Stories All the Way Down
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A blog about the current state of literature and its ills; about the writing life and its follies; about historical fiction and its foibles; about being a Catholic novelist and its contradictions; about roaming about and its perplexities.
Stories All the Way Down
2y ago
Seen in the right light, there is a fairytale quality to the Grand Canyon and to the forests that line the rim. But the forest path can sometimes lead to the witch’s cave — in our case, the US medical system. May 16: Grand Canyon to Flagstaff: I am usually an early riser and when we ..read more
Stories All the Way Down
2y ago
We cannot separate a people from their landscape. To visit one is to visit the other. This makes tourism a kind of natural resource that people living in attractive or unusual landscapes can choose to exploit as they would oil or timber or fertile crop land. But in the case of tourism, the choices and ..read more
Stories All the Way Down
2y ago
NFTs are suddenly a topic in the discussion of arts funding. For an example, see Elle Griffin’s newsletter on the subject. There is an awful lot of bafflegab around NFT’s (Non-Fungible Tokens) and I don’t propose to unravel it for you, since that would involve the unpleasant business of working it out for myself. But ..read more
Stories All the Way Down
2y ago
A friend asked me yesterday if I had thought about doing a book trailer. She even pointed me to a list of the ten most viewed book trailers of all time: https://film-14.com/the-10-most-viewed-book-trailers-of-all-time-updated/ I watched them. I don’t get it. It is not that they are not good. They are as slick as any Hollywood movie ..read more
Stories All the Way Down
2y ago
Sights ancient and modern are larded with claims of certain knowledge that are dubious at best, given the available evidence. Without contradiction, a guess hardens into assurance. But our certainty is tinged with aspiration. May 13, 2018, Gallup to Winslow: I’m not sure what the climate classification is for the landscape West of Gallup, New ..read more
Stories All the Way Down
2y ago
My novel, The Wistful and the Good, begins serializing on Substack tomorrow, November 27. You will be able to read the first chapter at https://gmbaker.substack.com/p/wag1 and you can subscribe to receive a new chapter by email each week. Besides the novel, I am also serializing a series of backgrounder posts discussing the historical background and ..read more
Stories All the Way Down
2y ago
From the low of a mine to the height of the Continental Divide and from the width of the plain to the steepness of Gallup’s streets, this is a day on the move. And a chat with the ghost of Jimmy Stewart. May 12, 2018, Albuquerque to Gallup: We begin the day with a tour ..read more
Stories All the Way Down
2y ago
To travel is to intrude. The intrusion may be welcomed. It may be invited. You may pay for the privilege of intruding. But it is still an intrusion, and sometimes you feel like an intruder even where you are welcomed. But then, there are some places, no matter how foreign, where you always feel at ..read more
Stories All the Way Down
2y ago
All through the New Mexico portion of this journey, I have noted how much it matters here what things look like. This is in some small part a reflection of how much things matter. I don’t mean this in the sense of how much it matters to have things. Rather in the sense that things ..read more
Stories All the Way Down
2y ago
The museum has become the artefact. These days one can often tell more about a people from how they structure and present their museums than from what those museums contain. Thursday, May 10, 2018, Santa Fe to Taos: This was a day mostly about visits to various sites and there is enough to say about ..read more