As a ten-year-old, Marty Robbins would work all day in the cotton fields of Glendale, Arizona, to earn the change he needed for the movie house in Phoenix. “Well I would go in at 12:45 when it opened,” Robbins later remembered, “and I would stay ‘til Gene Autry was through that night. I’d walk back… Continue reading K Paoletter 30: Big Iron On His Hip
It’s the 21st Century — B.C. The Epic of Gilgamesh is being formalized into written Akkadian during the Third Dynasty of Ur. Yu the Great spends thirteen years stemming the flooding of the Yellow River, gaining him enough supporters to take over the domain of Xia. Mentuhotep II reunifies Egypt. In one of the driest… Continue reading K Paoletter 29: Making Due
It was in the summer of 1976 that Lee and Jimmy Chagra became Las Vegas legends. Lee had already established something of a reputation in town, both for the El Paso criminal defense attorney’s knack for helping drug smugglers dodge jail time and for his habit of posting up at a craps table anytime he… Continue reading K Paoletter 28: Loading the Boat
When I arrived at the base of Mount Cristo Rey earlier this month, the morning sun had already forced the thermometer on my rental car up into the low 80s, though it was not yet 7AM. A sign in the dirt parking lot advised all visitors to alert the police department of Sunland Park, NM,… Continue reading K Paoletter 27: From On High
The last time I visited Lake Powell was in February 2020, three weeks before the world stopped. I was in Page, Arizona, on a reporting trip, and had taken my laptop down to the lobby of my hotel to answer some emails. Soon enough, a chatty employee who was mopping the tile floor made his… Continue reading K Paoletter 26: Luddites On a Mission
I’ve been thinking of starting a diary. Which, of course, is not the same as actually starting one. The inclination to journal was triggered by — what else — reading another writer’s journal, in this case The Folded Clock, by Heidi Julavits, one of my grad school professors and a mensch of the highest order.… Continue reading K Paoletter 25: Under Lock & Key
A woman pulls up to an overlook in Northern New Mexico. She unloads a tent from her trunk and settles in for the evening, holding her camera ready to capture the sun as it sets behind the distant mesas. At some point during the night, she returns to the car from her tent to admire… Continue reading K Paoletter 24: Compact Crossover
There were twenty-four public massacres in the two years it took Seamus McGraw to write From a Taller Tower: The Rise of the American Mass Shooter. Not long after the book’s publication last month, a gunman opened fire on his former coworkers at a FedEx facility in Indianapolis. That shooting came on the heels of… Continue reading K Paoletter 23: American Pestilence
“I thought my ideas were so clear.” That’s Guido Anselmi, the stand-in for Federico Fellini in 8 ½, trying to explain his inability to take the movie that exists in his mind and articulate how to film it to his increasingly impatient production crew. “I thought I had something so simple to say. Something useful… Continue reading K Paoletter 22: in medias res
Despite its recency, my memories of 2010 are decidedly vague. I spent the first months of the year in the rambling house I lived in at Tufts, mostly in my crawlway of a room where I lay in bed watching hour after hour of cross-country skiing at the Vancouver Olympics, and then, some time later,… Continue reading K Paoletter 21: Not So Fast
Kyle Paoletta 