I’ll walk where my own nature would be leading —
It vexes me to choose another guide —
― Emily Brontë
Welcome to Portable Bohemia, a website and blog devoted to celebration of the artistic spirit and pursuit of intellectual adventure.
The blog features essays, reviews, rants, screeds, ruminations, and on the good days maybe a measure of insightful commentary about books, cinema, art and culture, sports, and sundry other themes and topics. Matters of politics and current affairs are taken up as conscience and honest indignation dictate.
​
Portable Bohemia goes Substack. The blog moved to Substack on April 16, 2023. Content remains free. Click the link above to subscribe for free posts via email and the Substack app.
Check out the Gallery page for photographs. For the most part I point the camera and hope something good will come of it. I like to think that sometimes it does.
​​Contact me if you have questions, comments, or information about upcoming events. I would love to hear from you.
​
The site member feature has been discontinued. I set it up for a while as a way to monitor comments on blog posts. This proved both unnecessary and unwieldy. New requests show up somehow from somewhere from time to time. These are blocked without reply. Readers who wish to contact me may use the from on the contact page.
​
Newsletters
-
December 1, 2023 / Vol. VIII, No. 23: holiday greetings, commentary on Tim Alberta's article about bogus historians who teach evangelical Christians they live in a theocracy, William Brangham's moving interview with mothers of two of the three Palestinian students shot in Vermont, Substack's Nazi problem…
-
November 15, 2023 / Vol. VIII, No. 22: Dostoevsky and intellectual ferment in mid-19th century Russia, congressional shenanigans and clownery headlined by Mike Johnson, the Taylor Greene-Boebert duo, and cheap-shot artist Kevin McCarthy's sucker elbow to Tim Burchett's kidney…
-
November 1, 2023 / Vol. VIII, No. 21: capsule review of Louis Garrel's film L'innocent, context missing from the decolonization narrative, Mike Johnson's opening salvo, the baffling mystery of why so many voters think Joe Biden is a radical progressive…
-
October 15, 2023 / Vol. VIII, No. 20: comment about the current crisis in Israel and Gaza, a celebration of films by Nuri Bilge Ceylan and Krzysztof KieÅ›lowski, memo from the sports desk…
Portable Bohemia at Substack
-
Reckoning with Collaborators, December 5, 2023. The 84-year-old soldier and diplomat Marshal Philippe Pétain (1856–1951) was brought into the French government after Germany invaded France and the Low Countries on May 10, 1940, drove the British army into the sea at Dunkirk, and routed the French army. On June 22 Pétain agreed to an armistice…
-
Johnson Endorses Trump and Porn-Addiction App, November 22, 2023. Mike Johnson’s endorsement of Donald Trump is hardly news. Of course he endorses the twice-impeached, multiply indicted former president who promises to rid the country of vermin like me. It is Johnson’s declaration…
-
Each Month Has Its Fill (a poem), November 19, 2023. “Each Month Has Its Fill” was first published in The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature…
Poems
​Adelaide Literary Magazine December 2022
Otoliths issue fifty-seven, southern autumn, 2020
Quill & Parchment
-
Easy to Forget (February 2007)
-
A Hard Climb (March 2007)
-
Wait (April 2008)
Steam Ticket Vol. 25 Spring 2022
​
Literary
Websites of Interest
Activism
​Arts
Bookstores
-
City Lights (San Francicso)
-
Odd Bird Books (Columbia, SC)
-
Powell's Books (Portland)
-
The Source (Detroit)
-
The Strand (New York)
-
Tall Tales (Atlanta)
Coffee Dens, etc.
​
​
​
​
​
​
​
​
​​