Category: Yo Ivanhoe

  • Let It Loose, Let It All Come Down: A Very Sad Business All Around

    Some mysterious combination of failing light, and the smell of an unrecognized plant bring back to some men the sense of childhood, and of future hope; and to others the sense of something which has been lost and nearly forgotten. –Graham Greene, The Honorary Counsul What we cannot think, we cannot think; we cannot therefore…

  • The Wasteland

    This month marks the third anniversary of Yo Ivanhoe, and considering the similarly wasted years I spent shoveling words in a similar hole (Open All Night) at City Pages, I’m not much in the mood to celebrate five years of futility. When I first started doing this nonsense I was nothing but a clueless conscript…

  • From the Wayback Machine: My Brief History of Magic

    Elmer Gylleck was a Chicago architect who did a bumbling comedy-magic act built around a character he called Dr. Clutterhouse. Dr. Clutterhouse would come on stage clutching a briefcase and carrying an umbrella. The briefcase was possessed, full of odd spirits; ghosts would fly from it, and gunshots would ring out whenever Clutterhouse opened the…

  • There Is No Bottom. There Is Simply —Or Not So Simply— the End

    There is another kind of sleep, We are talking in it now. As children we walked in it, a mile to school, And dreamed we dreamed we dreamed. —James Galvin, from "Hematite Lake" Maris Gomes was very young when he went to sea for the first time, and not much older –still much too young–…

  • Foolish Fire

    The small river town where I lived and worked for a time was in a pretty and neglected part of the state. When I first moved down there I used to tell friends that it was as if I’d relocated to a remote little corner of some obscure European country. There were rolling, wooded hills,…

  • Yo Ivanhoe Goes to the Movies!

    Believe me, I fully recognize that a guy pretty much has to be a moron and a glutton for punishment to criticize Diablo Cody at this point. Either that or he has to be a very, very brave man, a man with the stones of Anton Chigurh. I’ll plead absolutely guilty on the first counts.…