Back at the Wilshire, Pedro sits there dreaming
He's found a book on magic in a garbage can
He looks at the pictures and stares up at the cracked ceiling
"At the count of three," he says, "I hope I can disappear"...
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The Hammock Papers
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I apprehend no danger to our country from a foreign foe. Our destruction, should it come at all, will be from another quarter. From the inattention of the people to the concerns of their government, from their carelessness and negligence, I must confess that I do apprehend some danger. I fear that they may place too implicit a confidence in their public servants, and fail properly to scrutinize their conduct; that in this way they may be made the dupes of designing men, and become the instruments of their own undoing. Make them intelligent, and they will be vigilant; give them the means of detecting the wrong, and they will apply the remedy.
I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth. Perhaps the mission of those who love mankind is to make people laugh at the truth, to make truth laugh, because the only truth lies in learning to free ourselves from insane passion for the truth.
Jorge Luis Borges, from A Personal Anthology
No man was ever yet a great poet, without at the same time being a profound philosopher.
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"The house shelters day-dreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace.”
"The strength of a man’s virtue should not be measured by his special exertions but by his habitual acts.” Blaise Pascal
"Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about."
"O Mole! the beauty of it! The merry bubble and joy, the thin, clear, happy call of the distant piping!"
37. Beware, O wanderer, the road is walking too, said Rilke one day to no one in particular as good poets everywhere address the six directions. If you can’t bow, you’re dead meat. You’ll break like uncooked spaghetti. Listen to the gods. They’re shouting in your ear every second.
"When I am, as it were, completely myself, entirely alone and of good cheer – say travelling in a carriage or walking after a good meal, or during the night when I cannot sleep – it is on such occasions that my ideas flow best and most abundantly. Whence, and how, they come I know not ; nor can I force them. Those ideas that please me I retain in memory and am accustomed, as I have been told, to hum them to myself. If I continue in this way, it soon occurs to me how I may turn this dainty morsel to account, so as to make a good dish of it. That is to say, agreeable to the rules of counterpoint, to the peculiarities of various instruments etc. All this fires my soul, and, provided I am not disturbed, my subject enlarges itself, becomes methodised, and defined, and the whole, though it be long, stands almost complete and finished in my mind, so that I can survey it like a fine picture or a beautiful statue at a glance. Nor do I hear in my imagination the parts successively, but I hear them, as it were, all at once. What a delight this is, I cannot tell."
"Feel wind stir the greenwood, or turn pages of a book made from his flesh -- lean close, then, and hear, Green Man's voice."
Cold Maker, Winter, 1909
Smelt Basket
Elizabeth Winthrop Chanler (detail), 1893
"We are so concerned to flatter the majority that we lose sight of how very often it is necessary, in order to preserve freedom for the minority, let alone for the individual, to face that majority down."
"Beauty is a value, as important as truth and goodness."
"A gentleman does not have a ham sandwich without mustard."
"If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world."
"When the midnight strikes in the belfry dark/And the white goose quakes at the fox’s bark/We saddle the horse that is hayless, oatless/Hoofless and pranceless, kickless and coatless/We canter off for a midnight prowl/Whoo-hoo-hoo, says the hook-eared owl."
"However tiresome to others, the most indefatigable orator is never tedious to himself. The sound of his own voice never loses its harmony to his own ear; and among the delusions, which self-love is ever assiduous in attempting to pass upon virtue, he fancies himself to be sounding the sweetest tones."
"Take the Adventure, heed the call, now, ere the irrevocable moment passes! ‘Tis but a banging of the door behind you, a blithesome step forward, and you are out of the old life and into the new! Then some day, some day long hence, jog home here if you will, when the cup has been drained and the play has been played, and sit down by your quiet river with a store of goodly memories for company."
"Barring love I'll take my life in large doses alone--rivers, forests, fish, grouse, mountains. Dogs."
"It is a very great mistake to imagine that the object of loyalty is the authority and interest of one individual man, however dignified by the applause or enriched by the success of popular actions."
"Is your cucumber bitter? Throw it away. Are there briars in your path? Turn aside. That is enough. Do not go on and say, 'Why were things of this sort ever brought into this world?' neither intolerable nor everlasting - if thou bearest in mind that it has its limits, and if thou addest nothing to it in imagination. Pain is either an evil to the body (then let the body say what it thinks of it!)-or to the soul. But it is in the power of the soul to maintain its own serenity and tranquility."
"What am I in the eyes of most people? A nonentity or an oddity or a disagreeable person — someone who has and will have no position in society, in short a little lower than the lowest. Very well — assuming that everything is indeed like that, then through my work I’d like to show what there is in the heart of such an oddity, such a nobody. This is my ambition, which is based less on resentment than on love in spite of everything, based more on a feeling of serenity than on passion. Even though I’m often in a mess, inside me there’s still a calm, pure harmony and music. In the poorest little house, in the filthiest corner, I see paintings or drawings. And my mind turns in that direction as if with an irresistible urge. As time passes, other things are increasingly excluded, and the more they are the faster my eyes see the picturesque. Art demands persistent work, work in spite of everything, and unceasing observation."
