Watching Spring come in...slowly

I'm looking out at the backyard ice rink, which, like many of our glaciers, has lost about a third of its ice. But unlike with global warming, I'm not that sorry to see the ice go.

On the other hand, there is free skiing this Wednesday at Okemo if you bring three non-perishable items of food. Maybe King Winter can hold out for another week or two. Snow in the first two weeks of April is not out of the question.

Budget Traveler's Best of Ireland photos

Wonder of all wonders, I clicked on Budget Travels "Best of Ireland" photos link and was hit with this photo in the number one slot:



I doubt it is based on quality, but it is nice to be first in line. Check out the rest of the show at Budget Travel

Check out the Photoshelter Page

For more information on my photographic services, check out my Photoshelter page by clicking on the image below.

lecture at All Souls Church -- Feburary 26, 2009

First, thank you all for coming out on a Thursday night. I’d also like to thank Carlos Martinez for setting up this event, and Jim Yacopino for the introduction. It is a thrill to be here. In preparation, I was reading a bit on your congregation and the Emerson Circle. Besides being a little humbling, it was wonderful to read about the variety of voices and perspectives you’ve had come speak here. It’s an exciting honor to add mine to such distinguished company.

As was mentioned in the introduction, I was an English teacher for 9 years before I became a writer. Well, I guess I was a writer all along, but it took a stroke of luck for me to become a book author. In the spring of 2004, after much deliberation, my wife and I decided it was time for me to take a break from teaching and chase my dream of the writing life. I submitted my resignation to the school where I worked and was prepared to spend a year trying to start a career as a freelance writer when, merely a week later and literally a month before school ended, a colleague emailed me. He wrote that a friend of his was starting a publishing company and was looking for a writer in New England willing to take on a book project. Did I know of any writers in New England who might be interested? I just so happened to be a writer in New England willing to take on a book project. When I found out that it was to be a literary travel guide, I could not believe my luck. Well, that turned out to be this book and I had so much fun doing this one that I decided to do one on Ireland’s Literary Revival, (which is here), and one on England’s Lake District Poets, (which is still in the works).

Before I go much further, let me take a moment to explain a little about the series. The ArtPlace series explores the interaction between art and place. The books look at the places where artists and thinkers lived and worked, and how those places affected them. It also examines how that artist's legacy affects and changes the very landscapes that helped sparked their creativity. The Transcendentalist book is the 3rd in a series of seven which includes Dorothy Parker's New York, John Steinbeck's California, Flaubert's Normandy, Matisse's South of France, Michelangelo's Rome, and my second book, the Ireland of the Irish Literary Revival.
Because I got involved with the series at the beginning, I was able to do two things: write the type of book I would buy and write the type of book that I would teach. Although this book makes no claims at academic or scholarly argument, it does provide a unique way in -- a way to explore Transcendentalism in a way that is accessible and hopefully engaging. And because you already have such a rich and detailed picture of Emerson, I’ll try to focus my remarks a bit more on those around Emerson. And, given your patience, I will also talk a little about my process in putting the book together.

I started my research process by looking around for a few concise definitions of Transcendentalism. One of the first definitions I found came from a minister named Father Taylor, who was a friend and colleague of the Transcendentalists. He defined Transcendentalism as “a seagull with long wings, lean body, poor feathers, and miserable meat.” Not very helpful.

The writer Rebecca Harding Davis characterized the followers of Transcendentalism in her book, Bits of Gossip, as “hordes of wild-eyed Harvard undergraduates and lean, underpaid working-women, each with a disease of the soul to be cured by the new healer.”

Even Nathaniel Hawthorne, got in on the act in his Mosses from the Old Manse, describing Concord as “a poor little country village infested with such a variety of queer, strangely-dressed, oddly-behaved mortals.” Sounds a bit like Amherst to me.

It’s not surprising that when the British novelist Charles Dickens came to Boston and inquired about Transcendentalism, he was told that “whatever is unintelligible would certainly be transcendental.” Clearly, these answers were not going to help me, so I went to the town of Concord, and to an old house by the river. The river is the Concord River (near the famous North Bridge of the Battle of Concord) and the house is now called, The Old Manse.

As many of you know, while Emerson lived at the Manse with his mother, he wrote Nature. The challenge with which Emerson opens the book is remarkable:

The forgoing generations beheld God and nature face to face; we, through their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe? Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs?

