The High Wood
I was shocked to discover that the forest wasn’t mine
COVID sends me back home to Vermont, where my daughter can walk in the woods with her grandparents
A man named Phil keeps his promise
At the end of a dirt road on a hillside in Vermont is an old hollow tree. In my youth, it marked the boundary between my parents’ land and the dense maple and pine forest that spans thousands of acres along the rolling hills. The tree is very old and very dead. When I would enter the forest, I would always throw a stone into its large hollow before tearing up the old logging road with stick in hand to fight dragons and explore the woods. I happily wandered through every good green place — the sunny forest clearing where all the logging roads meet, the deep gully that collects tangles of deadfall trees perfect for climbing, the old overlook high up on the hill with the old camper trailers — receiving stings from nettle and bites from briar, building forts and cultivating an overwhelming love for all things that grow. As this wandering, daydreaming, and adventuring continued through my adolescence, the dark …
A Fugitive From Myself
I dropped acid with Timothy Leary in Algeria, and I didn’t like it
I have tried to hide in libraries, in teaching, in sex, and through drugs
At 82, I don’t want to be a fugitive anymore
You’ve no doubt heard the slogan “Drugs ‘R’ Us.” I have. By 1960s standards, I was a modest druggie. I never went over the edge. But I knew that I was drugs and drugs were me. Case in point: I met Dr. Timothy Leary a handful of times during the last few decades of the twentieth century and dropped acid with him in LA and then in Algeria, where he was a fugitive from the law. Still, I was never by any stretch of the imagination an acidhead; I had friends who went on hundreds of acid trips, while I rejected the gospel of acid and disliked Leary’s slogan, “Turn on, tune in, drop out.” He was a salesman and LSD was his product. I was an academic and didn’t want to damage my precious brain. But after a long dry spell, I did catch up with “the drug culture” — or perhaps, more accurately, it caught up with me.
In the late 1960s, I got stoned with a Columbia Law School student and an SDS member named Gustin “Gus” …
A Little Lana Del Rey To Brighten Up Your Day
Americans still make great things. We’re just too violent and chaotic to enjoy them.
‘People love sad shit. They love watching people cry.’
The only time men fall in love with roses is in douche commercials
Lizzy Grant, known to the weeping masses as Lana Del Rey, takes the first part of her stage name from Lana Turner, a 1940s pinup who was married eight times and played an alcoholic small-time actress made overnight sensation in the pulp classic The Bad and the Beautiful. Turner never had the chance to marry Tommy Stompanado, a mob enforcer and former Mickey Cohen bodyguard, because her daughter stabbed her mother’s sexy psychopathic boyfriend to death in 1958 while trying to protect her against one of his frequent abusive rages. The present-day pop star’s chosen name hearkens to the glamor and violence of a now-mythological phase in American culture, and her music often surfaces the brief and only half-guilty hope that we can regain our former prowess at both of them.
A little past nightfall on the Friday of Barcelona’s Primavera Sound festival, you could see Lana Del Rey’s rhinestone boots …