48 career games started; 2,176 rushing yards, 34 touchdowns; 4,284 passing yards, 48 touchdowns; 7-2 career record versus Michigan State, Notre Dame, and Ohio combined; three-time All-American, All-Big Ten, and Heisman finalist
"One cloud feels lonely."
"Cultivate an ever continuous power of observation. Wherever you are, be always ready to make slight notes of postures, groups and incidents. Store up in the mind a continuous stream of observations."
The Lone Boat, North Woods Club, Adirondacks, 1892
And how can man die better / Than facing fearful odds / For the ashes of his fathers / And the temples of his gods
WHITE HORSES Far out at sea / There are horses to ride, / Little white horses / That race with the tide. / Their tossing manes / Are the white sea-foam, / And the lashing winds / Are driving them home- / To shadowy stables / Fast they must flee, / To the great green caverns / Down under the sea. Irene Pawsey
"The euphony transformed me and inundated my soul in a roguish countenance, the likes of which I had know well in younger days. Such impishness soon drove out the complaints of the day."
"I don't want to repeat my innocence. I want the pleasure of losing it again.” This Side of Paradise
"In skating over thin ice, our safety is in our speed."
"There are those who love to get dirty and fix things. They drink coffee at dawn, beer after work. And those who stay clean, just appreciate things. At breakfast they have milk and juice at night. There are those who do both, they drink tea.”
"Enlightenment is man's emergence from his self-imposed nonage. Nonage is the inability to use one's own understanding without another's guidance. This nonage is self-imposed if its cause lies not in lack of understanding but in indecision and lack of courage to use one's own mind without another's guidance. Dare to know! Sapere aude. 'Have the courage to use your own understanding,' is therefore the motto of the enlightenment."
"We’re gonna kick you in the teeth, and when you punch us back we’re gonna smile at you, and when you knock us down we’re going to get up, and on the way, we’re going to bite a kneecap off. We’re going to stand up, and it’s going to take two more shots to knock us down. And on the way up, we’re going to take your other kneecap, and we’re going to get up, and it’s gonna take three shots to get us down. And when we do, we’re gonna take another hunk out of you."
"Sit down before fact as a little child, be prepared to give up every conceived notion, follow humbly wherever and whatever abysses nature leads, or you will learn nothing."
"Bold knaves thrive without one grain of sense, but good men starve for want of impudence.”
"Those who restrain desire do so because theirs is weak enough to be restrained."
"Whoever wants music instead of noise, joy instead of pleasure, soul instead of gold, creative work instead of business, passion instead of foolery, finds no home in this trivial world of ours."
"Certainly work is not always required of a man. There is such a thing as a sacred idleness, the cultivation of which is now fearfully neglected."
"You have to have a habitual vision of greatness … you have to believe in fact that you will refuse to settle for mediocrity. You won’t confuse your financial security with your personal integrity, you won’t confuse your success with your greatness or your prosperity with your magnanimity … believe in fact that living is connected to giving.”
"You see George, you've really had a wonderful life. Don't you see what a mistake it would be to just throw it away?"
"There's a basic rule which runs through all kinds of music, kind of an unwritten rule. I don't know what it is, but I've got it."
"Exuberance is beauty." (William Blake)
"Sunshine is delicious, rain is refreshing, wind braces us up, snow is exhilarating; there is really no such thing as bad weather, only different kinds of good weather."
"Literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life.” Fernando Pessoa
"[I]in the spiky fall season, days like today with the little chill that makes one feel freshly laundered ..."
"Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes)."
"Every normal man must be tempted, at times, to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats. But this business, alas, is fatal to the placid moods and fine other-worldliness of the poet."
"I say let the world go to hell, but I should always have my tea."
"We all come from our own little planets. That's why we're all different. That's what makes life interesting."
"We're just dancing in the rain ..."
"If, then, I were asked for the most important advice I could give, that which I considered to be the most useful to the men of our century, I should simply say: in the name of God, stop a moment, cease your work, look around you."
"It is hard to go on living without some hope of encountering the extraordinary."
Unlikely General: "Mad" Anthony Wayne and the Battle for America
"I have stretched ropes from steeple to steeple; Garlands from window to window; Golden chains from star to star ... And I dance."
"When you do things from your soul, you feel a river moving in you, a joy.”
"In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert's there are few."
¨The danger of civilization, of course, is that you will piss away your life on nonsense.¨
"The Poet is the Priest of The Invisible." Wallace Stevens
"Technique is the proof of your seriousness." Wallace Stevens
"Whatever is goode in its kinde ought to be preserv'd in respect for antiquity, as well as our present advantage, for destruction can be profitable to none but such as live by it."
"Whatever is my right as a man is also the right of another; and it becomes my duty to guarantee as well as to possess."
"...the imprisoned lightning"
"The best defense against a usurpatory government is an assertive citizenry."
"We don’t need a list of rights and wrongs, tables of dos and don’ts: we need books, time, and silence."
