5.23.2026 – asked her whether

asked her whether
she meant I hope or in a
hopeful frame of mind

The first time we heard the word “hopefully” used to mean something it doesn’t mean was from the lips of a pretty woman whom we were wining and dining in a restaurant.

We asked her when she expected to move into her apartment, and she answered, “Hopefully on Tuesday.” We laid down our fork and asked her whether she meant “I hope on Tuesday” or whether she meant “On Tuesday in a hopeful frame of mind.”

She then laid down her fork and wanted to know what the hell we were driving at.

She confessed that she saw nothing wrong with “Hopefully on Tuesday.”

Rather than labor the thing, we shifted subjects; it is not our policy to badger pretty women. Since that memorable occasion, we have encountered this use of “hopefully” at every turn.

It is all over the place and has, we suspect, come into the language.

Time, always elegant in its rhetoric, appeared not long ago with this sobering sentence: “The Government would like to bring the case to a quick trial, hopefully before the end of January.”

Lacking a fork to lay down, we simply laid down the magazine.

EB White in Notes and Comment, The New Yorker Magazine, March 27, 1965.

Not sure about but lunch with EB White and his wife, Katherine Angell White, the editor who made the New Yorker Magazine into the New Yorker Magazine … sounds terrifying.

I am full of hope not to ever have to explain these essays to them.

5.22.2026 – weren’t satisfied with

weren’t satisfied with
having money unless there
were many who didn’t

Oddly, it wasn’t the poverty that ground against the sensibilities so hard that depressed me the most but the attitude of many of the more fortunate who weren’t satisfied with having money unless there were many who didn’t have it.

Even quasi-religious people liked to quote Jesus as saying, “The poor you have with you always,” neglecting to add that he didn’t say to sit on your ass and don’t do anything about it.

The thought that my country accepts the idea that a quarter of its citizens are destined to be social mutants peels my nerves.

Our compassion quotient has seemed to lower a bit more every year of my adult life.

I never much minded when my colleagues would tease me for being a “bleeding heart” because if your heart doesn’t bleed you’re dead, and you’ve become just another greedy little shit factory on life’s way.

From The Road Home by Jim Harrison (New York, Grove Press, 2004).

Yes of late I have been drawing a lot of inspiration from Mr. Harrison and The Road Home of late.

You can guess that I am re-reading it again and wonder if the power of some of Mr. Harrison’s writing would have been lessened had he left some of the rawness out of it.

But this is like trying to draw life lessons from watching the Soprano’s and wishing they could have dropping the violence.

The life frustrations of Tony in his sessions with the psychiatrist (“If my calling is so important, PICK UP THE PHONE”) I guess need the contrast with the miserable life of a mobster.

But I digress.

Our compassion quotient has seemed to lower a bit more every year of my adult life.

I could start with the compassion quotient but you could add almost any other aspect of life and it has seemed to lower a bit more every year.

It seems that I have read stories that for the first time, the next generation of Americans are looking at a worse world then the previous generation had.

We could start with that current man in the oval office and go down hill from there.

I read books and poems about a filled with bird song and all I have around my house is the caw caw of crows.

I read books filled with exclamations of wonder and beauty over the salt sea breeze and where I live on the Atlantic Coast of South Carolina, what you get is the pluff mud of the salt march which smells of dirty diapers.

Sports are money pits with nothing to do about sports.

I am tired of raging against the machine.

There is just too much money, dead money, money that isn’t doing anything but sitting in banks in account and doing nothing.

I don’t like to go to Woody Allen but in Annie Hall, the artist (Max von Sydow) says:

Money, money, money! If Jesus came back, and saw what’s going on in his name, he’d never stop throwing up.

5.20.2026 – the question, of course

the question, of course,
is how you can make your soul
clap its hands and sing

The question, of course, is how you make your soul clap its hands and sing.

My bones seemed built out of incomprehension.

The road was rutted enough by winter rains so that the car drove itself.

I was ringed by four mountain ranges in this valley but then natural beauty seems to offer no more than you can bring to it. There was scarcely a patch in a thousand square miles I hadn’t covered on foot.

Looking down you see blue and black gama, side oats gama, curly mesquite, sprangle-top, and the grassy skin of the local earth.

Straight up is invariably sky.

Up in my own country it was apparently our nature to kill seventy million buffalo just as it was our nature to destroy the Native cultures.

History will not help your soul clap its hands and sing but it is unconscionable to proceed without knowing it.

From True North by Jim Harrison (New York, Grove Press, 2004).

Mr. Harrison is referencing the poem, Sailing to Byzantium by William Butler Yeats.

Mr. Harrison quotes the 2nd of 4 stanzas.

An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress,
Nor is there singing school but studying
Monuments of its own magnificence;
And therefore I have sailed the seas and come
To the holy city of Byzantium.

Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing.

And louder sing.

An aged man is but a paltry thing.

History will not help your soul clap its hands and sing but it is unconscionable to proceed without knowing it.

So much news of late.

How frail our constitution was.

How frail life is.

Therefore I have sailed the seas and come
To the holy city of Byzantium.

BTW – to make this work, I had to add a word to Mr. Harrison’s words … have a feeling he would not have been happy but when I do the same thing to Shakespeare and Sandburg …

5.19.2026 – a small sailing craft

a small sailing craft
is full of strange promise and
the hint of trouble

If a man must be obsessed by something,

I suppose a boat is as good as anything,

perhaps a bit better than most.

A small sailing craft is not only beautiful,

it is seductive and full of strange promise and the hint of trouble.

EB White in his essay, “The Sea and the Wind That Blows,” (1963; Essays of E. B. White, p. 205)

5.16.2026 – formless, faceless, he …

formless, faceless, he …
seems the very prototype
of the little man

This drawing was published in the New Yorker Magazine on May 16, 1936.

90 years ago today.

I am sorry to have to admit I had to look up Dorothy Thompson.

According to Wikipedia, Dorothy Celene Thompson (July 9, 1893 – January 30, 1961) was an American journalist and radio broadcaster. She was the first American journalist to be expelled from Nazi Germany, in 1934, and was one of the few women news commentators broadcasting on radio during the 1930s. Thompson is regarded by some as the “First Lady of American Journalism” and was recognized by Time magazine in 1939 as equal in influence to Eleanor Roosevelt.

Wow and I had to look her up.

Again, according to Wikipedia, “Thompson’s most significant work abroad took place in Germany in the early 1930s. In Munich, Thompson met and interviewed Adolf Hitler for the first time in 1931. This would be the basis for her subsequent book, I Saw Hitler, in which she wrote about the dangers of him winning power in Germany. Later, in a Harper’s Magazine article in December 1934, Thompson described Hitler in the following terms: “He is formless, almost faceless, a man whose countenance is a caricature, a man whose framework seems cartilaginous, without bones. He is inconsequent and voluble, ill poised and insecure. He is the very prototype of the little man.”

And I thought, what would Ms. Thompson thought of the current man is office?

For some reason, I think she might have written:

He is formless, almost faceless, a man whose countenance is a caricature, a man whose framework seems cartilaginous, without bones.

He is inconsequent and voluble, ill poised and insecure.

He is the very prototype of the little man.

Works.

Really works, doesn’t it?