I’ve been wanting to say a few words about the death of John Prine. It saddens me to write those words, and perhaps that’s why I’ve put off writing this post for so long. So much seems to have happened since then, but here goes. I came late to the music of John Prine, having …
Some New Waders and a Stringer Full of Fish Books
There’s just something about wading into a cold stream with a fly rod. After many years away, I’d almost forgotten the feeling. Last spring, however, I started reading Vermont River by W. D. Wetherell. It’s a memoir about fly-fishing, a kind of love story about a year in the life of a devout fishermen. It …
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A Deeper Look at Jason Isbell’s “Speed Trap Town”
In December, I had the opportunity to see Jason Isbell play an acoustic show at the Kirby Center in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. My wife and I have been huge fans since discovering him in the summer of 2015, and for the past five years, we’ve been obsessed. It was on the heels of his album Something …
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Sizing Up Walt Whitman & Friends
It’s about this time that I’m usually wrapping up my teaching of American Romanticism. We’ve made it through Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and we’re just about done with my favorite, Henry David Thoreau. Over the years, I’ve made deletions and additions to the scope and sequence, hoping …
Another Bartleby Surprise
Last year around this time, I launched The White Whale with a post not about Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, but rather his short story, “Bartleby, the Scrivener.” It’s such a curious story, and when I had written about it before, I had been obsessing about John Jacob Astor, a name mentioned by the narrator at the …
