Last Bender

If a blogh is not a place to reveal ones deepest shame I don’t know what is. So I am going to confess that for a number of years in high school I was that most shameful thing of all, a Deadhead. I listened to Grateful Dead albums obsessively, I read books about them and [...]

In the late 80’s and early 90’s, when the Soviet Union was collapsing, one of my oldest friends married a Russian woman he had met in the Ukraine. She didn’t love the Soviet Union. She hated it. An only child, she grew up with her mother waiting on long lines to get the simplest things, [...]

On a fall or winter Sunday there is nothing better than a pot of slow-cooked meat with noodles, greens and root vegetables. Yesterday I made a Chinese version with chicken. It took about two hours total and was perfect after a day of raking leaves, turning the garden beds and chopping a pile of old [...]

The library I work in got rid of the last two working typewriters last week. When I arrived here, in 1991, we were still typing labels. Typed labels, especially call number labels, were subject to typos. Printing has errors too, but they are more likely to be cut and paste errors. No one I know [...]

Thomas Hardy: At the War Office, London                           I Last year I called this world of gaingivings The darkest thinkable, and questioned sadly If my own land could heave its pulse less gladly, So charged it seemed with circumstance that brings                     The tragedy of things                         II Yet at that censured time no [...]