I’ve always enjoyed dialects, and I’ve had the good fortune to live in a few places with strong dialect areas, from Torlak to Veneto to Cantonese. But what about American dialects? Are we too young of a nation to really have them, as our transatlantic cousins might assert? I don’t think so. I had fun …
Author Archives: hnbjr
Sorry, Charlie: Deep Parables of Consumer Capitalism
There’s no age quite as awkward as the semi-pubescent 11-14 age range which corresponds to what we now know as the middle school years. My own awkwardness at that age can probably best be encapsulated by a rundown of my lunchtime eating habits: every day, a can of StarKist albacore tuna, some saltines, and a can of …
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Amid What Bells Do You Appear Rovigo?
April’s poetry discovery was that Polish poet Zbigniew Herbert has not only a poem, but an entire volume entitled Rovigo, with the eponymous poem being indeed about that small town in Veneto midway between mythical Venice and sumptuous Bologna where I lived in 2007 and 2008. (Sadly the book is available only in German at Amazon, …
The Point of the Jesus Lizard
Once in a while you see an example of rock music that makes you realize exactly what that well-worn exercise is all about. The Jesus Lizard and David Yow were to me always the supreme exemplars of rock music: a tension between precise, simple musicality and raw unhingedness; the Apollonian and the Dionysian. On the …
48 Hours of Eating in the Fragrant Harbor
All prices in USD, not HKD. We went to Hong Kong for a variety of reasons but near the top of the list was to eat. What we learned quickly is that food in Hong Kong is really expensive. But it’s good. Not only non-toxic (a serious concern in China that dampens my usual try-everything ethos) …
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Two Competing Visions
From Per Petterson’s remarkable I Curse the River of Time, two visions of death. He seems to think that the first, and not the second is inevitable, yet he spends considerably more effort describing the second, more pleasant alternative, so which can he hope for? …when it came to dying, I was scared. Not of …
Review of Peter Hessler’s River Town
Peter Hessler was a Peace Corps volunteer in Sichuan in 1996-1998 and his book chronicling his life there, River Town, is an excellent Peace Corps memoir. Even though I can’t think of a place more different from Macedonia, where I served, than China, he still has many of the same or similar experiences living in a …
Some Jon Cook Music
I didn’t make it to Louisville in time for Jon Cook’s memorial on March 9th, but I was in Louisville recently and I did extract some Jon Cook gems from my archives. The first two feature Jon’s collaborations with a couple of other recently- and tragically- departed Louisville musicians. “Unhindered Perception of the Happy Machine” …
On the Unremarkable Processes of Life
I had a relatively minor surgery last week and thus had more than the usual amount of time to sit around reading, especially about healthcare, medicine, and most of all its incredible rising cost. From Craig Bowron’s most recent article in the Washington Post comes an excellent meditation on dying in the 21st century, on …
Goodbye, Jon Cook
You can’t revisit your childhood, because it no longer exists, I told myself. — Thomas Bernhard, Extinction Jon Cook from Crain and Rodan, two of my favorite homegrown bands, was finally taken off life support tonight, ending two days of tortuous rumors and speculation. He was a bright spot in Louisville’s underground in the ’90s, …