Then follows an Emersonian, and therefore Transcendentalist solution: go spend time in nature, and see what new ideas this brings. They will surely be more powerful and enticing than ancient philosophy and dusty theology.

Embosomed for a season in nature, whose floods of life stream around and through us, and invite us, by the powers they supply to action proportioned to nature, why should we grope among the dry bones of the past?

It seems particularly telling that Emerson wrote these words, with their central metaphor of “the flood of life,” looking out at the river from the window of his study. As he states, however, “to go out into solitude [to achieve our ‘original relation’], a man needs to retire as much from his chamber as from society.” Emerson made good on this premise by going out daily to walk the hills, forests, and meadows of his chosen town of Concord. He let neither the elements nor the demands of society keep him from his walks.

Emerson is also clear about the benefits of the move into nature:

In the woods, we return to reason and faith. There I feel that nothing can befall me in life, -- no disgrace, no calamity, (leaving me my eyes,) which nature cannot repair. Standing on the bare ground, -- my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space, -- a mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eye-ball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God.

It was in these passages from Nature that Transcendentalism first came alive for me, and I structured the book around what I view as Transcendentalism’s central quest: to forge an original relationship with the universe or, as Emerson puts it, to behold “God and nature face to face.”

So, what quickly became interesting to me was how this group of writers, philosophers, poets, activists and dreamers conducted their quests. Where did they go for that “face to face” interaction? How does one forge one’s own unique relationship with the universe? This idea became the central theme of my book: where did the Transcendentalists go in New England and what did they do there?

Obviously, they came here, to Concord. They came to visit and converse with Emerson. They came to walk the paths and trails around the town and draw inspiration from the trails. Or, as Hawthorne did, stare lovingly at his garden watching the melons grow. (No kidding, he wrote in American Notes): "I used to visit and revisit it a dozen times a day and stand in deep contemplation over my vegetable progeny with a love that nobody could share or conceive of who had not taken part in the process of creation." It’s little surprise the practical, no-nonsense farmers of Concord wondered about him.

Hawthorne came to Concord after his marriage to Elizabeth Peabody’s younger sister, Sophia. By that time, Elizabeth was an ardent admirer of Emerson and an important Transcendentalist in her own right, but more on her later. The Hawthornes arrived in 1842 and moved into the very same house where Emerson wrote Nature. Emerson himself had bought another house on the other side of town seven years earlier. While at the Old Manse, Hawthorne wrote prolifically, took long walks in the woods, rowed on the river in a boat he bought from Thoreau, and, yes, stared mooningly at his garden.

Bronson Alcott also came to Concord…repeatedly. He came, with his wife and four daughters, and lived in a number of houses in Concord, including one he eventually sold to the Hawthornes, and another that still serves as an Alcott museum called The Orchard House. Alcott’s quest to behold Got and nature face to face was most successful in his educational endeavors, schools he started in Boston and on the grounds of The Orchard House. In Boston, Elizabeth Peabody’s bookstore on West Street was another place the Transcendentalists went to develop forge that relationship with the universe. They spent time here bouncing ideas of each other and searching for a better way before wandering up Tremont Street to School Street and the Old Corner Bookstore and the Parker House hotel. Among the ideas battered around the downstairs of Elizabeth Peabody’s bookstore was for a utopian society created out of Transcendental optimism and a utopian theory called Fourierism. Brook Farm, in the Boston suburb of West Roxbury, Although Brook Farm literally went up in flames after seven years, its promise of a more balanced, Transcendental agrarian life enticed the likes of Emerson, Thoreau, and Margaret Fuller, all of whom regularly visited. Hawthorne did join but quickly realized his unique relation to the universe did not include milking cows.

Perhaps the most well known method to forge an original relationship to the universe was to move to Walden Pond and attempt to “front only the essential facts of life” as Thoreau did from 1845 to 1847. His experiment in living the Transcendentalist quest, along with the record of it we know as Walden, has had perhaps the greatest impact of any of the Transcendentalist writings.

It is regularly quoted as the defining text for a wide variety of philosophical movements and radical thinkers...or just to sell t-shirts and yoga-tapes. I've even seen Walden quoted in a review of new electrical gadgets like cell phones and iPods.
But my favorite story of Thoreau’s influence is about a shy, lanky Irish boy whose father read Walden to him in the mornings before he trundled off to school. On summer vacation in the west of Ireland, this same boy then dreamed about moving to an island in the middle of a lake and living like Thoreau.

