Michael Downs

Breakfast in Baltimore with James Baldwin.

My policy is not to read the recent Pulitzer/book-everyone-is-talking-about unless people are still talking about it five years later. I sometimes break that rule--this year with JAMES, a good decision–but too often I find the prizes are about fads or committees choosing the book they can agree on.

I love his Way to Rainy Mountain, with illustrations (!), but House Made of Dawn doesn't stay with me the way works by Silko, Erdrich and others do. SIlko's Ceremony lives in me, and so does Erdrich's Love Medicine.

To begin, I must admit that I am no one you know, and ask you to excuse my forwardness.

– a #SundaySentence from the anthology Letters to a Stranger, "To the Young German Horsewoman, Chosen to Help with Réttir," by Pam Houston

‘Welcome to hell’: Inside the megaprison where the U.S. deported migrants Interviews with 16 former detainees of El Salvador’s Terrorism Confinement Center offer the most complete view yet of conditions inside the notorious prison.

The US government has sent innocent men to be beaten and raped in a foreign gulag

www.washingtonpost.com/world/2025/0...

If everybody did, then I'd have to find another word like "kapelusz" or "sombrero."

YouTube video by Willie Nelson discography Willie Nelson - Sittin' On Top Of The World

At last watching Ken Burns' "Country Music." So many of its featured performers have recorded the song of my fascination, "Sitting on Top of the World." Bob Wills, Milton Brown, Asleep @ the Wheel, Bill Monroe, the Carter Family, Willie Nelson.
And the song predates our concept of country.

Amen. Here's a recent example.

My fave of the week. Thanks for it!

Their father was shot against a wall for one of those things, and the mother died of T.B. and undernourishment in 1941.

–a #SundaySentence from The Hive, Camilo José Cela's novel about Madrileños living under Franco's dictatorship.

Such insidious language. "Compliance with Administration directives." "Administration" capitalized as if a proper noun. "Compliance," related to "complaisant" and "comply," meaning "to acquiesce," to accept without protest the directives. Of the (capitalized) Administration.

Anodyne and terrifying.

That photo also served as the cover for Edward P. Jones's Pulitzer-Prize winning novel, The Known World. One great work of art complementing another.

Black Sabbath's Ozzy Osbourne dies aged 76, his family announces - live updates A statement from his family says Osbourne was with them and

And so, as you hear these words
Telling you now of my state
I tell you to enjoy life
I wish I could but it's too late

"Some people's guts must be large and soft, like slugs, and other's small and hard, like the flint of a lighter."

– a #SundaySentence from Camilo José Cela's THE HIVE, translated from Spanish by J.M. Cohen and Arturo Barea.

A Spy Thriller With an Unlikely Hero: A Disgraced Comedian

A brave writer tries new things with each novel. Dan Fesperman tries something new in PARIAH and the NYTimes approves. “Dan Fesperman, wielding a sharp eye for atmospheric detail and a finely tuned ear for comic relief, has proved to be one of the genre’s most exciting contemporary writers.”

Good summer reading y'all, coming to you from the hard-working volunteers at Baltimore Review.

The Trump Administration Is About to Incinerate 500 Tons of Emergency Food Federal workers warned for months that the high-energy biscuits would go to waste.

Heart ache. Heart fury.

These are biscuits to feed hungry children.

Fun fact: Bram Stoker married his beloved, Florence, in this same church.

Reportedly, she had also dated Oscar Wilde, which didn't work out.

"In the Crypt of this Church, near the Body of her honoured Father...lies the mortal part of Mrs. Laetitia Pilkington Whose spirit hopes for that Peace, thro' the infinite Merit of Christ, which a cruel & merciless world never afforded her."

– a #SundaySentence from a tomb inside St. Ann's, Dublin

Such a good book.

"But we've got so many Thursdays left this year." Devastating.

"We were broken by tiredness, but we seemed to have finally accomplished something useful–perhaps like God after the first day of creation."

–a #SundaySentence from Primo Levi's "Survival at Auschwitz." Translation by Stuart Woolf.

Just ended 10 remarkable days in Kraków with writing grad students from Johns Hopkins University. Literature, history, current events, language, culture–we did it all. Here we are at Szymborska Park. Like the poet, we value "The joy of writing. / The power of preserving. / Revenge of a mortal hand."

Jim Shooter, Former Marvel Comics Editor-In-Chief Who Wrote Secret Wars, Dies at 73 Jim Shooter — the controversial former editor-in-chief of Marvel Comics who conceived and wrote 1984’s Marvel Super Heroes Secret Wars, the first company-wide crossover in the history of comics — has ...

Apparently, Jim Shooter was a controversial editor because of his management style. What did I know about that? I was 13, 14, 15, 16, engrossed by the Marvel Universe he oversaw. Godspeed, Mr. Shooter.

Only the most secure nations dare to unleash their artists, those writers and dancers and painters and poets, and archivists, who will brazenly reveal our beauty, our ugliness, our past, and our today.
– a #SundaySentence, former U.S. Congressman Pat Williams (D-Mont) from an oral history interview

Source: University of Montana Scholar Works, Oral History Number: 442-001
Interviewee: Pat Williams
Interviewer: Donna McCrea
Date of Interview: September 24, 2014

And during my two decades in the Congress I was pleased to have been in a place where I could be a leading defender of the National Endowment for the Arts, that tiny agency which demonstrates American's belief in freedom of expression. NEA ... is America's proudly worn little badge of courage."

dare to unleash their artists, those writers and dancers and painters and poets, and archivists, who will brazenly reveal our beauty, our ugliness, our past, and our today. ...

whether we recognize it or not—every day that we look at that painting, that abstract piece of sculpture or whatever it is, that they, and we, are free. In totalitarian societies, they lock up the artists first. Usually, by the way, the poets. Only the most secure nations ...

the reasoned arguments of law and regulations, we submit instead to the pleasure or pain of the artist. The artists are our sorcerers, they are our seducers. And their spinnings are necessary for they remind us every day—