Recently I was looking for this picture of an artfully rusted steam engine that I took during a cross-country trip in 2009. Rather than dig through the many thousands of photographs on the back-up server, I searched through the series of blog entries titled It’s a Big Dam Country that I wrote while on that road …
Author Archives: lara
The Books of July
July was a thin month for books. I had a week in Port Townsend for the Centrum writer’s conference and some personal issues to attend to. But I did get through a few things. Books I Read: The Hatred of Poetry — Ben Lerner (2016) The most often quoted bit in the reviews of this book …
Nuke and Pave…
… is an old computer term for removing all of the software from the hardware and starting over again. Back when we could rm ‑rf we would occasionally find that a system had got itself into a non-recoverable state and need to be rebuilt from the ground up in order to function again. Or on …
The Books of June
Books I read in June: Cleaning Up New York — Bob Rosenthal (1976) Referred to as a cult classic. I don’t get it. You expect a cleaning memoir to have good stories about clients and the occasional cleaning tip. This one has both but doesn’t manage to make either of them interesting. * I just don’t …
Stinker
Once upon a time there was a little boy who had both a dog and a monster. This boy spent his summer days with the dog traveling out with him in the morning and returning each afternoon in the hottest part of the day to cool in the shade of the back porch with the …