He even picked out the perfect island and spent a night reconnoitering it. As it turned out, the boy never lived out his dream, but he did write a poem about the island. The poem is called “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” and the boy is the Novel prize winning writer William Butler Yeats. As a side note, I will talk about that story and much more tomorrow night at the National Arts Club.

My central theme of a “quest” helped me through the writing of the book, but I also had to take the photographs that accompany the text. And in taking those pictures, I tried to be Emerson’s eyeball. I tried to see all and vanish into nothing. Not an easy trick standing on the Boston Common in the middle of a busy afternoon. But I tried.

And, after the book was published, and I was putting together an collection of photographs from the book for an exhibition at the Fruitlands Museum in Harvard, Massachusetts, I realized that Transcendentalism was more than just a quest to create that unique place for one’s self in the universe, it was also a way of seeing the universe -- not just looking, but truly seeing. The Transcendentalists were both unfailingly dedicated to the careful study of the natural world and unequivocal about the benefits. Again, from Emerson's Nature, I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me." And Henry David Thoreau challenges us, with his usual play on words, to go beyond looking to really seeing: "Will you be a reader, a student merely, or a seer."

It is perhaps no surprise to this crowd that the person who was met that challenge and was clearly much, much more than a student seemed to prefer more the journeys of the imagination. Like William Wordsworth and Emerson before her, Emily Dickinson was greatly inspired by what she had seen. As someone who actually had to travel to Cambridge for uncomfortable eye treatments (at which the doctor forbid her to write and even took her pen from her, forcing her to use a pencil she must have snuck in), vision is not something Dickinson takes lightly. Like her predecessor, the visionary British poet William Blake, When Dickinson does turn her eyes to something, she sees it as well as something else: From that "narrow fellow in the grass" to the trains she saw from her bedroom that



"lap the miles,/And lick the valleys up
And stop to feed itself at tanks;
And then, prodigious, step

Around a pile of mountains,
And, supercilious, peer
In shanties by the sides of roads;
And then a quarry pare

To fit its sides, and crawl between,
Complaining all the while
In horrid, hooting stanza;
Then chase itself down hill

And neigh like Boanerges;
Then, punctual as a star,
Stop – docile and omnipotent –
In fact, she recognizes the power of her imagination to create riches from what she sees:
‘Tis little I could care for pearls
Who own the ample sea;
Or brooches, when the Emperor
With Rubies pelteth me;

Or gold, who am the Prince of Mines;
Or diamonds, when I see
A Diadem to fit a dome
Continual crowning me

And even when her circumstances did not allow her to use the actual sight of something as a jumping off place, Dickinson is still satisfied (and rightly so), with seeing things in her mind.


I never saw a moor
I never saw the sea;
Yet know I how the heather looks,
And what a wave must be

I never spoke with God
Nor visited in heaven;
Yet certain am I of the spot
As if the chart were given

When Thoreau went to Walden, he said it was to "live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived." Although Dickinson never walked the shores of Walden Pond, or even went to Concord, she clearly lived deliberately, fronted the facts of life, and lived her life to the fullest. And even though she was never invited to one of the famous conversation groups Emerson held at his house, when Emerson extolled his audience, "to see God face to face," Dickinson knows the way. In fact, where others put their eyeballs (transparent or otherwise), Emily puts up her soul:

Before I got my eye put out,
I liked as well to see
As other creatures that have eyes,
And know no other way.

But were it told to me today,
That I might have the sky
For mine, I tell you that my heart
Would split, for the size of me.

The meadows mine, the mountains mine, --
All forests, stintless stars,
As much of noon as I could take
Between my finite eyes.

The motions of the dipping birds,
The lightning’s jointed road,
For mine to look at when I liked, --
The news would strike me dead!

So safe, guess, with just my soul
Upon the window-pane
Where other creatures put their eyes,
Incautious of the sun.

And perhaps that is the best place for us to end, with our souls upon the window pane." I believe it is the best way to create what Emerson called "an original relation with the universe" -- something that Dickinson, perhaps more than Emerson himself, or even Thoreau, was able to do through her vision, her imagination, and her poetry.

