The year has flown by, and I am aware often now how swift life’s journey is. As December concludes another chapter, it is clear that the mark between the pages read and the pages that remain is decidedly nearer the back cover! Even so, this recent chapter has been a pleasant one. I read bittersweet […]

Obviously in It’s a Wonderful Life–which I watch every year–Mary Hatch’s wish counteracts George Bailey’s and causes him to wind up staying in Bedford Falls, but something much darker never occurred to me before tonight. As anyone who has seen it likely recalls, the two young people are coming home from the school dance and […]

I’ve not blogged in a couple of days, but I have been busy researching the play, to the degree I’ve been less interested in most everything else. What has been most captivating is reading these materials and encountering so many place names that are right here. I’ve always loved history and as a youngster was […]

In researching this play, I’ve been looking at newspapers from the Civil War era and thinking just how much you could get away with as a purveyor of media when Americans faced such a limited choice. Just as the big networks would have their heyday in the latter half of the 20th century, in the […]

Tonight I’m working on a play I plan to enter in the John Cullum competition. Although the play is historical, I hope to bring into some of the themes that concern me regarding contemporary politics, domestic opposition and dissent, free speech, and the necessity of protecting unpopular ideas and opinions. Could there have been a […]

As long as we’ve had writing, every generation worries that the next generation will face a decline. Certainly in some periods this opinion has had ascendancy and in some periods it’s receded. I remember studying Augustine in Western Civ as an undergraduate and the poignancy of his desperately wanting the best of Roman custom preserved […]

Following up on my comment re plagiarism and Turn It In, news broke today of a lawsuit regarding Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven.” Turns out, this debate about whether the $562 million rock epic is a rip off of an earlier riff by Spirit has been going on for decades. (Personally, I find it hard […]

For about a year and a half, I’ve been writing for a local Knoxville magazine called Cityview. Eventually, I will put that material–which is well over 100,000 words by now, I think–on this site somehow, either via link or upload. The difficulty in linking it is that the publisher uses a flipbook for each issue’s […]

I’ve been on the Internet long enough to remember when it was not ubiquitous. Rather, it was a place where (mostly) introverts could go to find like-minded souls away from their face-to-face lives. There was a lot more anonymity and more of a sense of Route 66 than Information Superhighway. As social networks have come […]

Why write another blog? I already have three myself, but each of those has been for a different purpose than this–which will be more personal. Previously, I created a site to organize all the materials from my late wife’s life, perhaps as a way of working through grief. The other two attempts were expressions of […]