknowledged and addressed. But in the months that followed V-J Day an odd thing happened, as military testing of the new weaponry provided an opportunity for bomb-watchers to indulge their awe without having to confront the frightful context of war. In the estimation of President Truman, America was not only the most powerful nation on the planet, it was likely the most powerful nation in history (8/20/45, 32). If the bomb did possess apocalyptic potential, at least it could now be addressed within the relative calm that attends triumph, peace, and unchallenged superiority. Full Story »

Part three in a series.

In an age and a culture dominated by scientism, the word “sample” tends to invoke the adjectival “representative,” and I cannot begin to imagine culling a meaningful representative sample from LIFE’s 400-plus issues. Still, it seems important to devote a few pages to what happened with LIFE and technology between the Fort Peck Dam and Apollo 17. I will center this discussion on innovations and events that, from our perspective here at the end of the century, appear to have left significant marks on history.

The Medical Morality Play

LIFE’s coverage of medical technology began early and covered, through the decades, the research, development, and application of treatments for a variety of diseases and disorders afflicting humanity. Full Story »

Part two in a series.

As I suggested in Part One, the messianic/utopian view of science and technology attributed to LIFE Magazine is consistent with an ideological bent that traces its lineage to the dawn of the Enlightenment in Europe.

Francis Bacon’s highly influential New Atlantis, first published in 1626, recounts the narrator’s fictional shipwreck on the shores of Bensalem, a lost utopia, and offers one of the earliest testaments to the potential of applied science (Outhwaite & Bottomore 1994). In an extended ceremony, Bacon is given to know the seemingly limitless bounty of Bensalem’s scientific expertise. Bensalem is well versed in all manner of advanced technology: refrigeration and preservation, mining, agriculture, astronomy, meteorology, genetics, animal husbandry, desalination, medicine, musicology, mechanics, air flight, and mathematics are literally only a few of the society’s advanced technological arts. Full Story »

by Chris Mackowski

Mr. Adams’s Last Crusade: John Quincy Adams’s Extraordinary Post-Presidential Life in Congress
by Joseph Wheelan
PublicAffairs Publishing

Fewer families in America have had a greater influence on the country than the Adams family of Quincy, Massachusetts. After all, the family spawned two presidents, America’s most influential Founding Mother, a minister to England who helped saved the Union during the Civil War, and a turn-of-the-twentieth-century literary giant.

The family patriarch—America’s second president, John—has received a lot of attention in the past few years since the publication of David McCullough’s Pulitzer Prize winning biography. Full Story »

Ozymandias Source: Jack Cohen Art, Shadows exhibit

The universe is destined to die. Some physicists believe that this death will occur as the rate of expansion tears every atom apart. Others believe that the Second Law of Thermodynamics means that, trillions of years into the future, all that will be left is the universal background radiation, after all the suns have burned out and all the black holes have even evaporated. But even before the Big Rip or the heat death of the universe, entropy - the degree of disorder in our own systems - is destined to rule our future. We can struggle against it, and we can even beat it back for a time, but ultimately entropy wins and we die. Our works fall apart. And memory fades.

Today, we explore entropy in the written word. Full Story »

Beginning tomorrow, S&R’s weekly literature feature, VerseDay, becomes WordsDay. We love poetry, but we felt like we were ignoring other literary forms, so it just made sense to expand the field.

WordsDay will continue to address poetry, but now we’ll also be writing about fiction and creative non-fiction, as well.

We hope you enjoy it.

The upcoming presidential election and the economy are pretty poor excuses for our inability to focus on Iraq. Especially since we’ve not only passed the 4,000 mark of American dead, but 25 were killed in a recent two-week span.

It’s frightening how comfortable we’ve learned to live with the war since the “surge” supposedly turned things around. The continuing carnage among those who were supposed to enjoy some of the fruits of our liberation isn’t even on our radar screens.

Not only aren’t most of us following Iraq in the news, we turn our backs on books and movies that dramatize it. Yet our veterans aren’t just returning with problems, but with a whole lore. You can’t help but conclude that their experiences need to be watered down to be made palatable. Full Story »

Banana: The Fate of the Fruit that Changed the World
by Dan Koeppel
Hudson Street Press
(December 27, 2007)

by Chris Mackowski

I fell for Dan Koeppel’s new book like a man slipping on a banana peel.

