It's important for survival that children have their own experiences, the kind they learn from. The kind their parents arrange for are not as useful.… - Garrison Keillor

I expected to include plenty of Whitman here and discovered, reading him, a sort of seasickness at all those undulating lines of Uncle Walt’s perpetual swoon over grass and leaves and camerados. There are good poems there, and it’s a mistake to omit them, but Walt is the Typhoid Mary of American Lit: so much bad poetry can be traced back to him (and not brief bad poems, either), he gave so many dreadful writers permission to lavish themselves upon us. Lord, forgive me.

A good newspaper is never good enough, but a lousy newspaper is a joy forever.

I feel like a blind man searching a dark room.
(Old Man Alone on Labor Day Weekend — blog post)