To get to Tillamook, Oregon, head west from Portland and veer left onto Oregon Route 6. The next 50 miles are a winding, sometimes steep road that takes you up and over the Coast Range, through parts of the Tillamook Burn, following the Wilson River down into a valley full of dairy farms that supply [...]

Clearly, I get blogging. For a writer, blogging seems the natural evolution of Samual Pepys’ diary. Even Geoffrey Chaucer Hath a Blog. I don’t understand the attraction of Twitter, though, except perhaps as a target of satire. 140 characters? RT? @whocares? I think not.
Historical Tweets combines witty writing with an appropriate sense of the absurd. [...]

There is a remote but distinct possibility that I may have been wrong about The Road.
The characters, story, and even snippets of McCarthy’s “pretentious, mannered style” (my words) have stuck with me over the last three months, and I find myself considering whether the novel may not be, in fact, utter crap. I hate being [...]

My last day in England, I embarked upon a pilgrimage.
I took the Tube from Russell Square to Leicester Square, transferred to the Northern Line for one stop going south, and entered Trafalgar Square from Charing Cross.
Two nights earlier, I’d walked down in the dark, emerging between St. Martin-in-the-Fields and the National Gallery at dusk, [...]

As in this ad for Levis, featuring Pioneers! O Pioneers! by Walt Whitman.

Most advertising is crap. Hearing poetry in place of “Your life has more than one dimension — so should your beer” is a welcome change.