Maybe that’s because of the appeal of the cover: a close-up of a banana with a blue sticker on it so identical to a real banana sticker that I had to do a double-take.

I picked it up, peeled open the cover, and read the first line to get a taste of the writing. “If you are an average American, about forty years old, you’re probably approaching banana ten thousand, just as I am,” Koeppel writes. Full Story »

by Chris Mackowski

The World Without Us
by Alan Weisman
Thomas Dunne Books–St. Martin’s Press
324 pp.

What would the world be like if the human race just up and vanished?

“Unlikely, perhaps, but for the sake of argument, not impossible,” writes journalist Alan Weisman. Perhaps a human-specific virus wipes us out or aliens kidnap us or God raptures us away. Poof—we’re gone. Tomorrow.

That’s the hypothetical premise behind Weisman’s newest book, The World Without Us.

But while the premise sounds fanciful, Weisman offers nothing but cold, hard facts and a gnawing gut feeling that something is already dreadfully, dreadfully wrong. Full Story »

Scholars & Rogues has added a couple of new features to its lineup, and we hope the new additions will provide our readers with even more reason to check by each day to see what’s new. In addition, we’ve reshuffled the feature lineup a bit, so here’s what to look for.

• Monday: Nota Bene - Scholars & Rogues takes you around the Web for all kinds of interesting stories you may have missed.
• Tuesday: TunesDay - A new feature. Each Tuesday S&R’s team of music lovers will present an artist or band of the week (maybe more than one), or will perhaps examine a new development in the world of tuneage, or note an important historical landmark… The possibilities are endless. Tune in for the first installment tomorrow. Full Story »

[An artist] should copy the masters and re-copy them, and after he has given every evidence of being a good copyist, he might then reasonably be allowed to do a radish, perhaps, from Nature. - Edgar Degas

I went to see the “Inspiring Impressionism” exhibit yesterday at the Denver Art Museum and came away struck by how remarkably it addressed questions of influence and originality in art, issues that have long been central to my own thinking and writing. As a poet, I’ve long been aware of the debt I owe the masters whose genius has shaped my own work, and if my efforts pale in comparison, they’re at least less meager than they would have been had I not spent so much time in the company of Donne, Shakespeare, Yeats, Hopkins, Wright, Thomas, and perhaps most especially, Eliot. Full Story »

On Wednesday, I “officially” became a journalist. Through the encouragement of several of my fellow Scrogues here, and my work on a number of issues that I’ve published here, I was accepted for membership by the Society of Environmental Journalists and received notice of my acceptance Wednesday.

It’s an absolutely wild feeling, a strange combination of elation and apprehension. It’s my first real step toward following my passion - writing - and if that step was toward journalism instead of fiction, then that means my need to write has become more encompassing than I anticipated a few years ago. My blogging, combined with finally self-publishing my first “short” story in December, makes me feel like I’m actually making progress toward being an honest-to-the-gods writer. My utter lack of progress on this goal for many years had bothered me a great deal. Full Story »

I’ve long been convinced of two truths regarding poetry:

1: The easiest thing in the world to write is a love poem.

2: The hardest thing in the world to write is a good love poem.

Accordingly, I admire the hell out of a writer who can produce a tribute to his/her eternal love without making me a little sick to the stomach.

I think the problem I’ve often encountered is that great poetry - great art of any sort, really - is driven by tension. Whether it’s political rage, the fear of loss, the pain of mourning, whatever, it seems that the muse is more intrigued by that which is wrong with the world than that which is right. And love - real love, anyway - is an expression of two people’s triumph over the dark tension propelling most great artists. Most of the great love poems I can think of aren’t really love poems purely - they’re often driven by negative conditions. The love is unrequited, a lover is marching off to war, things like that. Full Story »

The Prince, by Niccolo Machiavelli, first published in 1513, 176 pages, ISBN 978-0553212785

The worst that a prince may expect from a hostile people is to be abandoned by them; but from hostile nobles he has not only to fear abandonment, but also that they will rise against him;

In 1513, early into the Great Wars of Italy, an Italian politician, ambassador, soldier, and political philosopher was on the losing end of one of the many internal conflicts that followed the Reniassance. After being tortured and eventually released, he moved to his beloved Florence and settled down on a farm to write what is probably one of the most important treatises on politics written - Il Principe, The Prince, by Niccolo Machiavelli. Full Story »