Search Results for: black cat alley

In anticipation of the month-long series of free, citizen-led neighborhood explorations called Jane’s Walk MKE that I am helping to coordinate this May, I have been contemplating how and why Milwaukee walks by considering how and why humans have walked in the past. This exercise has led me down a rabbit hole of research that I have only begun to scratch – as far back as Homo erectus on the plains of Africa, as unexpectedly as 1920s France, and as recently as the March for Our Lives – but one that has provided me with new pathways for my...

I used to tell my English students that metaphor was the most important rhetorical device humans had ever created. Metaphor compares two seemingly dissimilar things in a new way. It’s a big powerful equal sign (that, in itself, was a metaphor). But metaphor is so much more than poetry to be appreciated or studied in a class–“All the world’s a stage,” “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day,” “wine-dark sea” or “I know how the caged bird sings”–though these are certainly timeless and lovely parallels. Without metaphor, I would insist, there would have been no Hammurabi’s Code or...