The Blog

By: Sallie Bingham

One of Oscar Wilde’s poems, “The Ballad of Reading Gaol” has a line lamenting, “…that little tent of blue Which prisoners call the sky”—his feeling when jailed on charges of indecency or some such after his relationship with a young man was revealed. I used to repeat that line to myself when washing dishes in a Manhattan apartment beneath a window that opened onto an airshaft; now, it comes to mind in my tiny cabin with its porthole that shows a bit of sea and sky.

By: Sallie Bingham

Sailing out of Newport on the first morning of our trip, the ship began to roll. The motion reminded me of cantering on horseback or riding the earlier rapid on the Colorado through the Grand Canyon; physical instability has its curious rewards. Through the lounge window, the horizon rose and fell; on the steepest downward dip, there was no horizon, only a blink of the blue sea. On the most extreme upward roll, only the sky was, briefly, available. This was not due to stormy weather but the effect of long regular swells on the hull of the ship.

By Sallie Bingham

She won’t sail, she can’t sail, this great queenly 120 feet long, three-masted white ship; her sails are furled, covered with their canvas slings and tied down tight, and the hydraulics that would grind them aloft are silent. One of these tall aluminum masts broke in a 15-knot wind some weeks ago with a terrible crack, a sundering, and a crash. Now the coastguard has ordered that the sails cannot be raised until all the masts are stripped of their paint and minutely inspected for more cracks.

This week on To The Contrary with Bonnie Erbe, our panelists discuss Birth of A Nation’s director and star Nate Parker’s 1999 rape case, Donald Trump’s new campaign team and advisors and France’s ban on burkinis.

On the panel this week joining host Bonnie Erbe is Author and Activist Siobhan “Sam” Bennett, Republican Strategist Jennifer Higgins, Washington Examiner Columnist Ashe Schow, and Democratic Strategist Atima Omara.

Click read more to see what they had to say!

By Sallie Bingham

Every three seconds during the five night I’ve spent in North Truro, the Highland Light strokes its beams across my bed. In Virginia Woolf’s magnificent, To The Lighthouse, a lighthouse on the coast of Cornwall strokes the family’s beds. When, after a series of deaths, they no longer come and the house begins to deteriorate, the lighthouse still strokes their empty beds.

As Woolf’s novel has become for me the measure of what a great novel should be, empathetic, courageous, unexpected, the Truro lighthouse’s beams have become the symbol of fidelity in women’s friendships.