Thank you so much for your time and wonderful attention. I would certainly love to hear any questions or comments you might have, either now or later. I will be posting the text of this talk at http://openpage-openroad.blogspot.com/ as well as information about my upcoming events and books. I will turn on a slide show of photographs to run as I sign books.

lecture at the Yeats Society of the New York - February 27, 2009

First off, thank you to all of you who have come this evening. It’s so gratifying to know I’m not the only one who likes spending a Friday night talking about Yeats and poetry. I'd also like to extend a special thank you to Andy McGowan for setting up this event.

Before I go much further, let me take a moment to explain a little about the series and how I got involved. I was an English teacher for nine years before I became a writer. Well, I guess I was a writer all along, but it took a stroke of luck for me to become a book author. In the spring of 2004, after much deliberation, my wife and I decided it was time for me to take a break from teaching and chase my dream of the writing life. I submitted my resignation to the school where I worked and was prepared to spend a year trying to start a career as a freelance writer when, literally a month before school ended, a colleague emailed me. He wrote that a friend of his was starting a publishing company and was looking for a writer in New England willing to take on a book project. Did I know of any writers in New England who might be interested? I just so happened to be a writer in New England willing to take on a book project. When I found out that it was to be a literary travel guide, I could not believe my luck. Well, that turned out to be my first Roaring Forties Press ArtPlace book and I had so much fun doing that one that I immediately pitched another idea that was near and dear to me: Irish Literature.


The Art Place Series
The ArtPlace series explores the interaction between art and place. The books look at the places where artists and thinkers lived and worked, and how those places affected them. It also examines how that artist's legacy affects and changes the very landscapes that helped sparked their creativity. In my books, there is an additional layer of how members of the group interact with each other, and in the case of this book, there is one more layer of how the writers and thinkers dealt with a culture that had all but vanished when they first took up their pens.

The Irish Book was fifth in a series of seven which includes Dorothy Parker's New York, John Steinbeck's California, Flaubert's Normandy, Matisse's South of France, Michelangelo's Rome, and my book on the Transcendentalists’ New England

Because I got involved with the series at the beginning, I was able to do two things: write the type of book I would buy and write the type of book that I would teach. Although this book makes no claims at academic or scholarly argument, it does provide a unique way in -- a way to explore the Irish Literary revival in a way that is accessible and hopefully engaging. As a teacher, I often found that students were the most engaged and interested, not when we were talking about the grand scope of literature, or even about the big ideas, but when we focused on specific events, moments actually.

Moments of Place, Art, & Geography
So in this book, I really focused on special moments, moments when place, art, and geography collide. Like that moment two friends having tea on a wet and windy afternoon in County Galway decide that Ireland needs its own theater tradition and the Irish Theatre Movement is born. Or that moment when a young poet standing by a lake shore sees nine and fifty swans scatter wheeling into the sky above him and, from their flight, creates the poem “The Wild Swans at Coole.” This book is about that moment when a young man listens to a story told to him by an Aran Islander and finds in it a drama of lasting value. And finally, the book is about that moment when a play written by Irish authors and acted by Irish actors on an Irish stage inspires the tearful singing of patriotic songs and that moment a few years later when another Irish play in Dublin incites rioting and violence, in many cases by the same people.

Indeed, looking back, the Irish Literary Revival can be seen as a moment itself. Lasting only a short time from the early 1890’s through roughly 1926, the Irish Literary Revival was nothing more than a flowering of literature that sought to first glorify then critically examine, what it meant to be truly Irish. It was also nothing less than a profound shift in how the citizens of this country not much bigger than Maine identified themselves, both within their own counties and to the world.

While Irish history is long, complex, and mythological, it is important to know that Ireland was, for many hundreds of years, under English control. To help solidify this English rule, many British second sons, with no claim to land in England, colonized Ireland, displacing many Irish farmers. In some cases, these families eventually felt more Irish than the farmers whose lands their ancestors had taken centuries before. When England switched from Catholicism to the Protestant faith, religion became a dividing line and those who practiced Catholicism were systematically oppressed and denied access to land and power. By the time the potato blight of the mid-nineteenth century hit Ireland, most of the Irish Catholics had few options but to leave Ireland or die. Millions did both.

