Jay Wrote

I think I skimmed a Time Magazine article about Samuel Beckett’s play in the 1960s.  Probably a black and white photo and a headline using the label “absurdist.”  Yeah, the play where nothing happens. I had pushed my way through a Kafka and Camus or two long, long ago. No Beckett. So my expectations were fuzzy and not high. With some sense of adventure and a feeling that “this is something I should see, even if it is dreadful” I made plans with my English major friend, Mike. I decided to listen to two podcasts before seeing The Guthrie Theater’s production with Jason Strathairn this fall. They were both helpful to understanding, understanding of the context, the spirit of the play.  Most importantly I was advised:  “Don’t try to understand the play; just experience it.” What a great approach!  I experienced great theater, though perhaps not a great play, not in the traditional sense, where plot, character development, action, language, beauty, humor and insight...

  Milo Fine, Anthony Cox and Kyle Motl:   Unimpeded Mutual Interpenetration; An Appreciation. On September 13 , 2026 Cox and Motl brought their double basses to Fine’s Studio Toile d’Angles in near north Minneapolis for two hours of intense, exciting improvisation, perhaps fitting the Free Jazz label.  Fine rotated between playing clarinet, percussion and his Bosendorpher Imperial.  This time I did not ask about planning vs. improvisation.  When I first heard Fine and Cox a year ago, Fine affirmed that that two hour performance was 100% improvised and Cox reported that the two of them had been practicing their improvisation together for five decades.  I suspect Motl, who teaches bass at the U of M,  has not been playing bass for two decades, let alone five, but their answers to my question last fall would have been equally true this week. In my appreciation of the Cox Fine performance in 2025 I express my wonder in the up close experience of Fine’s ma...

  Son of Vermont’s Forests, Reflections After Reading: When the Trees Came Back. The Great Battle to Save Vermont’s Forests. Robert Mello. Vermont Historical Society, 2026. I am a son of Vermont’s forests.  This book tells of the denuding and reforestation of Vermont. The people, places and decisions described in it created a landscape and experience which has had profound effects on me  This essay reflects on this impact and adds just one of the many necessarily-missing biographies which could have appeared in When the Trees Came Back. My father, Jim Wilkinson, was hired by Perry Merrill (head of Vermont forestry from 1930 to 1966) soon after his return from flying 32 B-17 bomber missions out of England. A native of New Jersey and graduate of Penn State forestry school, before enlisting Jim had worked loading logs at a company town lumber operation in the hills of West Virginia. Merrill hired him via the Postal Service to supervise the fire lookout stations in the south...

  You Don’t Have to Sing the Blues, New Insight About Living With Trauma. “ We have art so that we do not perish because of the truth.” Friedrich Nietzsche, Will to Power Or, we have art so we can turn sometimes awful truths into new and even joyful life, a dialectic we can enact in  our own experiences.   This is my new understanding of how I have dealt with big trauma by turning to art. I address the personal loss  and tragedy in my wife Karen’s stroke and her survival and how writing, my artistic outlet, gave me surprising joy.   And looking back on my brother David’s even more tragic mental illness, art is there too.  I found things that we  can take from these experiences individually and as a community.  And in the process of looking at all this I’ve  found others who have turned trauma and tragedy into unexpected joy.  Lost and Found Connections In early 2001 Karen was working at Northwest Airlines and we took advan...