The Sons of Liberty
Two days after Josiah Chase’s eighth birthday had been marked by a raisin cake and a game of roundelay with his seven siblings, his father’s elder half-brother Ezekiel had appeared from out of the west, occasioning a great stir. Ezekiel had traveled the Pennsylvania frontier as a chain-bearer with the surveyors, and then had fought in the Indian Wars, and seemed easily the tallest man anyone had ever seen. He wore long breeches and a hunting shirt the color of dried leaves and told tales of summer ambushes so vivid that Josiah could smell the pines and feel the hush hanging in the hot air. One account involved an English supply train in the wilderness for which Ezekiel had been employed as an escort, a column so encumbered with necessities that it extended six miles, and included folding chase chairs, cases of powdered mustard, and dozens of bottles of Madeira wine. After the rout the abandoned spoils …
The Great American Eclipse
In the woods with Sasquatch and the Red-Haired Dancer
Who is engineering the weather?
Sundown, you better take care, if I find you been creeping ’round my back-stairs
My friend Ashlea Stinnett invited me to a Bigfoot campout in Washington State. I brought the Red-Haired Dancer with me, fully aware of our interloper status. We were among a crew of true believers, mostly older women with a knack for kindness and the telling of a good yarn, who spent their days noticing twigs arranged into meaningful hieroglyphics, felled trees in impossible arrangements, a pack of Honeybuns gone missing and empty wrappers carefully returned to the base of a tree. Sasquatch left a knife near Ashlea’s tent the day after I mentioned she was the kind of woman to carry a knife on her belt. Sasquatch evaded me however, probably because I am a writer.
The truth is that I was the one evading Sasquatch because I can barely make sense of this world, let alone an interdimensional one. I came because I wanted to reconnect with Ashlea, who I met in a bar in Phoenix, Arizona, during my first …
The View-Master
The more ubiquitous our image-making machinery gets, the rarer independent perception and personality become.
‘One of the most sublime — if highly introverted — experiences you can have is examining a View Master transparency exposed on a sunny day, on a cloudy one.’
I struggle to convince myself that it’s all just entertainment.
“Wit is the epitaph of an emotion.” So asserted Oscar Wilde; and, as one of the wittiest people ever to have razzed a US customs official, he knew what he was quipping about. When I was reworking his Modernist myth, The Picture of Dorian Gray, for a film adaptation, I went through the text and wrote down every single epigram.
There were scores — for, in truth, Wilde’s novel is little else but a thin chain of narrative links, from which depend, jewel-like, scores of epigrams, apothegms, bon mots, and pinpoint-sharp remarks. Which is not to denigrate it: For all its clunkiness as a work of literature, it is as an aesthetic fairytale that Dorian Gray has come to lodge permanently in the contemporary imagination. The reason for this is the timeliness of the book, which appeared in the first year of the decade during which virtuality, having massed its shadowy forces in the very wings …
