The Lone Prairie Blog

These posts include content from the Substack blog and other sources. Some posts are only available to paid members and are themed accordingly. If you do not have a membership, you will still be able to read public posts.

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The ultimate blog post about the word penultimate.

Photo by Julie R. Neidlinger, at Texas A&M It started with a simple statement, which later permuted itself into raging brain activity as I tried to get to sleep.

Feb 11

When being well-read doesn't pay off, and other problems of main character syndrome: The problem of reading books instead of letting them read you.

It was the late 1990s, and Jane Austen was hot. Every movie was either based on Austen, Alcott, Gaskell, James, one of the Brontes, Trollope, or the like. It was all Merchant Ivory and Miramax productions. It was wonderful and also introduced me to the concept of main-character syndrome.

Feb 3

Vasily Arkhipov: the man who saved the world.

It was 1962, and the Cuban Missile Crisis had the world on edge. Vasily Arkhipov was serving aboard a Soviet nuclear submarine, B-59 , parked in international waters near Cuba; he was about to save the world by keeping his cool. Arkhipov had experience in keeping his cool. A year earlier, he had been the deputy commander of K-19 , a nuclear submarine patrolling southwest of Greenland, when it experienced a leak in its reactor coolant system that resulted in significant radiat

Jan 27

Applying Carl Orff therapy to the potheads living below my apartment.

Many years ago, my German sister Bine gave me a Carl Orff CD. I have received many German classical CDs from her, often dark, brutal, and a reminder that Chopin’s Polish version of melodic depression is very different from most German composers’ versions; it is the difference between writing poetry and sharpening axes. It has often seemed to me that German composers were either overly jolly with beer, waltzes, and positivity, or starting a metallurgical war.

Jan 20