About This Blog

I'm a writer in the American midwest.

It's tempting at this point to go with Dorothy Thompson, the criminally underappreciated American reporter and anti-fascist, and say “The rest is silence.”

But that would be very anti-internet culture, which is (a) rescuing print from itself by allowing people to write what and how as they want instead of lacing them in eight-hundred-word straitjackets of topicality, and (b) creating a flowering of diarists unseen since the Victorian Age.

So:

The underrated outsider ballerina Allegra Kent once said, “As a child, I knew I had one great possession: my body.”

The triumphant insider ballerina Margot Fonteyn, speaking of her husband's fortuitous recovery of his mental faculties from a dangerous fever, said “That's the most important part of us, after all, is our brain.”

Two different ways of saying the same thing, of course.

Kent goes on, “As an adult, I met people who talked passionately about their new Rolls-Royce. But that isn't a real possession.” As Mr. Rogers put it, “Not your toys; they're just beside you.” Fonteyn's life describes something of the same insight, since she ended on a remote farm in Panama, far from her career, unable to confuse herself with her surroundings or belongings. Only she was left.

This blog is about what's left.