vermont views magazine Home page “Quality of Life, Spirit of Place”

A unique community supported cultural magazine exploring Quality of Life and Spirit of Place in our bio-region, with extraordinary photographs, 22 regular columnists plus feature articles, galleries & essays, new articles and photos every day. 100s more articles in the Archive.

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PHOTO OF THE DAY

The Lake Isle Of Innisfree — William Butler Yeats

Photo by Phil Innes: Brattle-lake

I WILL arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,

And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made:

Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honeybee,

And live alone in the bee-loud glade.

And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,

Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;

There midnight's all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,

And evening full of the linnet's wings.

I will arise and go now, for always night and day

I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;

While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,

I hear it in the deep heart's core.

PASSAGES

Sponsored by Delectable Mountain Cloth

Caption It!

MM Kizi

Series 22 images

GUEST COLUMN

Barking soliloquies

Susan Cruickshank

Annabelle is the low-key English Setter that I spend time with while in Vermont. She seems to become more gentle and more laid back as the years creep forward, or maybe I've just gotten to know her better.

Regardless, there are exceptions.

Mornings after breakfast, and in the evenings after supper, she waits at the front door with anxious anticipation, impatience brimming until I open the door and she is free to dart out to begin her rounds.

Part of her routine is to bark. She barks a lot.

To the unrefined ear, Annabelle’s earnest pronouncements are noise. I too felt that her barking was excessive when getting to know her. But that was before I took the time to watch her nightly laps, before understanding and love took over and brought me eyes that could see.

Read On >>>

SCREENplay

Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool

Lawrence Klepp

If you are a fan of film noir, you will recognize the name of Gloria Graham. She wasn’t exactly a femme fatale, she didn’t have that kind of allure. Her prettiness was slightly weak or off-key, making her look a little devious, as if there was something hidden, whether malice or vulnerable innocence, beneath the surface. She was the bad girl maybe not quite so bad, the good girl with a trick or two up her sleeve.

In one great but often neglected film noir, Sudden Fear (1952), she played the accomplice of Jack Palance as he plots to murder Joan Crawford, his new, wealthy bride. In Fritz Lang’s The Big Heat (1953), she gets involved in a double game between Glenn Ford’s vengeful ex-cop, who sees in her a resemblance to his murdered wife, and her sadistic gangster boyfriend, Lee Marvin. In Nicholas Ray’s masterpiece, In a Lonely Place (1950), her quiet ambiguity matches up with the more volatile ambiguity of her neighbor, the hard-drinking, burnt-out screenwriter played by Humphrey Bogart. She won an Oscar for The Bad and the Beautiful (1952), where she’s one of the characters badly used by Kirk Douglas’s ruthless Hollywood producer.

LOVE IN ACTION

Blooming through the gloaming

Elizabeth Hill

Today’s strangely mysterious gloaming sky reminded me that we humans, too, are part of nature. Perhaps, if we are open to the possibilities, the waxing and waning of the seasons with all their colors, textures, tones, their charms, as well as their challenges can help sustain our strength and resolve through these times of necessary change.

Recently, many American teenagers have managed to plant themselves firmly into the heart of our nation, leading the way in a most contentious yet essential struggle for nothing less than justice, sensible legislation, and positive transformation across our land. May the ever-changing seasons be of sustenance for body, mind, and spirit in each of these young peaceful warriors as they move forward in the tasks ahead.

Let us remember: One book, one pen, one child, and one teacher

can change the world.

~Malala Yousafzai

Read on >>>

MONKEY’S CLOAK

Ode to a Goddess

Charles Monette

Petals soft as skin warm my memory

A lovely vision comes in sight

I hold it, dream anew when twelve hours strike midnight

With me now amid forest’s solitude

Enchantment, held close, imagines amour’s guarantee

Not to know beclouds, bemists uncertainty

On a ragged wild precipice, high fog’s walk

Unsure below

Lightheaded thoughts drift off… in languid vertigo

Awaiting love’s return

A goddess’ pale smile

Her adorable being, heart pulsatile

Returning to Black Mountain’s wide expanse

My sanctuary on high

Glimpsing all that’s down below, what my soul espies

OPEN MIND

Black Man/Black Panther

Offie Wortham

How does a black man feel being the only person of color in a theatre in Vermont watching Black Panther? I was the person and it was one of the loneliness feelings in my life.

Neither I, nor anyone else in theatre had ever seen a movie like this. A first-class, and highly acclaimed, action movie written, directed, and starring black people! Should I be proud? Should I be nervous, and worried about some negative racist violence directed toward me? Would I be considered second class? Or should I simply be amazed that race relations have advanced so much in the past 50 years?

When I was a child I never saw a black face in a commercial, in an advertisement (except Aunt Jemima and Uncle Ben) Read More>>>

THE FIRST GLASS

TODAY'S WEATHER

Vincent Panella

She was sitting in front of the TV, remote in hand, water, books, and pills on the side table. She lowered the sound when he came in and sat, his back hurting from the day's work.

I don't think I'll be able to get up.

You poor thing.

