It was just before Christmas, and for some reason I thought the fishing would be good in the Dominican Republic during that time of the year. I had no information to that effect, but a friend, who does not fish, spoke favorably of DR (that’s how many refer to the country). The tarpon had left...
Author: William Mills (William Mills)
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Gone Fishing
Maybe it’s the increasing need to find a replacement for what America once was, or just the plain joy of sports fishing, but whatever die real motive, I found myself headed for Costa Rica in October. I had most of a day free in San Jose before a little bush plane would fly me at...
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Wisconsin Apocalypse
Since I was going to fish in the Northwoods of Wisconsin, I decided like any bookish person to read some books about the place. I expect I own all of Gordon Weaver’s ten or twelve books, and I went digging through them again to sec which ones were set in Wisconsin. Besides growing up in...
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Confidants of Blood
“If I do not remember thee, let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth.” —Psalm 137:6 This troubling memoir of James Dickey by his son, Christopher, is troubling as well for me to review because I knew James Dickey a little, and I greatly admire his work. Whether all the scenes in it...
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Beyond the Crossing
In Cities of the Plain, the final volume of McCarthy’s The Border Trilogy, John Grady Cole, principal character of All the Pretty Horses, joins Billy Parham of The Crossing in the West Texas-Juarez border world, both men a few years older but still managing to get into trouble. As in the earlier works, the reader...
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James Dickey, R.I.P.
James Dickey, one of the stars in the American firmament, died this past January. For certain of us, he was the most powerful, the most loved, poet from the 1960’s onward. By the time I met him in ’67 or ’68 he had brought out Poems 1957-1967, which included Buckdancer’s Choice, winner of the 1966...
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Bulgarian Autumn, Part II
For travelers drawn to the cradles of civilization, Bulgaria offers a good alternative to the crowds of Greece. One can revel in the Greek and Roman occupations that followed the Thracians. Moreover, while civilization was having a rough go later on in the western Roman empire, matters were quite different in the eastern Roman Empire,...
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Bulgarian Autumn, Part I
Rather than dropping out of the sky into Bulgaria at the Sophia airport as I did, travelers would be better advised to enter by other ways. Driving up from Greece through the Rhodope mountains would be one appealing way. Another fascinating approach would be to sail into the Black Sea city of Varna or the...
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Down Ecuador Way, Part II
Part of the charm of Latin American visual arts for me is the absence of extreme polarities in the continuum anchored by folk art on one end and fine art on the other. A continuum often seems not to exist in “First World Countries.” The fine art that I saw in Ecuador often contained the...
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Down Ecuador Way, Part I
Latin elections are such vibrant theater, unlike our plastic-coated, high-tech soap operas, I thought I might catch the presidential election in Ecuador this year. Besides, there was an off-again, on-again war with Peru to give an edge to the trip. Not long into the journey I got all the edge I would need for the...
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The Story of Love
Octavio Paz, who was 82 when he wrote this book, asks in his preface, “Wasn’t it a little ridiculous, at the end of my days, to write a book about love?” The answer is a resounding “no.” The text is densely rich with ideas, elegant in style, and the ruminations are very wise. Paz ends...
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A Jug of Wine, A New Zealand Trout
With Missouri frozen solid for two February weeks in a row, naturally one’s thoughts turn to the Southern Hemisphere. There were some hot spots in our beloved country even this winter—Miz Hillary was testifying before a federal grand jury, the Rose Law Firm was smoking, and Mr. Starr was building a few fires of his...
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Letter From the Crimea: The Price of Folly
On the night train from Kiev to Simferopol I share a compartment with Volodymyr Prytula, a Crimean journalist. Called “Vova” by his friends, this slender man with a Zhivagoesque mustache is my sole contact in the Crimea. He speaks little English, I no Ukrainian or Russian, but we communicate with the help of Ukrainian red...
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Swimming Against the Tide
Mario Vargas Llosa, the winner of the 1991 T.S. Eliot Award for Creative Writing, has fashioned a provocative symmetry in this memoir. He writes of growing up in Peru and Bolivia, bringing his life up to the point where he leaves for Europe at age 22, all the while alternating chapters that cover his candidacy...
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Letter From Caucasia Georgia on My Mind
Getting from the Crimea to the Republic of Georgia presents several problems. I had been told that one way was to get to Trabzon on the Black Sea Coast of Turkey, and then take a boat to the coastal town of Batumi in Georgia. A guidebook had warned that foreigners could not cross the Georgian-Turkish...
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The Attraction Offshore
With the government seizing at least half our incomes each year and the “multi-diversity” crowd sowing seeds of anger and disunity that could well lead to civil war down the road, I hear more and more people talking of places to relocate themselves and their capital: New Zealand, Australia, Switzerland, and Costa Rica. And Chile....
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Remembering Cleanth Brooks
Cleanth Brooks, one of the giants of literary criticism, died last May 10. He was 87 years old. He taught thousands of us how to read a poem or a story. Some he taught over a half-century by way of the classroom, some in his numerous public lectures across this country and abroad, and many...
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Negative Capability
So many things have been said in praise of McCarthy’s work that it is hard not to sound like an echo. Inevitably, the reviewer notes the energy and grace of his style, and there is no gainsaying that. The relentless power of his sentences and the tautness of the action can leave a reader emotionally...
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Howard Nemerov, R.I.P.
Howard Nemerov, one of our country’s titans of literature, died last July. He published his first book shortly after Wodd War II, and during the next 44 years a stream of 26 books garnered for him the country’s most prestigious awards. He won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer in 1978 for his Collected...
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An Imitation: A Short Story
“It behoveth thee to be a fool for Christ.” —Thomas à Kempis Hawkins was doing his version of an Iranian student who had missed eight weeks of class, yet wanted an “A” in the calculus course. “I know you are wondering why I have not to come to class since school start. I am good...
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The Structure of Meaning
Levy’s latest and very ambitious new book is an inquiry into the fundamental characteristics of political order from two perspectives: philosophical anthropology and the political philosophy of Eric Voegelin. The outcome is a vigorous defense of our institutions and traditions. The anthropological perspective has its roots in Max Scheler’s work in the 1920’s and 1930’s....
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The Flies of Summer
Last summer I was standing next to a great bull buffalo in western Kansas. He was mad and had a right to be. My buddy Joe Kramer, along with other men from Kansas Fish & Game, had this great American bison in an animal squeeze while they took a blood sample and gave him a...