“We may ignore, but we can nowhere evade, the presence of God. The world is crowded with him. He walks everywhere incognito.” (Thank you, Mr. Wade)
The Hammock Papers
A forest of things.
"I am not one who was born in the custody of wisdom. I am one who is fond of olden times and intense in quest of the sacred knowing of the ancients."
Gustave Courbet
18 January 2026
Happy Birthday, Daniel Webster
I apprehend no danger to our country from a foreign foe. Our destruction, should it come at all, will be from another quarter. From the inattention of the people to the concerns of their government, from their carelessness and negligence, I must confess that I do apprehend some danger. I fear that they may place too implicit a confidence in their public servants, and fail properly to scrutinize their conduct; that in this way they may be made the dupes of designing men, and become the instruments of their own undoing. Make them intelligent, and they will be vigilant; give them the means of detecting the wrong, and they will apply the remedy.
Good intentions will always be pleaded for every assumption of authority. It is hardly too strong to say that the Constitution was made to guard the people against the dangers of good intentions. There are men in all ages who mean to govern well, but they mean to govern. They promise to be good masters, but they mean to be masters.
Hold on, my friends, to the Constitution and to the Republic for which it stands. Miracles do not cluster and what has happened once in 6,000 years, may not happen again. Hold on to the Constitution, for if the American Constitution should fail, there will be anarchy throughout the world.
Daniel Webster, born on this day in 1782
Truth.
I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth. Perhaps the mission of those who love mankind is to make people laugh at the truth, to make truth laugh, because the only truth lies in learning to free ourselves from insane passion for the truth.
Umberto Eco
Happy Birthday, A.A. Milne
Sometimes, if you stand on the bottom rail of a bridge and
lean over to watch the river slipping slowly away beneath you, you will
suddenly know everything there is to be known.
A.A. Milne, born on this day in 1882
17 January 2026
Nostalgia.
Before MTV, imaginative music listeners often composed their own mental movies inspired by a track. The lyrics, melody, and deeply personal associations evoked vivid visuals for each person. Then came moonwalking and animated heartbreak, imagery that, like a musical earwig, locked in, seemingly for an eternity. For many, it replaced their own imagination. The director's vision became the "correct" one, and replaying the song often meant a review of the video running through the mind, as well. Narrative videos imposed upon rather than expanding the imagination ("Sledgehammer"), reductive and literal-minded -- a great argument supporting live performance videos.
I was never a fan of the tyranny imposed by what I considered the standardized, highly-rotated visual narratives' intrusion on my deeply personal emotions and memories. I preferred instead the joyful musical nostalgia of rebellious runs through the night with a paper bag of shucked corn, car rides to concerts and skating rinks, and reminiscing about a girlfriend's perfume.
It's best that MTV be left in its proper place -- the dustbin of history.
Mozart.
Anne-Sophie Mutter and Lambert "Don't-Be-An" Orkis lift the morning with over two hours of Mozart sonatas ...
Chance.
I had no wish to take any determined route on that stroll; I attempted, rather, a maximum latitude of probabilities in order not to wear out expectation with an obligatory anticipation of a single one of them. I was able, within the imperfect limits of possibility, to walk, as they say, at random. I accepted, without any conscious prejudice but that of avoiding the wider avenues and streets, the most obscure invitations of chance.
Jorge Luis Borges, from A Personal Anthology
Lives.
Trottestam, Books, Ladders, 2025
The stories that unfold in the space of a writer's study, the objects chosen to watch over a desk, the books selected to sit on the shelves, all weave a web of echoes and reflections of meanings and affections, that lend a visitor the illusion that something of the owner of this space lives on between these walls, even if the owner is no more ...
In the dark, with the windows lit and the rows of books glittering, the library is a closed space, a universe of self-serving rules that pretend to replace or translate those of the shapeless universe beyond.
Alberto Manguel, from The Library at Night
Different.
The best thing, though, in that museum was that everything always stayed right where it was. Nobody'd move. You could go there a hundred thousand times, and that Eskimo would still be just finished catching those two fish, the birds would still be on their way south, the deers would still be drinking out of that water hole, with their pretty antlers and they're pretty, skinny legs, and that squaw with the naked bosom would still be weaving that same blanket. Nobody'd be different. The only thing that would be different would be you. Not that you'd be so much older or anything. It wouldn't be that, exactly. You'd just be different, that's all. You'd have an overcoat this time. Or the kid that was your partner in line the last time had got scarlet fever and you'd have a new partner. Or you'd have a substitute taking the class, instead of Miss Aigletinger. Or you'd heard your mother and father having a terrific fight in the bathroom. Or you'd just passed by one of those puddles in the street with gasoline rainbows in them. I mean you'd be different in some way—I can't explain what I mean. And even if I could, I'm not sure I'd feel like it.
J.D. Salinger, from The Catcher in the Rye
Guess.
