WOOD-FIRED open-air cremation is the way to go in Crestone, Colorado. I distinctly remember four of these lawful funerals held in a circular sanctuary on a hill on the sandy side of the San Luis Valley, below the highest of the Sangre de Cristo mountains. It always begins in the stillness before dawn. Two of […]
THE MILLENNIUM began at midnight in Australia with a blazing word on the Sydney harbor bridge: “Eternity” in a flowing script called copperplate. What was it supposed to mean? By then Aussies — but few of the global TV watchers — knew the story behind it. There was a writer — Arthur Stace
In the golf comedy “Caddyshack” Bill Murray, playing the blundering groundskeeper, brags: “I caddied for the Dalai Lama.” Doug Preston, a Santa Fe writer, can say, “I rode a ski lift with the Dalai Lama.” But it’s no laff line. It’s true. His reminiscence in Slate releases a flood of links on Google if you
I RECALL Professor Charles Nilon, teaching a class in modern novels at Boulder, identified Ernest Hemingway as “an American gentleman.” The memory surfaced as I watched the first episode of the Ken Burns documentary on PBS. Like a British noble, Hemingway toured the colonies, hunted trophy animals, behaved well in military combat, was a sportsman
“Klara And The Sun” by Kazuo Ishiguro is a tale told by a robot living — if that is the right word — in an AI-governed dystopia where automatons imitate humans and ambitious parents submit their children to “genetic editing” for success in the vicious meritocracy. She (Klara) is an “AF” (artificial friend) bought like
THE VACCINES are federal but the vaccinations are local. I was wondering how the two levels of government were meshing as I began to roll across the San Luis Valley to the community center in Saguache to get the first of my covid jabs, as the Brits call them. (We call them shots, but that
