If there is an emerging genetic underclass, I could run for class president or class clown. Read more in ![Fog at Isle Royale [Source: wildmengoneborneo.com]](../wp-content/uploads/2008/04/isle_royale_fog.jpg "Fog at Isle Royale [Source: wildmengoneborneo.com]")
"Brendan, this is what the world looks like all the time to me. Just a little fog. It’s a fine day for boating on the Great Lakes.” Without missing a stroke he turned to dart a skeptical glance at me. Brendan the Navigator. When we named him I didn’t tell his mother everything the legendary Irish name implied. But I imagined him taking on the role of navigator for me. Growing up with Coastal Survey charts and tales of Great Lakes shipwrecks, he came to know Superior as another home. He never doubted the wisdom of canoeing there with a father who was half blind. 
![Charlotte Casiraghi in a red dress. [Source: Stylophile]](../wp-content/uploads/2008/02/charlotte_casiraghi_red_dress.jpg "Charlotte Casiraghi in a red dress. [Source: Stylophile]")
When I figured out who Charlotte Casiraghi was, I realized that I once sent a poem to her mother. 
The legendary Kiki of Montparnasse posed for Man Ray’s 
The memory of Dick Proenneke has been a welcome presence this Christmas. I gave Brendan a copy of One Man’s Wilderness, and on Christmas Eve, Ms. M and I watched the PBS documentary based on the book and Dick’s vintage film footage. I’m fascinated by the solo process he developed for documenting his cabin-building in [...]
Entries from December 2009
Building a Log Cabin in One Man’s Wilderness
2
December 26, 2023 at 1:56pm
by Mark Willis
Noel: Notre Dame de Paris
0
December 25, 2023 at 12:05am
by Mark Willis
Notre Dame de Paris shimmers on a December night. [Photo by M. Bob] And so do the radiant voices of the Anonymous 4 [Miracles of Compostela: Congaudeant Catholici]
Imaging Paris · Ve Add Your Comment
Praying for a Piano Player
9
December 24, 2023 at 2:00pm
by Mark Willis
Every family with an oral tradition has a story that is told and re-told at Christmas until it acquires the power of myth. This is mine. It tells how my grandmother, Ona Willis, joined the Salvation Army.
It was a rainy night in Columbus, Ohio on Christmas Eve in 1944. All three of Ona’s sons were [...]
Playing by Ear · memoir Add Your Comment
A Cacophony of Cranes Made Me a True Believer
0
December 13, 2023 at 11:33am
by Mark Willis
Every December a dark moment comes when I tell myself that I’m too old for cutting, splitting, and stacking firewood. This moment arrives with the first ice storm of winter, when I need to work outside in marginal conditions with cold, wet hands to do something that should have been finished two months sooner. That’s [...]
Playing by Ear · memoir Add Your Comment
Cranking Up Charles Babbage’s Difference Engine
0
December 10, 2023 at 5:29pm
by Mark Willis
Some years back when I read The Difference Engine, the “alternate history” novel by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling, I thought Charles Babbage was just a fanciful blip in the authors’ metaverse. Later I learned that Babbage was the real deal, an iconoclastic prophet of modern computer science. The novel’s computing machine chugged and clanked [...]
The King Is Dead. Long Live The Herons!
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December 9, 2023 at 8:16pm
by Mark Willis
The statistics are staggering for the wine auction at La Tour d’Argent, the venerable Left Bank restaurant with a 27-room wine cellar [left; photo by David Queen/Wikipedia]. The auction fetched more than a million euros, according to AFP. A bottle of Vieux Cognac Le Clos Griffier sold for €25,000, according to the Globe and Mail. [...]
Edible Dramas Add Your Comment
To Kiki the Lascivious Tortoise, Adieu
0
December 8, 2023 at 7:29am
by Mark Willis
“France was in mourning today for one of its oldest and best-loved lotharios, a giant tortoise named Kiki, who died at the age of 146.”
Imaging Paris Add Your Comment
Looking Back (Demurely) Over A Quarter Million Page Views
3
December 6, 2023 at 3:45pm
by Mark Willis
This site crossed a quantitative threshold last night when it surpassed 250,000 page views. It was almost two years to the day when I installed the WordPress.com stat counter to measure Internet traffic here, and a little more than seven months since the count reached 100,000. On that occasion I reposted Degas’s Spartan Girls Provoking [...]
Is An Audiobook Really a Book?
2
December 1, 2023 at 8:58pm
by Mark Willis
I see red whenever I run into the pompous assertion that reading by listening to a book read aloud is not really reading. Then I ask (loudly, of course, to anyone who will listen), how did I read Ulysses (three times in as many decades) and Finnegans Wake (not quite once, completely)? How did I [...]