Wyeth, N.C., Imagination, 1921
The alchemists have a saying: Tertium non datur, "The third is not given." That is, the transformation from one element into another, from waste matter into best gold is a mystery, not a formula. No one can predict what will form out of the tensions of opposites and effect a healing change between them. And so it is with the mind that moves from its prison to a free and vast plain without any movement at all. Something new has entered the process. We can only guess.
Jeanette Winterson, from "Orion"
Meeting.
Loth, Old Peasant Lighting a Pipe, 1660
"I wonder, old man, smelling of the wind,
Your face leathered, eyes glassy,
Blowing mist on weathered fingers --
Who am I meeting?"
Lighting his pipe
With an ember from the fire,
He whispered --
"I am Winter."
Labels:
'TIS Winter,
appreciation,
art,
january,
Loth,
pipes,
poetry,
weather,
winter
Exist.
Ari Weinzweig on being aware of the invisible ...
Last week, I was fortunate enough to see a photocopy of a letter a local 10-year-old boy wrote to his cousin. This was not just an ordinary message from one young cousin to another who’s a year or two older and struggling, as so many are in the world today. This wonderful kid told his cousin how much she matters and how much he loves her in such a lovely way. I had tears in my eyes the whole time I was reading his letter. When 10-year-olds can write letters like that, then I know for sure that, regardless of what you might find in the financial pages of the Wall Street Journal, magic really does exist in the world. The problem is that most people miss it.
Happy Birthday, Benjamin Franklin
After Saint-Aubin, Cochin the Younger, Benjamin Franklin, 1777
He that would live in peace and at ease,
Must not speak all he knows, nor judge all he sees.
Benjamin Franklin, born on this day in 1706, from Poor Richard, 1736
Please, keep reminding me.
15 January 2026
Wander.
Spitzweg, The Bookworm, 1850
Those who wander are always objects of suspicion and sometimes even of fear.
Peter Ackroyd, from Hawksmoor
Happy Birthday, Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King
I am convinced that love is the most durable power in the world. It is not an expression of impractical idealism, but of practical realism. Far from being the pious injunction of a Utopian dreamer, love is an absolute necessity for the survival of our civilization. To return hate for hate does nothing but intensify the existence of evil in the universe. In struggling for human dignity, the oppressed people of the world must not allow themselves to become bitter or indulge in hate campaigns. Someone must have sense enough and morality enough to cut off the chain of hate. This can be done only by projecting the ethics of love to the center of our lives.
Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., born on this day in 1929
Whither leadership?
14 January 2026
Regularly.
Steve's going 4XL, regularly.
Exhibit A (my life changed the day I accepted this):
I've always found it hard to conform to the so-called standards. Each time a teacher or an adult told me I shouldn't do this or that, I'd nod but let their words breeze past me. I refused to believe there was only one path in life.Hwang Bo-Reum
Smallest.
I once heard a story about a Buddhist monk who walked into a middle school classroom and as he entered the room, he didn't say a word but instead walked to the board and wrote this:
EVERYONE WANTS TO SAVE THE WORLD, BUT NO ONE WANTS TO HELP MOM DO THE DISHES.
Everyone laughed. But then he went on to say this to the students:
Statistically, it's highly unlikely that any of you will ever have the opportunity to run into a burning building and rescue someone. But, in the smallest gesture of kindness -- a warm smile, holding the door for the person behind you, shoveling the driveway of the elderly person next door, doing the dishes for your mother -- you have committed an act of immeasurable profundity, because to each of us, our life is our universe.
May we each remember that we don’t need to feel responsible for saving the whole world, but that that through even the smallest acts of kindness, we can make a difference in our small world.
Edward Espe Brown, from the documentary, How to Cook Your Life
Vivaldi, Recorder Concerto in C major, RV 443
The Woodpecker Recorder Quartet performs the Allegro molto ...
13 January 2026
12 January 2026
Retired.
Detroit Red Wings great Sergei Fedorov's number 91 entered the rafters and his jersey was officially retired today ...
Hey, Hockeytown: A Letter from Sergei Fedorov ...
Those were heady days ...
Private.
The most important office, and the one which all of us can and should fill, is that of private citizen.
Louis Brandeis
Happy Birthday, Jack London
I was born so long ago that I grew up before the era of gasoline. As a result, I am old-fashioned. I prefer a sail-boat to a motor- boat, and it is my belief that boat-sailing is a finer, more difficult, and sturdier art than running a motor. Gasoline engines are becoming fool-proof, and while it is unfair to say that any fool can run an engine, it is fair to say that almost any one can. Not so, when it comes to sailing a boat. More skill, more intelligence, and a vast deal more training are necessary. It is the finest training in the world for boy and youth and man. If the boy is very small, equip him with a small, comfortable skiff. He will do the rest. He won’t need to be taught. Shortly he will be setting a tiny leg-of-mutton and steering with an oar. Then he will begin to talk keels and centerboards and want to take his blankets out and stop aboard all night.
But don’t be afraid for him. He is bound to run risks and encounter accidents. Remember, there are accidents in the nursery as well as out on the water. More boys have died from hot-house culture than have died on boats large and small; and more boys have been made into strong and reliant men by boat-sailing than by lawn-croquet and dancing-school.