Therefore, it is not surprising that by the late nineteenth century, Britain was not just the main cultural influence in Irish cities like Dublin, Belfast, and Cork – it was the only option. The fields of music, literature, and art were dominated by British tastes, and when the Irish were represented, they were portrayed as drunk, stupid, or quick to anger…or all three.

Through a series of political events, which included failed insurrections, bungled political wrangling, and the fall and quick death of Ireland’s best political hope for independence from Britain, the Irish who wanted to create an Irish identity separate from England turned to Celtic sports, art, and literature to create a social movement where the political one had failed.

Into the Mix of Irish Literary Revival
Into this mix came a young poet, tall with unruly black hair. He was not Catholic, could not speak Gaelic, and did not even come from the land-owning Protestant ascendancy. But he could write beautifully of place and write he did. Yeats’ poems, beginning with his first poetry collection in 1889, so captured the essence of his childhood home of County Sligo in the west of Ireland, that he quickly became the center of the Irish Literary Revival.

Attracted by his poetic talent, and perhaps the dark unruly hair and piercing eyes, the widow Isabelle Augusta Gregory, made friends with Yeats and opened her Galway home to him. It became the western birthplace of the Revival, and many of the writers, painters, and poets came to visit with Lady Gregory and Yeats when he was in residence. J.M. Synge stopped by on his way back to Dublin after his trips to the Aran Islands. After the tremendous success of his play, The Plough and the Stars at the Abbey Theater, Sean O’Casey was introduced to polite society by Lady Gregory. George Bernard Shaw came often but remained aloof from the rest of the revival. The novelist George Moore came to collaborate with Yeats on their plays. James Joyce was invited but declined to come. But it was Yeats above all who was the featured guest.

At Coole Park

Yeats had a pretty cushy life there…literally. While Yeats was working in the best room in the house, Lady Gregory laid the thickest and softest rugs she had in the hallway outside his room so that footsteps wouldn’t disturb his thoughts. She brought him hot broth and tea to keep his strength up and offered the best port for after dinners. And all the while, she was collecting folk and fairy tales from the local tenant farmers first for Yeats to use in his own writing, and then eventually for her own books and plays. But, she stated that her first duty was to support her poet friend.

So it is little wonder that Yeats wanted to come back…and often. Nor is it surprising that when it came time for him to buy a summer house, he choose the nearby house and tower, which he named Thoor Ballyllee. It was literally a Norman fort which had in essence been abandoned and left to rot. But it was where Yeats wrote some of his finest poetry, as he describes in a letter written from Ballylee

Alas I have to return to Dublin in a couple of days. There one gets angry and writes prose, but here beside a little stream I write poetry and think of nothing else.

The poetry from his collection The Tower exemplifies the best of Yeats’ ability to simultaneously portray landscape and create symbols from it. Listen to this passage from his long poem, “Meditation in Time of Civil War," in which he takes stock of his surroundings:

An ancient bridge, and a more ancient tower,
A farmhouse that is sheltered by its wall
An acre of stony ground,
Where the symbolic rose can break in flower,
Old ragged elms, old thorns innumerable,
The sound of the rain or the sound
Of ever wind that blows;
The stilted water-hen
Crossing stream again
Scared by the splashing of a dozen cows

A winding stair, a chamber arched with stone,
A grey stone fireplace with an open hearth
A candle and written page

To the Aran Islands

So, if it was Yeats’ special gift to encapsulate moments of time where mountains, streams, lakes, and ancient forts become more symbol than scene, he also had the ability to inspire those moments in others…or at least set them on their way. It was his advice, spoken in an unguarded moment of criticism, to John Millington Synge, that helped shape that young writer’s career. Upon meeting Synge in Paris, Yeats told him:

Give up Paris. You will never create anything by reading Racine and Arthur Symons will always be a better critic of French literature. Go to the Aran Islands. Live there as if you were one of the people themselves; express a life that has never found expression

Although Synge was best known for his drama, one of his finest works is a small book called The Aran Islands. This slim volume narrates the events of Synge’s three consecutive visits to the Aran Islands, a group of three small, very rocky, and culturally isolated islands just off the west coast of Ireland. While he lived on the middle island of Inis Meain, Synge often sat on the stones just watching the weather change or observing the comings and goings of the people at work and play. He also collected stories from the elders.

