Oh, Happy Day
Walt Whitman is unbeatable at expressing, to use a word of his, athletic joy. The opening lines of “Song of Myself,” pictured above, are worth committing to memory for they express a private, but generous, feeling of celebration. Today, I feel like celebrating. The sun is shining here in Aspen, Colorado, happiest of happy places, where […]
I, too, Am America
“Langston Hughes, although only twenty-four years old, is already conspicuous in the group of Negro intellectuals who are dignifying Harlem with a genuine art life. . . .”wrote author Du Bose Heyward in the New York Herald Tribune in 1926. Despite such praise, Hughes was derided by his fellow black writers of the time for allowing race to be a […]
If France Ruled America
I am not much of a magazine reader, but The Economist is The Exception. To almost everything. I don’t read it as often as I’d like, so I was fortunate to pick up the latest issue, which has some interesting reads on technology and jobs. Pretty much, we’d all better start doing what we love […]