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December 2012

December 14, 2012

Namaste Neighborhood Yoga Studio

My local yoga studio just closed. I’ve known the day was coming, as much as...

December 13, 2012

The Hobbit on Steroids

In a public library, there waited The Hobbit. And in a cineplex, there screened The...

December 11, 2012

Alone at Christmas

By Shannon Huffman Polson I went alone that Christmas to a place far away from...

December 09, 2012

Science and the Death of Philosophy

My boy is a bit of a science geek. He subscribes to Discover and Popular...

December 07, 2012

The Eclipse of the Airport Chapel

The San Francisco International Airport has a yoga room, but no chapel. At least that’s...

December 06, 2012

Cicero and Machiavelli: Being and Seeming

Cicero said that it is better to be than to seem. Some fifteen centuries later,...

December 05, 2012

Life and Longing in Laramie

Dust…flies free for a moment, then returns, leisurely, to the habitual road—that bruised string which...

December 04, 2012

Constructive Disruption: On Derek Webb’s Mind Ctrl Part Two

Continued from yesterday. McDonald’s employees allegedly assaulted human cyborg Steve Mann in Paris, France on...

December 03, 2012

Constructive Disruption: On Derek Webb’s Mind Ctrl Part One

On his 2009 album, Stockholm Syndrome, in a song titled “Freddie Please,” singer-songwriter Derek Webb...

November 2012

November 30, 2012

The Cost of Writing the Truth

I remember my mother used to go to bed for the day. The blackness of...

November 29, 2012

Books for Holiday Giving

Kudos to the university presses that are publishing books of the soundest scholarship for the...

November 28, 2012

Poetry and Restraint: Teaching as T’Shuvah

Restraint. A poet’s restraint. A teacher’s. The penultimate moment of Elizabeth Bishop’s “Filling Station”: ......

November 27, 2012

In Memoriam: Joshua Casteel

I’m guessing that most of you haven’t heard of Joshua Casteel—but you should have. Casteel...

November 26, 2012

Pennies for a Conquistador

Today Good Letters welcomes Jessica Eddings-Roeser as a regular contributor. Jessica holds an MFA in...

November 23, 2012

Holy Motors’ Motor Skills

As Holy Motors begins, a sleepwalker leans against his bedroom wall, upon which a forest...

November 20, 2012

How To Accomplish Love

From time to time, a big sheet of butcher paper goes up on the wall...

November 16, 2012

Weathering Disaster from Beirut to Brooklyn

In the terrible wake of Hurricane Sandy which left my family unscathed without even a...

November 14, 2012

On the Marine Corps Birthday: Why Not Turn the Other Cheek?

Most years when the Marine Corps birthday comes around, followed immediately by Veterans Day, I...

November 13, 2012

Margaret and the Blight Man Was Born for

Near the end of Kenneth Lonergan’s film, Margaret, a seventeen-year-old girl sits next to her...

November 07, 2012

Do-It-Yourself Sacramental Tedium

Last Tuesday, after it became clear that Superstorm Sandy was going to bypass Washington, D.C.,...

November 06, 2012

Denise Levertov: A Poet’s Life, Part Two

Yesterday, in Part One of my review of the major new biography, Denise Levertov: A Poet’s...

November 05, 2012

Denise Levertov: A Poet’s Life, Part One

I thought I knew Denise Levertov. In the 1970s, she and my husband were both...

November 02, 2012

Listening to a Stranger’s Story

I am boarding a plane to Detroit, and so is she, her thick coat falling...

November 01, 2012

The Scatological Opportunist

Train up a child in the way he should go. Even when he is old...

October 2012

October 31, 2012

The Work Awaits, Part Two

Almost exactly two years ago, I made my Good Letters debut with a post titled...

October 30, 2012

To Live by the Light of Fiction

“In the end, a story is never going to make a damn bit of difference...

October 29, 2012

Sleeping in Slave Quarters at Sweet Briar College

From my office window I can see the pale yellow plantation house, its sharply pitched...

October 26, 2012

Elections Plus Economics, a Losing Equation

It’s time again. We’re just days from that sacred quadrennial ritual, wherein we profess outrage...

October 25, 2012

Something Like Jasmine Meditates on Mortality

Living with leukemia, I naturally meditate often on our human mortality. No, often is the...

October 24, 2012

A Tale of Two Rivers

“In our family, there was no clear line between religion and fly fishing. We lived...