And once a sailor, always a sailor. The savor of the salt never stales. The sailor never grows so old that he does not care to go back for one more wrestling bout with wind and wave. I know it of myself. I have turned rancher, and live beyond sight of the sea. Yet I can stay away from it only so long. After several months have passed, I begin to grow restless. I find myself day-dreaming over incidents of the last cruise, or wondering if the striped bass are running on Wingo Slough, or eagerly reading the newspapers for reports of the first northern flights of ducks. And then, suddenly, there is a hurried pack of suit-cases and overhauling of gear, and we are off for Vallejo where the little Roamer lies, waiting, always waiting, for the skiff to come alongside, for the lighting of the fire in the galley-stove, for the pulling off of gaskets, the swinging up of the mainsail, and the rat-tat-tat of the reef-points, for the heaving short and the breaking out, and for the twirling of the wheel as she fills away and heads up Bay or down.
Jack London, born on this day in 1876, from "Small Boat Sailing"
11 January 2026
Beautiful.
On this day in 1805, President Thomas Jefferson signed an act of the United States Congress that made the most beautiful part of the planet the Michigan Territory.
Winter-Sound.
NO POSSUM, NO SOP, NO TATERS
He is not here, the old sun,
As absent as if we were asleep.
The field is frozen. The leaves are dry.
Bad is final in this light.
In this bleak air the broken stalks
Have arms without hands. They have trunks
Without legs or, for that, without heads.
They have heads in which a captive cry
Is merely the moving of a tongue.
Snow sparkles like eyesight falling to earth,
Like seeing fallen brightly away.
The leaves hop, scraping on the ground.
It is deep January. The sky is hard.
The stalks are firmly rooted in ice.
It is in this solitude, a syllable,
Out of these gawky flitterings,
Intones its single emptiness,
The savagest hollow of winter-sound.
It is here, in this bad, that we reach
The last purity of the knowledge of good.
The crow looks rusty as he rises up.
Bright is the malice in his eye...
One joins him there for company,
But at a distance, in another tree.
Wallace Stevens
Same.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Memories.
We comfort ourselves by reliving memories of protection. Something closed must retain our memories, while leaving them their original value as images. Memories of the outside world will never have the same tonality as those of home and, by recalling these memories, we add to our store of dreams; we are never real historians, but always near poets, and our emotion is perhaps nothing but an expression of a poetry that was lost.
I should say: the house shelters day-dreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace.
Gaston Bachelard, from The Poetics of Space
Believe.
Steve wisely points us to a research-based list of secrets, from which nostalgia hit me like a freight train ...
Nostalgia helps us make sense of our lives. It provides narrative structure, which is desperately needed when most days feel like a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure story where every choice somehow ends with meh.Here’s the psychology: humans hate open loops. We hate chaos. Nostalgia is a way of shutting the loop, of saying, “No, no, it all led here.” With nostalgia, life’s a journey. Nostalgia says you’re progressing, that it isn’t all just entropy with a soundtrack.You stare at a Polaroid of yourself at eight years old (bowl haircut, missing teeth, Ninja Turtles backpack) and for a brief, hallucinatory second, you believe your life is not an aimless accumulation of trivialities but rather a novel with a discernible plot, a protagonist, and maybe even a moral arc.Nostalgia makes you less bothered by your problems. Because if you can believe that once upon a time you felt carefree and invincible then maybe today’s challenges aren’t the end of the world either.
Illumination.
A couple of years ago, a group of eager reading, writing, and thinking students at the school where I teach came to me with the request that they might use my classroom as a clubhouse once a week after school. They were having a difficult time meeting after hours and thought that a regular meeting during the day could be the ticket.
Thus was born The Eunoia Society, a self-created, self-managed, and self-named group of "crooked trees" that are some of the most energetic and inspiring people I've ever met.
Eunoia is currently in the process of creating a collaborative literary and illustrative "concept album" of short stories, like The Wall or Sgt. Pepper's they tell me. I get updates and samples for critique at all hours of the day and night, all week long.
Last night came this hopeful message from a member ...
Hope springs eternal in the human breast;
Man never Is, but always To be blest.
The soul, uneasy, and confin'd from home,
Rests and expatiates in a life to come.
Alexander Pope
Happy Birthday, William James
Whitman, William James, 1903
Good-humor is a philosophic state of mind; it seems to say to Nature that we take her no more seriously than she takes us. I maintain that one should always talk of philosophy with a smile.
William James, born on this day in 1842, from The Varieties of Religious Experience
Bob Weir, Rest in Peace
Bob Weir has passed.
"Only a River"...
The Grateful Dead are still one of the most over-rated bands of all-time.
Incomparable.
From the Geological Survey Division of the Michigan Department of Natural Resources, R. W. Kelley and W. R. Farrand's The Glacial Lakes around Michigan ...
