Dispatches since 2005
The journal
Announcements, new editions, travel, diving, cooking and the working life of a novelist — 3,173 entries, all of them here in full.
February 18, 2025 · 133 words
The Toolbox Strikes Again
Shen Tao (Taos Toolbox ’23) has sold her first novel in a number of markets, mostly at auction. After workshopping The Poet Empress at Toolbox, she finished the book, went straight out and got an agent, and then started collecting advances. A seven-figure advance in the States, a six-figure advance in Britain, another
Read entry →February 1, 2025 · 148 words
Cruising
Here’s a spotted eagle ray cruising over the reef in the Turks and/or Caicos, 2016. Eagle rays are impressive, with their ten-foot wing span, but they don’t hang around for long. They’re both fast and shy, and if they see divers in their vicinity, they’re out of sight very quickly. They’re pelagic fishes, living in [&h
Read entry →January 22, 2025 · 199 words
London Broil!
So what to do with a beef round roast? It’s tough, it’s very lean, and it can be kind of flavorless. Yet roasts can be comfort food, and comfort is what I’d kind of like given recent events, which include freezing weather for the last week, and a tomorrow promised to remain below freezing all […]
Read entry →January 22, 2025 · 99 words
Go ‘Pods!
A gorgeous nudibranch crawling along the reef at Siladen, Sulawesi (formerly known as Celebes). Sulawesi is a paradise for nudibranchs, and apparently every other form of aquatic life. Nudibranchs are a type of gastropod, basically a snail that has got rid of its shell and survives by tasting really awful to predators.
Read entry →January 18, 2025 · 110 words
Monstre!
French pro-Axis poster from the Second World War. Churchill smiles at a starving French family while surrounded by the slogan, “Monster, you make us suffer!” Churchill looks more like a film comedian than a statesman, let alone a monstre. The poster is intended to encourage the French public to forget that it was the G
Read entry →January 12, 2025 · 99 words
Immigrant
A Viking grave in a Scottish churchyard. (I don’t remember the name of the village, but it was very near Loch Lomond.) The gravestone is carved so as to resemble an overturned boat— boat burials were still a thing. The “viking funeral,” with the ship set on fire and pushed out to sea, is a […]
Read entry →January 10, 2025 · 351 words
Holy
This photo is 50 years old! And sort of looks it. I and Photoshop have done our best. This, from 1975, looks down from Delphi toward the Gulf of Corinth. I had come to Delphi at the command of a couple of major figures— one from the Bible, the other from science fiction. Not that […]
Read entry →January 7, 2025 · 153 words
Spin About
A reconstruction of the turret of the USS Monitor, open to allow a view of the mechanism and one of the two 11-inch guns. The turret was designed by American inventor Theodore Timby, and the rest of the ship by the Swedish-born John Ericsson. A problem with the turret was that there was no brake— […]
Read entry →December 31, 2024 · 833 words
Ghost Docks
About six years ago I was on a motor trip along the North Shore of Lake Superior, and wandered down a small road from the highway down to the lake. When I parked in the small recreational harbor, I saw this huge abandoned facility along the shoreline. (It’s much bigger than it looks in this […]
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