UNM’s Honors College: Bigger isn’t better
In a world of future shock, where nothing seems stable and change often happens for no rhyme or reason, institutions with continuity and humane values are worth preserving, even as they evolve.
The crucial thing to avoid is ruining a great and on-going achievement while trying to make it bigger and better.
The University of New Mexico’s new Honors College has morphed this year from the Honors Program, which is one of the gems of the American Honors movement. It’s regularly ranked as one of the top three programs in the nation...
Dan Foley for Gov.
Former New Mexico state rep. Dan Foley has been getting a lot of ink lately. He’s the tall, handsome guy who has appeared every week for just about forever as a conservative policy wonk on Gene Grant’s KNME TV show, New Mexico in Focus. Because of his superior wisdom and insight, Dan Foley consistently hits the nail on the head, so I always prick up my ears when Big Dan lets another brilliant and poignant pearl of wisdom fall from his lips about the insider maneuvering in New Mexico’s amazingly great state legislature...
Weekly Poetry: Officer Smith
What I wish I would have said to the soldier this morning as we stared each other down for a three second eternity in the *Smith’s parking lot (AKA “Officer Smith” poem)
I wonder
if this is what it feels like
standing on the other end
of your rifle
or are your eyes always that big
and soft
would you take offense?
if I said
that you are the only part
of that uniform
that makes me proud to be an American...
Believing in human potential – An interview with Ian Tregillis
Ian Tregillis represents two sides of New Mexico’s collective brainpower: the sciences and the arts. By day, he works at Los Alamos National Laboratory. By night—and on weekends and days off—he writes sharp trope-busting fiction. The ink is still cooling on the final volume of his Milkweed Triptych, Necessary Evil.
Is the series science fiction, or is it fantasy? Ian blends the two genres as artfully as he does physics and creativity. Through the expanded parameters of these genres, the trilogy pokes and prods at the very human issues and choices that face us today. The writing is far smarter than the dust jacket would have you believe, and the entire series bolsters New Mexico’s literary cred.
Courage in Mora County
If you knew that fallible human beings were going to drill for oil or gas through your precious groundwater would you feel confident about drinking and washing with that water? Not if you valued your health.
Of course you can’t see what actually happens when corporate persons out for profit pollute your ground water. But it doesn’t take much imagination to suppose pollution will occur many times, if not most times, when drilling rigs and all their gear and goop go at it...
Obama phone
One of the best ideas since sliced bread was the Sequester. This wonderful piece of non-legislation is destroying a whole lot of people who can’t be seen. We should be thankful for that. These invisibles are mostly drooling kids who just won’t get Headstart and senile elderly people who will just see their benefits slashed or Meals on Wheels taken away. Big deal. So what? I for one am deeply glad I can’t see these subhuman types and I can’t hear their stupid and silent screams...
What’s happened to Albuquerque? Part 4: A city of edges
Is it time for a complete revamping of the goals Albuquerque has set for itself as a city? Are we ready for a genuine city-wide discussion of what the current economic and environmental conditions mean for our future?
The great goals setting exercises of the l970s and l980s took place in an atmosphere of intense public interest and involvement in city issues. By comparison, 21st century Albuquerque seems asleep at the wheel...
The last poet standing
In Amiri Baraka’s review of Angles of Ascent: A Norton Anthology of Contemporary African American Poetry, I was struck by not only the vitriol, but how he was making a similar argument that I had made a few years ago during my review of In Company: An Anthology of New Mexico Poets After 1960. Lacking the vitriol, I took the editors to task for trying to be inclusive but missing what was happening outside the Academy...
Weekly Poem: When Will the Next Chance Be?
-written in response to Georgia O’Keeffe’s “Patio Door with Green Leaf”
There are doors
we never see.
Just this morning
I failed to find
the door that would have led me
to a deeper understanding of your heart...
What’s happened to Albuquerque? Part 3: Police trust
If there’s anything city residents need to hear about during this mayoral season it’s how the candidates plan to give Albuquerque a police force it can trust and admire, and is no longer afraid of?
How would a mayor accomplish that turnaround? I know many of us would like to learn in detail how that could be done.
Living in a city where one worries about the police going rogue, killing people, beating them up, drawing guns at routine traffic stops, and the like makes doing business and going about one’s daily life even harder than it already is...