The Great Lakes are incomparable. They could have been named "The Greatest Lakes" because no other body of fresh water in the world rivals them in size. Great size, however, is but one of many attributes. Consider also their strategic continental interior location, temperate climate, unique shore line configuration, great depth, and perhaps above all, their lucid beauty. Furthermore, have you ever noticed how readily they can be spotted on a globe?Many of us are prone to underestimate the importance of these vast inland seas. As intensive exploitation of land and water resources becomes increasingly necessary, respect for this magnificent natural resource will increase. Today many persons are earnestly wondering how these lakes were formed ...
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About Me
- Rob Firchau
- "A man should stir himself with poetry, stand firm in ritual, and complete himself in music." -Gary Snyder
Think ...
GASTON BACHELARD
"The house shelters day-dreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace.”
ARCHIVES
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2026
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January
(129)
- Disappear.
- Happy Birthday, Daniel Webster
- Truth.
- Deeply.
- Happy Birthday, A.A. Milne
- Excellent.
- Next.
- Nostalgia.
- Mozart.
- Chance.
- Excellent.
- Irreplaceable.
- Lives.
- Bach, Violin Partita No. 3 in E-Major, BWV 1006
- Different.
- Luka Bloom, "Beloved"
- Guess.
- Meeting.
- Exist.
- Happy Birthday, Benjamin Franklin
- Wander.
- Happy Birthday, Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King
- No title
- Regularly.
- Smallest.
- Vivaldi, Recorder Concerto in C major, RV 443
- Excellent.
- Done.
- Decades.
- Released.
- Released.
- Retired.
- Need.
- Private.
- Happy Birthday, Jack London
- Scaring the Children, "Two Djinn"
- Beautiful.
- No title
- Jorma Kaukonen, "There's a Bright Side Somewhere"
- Winter-Sound.
- Same.
- No title
- The Longest Johns, "Gloucestershire Wassail"
- Memories.
- Believe.
- Illumination.
- Happy Birthday, William James
- Glow.
- Bob Weir, Rest in Peace
- Incomparable.
- Excellent.
- Simple.
- Inkling.
- No title
- Beautiful.
- Meaning.
- Published.
- Excellent.
- Nobler.
- Guilty.
- Excellent.
- Bowie, "The Last Thing You Should Do"
- Strong.
- Ghosts.
- Guise.
- Happy Birthday, Thin White Duke
- Released.
- Excellent.
- Wisdom.
- Contrast.
- Treasures.
- No title
- Tradition.
- No title
- Happy Birthday, Malcolm Young
- Yuletide.
- No title
- Beholds.
- Hopkins, We Three Kings of Orient Are
- Shine.
- Twelve.
- Davies, An Orkney Wedding, with Sunrise
- Parry, Welcome Yule!
- Excellent.
- Lives.
- Happy Birthday, Isaac Newton
- Use.
- Whoppers.
- Happy Birthday, Benjamin Rush
- Proof.
- Managing.
- Happy Birthday, Giovanni Battista Pergolesi
- Free.
- Excellent.
- Murphy Campbell, "Edward"
- Boulanger, An Old Buddhist Prayer for the Entire U...
- Bones.
- Rejoice.
- Unite.
- Happy Birthday, J.R.R. Tolkien
-
▼
January
(129)
CARL R. FIRCHAU (1884-1973)
"The strength of a man’s virtue should not be measured by his special exertions but by his habitual acts.” Blaise Pascal
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C.S. LEWIS
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G.K. CHESTERTON
"Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about."
KENNETH GRAHAME
"O Mole! the beauty of it! The merry bubble and joy, the thin, clear, happy call of the distant piping!"
GEORDIE WALKER
ECHO & THE BUNNYMEN
JIM HARRISON
37. Beware, O wanderer, the road is walking too, said Rilke one day to no one in particular as good poets everywhere address the six directions. If you can’t bow, you’re dead meat. You’ll break like uncooked spaghetti. Listen to the gods. They’re shouting in your ear every second.
THE FURS
Suggestions
WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART
"When I am, as it were, completely myself, entirely alone and of good cheer – say travelling in a carriage or walking after a good meal, or during the night when I cannot sleep – it is on such occasions that my ideas flow best and most abundantly. Whence, and how, they come I know not ; nor can I force them. Those ideas that please me I retain in memory and am accustomed, as I have been told, to hum them to myself. If I continue in this way, it soon occurs to me how I may turn this dainty morsel to account, so as to make a good dish of it. That is to say, agreeable to the rules of counterpoint, to the peculiarities of various instruments etc. All this fires my soul, and, provided I am not disturbed, my subject enlarges itself, becomes methodised, and defined, and the whole, though it be long, stands almost complete and finished in my mind, so that I can survey it like a fine picture or a beautiful statue at a glance. Nor do I hear in my imagination the parts successively, but I hear them, as it were, all at once. What a delight this is, I cannot tell."
HOOKY
MARY SHELLEY
GREEN MAN
"Feel wind stir the greenwood, or turn pages of a book made from his flesh -- lean close, then, and hear, Green Man's voice."
