Baylis Greene

Riverhead

Associate Editor and Books Editor at The East Hampton Star

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Articles

Gristmill: Tending Sheep

1 week ago | easthamptonstar.com | Baylis Greene

I was in the neighborhood, so what the hell, on Sunday I stopped in at the most beautiful granite pile east of the outer boroughs, the Sacred Hearts Basilica in Southampton Village. Inside, the dark-wood arches and ceiling panels, the glowing Austrian stained glass, the series of wrought-iron chandeliers, and the 400-year-old French pulpit may well leave you pondering the sinfulness of attending a house of worship from which you draw inordinate visual and atmospheric pleasure.
Jill Bialosky, for Mother’s Day

1 week ago | easthamptonstar.com | Baylis Greene

Jill Bialosky is renowned as much for her memoirs of family (“History of a Suicide: My Sister’s Unfinished Life”) as for her confessional poetry (“Asylum: A Personal, Historical, Natural Inquiry in 103 Lyric Sections”). Now the W.W. Norton executive editor and part-time Bridgehampton resident will be at The Church in Sag Harbor to read from her latest, “The End Is the Beginning: A Personal History of My Mother,” out this week from Washington Square Press.
Gristmill: Hard and Harder Boiled

2 weeks ago | easthamptonstar.com | Baylis Greene

When Kenneth Millar went to pick a pen name, couldn’t it have been something other than Ross Macdonald? He apparently first went for John Macdonald, then John Ross Macdonald, before, given the existence of a fellow master of the crime novel named John D. MacDonald, just Ross Macdonald. Maybe John Ross would’ve made more sense? What with my fandom for both, this is what the kids today would call a “me problem.”Ross, the Bay Area-born Canadian who later turned Southern Californian.
Gristmill: Into the Wild

3 weeks ago | easthamptonstar.com | Baylis Greene

There’s good ecological news in the continued resurgence of the North American black bear, even if that’s partly related to copious trash as an abundant food source. Good news, yet enough to give you pause should you see bear tracks near your campsite. This happened to my son over Easter break, a second, shorter spring vacation of sorts courtesy of his Jesuit-run institution of higher learning.
Gristmill: On the Sunny Side

1 month ago | easthamptonstar.com | Baylis Greene

Be still my heart, when Sunny Sweeney takes to the airwaves of Willie’s Roadhouse on SiriusXM. Willie, of course, being Willie Nelson, the most musically successful former encyclopedia salesman in the history of country-and-western. Good luck finding better commercial radio. It’s wall-to-wall midcentury Americana, which means a whole lotta heartache and pining, hard times and harder drinking.
Gristmill: Life of Bath

1 month ago | easthamptonstar.com | Baylis Greene

“Be warned! Crank skanks wander here!” So wrote some wit — black ink on a white wall of the entryway to an apartment building with a missing front door upstate in Bath. I’d recently watched an episode of the second season of “Breaking Bad” in which a meth addict crushes her druggie old man’s skull beneath a stolen A.T.M. because she takes exception to his nagging her with that most unbecoming of words, skank.
Gristmill: Rental Gold

1 month ago | easthamptonstar.com | Baylis Greene

There comes a time in the affairs of men when they must rent. A car. I don’t know why I hadn’t thought of this sooner, for fun or utility and before the necessity, before the latest round of repairs took a household of three drivers down to a single set of wheels. It’s a dream realized, this Enterprise-supplied 2024 Chevy Malibu four-door in a metallic taupe that’s pleasing in some nondescript way. I’ve always wanted an American-made car.
Gristmill: A Ladder Up

1 month ago | easthamptonstar.com | Baylis Greene

Maybe you’re someone who gladly takes nature in small doses. Or maybe you’re someone simply gladdened by wildlife no matter where you find it. Either way, urbanized or countrified, the sight of creatures gamely hanging on in a built environment is strangely moving. And in the greater Riverhead area? Double that emotion. Across the concrete four-lane that is County Road 51, a stone’s throw from the dated and homely functionality of the Evans K.
Gristmill: Piled High

1 month ago | easthamptonstar.com | Baylis Greene

“Do I dare ask what’s in the garbage plate?” So queried my older brother out on the West Coast, a fellow fan of Formica countertops and coffee cups of a certain ceramic heft, scuffed and pitted from decades of diner use. I’d just told him that three years after my eldest daughter first told me about this Rochester delicacy, I had at last sampled one. Or rather, ate till winded at a beery establishment beside the slow-moving waters of the Genesee River.
Gristmill: Chromosomes Crackling

2 months ago | easthamptonstar.com | Baylis Greene

“Fake time,” is how I’ve tended to refer to daylight saving time, that anachronistic act of social overengineering that the nation’s doctors tell us leads to quantifiable upticks in heart attacks, strokes, diabetes, and trips to the emergency room generally, to say nothing of car crashes, compromised workplace performance and on-the-job accidents, foul moods, and brain fog. On Sunday I was eating those words. All that extra sunshine had my nearly-springtime sap surging.