From the Paris Review, poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s journal of his 1961 visit to El Centro and the Salton Sea: Even at the Salton Sea, the face of death has its smile. In the morning the wind is still blowing but the sun is bright, and life is stirring. Even at the bottom of a well, there’s …
Continue reading ‘That time Lawrence Ferlinghetti visited the Salton Sea’ »
The book’s going well, thanks for asking. See below. What motivates me In my new gig as a university lecturer, my colleague and co-teacher Bob Berrens has the gray old faculty members (there are three of us) talk to the students on the opening day of class about what motivates us. It is the first …
Some things I learned from the late Richard Pipes.
I joined the Albuquerque Journal in 1990 in what I now think of as “the golden age of journalism”. That’s shorthand for reliable access to expense account travel, but something more. If, as it often was, the story happened to be at a nuclear waste dump in southeastern New Mexico, or at an Air Force …
In his dissent from the majority on today’s gay marriage ruling, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia weighed in on a central question confronting those of us in the western United States: Is California in The West? The court, Scalia notes, contains “not a single Southwesterner or even, to tell the truth, a genuine Westerner. …
Continue reading ‘I am a Californian. I am a Westerner. I proudly wear flip-flops.’ »
In one of those wonderful emergent social media moments yesterday, a suggested reading list emerged on Twitter, hashtagged #CharlestonSyllabus. I have two personal contributions. I’ve written previously in this space about Edward Baptist’s The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism. It’s a powerful economic history arguing that America’s great …
Thursday morning I found myself standing knee deep in the Rio Grande. Grinning. University of New Mexico water resources faculty members Mark Stone (that’s Mark in the green shirt helping the knee-deep students learn to measure river flow) and Becky Bixby were out at the river with the summer field course students. It was a trial run …
Continue reading ‘University of New Mexico Water Resources Program: my newly remodeled career’ »
In Las Vegas for a two-day conference on the Colorado River law and policy. Checked into my hotel room, looked out the window to see the Bellagio Fountains: My life has become self-parody.
Brian Devine gets how awesome this could be: @jfleck If you could mount it on buoyant outriggers it would make the sweetest Lake Havasu party boat EVER — Brian Devine (@bedevine25) March 19, 2015
Overheard on the 766 Rapid Ride bus as it pulled into downtown Albuquerque…. Guy standing in the aisle: “Is that a good book?” Guy seated: “I don’t know, I haven’t read it yet.” Pause. “It’s as old as fuck, though.” I look over to see the guy sitting across the aisle from me has a …