N.C. WYETH
Cold Maker, Winter, 1909
Dick's Pour House, Lake Leelanau, Michigan
Smelt Basket
PanAm "Pacific Clipper" (1941)
JOHN SINGER SARGENT
Elizabeth Winthrop Chanler (detail), 1893
WILLIAM F. BUCKLEY JR.
"We are so concerned to flatter the majority that we lose sight of how very often it is necessary, in order to preserve freedom for the minority, let alone for the individual, to face that majority down."
SIR ROGER SCRUTON
"Beauty is a value, as important as truth and goodness."
SIR WINSTON CHURCHILL
"A gentleman does not have a ham sandwich without mustard."
J.R.R. TOLKIEN
"If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world."
JOHN MASEFIELD
"When the midnight strikes in the belfry dark/And the white goose quakes at the fox’s bark/We saddle the horse that is hayless, oatless/Hoofless and pranceless, kickless and coatless/We canter off for a midnight prowl/Whoo-hoo-hoo, says the hook-eared owl."
IKKYU
VIRGINIA WOOLF
OLD MISSION
JOHN QUINCY ADAMS
"However tiresome to others, the most indefatigable orator is never tedious to himself. The sound of his own voice never loses its harmony to his own ear; and among the delusions, which self-love is ever assiduous in attempting to pass upon virtue, he fancies himself to be sounding the sweetest tones."
SIR KENNETH GRAHAME
"Take the Adventure, heed the call, now, ere the irrevocable moment passes! ‘Tis but a banging of the door behind you, a blithesome step forward, and you are out of the old life and into the new! Then some day, some day long hence, jog home here if you will, when the cup has been drained and the play has been played, and sit down by your quiet river with a store of goodly memories for company."
JIM HARRISON
"Barring love I'll take my life in large doses alone--rivers, forests, fish, grouse, mountains. Dogs."
WILLIAM WORDSWORTH
SAMUEL ADAMS
"It is a very great mistake to imagine that the object of loyalty is the authority and interest of one individual man, however dignified by the applause or enriched by the success of popular actions."
TAO TE CHING, Lao Tzu
MARCUS AURELIUS
"Is your cucumber bitter? Throw it away. Are there briars in your path? Turn aside. That is enough. Do not go on and say, 'Why were things of this sort ever brought into this world?' neither intolerable nor everlasting - if thou bearest in mind that it has its limits, and if thou addest nothing to it in imagination. Pain is either an evil to the body (then let the body say what it thinks of it!)-or to the soul. But it is in the power of the soul to maintain its own serenity and tranquility."
VINCENT van GOGH
"What am I in the eyes of most people? A nonentity or an oddity or a disagreeable person — someone who has and will have no position in society, in short a little lower than the lowest. Very well — assuming that everything is indeed like that, then through my work I’d like to show what there is in the heart of such an oddity, such a nobody. This is my ambition, which is based less on resentment than on love in spite of everything, based more on a feeling of serenity than on passion. Even though I’m often in a mess, inside me there’s still a calm, pure harmony and music. In the poorest little house, in the filthiest corner, I see paintings or drawings. And my mind turns in that direction as if with an irresistible urge. As time passes, other things are increasingly excluded, and the more they are the faster my eyes see the picturesque. Art demands persistent work, work in spite of everything, and unceasing observation."
RICK LEACH (1975-1978)
48 career games started; 2,176 rushing yards, 34 touchdowns; 4,284 passing yards, 48 touchdowns; 7-2 career record versus Michigan State, Notre Dame, and Ohio combined; three-time All-American, All-Big Ten, and Heisman finalist
RICHARD ADAMS
"One cloud feels lonely."
JOHN SINGER SARGENT
"Cultivate an ever continuous power of observation. Wherever you are, be always ready to make slight notes of postures, groups and incidents. Store up in the mind a continuous stream of observations."
WINSLOW HOMER
The Lone Boat, North Woods Club, Adirondacks, 1892
THOMAS BABINGTON MACAULEY
And how can man die better / Than facing fearful odds / For the ashes of his fathers / And the temples of his gods
WATERHOUSE, BOREAS, 1903
WHITE HORSES Far out at sea / There are horses to ride, / Little white horses / That race with the tide. / Their tossing manes / Are the white sea-foam, / And the lashing winds / Are driving them home- / To shadowy stables / Fast they must flee, / To the great green caverns / Down under the sea. Irene Pawsey
CINDY WILSON
UMBERTO LIMONGIELLO
"The euphony transformed me and inundated my soul in a roguish countenance, the likes of which I had know well in younger days. Such impishness soon drove out the complaints of the day."
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD
"I don't want to repeat my innocence. I want the pleasure of losing it again.” This Side of Paradise
RALPH WALDO EMERSON
"In skating over thin ice, our safety is in our speed."
ROBERT PLANT
GARY SNYDER
"There are those who love to get dirty and fix things. They drink coffee at dawn, beer after work. And those who stay clean, just appreciate things. At breakfast they have milk and juice at night. There are those who do both, they drink tea.”
