The photograph is scuffed. She is perfect and visible. There is a horse tangled in her hair. It will be two years yet before it escapes. She doesn’t know, though she is smiling out to you from within the picture’s pool, she doesn’t know yet whether next week she’ll have grown or shrunk by twenty feet, but she knows size is always shifting, and she knows light makes image possible. Read the rest of this entry »
The Zanesville Bear Cub & the Puritan Tradition
A truism of American history and thought is our country’s tendency to project evil onto an object and then attempt to destroy that object. We call this “the Puritan tradition,” and it includes woods, Indians, women presumed to be witches, the entire South, New York City when near-bankruptcy, smokers, moderate drinkers and eaters of transfats, practitioners of Islam, those whom the Republicans call “aliens,” and, most recently, exotic wildlife set loose in the small town of Zanesville, Ohio. Read the rest of this entry »