One of the most interesting stories he hears and narrates in his book is actually one that Yeats had also heard a few years before on his visit to the Arans. It tells of a man who kills his maniacal and vicious father and then escapes to the Aran Islands. Rather than reacting with horror at harboring a murderer in their midst, the islanders hide the man from the authorities and help him eventually escape to America, following the story, Synge offers this thought:

The impulse to protect the criminal is universal in the west. It seems partly due to the association between justice and the hated English jurisdiction, but more directly to the primitive feelings of these people, who are never criminals yet always capable of crime, that a man will not do wrong unless he is under the influence of a passion which is as irresponsible as a storm on the sea. If a man has killed his father, and is already sick and broken with remorse, there can be no reason why he should be dragged away and hanged by the law.

Although he acknowledges that he most likely always remain an outsider on the island, Synge gives the reader many glimpses into the souls of the Aran Islanders. In the moments after British soldiers, serving as the local police, turn an island woman out of her home because of debt, Synge clearly sees just what his means:

For these people the outrage to the heart is the supreme catastrophe. They live here in a world of grey, where they are wild rains and mists every week in the year, and their warm chimney corners, filled with children and young girls, grow into consciousness of each family in a way it is not easy to understand in more civilized places

Synge’s talent was to illuminate the special moments in the daily lives of the some of the most interesting Irish, the Aran Islanders.

Moments I'll Never Forget

For me, doing this book was also made up of moments too, moments when I felt art, history, and geography collide. Like when I sat on the rock formation atop the cliffs of the island of Inis Meain in the rock formation called “Synge’s Chair” in honor of the playwright who arranged the rocks and often sat there, I looked across the ocean to the coast just as he did and felt the wind on my back and the ocean sprays drifting up. As I sat there, I could almost sense his presence and understood much better what his experience was like.

A similar moment happened on the top of the mountain Ben Bulben. Yeats often climbed Ben Bulben as a youngster and had written that he wanted to be buried in the small Drumcliffe churchyard at the foot of the mountain. It was alone at the top of this cliff that I felt the closest connection to Yeats.

But the most powerful moments for me were the stories, like the one I heard mere hours after I landed in Ireland for this research trip.

I was sitting with a group attending the Lady Gregory's Autumn Gathering. Among the scholars and attendees whose father's friend was the taxi man for the town of Gort. One night, after stowing his horse and buggy and battening down the hatches against an oncoming storm, he was awakened by a terrible pounding on front door, as if someone were trying to break it down. A little frightened, he opened the window of the second floor and looked down. "Who is it," asked his trembling wife. A moment later, he pulled his head in and turned to his wife, "ach, it's only that mad Yeats, looking for a ride home in the rain."

The most special moment came during lunch the next day at the Lady Gregory fall symposium. I was late for lunch, so I picked the only spot available, next to a white-haired gentleman telling a story. At first, I was focusing on my lunch and what I needed to photograph that afternoon, then I started to pay attention to the story the man was telling.

“He only found out he had won when Bertie Smyllie called with the news and he just asked “how much is it? How much?” It was then I realized that he was Michael Yeats talking about when his father won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1923. I nearly choked on my potatoes. Michael Yeats, who passed away just before the book was published, was a wonderfully generous and kind spirit who was tremendously supportive of me. I want to give him my thanks as well

So, in wrapping up, I’d certainly like to encourage all of you to get to Ireland (and of course use this book!), but also get out in search of your own moments. Climb Ben Bulben or sit in Synge's Chair. Walk down to the water’s edge at Lough Gill and look out across the water to the lake isle of Innisfree. Sit it in the audience for a play at the Abbey Theatre or listen to the story the white-haired gentleman next to you is telling. Ireland’s magic need only take a moment -- I thank you for the moments you’ve spent with me.

back in Amherst

I;m thrilled to be back in Amherst after a great weekend in New York. I will be uploading the texts to both talks I gave in New York shortly, but first am getting the word out about my two talks this week.

Just in time for Saint Patrick’s day, I will be giving not one but two slide show presentations this Thursday. The first is at The Springfield Museum at 12:15 as part of their Museums A La Carte series. You get cookies if you come to this one; see the link for more information.

The second event is right here in Amherst, at the Jones Library at 7:00 pm. Although there are no official refreshments being offered, come on by and we’ll see what we can do.

I will be selling autographed books and photos (both framed and unframed) at both events. They might just make the perfect St. Patrick’s Day gift!

As always, thanks for all the great support.