Bent over a sink for the last few hours.

It's so good you came.

I'm a little late.

That doesn't matter. As long as you're here.

Turn that sound off. I can't stand him. Read More>>>

MEANDERINGS

Peaceful

Charles Monette

The first thing I heard was the quiet, the stillness of the trees… without wind, without leaves. Leaving my car at the trailhead, it felt good to be back in the woods. Peaceful.

Last day of February, early afternoon, I was surprised by how little snow was on the trail. An inch, maybe two, of soft crunch atop, a little slippery below. Tracks revealed few hikers before me in days past, a dog along, a solitary hiker ahead of me today.

Deer tracks were plentiful and easily read on each side of the varying 7 ‘ wide trail. They were deep and clearly marked along the path of least resistance. Nice to know I was among them. Read On>>>

OLD LADY BLOG

Writer and Agent

Toni Ortner

Writer: Mr. Dupane, I am honored to meet you.

Agent: Stop the bullshit. Every writer is dying to get me as their literary agent. You have ten minutes to make your case.

Writer: What I have is unique.

Agent: Sure. Blah Blah. Every writer says the same thing. You all think you’re so special but you’re no different than the rest of us.

VERMONT DIARY

The American Way

Vermont Views

If insurance companies set the rate for gun ownership/rage, how much would it be? More for a semi-automatic machine gun than for a car? This is an entirely American solution to gun rage based on unsentimental and apolitical insurance company estimates, so why not federally require insurance for weapon ownership and then get out of the way?

SCREENplay

The Darkest Hour

Lawrence Klepp

...replacing Neville Chamberlain. R.A. Butler, a Tory politician in the Foreign Office, called him “a half-breed American whose main support was inefficient but talkative people of a similar type.” It was whispered that he was vulgar, he was a drunkard, he was unreliable.

It is hard to realize now how much Churchill, the enduring emblem of indomitable British fortitude and tradition, was distrusted and disdained at the time by most of the British establishment.

AN A-MUSING LIFE

The Resolution Revolution

Nanci Bern

Well, it's that time of year again. The snow is showing its night time hue of get-inside-it's-too-cold blue; like what my lips will look like if I don't vamoose toward the warm wood stove.

And it's that time again to get ready for my Resolution Fairy to visit.

100 YEARS AGO

January 1918

Vermont Views

January – 1918 flu pandemic: "Spanish 'flu" (influenza) first observed in Haskell County, Kansas.

SELECTED LETTERS

Wonderful Letter

Vincent Panella

Advice for a cruise from one columnist to another — visiting Sicily

GUEST ARTCLE

LETTERS FROM CUBA #15

Some sentences from Cuba

Mac Gander

It is dawn in La Habana and I am listening to Bob Marley’s “Rebel Music” as my wife Shanta sleeps in the next room and I mark the end of our third week here. One week to go. Travel is exhausting. There is no moment in which one does not wish to be awake.

I am thinking of the opening trope in Denis Johnson’s “Fiskadoro,” where he invokes Marley as one of the three great gods still left in the Florida Keys after a nuclear holocaust, a book that ends with a war-ship returning to those shores after a 90-year quarantine, from Cuba, a grey ship that is taller than the sky.

GUEST ARTICLE

LETTERS FROM CUBA #12

What lies beneath: Our stories our ghosts

Shanta Lee Gander

Who came first? Europa or Europe? With some research, I could get an answer, but the story of a girl who keeps dreaming about two continents fighting over her and who meets her fate and immortality with a God turned beautiful bull is an old one

SPECIAL FEATURE

A Dance with Hermes

Ken Masters

‘Into this hallowed room (I remember a gratifying visiting Professor of Logic, who, whilst debunking “Eastern Philosophy”, and cutting short his fourteen pages of definitions of “consciousness”, waved his arms in the air, inviting in the energy to energise the very expression of his de-bunking – which intangibility I can not possibly recognise, classify, or exonerate) came one Lindsay Clarke, propagating one irritatingly intangible “(A Dance With) Hermes”, full of vital “presence”, whom I hoped I had seen off aeons ago.

IN BETWEEN

Our Expectations

Julia Ferrari

“for a champagne evening, and be whisked away by private boat the next day to Murano”

URBAN NATURALIST

“...spanning 6 1/2 to 7 feet”

Lloyd Graf

Chipmunks, needing a position suited for chastising the lumpen bipeds who invade their territories by walking the Sanctuary trail have dug a burrow right by the trail-head entry post

ARCHETYPAL HIPPIE SPEAKS

Bread & Circuses

Jeri Rose

A friend saw a mound of things left on the sidewalk left by an eviction. In a notebook in a child's hand was a poem:

We have food today

O boy!

We have food today!

DARKEST VERMONT

Better the dog

Vermont Views

Where is any reporting on winter this year?

NOW, HERE, THIS!

Wednesday Storm — 7 March

Vermont Views

Forecasts so far are 6 or 8-12 but maybe 18. Brattleboro seems about in the center of the map. Get it done early tomorrow since it is starting about 11am Wednesday morning.