TomT

We’ve all heard that the struggle in Wisconsin continues – now with a challenged judicial restraining order, and efforts to recall Republican legislators underway all over the state.   For what it’s worth, I had intended to continue posting small Wisconsin roundups but was repeatedly overtaken by events – and by events, I mostly mean the assault on what’s left of the American labor movement that has now spread to many other states, including Illinois.

John Hicks

I’ve been working on a short story this week (and doing lots of spring farm chores, like garden prep and cutting grass), so the following will be brief. I’m hoping Esquire will not sue me for ripping off their format. I steal with love, guys.

JOHN HICKS
PILGRIM AND WAYFARER, 49, TUSCUMBIA, ALABAMA

Jimmy Gabacho

I just finished Peter Conners’ Growing up Dead: the Hallucinated Confessions of a Teenage Deadhead (Cambridge: Dacapo Press, 2009), it’s a good read that brings back a lot of memories. It is a coming of age story about a teenager in upstate New York who decides to “flip off” his white middle-class background, forego the Game of Life, and become a modern-day gypsy, traveling from campground to campground, attending the shows of the Grateful Dead. His narrative describes traveling from show to show, sleeping in a green VW microbus, smoking copious amounts of marijuana, dropping LSD, living without the luxury of a shower, and living hand to mouth for months on end.

John Hicks

“If you know sentences, you know everything,” Stanley Fish writes in his latest book, How to Write a Sentence (and How to Read One).

“Good sentences promise nothing less than lessons and practice in the organization of the world,” Fish continues.

I admit to making a rude noise when I read that last one. It sounds a little too much like something out of the Boy Scout Handbook. (The world doesn’t care one whit about our organizational plans. People who try to organize the world go insane. I see it happen all the time, especially during the holiday season.)

B2L2