Scribblings

The weather is so odd. The sky is a grey white. The trees sway in the breeze. The snow has wiped out all color on the ground. It’s like being inside a satin lined coffiin except it’s colder. Yep, all I want to do is recite The Raven or Annabelle Lee.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
“It remains one of our best, and most imaginative, literary magazines.” ——Michael Dirda, The New York Review of Books
Editorial Offices Ronald Spatz, Editor
Alaska literary giants lead the celebration of Alaska Quarterly Review ‘s 33 years of continuous publication with its 2015 Fall & Winter issue.
The edition’s exclusive special feature is “They Were My People” by Alaska’s Pulitzer Prize and Grammy-winning composer John Luther Adams. In this 80-page selection from his upcoming memoir Silences So Deep: A Memoir of Music and Alaska, John Luther Adams writes about his music and deep friendship with conductor and

What more is there to say? Seems as though every week brings another horror, another tragedy. We bomb the crap out of them. They terrorize the crap out of us. And we all do it in the name of a merciful and loving god.

Talk about giving religion a bad name.

Donal Trump running for president with Sarah Palin as his running mate… she’d wear a sash, of course.

Ben Carson… well, doesn’t matter who is running with him, it’s a nightmare. 

On the one hand, I don’t think watching TV is an inherently non-intellectual thing to do. I think you can admit to having a slavish devotion to NCIS: LA and Elementary and also be a reader. On the other hand, having reached the demographic that is no longer desired by advertisers, I find less and less that interests me on either the TV or Internet. And that’s a good thing because I’m in the middle of rereading Vanity Fair and am once again thoroughly enthralled.

So started out at 10 AM in Laos. Flight delayed two hours. Connection to Bangkok missed. Very nice Lao staff find us in terminal and say they’ll re-book us. Terminal, BTW, is about Barrow size so not hard to find us. Come back and say we’re re-booked on another flight from Bangkok to Hong Kong but all boarding passes have to be reissued and their machine is broken. They are waiting for IT. We get to Bangkok only to be told by airline that they can’t issue our tickets for America. We have to do that in Hong Kong. And

Ok. I guess it was inevitable. I’ve spent the day in bed with Montezuma’s revenge. Since I leave day after tomorrow, I am being very cautious since this is not an illness to have when you are facing over 24 hours of flying. But if you’re going to be sick, this is the place to be. Staff swarmed all over me when I came back from the museum looking white and ready to pass out

The ladies got me undressed, offered a bed bath to cool me and then sat quietly in the room until they were sure I was

Here’s what sisters do for you. My bungalow here in Luang Prabang was far down a dark path that had twists and turns and steps down. Judy’s was right across from the reception bungalow. She insisted we change so that she didn’t have to medivac me out with a broken leg. When I went back to get my stuff to change rooms, I realized that the air conditioner wasn’t working and the room was still hot and stuffy. There are fans but you can’t open the windows because of the mosquitos. So she gave me her room and she’ll be

This is the original version of what I wrote after visiting at COPE in Laos. It became the basis for my newspaper column of a week or so ago.

I spent part of this morning at a facility called COPE here in Vientiane, Laos. If you are of a certain age, you’ll remember Laos as the place Nixon told us Americans had no ground troops. He neglected to mention the daily bombings. Here in Laos, the war hasn’t really ended. There are over 100 million unexploded bombs still on the ground… bombs that children dig up for the money they