IMMANUEL KANT
"Enlightenment is man's emergence from his self-imposed nonage. Nonage is the inability to use one's own understanding without another's guidance. This nonage is self-imposed if its cause lies not in lack of understanding but in indecision and lack of courage to use one's own mind without another's guidance. Dare to know! Sapere aude. 'Have the courage to use your own understanding,' is therefore the motto of the enlightenment."
DAN CAMPBELL
"We’re gonna kick you in the teeth, and when you punch us back we’re gonna smile at you, and when you knock us down we’re going to get up, and on the way, we’re going to bite a kneecap off. We’re going to stand up, and it’s going to take two more shots to knock us down. And on the way up, we’re going to take your other kneecap, and we’re going to get up, and it’s gonna take three shots to get us down. And when we do, we’re gonna take another hunk out of you."
THOMAS HUXLEY
"Sit down before fact as a little child, be prepared to give up every conceived notion, follow humbly wherever and whatever abysses nature leads, or you will learn nothing."
JOHN DRYDEN
"Bold knaves thrive without one grain of sense, but good men starve for want of impudence.”
WILLIAM BLAKE
"Those who restrain desire do so because theirs is weak enough to be restrained."
HERMANN HESSE
"Whoever wants music instead of noise, joy instead of pleasure, soul instead of gold, creative work instead of business, passion instead of foolery, finds no home in this trivial world of ours."
GEORGE MACDONALD
"Certainly work is not always required of a man. There is such a thing as a sacred idleness, the cultivation of which is now fearfully neglected."
REV. DR. CORNEL WEST
"You have to have a habitual vision of greatness … you have to believe in fact that you will refuse to settle for mediocrity. You won’t confuse your financial security with your personal integrity, you won’t confuse your success with your greatness or your prosperity with your magnanimity … believe in fact that living is connected to giving.”
IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE
"You see George, you've really had a wonderful life. Don't you see what a mistake it would be to just throw it away?"
WOODY
"There's a basic rule which runs through all kinds of music, kind of an unwritten rule. I don't know what it is, but I've got it."
MIGGY
"Exuberance is beauty." (William Blake)
Festina Lente
GARAGE SALINGER
JOHN RUSKIN
"Sunshine is delicious, rain is refreshing, wind braces us up, snow is exhilarating; there is really no such thing as bad weather, only different kinds of good weather."
Spitzweg, The Bookworm, 1850
"Literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life.” Fernando Pessoa
WILLIAM F. BUCKLEY JR.
"[I]in the spiky fall season, days like today with the little chill that makes one feel freshly laundered ..."
SYRINX
TINA WEYMOUTH
WALT WHITMAN
"Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes)."
H.L. MENCKEN
"Every normal man must be tempted, at times, to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats. But this business, alas, is fatal to the placid moods and fine other-worldliness of the poet."
FYODOR DOSTOEVSKY
"I say let the world go to hell, but I should always have my tea."
DUDLEY
"We all come from our own little planets. That's why we're all different. That's what makes life interesting."
HERMAN MELVILLE
"We're just dancing in the rain ..."
LEO TOLSTOY
"If, then, I were asked for the most important advice I could give, that which I considered to be the most useful to the men of our century, I should simply say: in the name of God, stop a moment, cease your work, look around you."
HAROLD BLOOM
"It is hard to go on living without some hope of encountering the extraordinary."
I'm reading ...
Unlikely General: "Mad" Anthony Wayne and the Battle for America
CURRENT MOON
ARTHUR RIMBAUD
"I have stretched ropes from steeple to steeple; Garlands from window to window; Golden chains from star to star ... And I dance."
RUMI
"When you do things from your soul, you feel a river moving in you, a joy.”
Shunryu Suzuki, "Beginner's Mind"
"In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert's there are few."
JIM HARRISON
¨The danger of civilization, of course, is that you will piss away your life on nonsense.¨
van EYCK, PORTRAIT of a MAN in a RED TURBAN, 1433
"The Poet is the Priest of The Invisible." Wallace Stevens
Atget, Notre-Dame de Paris, 1923
Technique.
"Technique is the proof of your seriousness." Wallace Stevens
TIGHT LINES!
W.B. Yeats
THE CAPTAIN
NICHOLAS HAWKSMOOR
"Whatever is goode in its kinde ought to be preserv'd in respect for antiquity, as well as our present advantage, for destruction can be profitable to none but such as live by it."
THOMAS PAINE
"Whatever is my right as a man is also the right of another; and it becomes my duty to guarantee as well as to possess."
LIBERTY
"...the imprisoned lightning"
WILLIAM F. BUCKLEY JR.
"The best defense against a usurpatory government is an assertive citizenry."
SIR PHILIP PULLMAN
"We don’t need a list of rights and wrongs, tables of dos and don’ts: we need books, time, and silence."
TRUE-BORN
THOMAS MERTON
C.S. LEWIS
“We may ignore, but we can nowhere evade, the presence of God. The world is crowded with him. He walks everywhere incognito.” (Thank you, Mr. Wade)
THOMAS PAINE
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