The Dirt Lease staff recently conducted a team-building retreat in New Mexico. When the doors to the rental car shuttle in Albuquerque airport closed and the chirpy voice intoned, ‘Welcome to New Mexico – Land of Enchantment!’, a wizened airport worker seated across from the staff said, ‘Land of Entrapment.’ Here is what we have …
The Irish seem more interested in stories about manufactured housing communities than anyone else. I suspect that that is because they connect with the themes of substance abuse, rural poverty and rural despair. God bless them. So what if they say, ‘to here’, when you ask them where their round-trip ticket is to, or if …
The first time I wrote about Arch Stanton, I looked up the movie The Good, The Bad and the Ugly on Netflix and watched it. I do not recommend doing so. It is not a good film. It is not even the kind of shitty film that is fun to watch. Maybe we just have …
Near the end of his life, the American poet Theodore Roethke went to visit the Irish poet Richard Murphy on the island of Inishbofin, off the west coast of Ireland. After several weeks of increasingly erratic behavior (Roethke suffered from what we now call bipolar disorder), he became violent and was carted off to an …
A few months ago, Mike, the manager at my park in northern New York called me and said, ‘I’m hurt.’ I pushed a blonde out of my lap and said, ‘What happened?’ ‘I was threading the pins on the bucket to Old Bessie and it slipped.’ Old Bessie is what he calls the backhoe. ‘Pin’ …
The woman I call Mrs. Wilson is leaving my park in northern New York – but nothing is simple with Mrs. Wilson. Readers might remember her. She shovels snow in high heels in the North Country when she claims to be in Alabama. She chained herself to a tree. She makes herself bulletproof by accusing …
My torts professor was old-school. Short, pudgy, longish gray hair, black-rimmed glasses, Santa Claus beard. He was one of eight people who graduated from the law school summa cum laude in the decades between 1969 and 2007. He clerked for Thurgood Marshall, worked as general counsel for the United Mine Workers, and has taught torts …
Beavis, Butt-Head and the Manufactured Housing Industry Read More »
Earlier this month, a woman named Bella Montoya banged on the walls of her coffin during her wake. She was not as dead as had been previously believed. Assembled family and clergy undid the screws and opened the box. Ms. Montoya left her wake standing up. I have had trouble recently with a maintenance guy …
Nassim Taleb is a bloviator, but he is often right. His hedge fund, Empirica, which made money by placing bets on fat tails and black swans, finished far in the black when it wound up in 2005. Taleb won big when equity markets tanked in 1987. A successor fund to Empirica, to which Taleb was …
From the Santa Fe Writers Project Quarterly, a publication based in Baltimore.