My travel articles, high and low, east and west.
A UNM UNDERGRADUATE named Federico Antonio Reade called me in Santa Fe in the fall of 1980 asking to record my recollections of the Rio Arriba County Court House Raid — a northern New Mexico rebellion that already was fading beneath a wash of scholarly interpretation. I had been the only journalist (and the only …
“My fellow citizens,” Abraham Lincoln said, addressing Congress in December 1863. “We cannot escape history.” The sentiment and, “The past never dies. It is not even past,” a line from William Faulkner that has been elevated by quote pickers to the status of an aphorism about the South, hummed like a soundtrack in my …
HOW DO YOU LIKE IT NOW, O PURPLE SAGE?
By Larry Joseph Calloway © We went to Ireland in the summer of the political year 2016 with a group that often burst out in song. They sang in enormous cathedrals, among grey monastic ruins, at a sacred lake shore, on a green moor above the ocean, and in pubs. Everyone was talking …
By LARRY JOSEPH CALLOWAY (C) Southern Arizona is known for some spectacular views of . . . the heavens. Kitt Peak, which we visited, has 25 big astronomical telescopes, most of them owned by universities. Other land-based optical observatories (to use the technical term accommodating the space age) are scattered on other Arizona peaks. Before …
By Larry Joseph Calloway © A Great Place to Have a War: America in Laos and the Birth of a Military CIA by Joshua Kurlantzick (Scribner, 2017) Laos is a great place to be a tourist. It has Luang Prabang, with its French colonial architecture and Buddhist monasteries along a simple historic main street. It …
Without planning it that way, I have spent a lifetime looking for the Anasazi. In books. In clefts in cliffs, as Gary Snyder put it.
Singapore political architect Lee Kwan Yew and his offhand critic, the American global anthropologist Clifford Geertz, needed to talk. About colonialism, democracy, culture. . . First of two essays on the possible city-state of the future.
What is culture? At first glance the amiable sales person was Chinese, but this was not China and we were dealing in English. I wanted a cultural experience, not the camera. Or so I thought.
